U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., has been threatened by angry criminals, drug cartels and al Qaeda. Nothing prepared him for the wave of harassment after he heard cases against supporters of former President Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 election. Right-wing websites painted Lamberth, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, as part of a “deep state” conspiracy to destroy Trump and his followers. Calls for his execution appeared on Trump-friendly websites. “Traitors get ropes,” one wrote. After he issued a prison sentence to a 69-year-old Idaho for joining the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, his voicemail filled with death threats. One man found Lamberth’s home phone number and called repeatedly with graphic vows to murder him. “I could not believe how many death threats I got,” Lamberth told Reuters.
As Trump faces indictments and lawsuits ahead of this year’s election, his loyalists have been waging a campaign of threats and intimidation at judges, prosecutors and other court officials, found a review of threat data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service, posts on right-wing message boards, and interviews with law-enforcement agents, judicial officials and legal experts. Trump attacks judges as political foes, demonizes prosecutors and casts the judicial system as biased against him and his supporters. These broadsides frequently trigger surges in threats against the judges, prosecutors and other court officials he targets. Since Trump launched his first presidential campaign in June 2015, the average number of threats and hostile communications directed at judges, federal prosecutors, judicial staff and court buildings has more than tripled. The annual average rose from 1,180 incidents in the decade prior to Trump’s campaign to 3,810 in the seven years after he declared his candidacy and began criticizing judges. In all, the U.S. Marshals Service documented nearly 27,000 threatening and harassing communications targeting federal courts from the fall of 2015 through the fall of 2022, a volume unprecedented in the agency's 234-year history.