Hosts of the Fox News roundtable show The Five were dismissive of reports that threats have been made against the federal judge in Florida who approved the search warrant that resulted in the FBI raiding former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach.
Following the Monday raid, right-wing extremists have threatened the judge in online posts, with some sharing what looks to be his home address, phone numbers, and relatives’ names. Accordingly, the judge’s profile was removed from the court’s website. Commentators on the right like The Five’s Jesse Watters have also worked to link the judge to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, since the judge was at one point a defense attorney for Epstein’s pilots and a scheduler.
When Jessica Tarlov, The Five’s resident left-of-center co-host, noted the threats against the judge, some of which were antisemitic, the subject was immediately changed to threats against Supreme Court justices.
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“This judge, by the way—who donated to President Obama and to Jeb Bush—now he had to have his information scrubbed from the internet,” Tarlov recapped. “He and his family have been threatened.”
“So have Supreme Court justices,” Judge Jeanine Pirro interjected, likely referring to backlash against the court’s conservative wing after it overturned Roe v. Wade.
Tarlov replied that she was “shocked,” given Pirro’s stint as judge in New York in the early 1990s. She then took aim at her other colleagues as well.
“All I hear about at this table, by the way, is that it is only Democrats that are crazy, unhinged violent types. We have evidence that this has happened in a day, that this man has to go into hiding,” Tarlov said, after which Pirro let out an exasperated sigh.
Later in the segment, co-host Greg Gutfeld addressed the threats briefly before bizarrely suggesting that the press is turning them into a story in order to move on from the “actual injustice” of the raid.
“I think that as legitimate as those threats might be, you are seeing the pivot from, ‘It’s not about the raid; it’s about the pouncing of the right.’” Gutfeld claimed. “This always happens when something [like this] happens. ‘The right is now pouncing!’ That’s their way of pivoting away from the actual injustice.”
Since news of the raid broke Monday night, several Fox hosts and guests have been making complaint after complaint about its supposed unfairness. A baseless narrative has also been perpetuated by the likes of Watters, Trump’s lawyers and Trump himself that the FBI possibly planted evidence.
