NBC News reporting tonight that the other main prosecution witness
in the Trump criminal trial,
Michael Cohen, has since the verdict had his whole family
doxxed.
People have posted St. addresses and other personally identifying information
for his wife and for his children.
NBC News also reported that in the immediate wake of
the verdict,
pro Trump message boards posted a high volume of violent
threats toward both the prosecutor and the judge in the
New York case,
including what purported to be the home address of District
Attorney Alvin Bragg and what purported to be the addresses,
the home addresses of some of the jurors from the
case.
This is what it's like for people who are part
of the legal system when the legal system is getting
Donald Trump in trouble.
And this is an ongoing thing.
This is not going away.
There's lots of pending cases against Trump
and these threats and the harassment and intimidation of people
who are involved in the legal system,
people who are witnesses, jurors,
prosecutors, judges, court personnel. Trump,
I mean, encourages it indirectly every time.
He makes individual people in these legal proceedings a personal
target for his criticism and vitriol
and often his lies.
He's never, ever discouraged his supporters from mounting the kind
of harassment and intimidation campaigns that they have against everyone
involved in these cases,
including like the court clerks and the family members of
the judges and the witnesses themselves and their families,
too.
And it's, it's, it's every time,
right? It's not just this current case.
Last summer, Trump supporters circulated the purported names and photographs
and home addresses of the grand jury
members of the grand jury in Fulton County,
Georgia, after that grand jury voted to indict Trump there
this year. Before Trump was convicted in March and April,
Reuters counted at least
152 posts on three pro Trump websites urging the beating
or killing
of Judge Marshawn or Judge and Goran in New York
or Judge McAfee in Georgia.
1 January 6th Convict
who has already served his prison sentence for taking part
in the Trump mob attack on Congress.
He posted on Twitter a photo of prosecutor Alvin Bragg
and a noose.
It is terrorizing to the people involved in these cases
and it is systemic. They do it to all of
them with all of the cases.
It's designed to make the legal system unworkable when it
comes to Trump,
right? It's designed to make people unwilling to participate in
the system if Trump is involved in the case because
you and your family will be put in danger,
right? It's designed if you are part of a case
involving Trump,
if you are considering being bringing some sort of legal
action,
however well justified, that relates to Trump.
They want you to fear for your life and for
the lives of your family.
That's the basic idea behind it,
right?
We're all supposed to be so scared of what he'll
do.
We're supposed to be so scared of how crazy his
supporters will go that,
you know, to be safe,
we should just let him do whatever he wants,
no matter what it is.
Just let him get away with it.
Because anything that annoys him,
anything that holds him back,
anything that punish him for,
punishes him for what he's done,
they'll get so mad. And we should be so scared
of what they'll do because,
oh, you wouldn't like them when they're mad.
Trump was asked this weekend about his potentially being sent
to prison when he gets sentenced next month.
He said this in response.
He said, quote, I don't know that the public would
stand for it.
I'm not sure the public would stand for it.
I think it would be tough for the public to
take.
You know, at a certain point,
there's a breaking point.
He's saying, you jail me.
There'll be a breaking point.
The public won't stand for it.
Sounds like a threat, right?
It is a threat. It's the same threat he always
makes because he wants us all to feel threatened.
But he makes the same threat all the time,
right? September 2022, after the FBI served the search warrant
at his home at Mar a Lago.
He says, quote, I don't know how much more our
country will be willing to withstand.
Two months later, December 2022,
all caps. The people of this country aren't going to
take it much longer.
Then he was asked on a radio show about the
possibility of him being criminally indicted.
He said, I think if it happened,
I think you'd have problems in this country the likes
of which we've never seen before.
I don't think the people of the United States would
stand for it.
I think they'd have big problems,
big problems. I just don't think they'd stand for it.
Then in March 2023, he said if he was indicted,
it would rain down death and destruction.
That, he said would be,
quote, catastrophic for our country,
death and destruction if he were indicted.
Then he was indicted.
Then last summer after after he was indicted,
he, he was asked about a,
a possible prison sentence. He says,
quote, I think it's a very dangerous thing to even
talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group
of voters.
I think it would be very dangerous,
very, very dangerous.
So yeah, now he's threatening again that there's going to
be catastrophic civil war level violence if anything bad happens
to him.
Like an indictment, which has happened four times,
like an arraignment, which has happened multiple times,
like a conviction, which has happened 34 times,
like a potential prison sentence,
which
stay tuned.
At every step of the way,
he has made the same threat.
At every step of the way,
he has shaken his first at the country and warned
that if anything happens to him,
his followers will rise up and level the place.
Death and destruction like nothing the country has ever seen
before.
It's always the same threat.
It is not actually what they do,
because it is not actually how the country feels.
If you look at the polling since the verdict in
the New York case came down,
there's been three national polls on reaction to the verdict
so far.
All of them show that most people in this country
think the verdict was the right thing.
The country is not rising up on mass to defend
him.
By and large, the country thinks he committed crimes and
it makes sense that he was convicted of them.
These threats that if anything happens to him in the
legal system,
the country won't stand for it and there will be
mass violence and there will be blood in the streets
and there will be riots.
You'll see it light rising up like the country has
never seen before.
That is not happening. What is happening is his followers
are terrorizing individual people involved in the legal process,
and the Republican Party at the highest level and with
almost total uniformity,
is simultaneously telling the American people that the American legal
system is bunk and they shouldn't respect it and they
shouldn't trust it.
And Republicans at the state level are not just tolerating
and trying to get away with election crimes to help
Trump.
Criminal election subversion is now being celebrated and rewarded even
in places where criminal prosecutions of these folks are ongoing.
Places like Arizona and Nevada.
Fake Trump electors are charged with felonies there.
But the accused felons have also just been given big
new jobs by the state Republican Party in those states.
They've been named delegates to the National Republican Convention and
state representatives to the Republican National Committee.
They've done the same with one of the fake electors
in Wisconsin,
where where Republicans are trying again to recall a state
legislative leader who acted in their mind with insufficient fervor
to overthrow the election results in Wisconsin when Biden won
that state and Trump lost.
I mean, in Nevada, two of the state's official electors
for the
2024 election will be people who are currently under indictment
for what they did
as fake electors in the last election.
In the Republican Party right now,
January 6th, defendants are hostages and heroes who will be
fully and immediately pardoned.
Fake electors will be new party leaders,
brave souls who said no to the coup,
who, you know, people who Democrats and normal people briefly
tried to lionize for their bravery,
people like, you know, Vice President Mike Pence.
They are roundly rejected by their party,
while prosecutors and judges and witnesses and jurors are hounded
and threatened daily.
This is not something about which you can sort of
put your head down and wait it out
because these cases are going to go on and on.
But we are in a moment where the burden
of intimidation and harassment and and threatened violence,
the burden of what's going on in the Trump movement
is terroristic.
It's not mass violence. The burden of what is being
threatened against
our fellow Americans is falling disproportionately on a very small
number of people.
It's falling on individual people they are singling out to
try to pick them off
in order to intimidate the whole country.
There isn't a civil war.
There isn't a riot. I was promised there would be
riots if Trump were convicted.
There were no riots. There hasn't even been a good
sized pro Trump protest anywhere in years.
They are not using mass action.
They are using targeted harassment and threats towards specific people
to try to cow all of us,
to make us all scared
of anything that holds Trump to account and punishes him
for committing crimes,
right? And so the solution to that is not rocket
science,
right? It's not complex. And it's just like,
it's like a, it's like a couple of things,
right? Fairly obviously, one we vociferously defend more than we
have been
the people who are being intimidated and harassed and threatened,
both because they deserve that as human beings,
but also because they are standing in for all of
us.
This small number of people
is being attacked in order to make all of us
afraid,
so that we as a country will change our behavior
so that we will,
in the words of Tim Snyder's book on tyranny,
we will obey in advance.
So we will cower and try to make sure we
only do things that make Trump happy because we're so
scared of the response.
There are individual people who are bearing the brunt of
terroristic intimidation
by the pro Trump movement that is designed not only
to ruin those people's lives and get retribution against them,
but to scare all of us that it could happen
to any of us.
It could happen to all of us.
If we don't stand up for those people,
that will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
So that's one. Stand up for those people and protect
those people better than we have been.
Recognize that they are small in number and they can
all be protected.
That's one
second.
Don't cower, right?
If that means there are going to be yet more
federal charges brought,
and there might be, we should not cower about the
prospect that Trump and his supporters will get mad.
If Trump is held to account,
yes, they'll be mad. That's their problem.
More federal charges may yet be brought if that is
where that investigation leads.
If so, so be it.
There's no reason anybody should shy away from that.
More state charges may yet be brought.
There are open investigations not just in Michigan,
but in some of the other states where they have
pronounced Trump,
for example, to be an unindicted Co conspirator.
They have also said the investigation is ongoing in more
states.
There may yet be more state charges.
If so, if that is where those investigations lead,
so be it. There's no reason anyone should shy from
that.
We are at a moment when the Republican Party says
the legal system doesn't work.
The criminals are the heroes.
Everybody involved in making the legal system work should fear
for their lives.
Trump says the country will rain down fire if he
faces any more legal consequences.
The Republican Party is wrong about that and Trump is
wrong about that.
Our system is strong,
and so we should feel very confident in standing up
to protect it.
Our system is strong, and so are we.