Phony Investigation by '60 Minutes' Glosses Over Legit Instances of Attacks on Judges

As federal judges continue a fast-moving coup against the Trump administration, the biggest trash talkers on the bench portray themselves as victims of the president.

The ink was barely dry on President Trump’s executive order drastically curbing the privilege of birthright citizenship when a federal judge in Washington state stepped in and immediately blocked it. In response to a lawsuit filed by a handful of states claiming the order would cause “irreparable harm” to children born on American soil to noncitizens, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour issued an emergency temporary restraining order on January 23, 2025—less than 72 hours after the inauguration, prohibiting the Trump administration from enforcing the new policy.

Two weeks later, Coughenour, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, issued a nationwide injunction (hold) on the president’s order. “Citizenship by birth is an unequivocal Constitutional right,” Coughenour, ignoring caveats in both the Citizenship Clause and case law suggesting the opposite, wrote on February 6. “It is one of the precious principles that makes the United States the great nation that it is. The President cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitutional right via executive order.” (During a hearing that day, Coughenour took numerous pot shots at the president in front of Department of Justice lawyers. “It has become ever more apparent that to our President the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” the judge harangued. He further claimed, without evidence, that the rule of law was “especially vulnerable” under President Trump.)

A few months later, the Supreme Court overturned Coughenour’s broad injunction, finding his decision had “exceed[ed] the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” The high court is expected to make a final determination on the question of automatic birthright citizenship—and the legitimacy of Coughenour’s view—this summer. (Oral arguments in the matter are set for April 1.)

That looming decision, however, is not stopping Coughenour from publicly defending his turf as the self-proclaimed last word on what is Constitutional and what is not. Further, the judge/-who took senior status in 2006 but refuses to retire despite turning 85 this July—claims “threats” to the federal bench pose the greatest danger to constitutional order, not hasty rushes to judgment by him and his colleagues to sabotage the president’s agenda and, by default, the will of the American people.

Coughenour was one of three federal judges featured in a nauseating propaganda segment on 60 Minutes that aired Sunday night. The segment is part of the nationwide media’s ongoing attempt to portray the president and his supporters as the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of political violence. Coughenour told CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker that armed sheriff deputies recently arrived at his home amid an alleged report that the judge had murdered his wife. (This is known as “swatting,” something that has happened to several Republicans lawmakers and influencers over the past few years.) The judge said he has received “dozens if not hundreds” of death threats since his birthright citizenship ruling.

A One-Sided ‘Investigation’

Coughenour’s sob story was part of what Whitaker described as the show’s “investigation” into federal judges now “under siege” by the president—apparently public comments and social media posts calling out partisan, rogue judges, many of whom are later reversed by higher courts, represent a “threat” in the world of hack journalists and lifetime appointed jurists including some who’ve been on the bench longer than the average American has been alive.

John Jones, a retired federal judge appointed by George W. Bush in 2001, warned it’s only a matter of time before a judge is murdered, presumably by a devotee of Donald Trump. “People are taking arms,” Jones, without evidence, claimed. (He now leads a “bi partisan” group of judges to lambast the president over any criticism of the bench and appears regularly on CNN.) Trump’s name calling, Jones alleged, is “an attempt to delegitimize the federal courts.”

Courts, however, are doing a very good job of that themselves. The Trump administration is facing at least 600 lawsuits filed in nearly every jurisdiction across the country; judges overwhelmingly have sided against the administration, particularly related to immigration policies. Court orders are often accompanied by political diatribes designed to make headlines and advance what Coughenour declared just two weeks into the new presidency—that Donald Trump and his handpicked officials will break the law to advance his wishes. Threats to hold top officials in contempt for imaginary violations of court orders, once a rarity, has become de rigueur at the federal judiciary.

But oddly enough, the show’s “investigation” into threats against federal judges failed to mention Aileen Cannon, the judge who presided over the classified documents case in southern Florida. Cannon has been the target of a nonstop barrage of threats and accusations since she first took on the special master lawsuit filed by the president in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid in 2022. The onslaught got so bad that the chief judge of the Florida appellate court in May 2024 halted acceptance of misconduct complaints against Cannon, calling the flood of demands to remove her from the case “an orchestrated campaign.”

A few months earlier, a Texas woman was sentenced to three years in prison for making repeated death threats against Cannon, warning the judge that she was “marked for assassination” and would be shot in front of her family.

But the 60 Minutes team apparently did not feel the need to acknowledge the sustained attacks on Judge Cannon. Perhaps even more outrageous is how the show buried a mention about the 2022 attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh at the ten-minute mark of the 13-minute segment, noting the incident in one brief sentence.

Those intentional omissions, however, apparently did not raise any objections by Bari Weiss, the newly installed editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss not only refused to pull the segment, as she did over concerns about an immigration related piece last December, Weiss reposted a clip of Coughenour’s outlandish allegations that if he and his colleagues don’t enforce the Constitution, “it becomes like the Constitution of Russia.”

HUH?

Perhaps no one better demonstrates the TDS suffered by most federal judges than Esther Salas. Just a stunning statement to make:

How does the Trump DOJ ever answer to someone like that?