Going full Fascist - Trump Administration to Judges: 'We Will Find You'

The arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan over allegedly obstructing the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant is an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. You can just ask Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi told Fox News, commenting on Dugan’s arrest. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We are sending a very strong message today: If you are harboring a fugitive, we don’t care who you are. If you are helping hide one, if you are giving a [gang] member guns, anyone who is illegally in this country, we will come after you, and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

Bondi might have easily stuck to the specifics of Dugan’s case, insisting that her behavior was particularly egregious, and that Dugan’s indictment was about her individual conduct and not the judiciary as a whole. Indeed, in 2019, that’s precisely what the Donald Trump–appointed U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling did in a similar case, when a Massachusetts judge, Shelley Joseph, was indicted for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant escape. But Bondi chose to do the opposite, implying that Dugan’s indictment was an attempt to intimidate the judiciary itself. The “message” is that judges who anger the administration will be prosecuted at Trump’s whim.

“The courts have a role in our constitutional system that they can only preserve if there’s an independent judiciary—that is to say, judges are free to make decisions without intimidation, without interference from the executive branch or the legislative, for that matter,” Geraldine Hines, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, told me. “This kind of prosecution is, in my view, and in the view of many of us who no longer sit on the bench, an effort to intimidate judges from playing their part in the constitutional order.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-judges-211448361.html