'We're in a dark space,' US judge says on rising threat

7/3/2025 6:26

Threats against U.S. judges

are rising and lawyers should do more to push back against

heated rhetoric, four federal judges said in a panel discussion

on Thursday.



Speaking at an American Bar Association meeting on white

collar crime in Miami, U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware of

Las Vegas federal court said threats against the judiciary had

gone up "exponentially."



"We’re in a dark space, and we have to stop pretending like

we're not in that space," Boulware said to applause from the

audience of mostly white collar defense lawyers.



U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high

threat levels as tech billionaire Elon Musk and other allies of

President Donald Trump ramp up efforts to discredit judges who

stand in the way of White House efforts to slash federal jobs

and programs, Reuters reported exclusively earlier this week,

citing several judges with knowledge of the warnings.



Republican lawmakers also have moved to impeach judges who

have ruled against Trump's policies, though it would take a

two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove a judge from office

- a likely insurmountable barrier.



Among the judges targeted for impeachment are U.S. District

Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan, who in February blocked

Musk's team from accessing U.S. Treasury Department systems

responsible for trillions of dollars in payments.



Engelmayer's decision prompted a wave of social media

criticism by Musk and other Trump allies.



"It became the subject of high-level Twitter, X discussion

to a point where he and his family started receiving really

disturbing communications, some at the level of threatening,"

another federal judge in Manhattan, Paul Oetken, told the

audience. "That's really troubling."



Boulware said judges do not always disclose the threats they

receive to lawyers in their cases, but that they were an "almost

regular occurrence." Neither he nor the other judges on the

panel provided statistics on threats.



The judges said the proper method for lawyers who disagreed

with their decisions was to appeal. They said lawyers'

questioning in public of judges' motives undermined trust in the

judiciary and contributed to the rise in threats.



"We can handle criticism. It's the type of criticism. If

it's done in a way that subjects us to harm, that's

problematic," said Darrin Gayles, a federal judge in Miami. "The

kinds of attacks from lawyers who should know better now, it

adds fuel to the fire."