Tanya S. Chutkan: The lot gave her oversight of the federal proceedings against Donald Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
A Texan woman massively threatened the federal judge who is leading Trump’s trial in Washington. The ex-president should be fine with that.
“We’ve got you in our sights, we want to kill you,” a 43-year-old Texan threatened the federal judge leading Trump’s trial in Washington. “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we’ll come to kill you, so be careful,. You’re being targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of that.”
Abigail Jo Shry (43) from Alvin, Texas, left a voice message peppered with threats and racial slurs at the office of Tanya S. Chutkan. This, after the federal judge in Washington had brought charges of election interference against Donald Trump two days earlier.
That’s according to the criminal complaint Shry is now facing.
When the FBI questioned Shry about the threat, she admitted to leaving the voice message. However, she does not plan to go to Washington or Houston, where the federal judge works. If, however, Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democratic congresswoman from Texas, comes to her hometown of Alvin, “then we have to worry,” Shry is said to have told the FBI.
Shry’s father, Marc, tried to put the 43-year-old’s threats into perspective. His daughter is a “non-violent alcoholic” who “sits on her couch every day and watches the news while drinking too much beer.” Then she often gets upset and starts “calling people and threatening them.”
But the federal district court in Houston remained firm and denied the Texan bail on Wednesday. After a detention hearing, she was detained for at least 30 days.
This is not the first time that Trump supporters have reacted aggressively to the consequences of his difficulties with the law, sometimes with fatal consequences.
When the FBI seized a number of classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last year, it infuriated an Ohio man so much that he broke into an FBI field office armed. He was killed in an exchange of fire with the police.
The ex-president contributes little to de-escalation with his messages on his social media platform Truth Social, on the contrary: Trump loves the verbal attacks against judges and other people involved in criminal proceedings against him. “IF YOU PERSECUTE ME, I’LL PERSECUTE YOU!” he posted to Judge Chutkan’s address when he was indicted in Washington. Or, “She obviously wants to see me behind bars. VERY BIASED AND UNFAIR.”
Judge Chutkan is bad to talk about Trump anyway. After all, it was she who decided in November 2021 whether the ex-president was allowed to withhold government documents from the committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol even after his term in office – on the basis of a president’s special rights.
Chutkan decided at the time: No, he was not allowed to do that. In her explanatory statement, the lawyer wrote the legendary sentence: “Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not president.” Now Chutkan will have to decide on Trump and his behavior on a much larger scale: in what is probably one of the most important proceedings in US history with regard to the constitutional order of the country.
