NBC News wants you to feel bad for those poor federal judges who have taken it upon themselves to decide how to run the executive branch and now claim they're living in fear. According to the story, they're getting swatted. They're receiving pizzas at odd hours. They're moving to different houses and arming themselves.
In his almost 45 years as a federal judge, John Coughenour has seen it all, including high-profile criminal trials that put his own safety at risk.
But this year, the 84-year-old senior district judge did something he hadn’t considered for a long time: He retrieved a gun he had stored at the federal courthouse in Seattle years ago and brought it back to his home in case he needed it to defend himself.
Coughenour is one of dozens of federal judges who have found themselves at the center of a political maelstrom as they have ruled against President Donald Trump or spoken up in defense of the judiciary. With Trump administration officials vilifying judges who rule against the government, a wave of violent threats and harassment has often followed.
Coughenour blocked Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship three days into Trump’s second term. “They put it before a certain judge in Seattle, I guess, right? And there’s no surprises with that judge,” Trump said.
According to NBC News, “the negative reaction soon followed,” which reportedly includes Coughenour being swatted, targeted with fake bomb threats, and having anonymous pizzas sent to his house. Another judge profiled by NBC News, U.S. District Judge Stephen Bough, says he also received unsolicited pizzas. According to Bough, these unsolicited pizzas are “a new way of intimidating judges.”
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Now, the swatting and bomb threats, if they actually happened, are unacceptable, but come on, spare me the violin music. Trump was shot last year and was mere centimeters from being killed. Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck in September and killed. I guess we’re supposed to believe that Trump calling out left-wing judges for making partisan rulings has made them targets.
Curiously missing from the article was the most notorious anti-Trump judge of them all: Judge James Boasberg.
Weird, right?
Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson fired back at NBC News, explaining that the administration "cares deeply for the safety of all members of the Judicial Branch" but dismissed NBC's framing entirely. "Any implication, by NBC, that sharing the truth is akin to making threats is deeply unserious and should be dismissed by anyone with half a brain," she said.
But, here’s a little secret: Criticizing judicial overreach isn't incitement. Now, when someone like Sen. Charles Schumer says, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions," as he did in 2020, that’s incitement. And, as you surely recall, Justice Brett Kavanaugh was later the target of an assassination attempt in 2022.
Strangely, the mainstream media didn’t blame Schumer for incitement.
NBC even floats the theory that foreign actors, possibly Russia, are behind the pizza campaign, because obviously, they still have to play up the bogus Trump-Russia crap. Cybersecurity expert Ron Zayas said his investigation found "signs of foreign intervention," though he admitted he didn't go deep enough to prove anything. Let me guess, Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, too?
So we're supposed to believe Vladimir Putin is now weaponizing Domino's to undermine American judges? This is the stuff of parody. But NBC ran with it anyway because it fits the left’s preferred narrative that Trump and his supporters are… you guessed it… a threat to democracy!
NBC's sob story is transparent. It's designed to paint Trump as dangerous and his supporters as violent while ignoring the real violence conservatives face daily. Nice try, but we're not buying it.
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