The beach home of a South Carolina judge who had received death threats after bucking the Trump DOJ on a key ruling was burned to the ground over the weekend, and local authorities are investigating it as a possible arson.
The president, who has spoken at length recently about siccing the DOJ on “far left lunatics” that he fantasizes as being “the enemy within,” has yet to speak a word about it.
The husband of Judge Diane Goodstein, Arnold Goodstein, a former Democratic state senator, was seriously injured trying to escape the fire by jumping out the window of the million-dollar home in Edisto Beach.
Hours before the blaze, Trump’s chief of staff, Stephen Miller, accused another judge who ruled against the Trump administration in another case of “legal insurrection.”
This, of course, is the same Stephen Miller who has accused Democrats of using incendiary language to “mark people” for political violence.
But don’t point that out to Stephen Miller, because he will get mad.
“You are vile. Deeply warped and vile. While the Trump administration has launched the first-ever government-wide effort to combat and prosecute illegal doxing, sinister threats and political violence, you continue to push despicable lies, demented smears, malicious defamation and foment unrest,” Miller wrote on Twitter in response to a post from Dan Golden, a New York Democratic congressman, who had asked, simply, if Trump would “speak out against the extreme right that did this,” referring to the Goodstein fire.
Miller went on in his obfuscating response to bring up the controversy in Virginia politics involving Jay Jones, the Democratic Party nominee for attorney general, whose texts to a former colleague in 2022 in which he fantasized aloud about violence aimed at former House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert have dominated the news cycle here in the Commonwealth in recent days.
ICYMI
- Immediately, if not sooner | Jay Jones needs to end his attorney general campaign
- Boy, that escalated quickly: Trumpers run off Todd Gilbert from U.S. Attorney post
And yes, in case you were wondering, we’re talking about the same Todd Gilbert who was fired from his job as a U.S. Attorney a few weeks ago by the Trumpers because Gilbert refused to fire a former Biden appointee from his office to open up a job for a MAGA loyalist.
As of a few days ago, Todd Gilbert was persona non grata in MAGA circles; now he’s being used as cannon fodder for mean tweets.
That, and he’s back to being an assistant county Commonwealth’s attorney, working out plea deals on jaywalking cases in Page County.
Life comes at you fast.
“While you post your libelous madness, we will keep focused on delivering public safety and fighting domestic terror,” Miller clapped back at Goldman, whose reply was, well, golden:
“If you are trying to combat political violence, why don’t you condemn the political violence against a judge who ruled against you and your admin?
“It’s pretty simple: do you condemn all political violence or only that against your supporters?”
We all know the answer to that.
The Goodstein ruling that we can presume got her house burned down involved a request from the DOJ to give it access to state voter files.
Her ruling earned her a rebuke from Harmeet Dhillon, whose job title is assistant attorney general for civil rights, and is a UVA Law grad.
Dhillon wrote on her socials that she “will not stand for a state court judge’s hasty nullification of our federal voting laws. I will allow nothing to stand in the way of our mandate to maintain clean voter rolls. One Citizen, One Vote!”
You might remember the name Harmeet Dhillon – she was one of the heavies who leaned on the UVA Board of Visitors to get them to push Jim Ryan out as president.
ICYMI
- Trump DOJ pressuring UVA President Jim Ryan to resign
- UVA President Jim Ryan resigns: Making sense of something that doesn’t make sense
- Faculty, staff groups at UVA pushing Board of Visitors on forced departure of Jim Ryan
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Chris Graham
