Former President Barack Obama. Former U.S. Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. Vice President Kamala Harris. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. New York Attorney General Letitia James. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Over the past decade and change, Black folks who’ve soared in the legal field and found themselves at odds with — or empowered over — Donald Trump have faced some of the conservative movement’s fiercest, most bigoted vitriol.
So the news that a Texas woman has been arrested after allegedly making a racist death threat toward Judge Chutkan, who’s overseeing the former president’s federal election interference case, was unsurprising to me — albeit noteworthy.
The affidavit, filed in federal court last week and first reported Wednesday by Bloomberg Law, alleges that Shry called U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers on Aug. 5 and left a “threatening voicemail message” intended for Chutkan, who was randomly assigned to oversee Trump’s criminal case.
“Hey you stupid slave,” Shry said before she referred to Chutkan using the N-word, the affidavit alleges. “You are in our sights, we want to kill you. … If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, b----.”
“You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it,” Shry is alleged to have said. (A lawyer for Shry did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.)
The arrest comes after reports that Chutkan has had to ramp up her security measures amid Trump’s attacks against her on social media.
To be clear, Trump has gone after white folks investigating him as well. He relentlessly attacked the FBI’s James Comey and Andrew McCabe for their roles in the Trump-Russia probe, for example. And he frequently attacks special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two criminal indictments against him.
But the most vitriolic attacks by Trump and his followers are seemingly reserved for Black judges and prosecutors.
Trump has baselessly called Bragg, James and Willis racist for investigating him. He recently waged a racist and sexist attack against Willis, in particular, and the prosecutor has spoken out about the vitriol she has received from Trump supporters. The former president has claimed Chutkan is incapable of giving him a fair trial.
In similar fashion, he has attacked cities with large Black populations, such as Atlanta and Washington, as inherently corrupt. With regard to Trump’s D.C. case, one of his lawyers even proposed moving the trial to largely white West Virginia because the state better “reflects the characteristics of the American people.”
All of this rhetoric lends itself to a belief in line with the alleged threat against Chutkan — that there’s effectively a race war underway between Black legal minds and Trump.
I don’t think we arrive at the point without years of conservative messaging implying that Black people who practice law — or people who use the law to the benefit of Black people — are untrustworthy.
I’m talking about the decades of dubious attacks on civil rights figures like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The years of attacks on Obama’s work as a community organizer after he obtained a law degree. The vicious attempts to malign Holder, the nation’s first Black attorney general. The historic delay in confirming Lynch, America’s second Black attorney general. The sexist and racist attacks on Harris, the country’s first Black vice president. The malicious and false allegations that Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was an enabler to child sex predators during her time as a federal judge.
I’d argue that over time, these attacks on Black legal minds — amplified routinely across conservative media — can culminate in threats of violence.
To a certain kind of bigot, it’s unconscionable that a system of laws historically used to persecute Black folks could ever be used to prosecute white ones. And the that fact this justice is being meted out by Black hands seems to offend them all the more.