WASHINGTON – False reports about jury instructions in the trial of former President Donald Trump silent money trial have spread across right-wing media, leading to threats against the judge overseeing the case.
Several conservative news personalities, including some affiliated with Fox News, falsely claimed that the New York state judge Juan Merchanas a Fox News anchor said in a viral post on X, “told the jury they don’t need unanimity to convict” Trump.
This is not true. Merchan instructed jurors on Wednesday that they “must unanimously conclude that a defendant conspired to promote or impede the election of any person to public office by unlawful means,” adding that they “need not be unanimous as to what those means were.” illegal.”
That means jurors must unanimously agree that Trump committed a crime by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to falsify records with the intent to commit one or more crimes in order to convict him. But jurors can choose between three options as to what those other crimes were: violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, falsification of other business records or violation of tax laws. These “unlawful means” are not charges in themselves and would not result in separate convictions, so jurors do not have to unanimously agree on them.
The jury instruction was complex and “nuanced” — as Fox anchor John Roberts tried to clarify an hour later in another publish on X with fewer views – but some right-wing accounts ran false reports.
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In response to inaccurate reports that Trump could be convicted without unanimous agreement that he committed a crime, a user on Gab, a website popular with far-right extremists, said Wednesday that it was “time to find out where this judge lives and protest while the left calls it that.” Another user posted: “I heard bad things happen to judges on their sidewalks.” On Telegram, a user called for “a military tribunal” for Merchan, and on Steve Bannon’s official “War Room” Telegram channel, a user said that Merchan “and everyone involved” should be hanged.
On another pro-Trump forum, a user said: “Merchan wants to be the merchant of death to sell more rope, except he could just as easily be selling the rope that hangs him.” Another user added: “Betrayal. With full penalty.”
On X, a right-wing influencer asked his followers who among them wanted to see Merchan arrested for treason. Another user, who identified himself as a Marine, responded: “Let me take care of the justice system and be judge and prosecutor, immediate judgment and justifiable punishments doled out, funeral directors prepare for lots of democratic socialist elites coming your way ”.
Trump continued to post on social media about the jury instructions Thursday morning, citing a Fox News commentator who called the prosecution “an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ case with a Mad Hatter judge,” on which the “valued principles of justice” have been turned upside down. .
Time and again, the legal proceedings in the four cases against Trump resulted in violent threats and, in at least one case, actual violence. In August, Trump supporters posted the names and addresses of the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jurors who indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants. In August 2022, a participant in the January 6 riot named Rickey Walter Shiffer posted calls for violence after the FBI sought Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and beyond fired a nail gun at an FBI field office in Cincinnati before being killed by authorities.
More recently, Trump and his allies in Congress falsely said that President Joe Biden planned to kill Trump during the Mar-a-Lago search based on the release of a standard FBI use of force form that limits the use of deadly force and must be completed in all operations. In fact, federal authorities specifically planned the search for a time when Trump was known to be out of state and contacted the Secret Service in advance to ensure the plan went as smoothly as possible. Even right-wing former FBI special agents who called for the FBI to be abolished resisted the false narrative, calling the FBI’s use of force language “standard” and showing frustration that viral misinformation on the right forced them to appear as if they were defending the agency.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last week called lies about the use of force policy “false” and “extremely dangerous” and pointed out that the same standard operations plan was used in the search of Biden’s own home (but did not lead to conspiracy theories that Biden planned to be assassinated).
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
