For weeks now, Donald Trump has targeted Judge Arthur Engoron and his clerk with disparaging and untrue claims in public and on Truth Social while a gag order is under appeal. Those comments have led Engoron and his staff to receive a barrage of threats, the enormity of which was revealed in a filing from court officials on Wednesday.
“On a daily basis, the judge and his staff are being inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemail messages, and emails,” Charles Hollon, a court official in the Public Safety Department, wrote in the filing arguing for the reinstatement of the gag order in Trump’s $250 million civil fraud trial.
A New York appeals court had temporarily paused the limited gag order on Nov. 16, citing the “constitutional and statutory rights at issue.”
The threats and harassment “increased exponentially” on or after Oct. 3, according to Hollon, when Trump suggested the clerk, Allison Greenfield, was in a romantic relationship with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is married. Trump’s post “resulted in hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages that have been transcribed into over 275 single spaced pages,” Hollon wrote. Engoron first imposed the gag order after that Trump post.
Greenfield has been doxxed and subjected to “harassing, disparaging comments and antisemitic tropes” every day, according to the filing. Hollon added:
The implementation of the limited gag orders resulted in a decrease in the number of threats, harassment, and disparaging messages that the judge and his staff received. However, when Mr. Trump violated the gag orders, the number of threatening, harassing and disparaging messages increased.
The filing also included transcripts of some of the voicemails that were left on Engoron’s chambers phone. “The threats against Justice Engoron and Ms. Greenfield are considered to be serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” Hollon wrote.
We’ve seen alarming consequences when Trump has been able to mobilize his supporters against those he regards as political enemies. Despite the documented threats against Engoron and his staff, Trump did not appear to be concerned in the least. In a post on Truth Social the very next day, he called Engoron a “Radical Left Trump Hating Judge” and a “Psycho,” and accused Greenfield of being a “Politically Biased & Corrupt Campaign Finance Violator.”
