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    Marshals’ Data Shows Spike in Threats Against Federal Judges

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    Data gathered by the law enforcement agency responsible for judicial security showed 162 judges faced threats between March 1 and April 14.Threats against federal judges have risen drastically since President Trump took office, according to internal data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service.In the five-month period leading up to March 1 of this year, 80 individual judges had received threats, the data shows.Then, over the next six weeks, an additional 162 judges received threats, a dramatic increase. That spike in threats coincided with a flood of harsh rhetoric — often from Mr. Trump himself — criticizing judges who have ruled against the administration and, in some cases, calling on Congress to impeach them.Many judges have already spoken out, worrying about the possibility of violence and urging political leaders to tone things down.Since mid-April, the pace of the threats has slowed slightly, the data shows. Between April 14 and May 27, it shows 35 additional individual judges received threats. Still, the total number of judges threatened this fiscal year — 277 — represents roughly a third of the judiciary.The threat data was not released publicly but was provided to The New York Times by Judge Esther Salas of Federal District Court for New Jersey, who said she obtained it from the Marshals Service, which is tasked by law with overseeing security for the judiciary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Several Supreme Court Justices Have Been Critical of Nationwide Injunctions

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      Across the ideological spectrum, justices have been troubled by rulings that touch everyone affected by a challenged law, regulation or executive action.Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum have said they are troubled by at least some nationwide injunctions, and several have long called for the court to address their proper scope.“It just can’t be right,” Justice Elena Kagan said in remarks in 2022 at Northwestern University’s law school, “that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”It is one thing for federal trial judges to resolve the dispute before them in rulings that are binding on the parties to the case, several justices have said. It is another to issue nationwide injunctions — sometimes called “universal” injunctions — that apply to everyone affected by the challenged law, regulation or executive action.In 2018, in a concurring opinion in a decision upholding President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “universal injunctions are legally and historically dubious.” He added that “if federal courts continue to issue them, this court is duty bound to adjudicate their authority to do so.”In 2020, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, urged his colleagues to give lower courts guidance on when such injunctions were appropriate.“The routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts and all those affected by these conflicting decisions.”In 2023, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh issued a statement joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett when the court refused to revive a Florida law barring children from drag performances.“The question of whether a district court, after holding that a law violates the Constitution, may nonetheless enjoin the government from enforcing that law against nonparties to the litigation is an important question that could warrant our review in the future,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote.Justices Kagan, Thomas and Gorsuch all said that the availability of nationwide injunctions can spur forum shopping, the practice of filing lawsuits in friendly jurisdictions, as it takes only one judge to block a program even if several others reject similar challenges.“In the Trump years,” Justice Kagan said in 2022, “people used to go to the Northern District of California, and in the Biden years, they go to Texas.”Challengers in the birthright citizenship cases said that some issues, like school segregation and racial gerrymandering, required universal relief rather than case-by-case litigation. Birthright citizenship, they wrote, is also such an issue.“The universal injunction in this case preserves the uniformity of United States citizenship, an area in which nationwide consistency is vitally important,” lawyers for the challenger wrote. “Whether a child is a citizen of our nation should not depend on the state where she is born.”A nationwide injunction blocking Mr. Trump’s order, they wrote, “serves the public interest by preventing chaos and confusion.” More

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      Justices can find these speeches to Congress to be a trial.

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      Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. makes a point of going to the State of the Union address. But he does not enjoy it, once calling it “a political pep rally.”He was there again on Tuesday, accompanied by Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both appointed by President Trump; Justice Elena Kagan, appointed by President Barack Obama; and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Reagan appointee who retired in 2018.“I’m not sure why we are there,” Chief Justice Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said in 2010, adding: “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think, is very troubling.”But the chief justice has continued to attend, while other members of the court have long ago stopped going. Justice Clarence Thomas, who has said that he could not abide “the catcalls, the whooping and hollering and under-the-breath comments,” has not gone for more than a decade.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. called the addresses “very political events” and “very awkward,” adding, “We have to sit there like the proverbial potted plant most of the time.”He did speak, sort of, in 2010 in response to President Obama’s criticism of the Citizens United campaign finance decision, then just a few days old. He mouthed the words “not true.” He has not been back since.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Attorney Rebuffed by Justice Dept. in Push to Escalate Inquiry into Schumer

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      Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, has been blocked so far in seeking a grand jury investigation into remarks made by Senator Chuck Schumer about Supreme Court justices.Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has been quietly pushing to present evidence against Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to a federal grand jury over comments he made about Supreme Court justices in 2020, according to people with knowledge of the situation.Justice Department officials have thus far rebuffed the unusual request by Mr. Martin, a partisan ally of President Trump with no previous prosecutorial experience, one of those people said.Mr. Martin has made clear his hopes of investigating whether the remarks made five years ago by Mr. Schumer amounted to threats against Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Bringing such a case is highly unusual and winning a conviction would be difficult, according to current and former prosecutors.Last month, Mr. Martin signaled his intention to take an aggressive approach, writing Mr. Schumer a letter demanding “information and clarification” of remarks he made at a rally on March 4, 2020.“You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price!” Mr. Schumer said at the rally, addressing his remarks to Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. Mr. Schumer’s staff retracted his statement and the senator apologized a day later, taking to the floor of the Senate to say, “I should not have used the words I used.”Mr. Schumer added that he had been referring to “political consequences” rather than violent retribution, chalking up his phrasing to his upbringing in Brooklyn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About Supreme Court Justices’ Book Deals

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      For the justices, selling books remains one of the few ways to earn income outside the court.For Supreme Court justices, books deals have become a highly lucrative way to shape the public narrative of their lives and legacies.The money brought in by those deals, one of the few ways that they can supplement their income, often far eclipses their salaries, roughly $300,000.A majority of the current justices have published books, most recently Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her memoir, “Lovely One,” which traces the arc of her family from the segregated Jim Crow South to her rise to the Supreme Court, was released this week and shot up Amazon’s best-seller list.Here’s a closer look.Which justices have written books?Six of the nine justices have written books or currently have book deals.Justice Jackson joins Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas in publishing moving accounts of their childhoods and paths to the court. Justice Sotomayor has also written several children’s books.Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has focused on the law, publishing books describing the ethical and legal issues raised by assisted suicide and euthanasia. His most recent, published this summer, is a series of stories drawn from court cases that he uses to argue that administrative overreach and the increasing number of laws have harmed ordinary Americans.Two of the newest justices — Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh — have book deals in place. Justice Barrett’s book has been described as her views about keeping personal feelings out of judicial rulings. Justice Kavanaugh’s is expected to be a legal memoir that is likely to touch on his bruising confirmation fight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      Sean Patrick Cirillo called Ms. Greene’s office and told staff members about his plans to kill the politician, the F.B.I. said. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.An Atlanta man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making death threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.The man, Sean Patrick Cirillo, 34, made two threatening phone calls on Nov. 8, 2023, to Ms. Greene’s Washington, D.C., office, spoke to staff members and said that he planned to shoot the politician in the head, an F.B.I. agent said in court documents.“I’m gonna kill her next week,” Mr. Cirillo said, according to recordings of the phone call that were reviewed by the F.B.I. “I’m gonna murder her.”Mr. Cirillo pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to one count of transmitting interstate threats. He will face a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 7.“Threatening to kill a public official is reprehensible,” Ryan K. Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Our office will not tolerate any form of violence, threats or intimidation against public officials.”In a statement, Mr. Cirillo’s lawyer, Allison Dawson, said that Mr. Cirillo had struggled with mental health issues and was not on his prescribed medication at the time of the incident.Ms. Greene’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.After Mr. Cirillo was arrested, Ms. Greene said in a statement to Atlanta News First: “Threats to murder elected officials should never be tolerated.”During his phone calls to Ms. Greene’s office, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Cirillo said that he was focusing on Ms. Greene through the sight of a sniper rifle. He also threatened to kill her staff members who picked up the two calls, which he made on Nov. 8 at 1:33 p.m. and 5:36 p.m., the F.B.I. said.The next day, when the F.B.I. showed up at Mr. Cirillo’s home by tracking his phone number, Mr. Cirillo admitted to making the calls, said he had made them to “get attention” and added that he had called “multiple other people as well including other members of Congress,” court records state. It is not clear who else received Mr. Cirillo’s calls.Mr. Cirillo’s guilty plea is the latest event in a recent pattern of threats toward political figures. Last week, a man was charged with threatening to assault and kill federal officials, judges and state employees across several states, including people involved in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump.In California, some elected officials said they were rethinking public office in light of increasing harassment.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Supreme Court Immunity Ruling Escalates Long Rise of Presidential Power

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      Beyond Donald J. Trump, the decision adds to the seemingly one-way ratchet of executive authority.The Supreme Court’s decision to bestow presidents with immunity from prosecution over official actions is an extraordinary expansion of executive power that will reverberate long after Donald J. Trump is gone.Beyond its immediate implications for the election subversion case against Mr. Trump and the prospect that he may feel less constrained by law if he returns to power, the ruling also adds to the nearly relentless rise of presidential power since the mid-20th century.It had seemed like a constitutional truism in recent years when more than one lower-court opinion addressing novel legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking behavior observed that presidents are not kings. But suddenly, they do enjoy a kind of monarchical prerogative.“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an outraged dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”Dismissing those worries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, argued that presidents stand apart from regular people, so protecting them from prosecution if they are accused of abusing their powers to commit official crimes is necessary.“Unlike anyone else,” he wrote, “the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Trump Cases Shadowed by Rocky Relationship With Supreme Court

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      Though he appointed three justices, his administration had the worst track record before the justices since at least the 1930s.“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court,” President Donald J. Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021. “They love to rule against me.”His assessment of the court, in a speech delivered outside the White House urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, had a substantial element of truth in it.Other parts of the speech were laced with fury and lies, and the Colorado Supreme Court cited some of those passages on Tuesday as evidence that Mr. Trump has engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office again.But Mr. Trump’s reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court in the speech, freighted with grievance and accusations of disloyalty, captured not only his perspective but also an inescapable reality. A fundamentally conservative court, with a six-justice majority of Republican appointees that includes three named by Mr. Trump himself, has not been particularly receptive to his arguments.Indeed, the Trump administration had the worst Supreme Court record of any since at least the Roosevelt administration, according to data developed by Lee Epstein and Rebecca L. Brown, law professors at the University of Southern California, for an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly.“Whether Trump’s poor performance speaks to the court’s view of him and his administration or to the justices’ increasing willingness to check executive authority, we can’t say,” the two professors wrote in an email. “Either way, though, the data suggest a bumpy road for Trump in cases implicating presidential power.”Now another series of Trump cases are at the court or on its threshold: one on whether he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution, another on the viability of a central charge in the federal election-interference case and the third, from Colorado, on whether he was barred from another term under the 14th Amendment.The cases pose distinct legal questions, but earlier decisions suggest they could divide the court’s conservative wing along a surprising fault line: Mr. Trump’s appointees have been less likely to vote for him in some politically charged cases than Justice Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by the first President Bush, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was appointed by the second one.In his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees: Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.“I picked three people,” he said. “I fought like hell for them.”In a speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees and suggested that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Trump said his nominees had abandoned him, blaming his losses on the justices’ eagerness to participate in Washington social life and to assert their independence from the charge that “they’re my puppets.”He added: “And now the only way they can get out of that because they hate that it’s not good in the social circuit. And the only way they get out is to rule against Trump. So let’s rule against Trump. And they do that.”Mr. Trump has criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on similar grounds. When the chief justice cast the decisive vote to save the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” citing a fake handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called the chief justice “an absolute disaster.”When he spoke on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump was probably thinking of the stinging loss the Supreme Court had just handed him weeks before, rejecting a lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states.Before the ruling, Mr. Trump said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, after rushing Justice Barrett onto the court in October 2020 in part in the hope that she would vote in Mr. Trump’s favor in election disputes.“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said of the election a few days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that September. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”After the ruling, Mr. Trump weighed in on Twitter. “The Supreme Court really let us down,” he said. “No Wisdom, No Courage!”The ruling in the Texas case was not quite unanimous. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, issued a brief statement on a technical point.Those same two justices were the only dissenters in a pair of cases in 2020 on access to Mr. Trump’s tax and business records, which had been sought by a New York prosecutor and a House committee.The general trend continued after Mr. Trump left office. In 2022, the court refused to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege. The court’s order let stand an appeals court ruling that Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain the confidentiality of internal White House communications was outweighed by the need for a full accounting of the attack and the disruption of the certification of the 2020 electoral count.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent. His participation in the case, despite his wife Virginia Thomas’s own efforts to overturn the election, drew harsh criticism.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon. His claim of absolute immunity appears vulnerable, based on other decisions from the court on the scope of presidential power.The case examining one of the federal statutes relied on by the special counsel in the federal election-interference case, which makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding, does not directly involve Mr. Trump, though the court’s ruling could undermine two of the charges against him.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe justices have been skeptical of broad interpretations of federal criminal laws, and the arguments in the case will doubtless involve close parsing of the statute’s text.The case that is hardest to assess is the one from Colorado, involving as it does a host of novel questions about the meaning of an almost entirely untested clause of the 14th Amendment, one that could bar Mr. Trump from the presidency. The case is not yet at the Supreme Court, but it is almost certain to arrive in the coming days.Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a law professor at Harvard, said the justices would have to act.“The Supreme Court is a contested entity, but it is the only institution that can weigh in and try to address this problem, which needs a national resolution,” he said. “There has been some loss of faith in the court, but even people who are deeply antagonistic to it believe it needs to step in.” More

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      Is the Supreme Court About to Upend American Election Laws?

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      Here’s what to know about a court case that could change the way Americans vote — and who decides how they do.For months, my inbox has been bombarded by anxious Democrats and election experts wanting to talk about a once-obscure legal theory that could fundamentally alter the way Americans vote.Known as the independent state legislature doctrine, it holds, in its purest form, that state constitutions have little to no ability to constrain state legislatures. The doctrine emerged from a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause, which grants states the authority to set the “time, places and manner” of federal elections.At the core of the dispute is whether the framers intended the word “legislature” in the document to be understood strictly, or whether they meant that other institutions — like state courts, governors and secretaries of state — also had important roles to play in setting and interpreting the rules around elections and voting.A fringe version of the doctrine entered the public discussion last year when it emerged that one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman, had written a memo arguing that it even allowed state lawmakers to send their own slate of presidential electors to Washington.The Supreme Court has traditionally been gun-shy about encroaching on state courts, especially when they are interpreting their own constitutions.But a more mainstream conservative position, embraced by the Republican Party and rejected by Democrats, started gaining support on the right amid legal battles over the accommodations some states made for voters during the pandemic, like the expansion of mail voting.If adopted, the doctrine would, among other things, bar state courts from ensuring that state laws comply with a requirement, common in many state constitutions, that elections be “free and fair” — with potentially vast implications for rules on redistricting, citizen-led commissions and voting. Understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More