US Judge Recounts Security Concerns After Trump Election Ruling

Federal appeals judge Stephanos Bibas was so concerned over the blowback from a 2020 opinion he authored rejecting a Trump election-related challenge that he told his children to be careful when answering the door at their home.

Some of the phone calls, emails, and letters sent to his chambers at the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit were “laudatory,” but others were “very angry,” Bibas said Wednesday at a judicial conference.

He found himself asking a clerk to help him scrub his home address off of the internet, and “warning my kids, ‘please don’t fling the front door open when someone rings the doorbell.’”

“It was afterwards that I realized I didn’t prepare well enough for this. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” said Bibas, a Trump appointee who participated with other judges on an election litigation panel at the Ninth Circuit gathering in Sacramento.

Threats against federal judges and other public officials have climbed in recent years. The US Marshals Service investigated over 450 threats against federal judges in 2023—more than twice the number from four years earlier.

Bibas called on other judges to remove their information from the internet, now made easier by a federal law enacted in response to the shooting death of US District Judge Esther Salas’ son.

Daniel Anderl, 20, was killed at the family home in New Jersey by a lawyer posing as a delivery driver targeting Salas just months before the Third Circuit election decision.

“The last thing you want is to get a case like this, and be worried that someone—however many people like your ruling, it only takes one disgruntled person to come for you,” Bibas said. “You need to do your job without fear or favor, but you also need to take whatever measures you can to protect your family.”

Security concerns expressed on the panel also come amid tense 2024 campaigning for the White House and both houses of Congress, and the potential for future election challenges.

Chief Judge Miranda Du of the Nevada federal district court also spoke on the security panel and encouraged judges to notify the Marshals Service when handling election cases, or other cases that may generate strong emotional responses.

Once they have been notified, “we do what we always do, which is focus on the issues in the case,” Du said.

Du dismissed a case earlier this month by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in a challenge related to mail-in ballots.

Bibas described his writing process when crafting the opinion issued the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2020. The decision rejected the Trump campaign’s request to undo the certification of certain ballots in Pennsylvania.

The panel could’ve released a short judgment with the outcome, but Bibas said the judges “thought the public wanted more explanation.”

And while they could have tossed the case for timeliness, he said they thought it was important to tackle the merits given the national significance.

Bibas also wanted the decision to be readable to the public and to journalists. He said he aimed to write the introduction to his decision “like a press release: what, when, where, how, and why.”

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” the opening frame of the decision said.

“In writing the opinion, I think the most important thing is: even if few of your rulings get read, this is one of them that’s going to get read. And you’ve got to show your work in a way that non-lawyers can understand,” Bibas said.