WASHINGTON — False reports about the jury instructions in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial have been spreading 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 Judge Juan Merchan, as one Fox News anchor put it in a viral post on X, “told the jury that they do not need unanimity to convict” Trump.
That’s not true. Merchan instructed the jury on Wednesday that they “must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means,” adding that they “need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.”
That means that jurors have to agree unanimously that Trump committed a crime by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to falsify records with the intent to commit one or more other crimes in order to convict him. But jurors can choose from three options about what those other crimes were: violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act; the falsification of other business records; or the violation of tax laws. Those “unlawful means” aren’t charges 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 and some right-wing accounts ran with false reports.
In response to inaccurate reporting that Trump could be convicted without unanimous agreement that he committed a crime, one user on Gab, a site popular with far-right extremists, said Wednesday it was “time to find out where that judge lives and protest as the left calls it.” Another user posted: “I hear bad stuff happens to judges in their driveways.” On Telegram, one user called for “a military tribunal” for Merchan and on the official Telegram channel of Steve Bannon’s WarRoom, a user said Merchan “and all involved” should be hanged.
Over on another pro-Trump forum, one user said “Merchan wants to be the merchant of death to sell more rope, except he could easily be selling the rope that hangs him.” Another user added: “Treason. With the full penalty.”
On X, after a right-wing influencer asked followers who among them wanted to see Merchan locked up for treason. Another user who identified himself as a Marine replied: “Let me handle the Justice System & be judge & Prosecutor, Immediate trial & Justifiable Punishments handed out, Funeral Directors get ready for a lot of Democratic Socialist Elites coming your way.”
Trump continued making social media posts about the jury instructions on Thursday morning, quoting a Fox News commentator who called the Trump prosecution “an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ case with a Mad Hatter judge” where the “cherished principles of fairness” had been turned upside down.
Time and time again, legal proceedings in the four cases against Trump have 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 grand jurors who indicted Trump and 18 of his co-defendants. In August 2022, a Jan. 6 participant named Rickey Walter Shiffer posted calls for violence after the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and then fired a nail gun into an FBI field office in Cincinnati before he was killed by law enforcement.
More recently, Trump and his congressional allies falsely said that President Joe Biden plotted to kill Trump during the search of Mar-a-Lago based upon a disclosure of a standard FBI use-of-force form which limits the use of deadly force and which must be filled out for every operation. 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 ahead of time to make sure the plan went as smoothly as possible. Even right-wing former FBI special agents who have called for the bureau to be abolished pushed back on the false narrative, calling the FBI use of force language “boilerplate” and showing frustration that viral misinformation on the right had forced them to be in the position of looking like they were defending the bureau.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last week called the 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 (yet did not lead to conspiracy theories that Biden planned to have himself assassinated.)
