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More than a month into his inquiry into threats against judges, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has not received adequate answers about how the U.S. Marshals have addressed the problem.
“We have not been able to get straight answers out of the Marshals Service about the status and the limits on their investigations,” Whitehouse told us on a Substack Live today.
On April 11, Whitehouse sent seven questions to the Marshals Service’s Acting Director Mark Pittella, and the senator noted that there should have been a “super simple” answer: “Threats will be investigated.”
“If it looks like there's orchestration of the threats, the orchestration will be investigated and to the full extent of the law,” Whitehouse said. “That's the easy, simple answer that could have come out in a minute, and the fact that it didn't is a bit of a tell.”
“They report to MAGA AG Pam Bondi”
During congressional testimony in 2024, a former U.S. Marshals director testified that threats against federal judges have doubled in the previous three years, and the agency’s most recent annual report found that the “number and intensity” of the threats continued to climb.
The Washington Post and other outlets reported on “pizza doxxing,” a phenomenon involving deliveries to the doorsteps of judges’ homes — often in the name of the murdered son of Judge Esther Salas. The chilling message communicates an implied death threat from a sender that knows the judges’ addresses.
Whitehouse, a former U.S. Attorney, noted that the patterns of the deliveries implies coordination.
“There weren’t 30 people across the country who suddenly, spontaneously, individually had the thought that they needed to send a pizza to a judge that they don't like with the name of the murdered son of another judge as the point of delivery,” Whitehouse said.
Since many of the targeted judges ruled against Trump, Whitehouse pointed out the roadblocks to a proper investigation.
“Now you have the problem of the Marshals, they have to protect the judges, but they report to MAGA AG Pam Bondi, and is Pam Bondi really going to let them do a proper criminal investigation with grand jury subpoena support, with agents going out to do interviews, when it looks like the orchestration might lead back to MAGA?” Whitehouse asked.
The U.S. Marshals Service did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
“Pretty Damn Unusual”
Just hours before the interview, a federal judge set a July trial date for Wisconsin state court Judge Hannah Dugan, whose lawyers recently denounced her “unprecedented” prosecution for an “official act” in her courtroom. (The Supreme Court’s immunity decision in Trump’s criminal docket figured prominently in Dugan’s motion to dismiss her charges.)
The Trump administration claims that she directed an undocumented defendant to an alternative exit, when immigration officials were waiting to apprehend him. The exit led to a public hallway.
“I kind of believe that other judges will have a fair amount of sympathy for a judge having a hostile reaction when somebody tries to charge into and disrupt their courtroom,” Whitehouse said, condemning the Trump administration’s attempted “humiliation” of her.
“You don't need to handcuff her,” Whitehouse said. “You don't need to perp walk her in her robes. All of that stuff is just more of this sort of macho bureaucratic signaling that, ‘I'm the king, and you all have to obey and that's the way it's going to be.’”
The roughly 30-minute interview also delved into Trump’s “weaponization” of law enforcement to try to stop $20 billion in congressionally appropriated funding to combat the climate crisis.
Whitehouse marveled at the “pretty damn unusual” string of defeats by Trump’s Jan. 6-supporting former U.S. Attorney Ed Martin to try to gin up an investigation against the grant recipients.
After the Senate refused to confirm him, Martin recently confirmed that he’s facing an ethics investigation, and Whitehouse doesn’t have high hopes for his successor: “that other prosecutorial genius, Jeanine Pirro.”
A longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse gave high marks to the courts in constraining Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, and he hoped that the Supreme Court keeps it that way in light of today’s oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. He believes that Trump’s attack on the judiciary has backfired.
“What you've done is you've created a body of judges who are very, very now motivated to protect their role and to protect their jobs and their colleagues against this mass assault,” Whitehouse said.
Watch the full interview at the top of the page.
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