The envelope never made it to Judge Arthur Engoron, but caused an emergency response at the courthouse.
The envelope never made it to Judge Arthur Engoron, but caused an emergency response at the courthouse.
Judge Arthur Engoron, who handed down a $355 million ruling against former President Donald Trump in his civil fraud trial, was sent an envelope containing white powder on Wednesday, causing an emergency response at his New York City courthouse, a source with direct knowledge of the incident confirmed to NBC News.
The judge and his staff were not exposed to the substance — his mail is pre-screened on a daily basis and was intercepted before it reached him, the source said. A court officer opened the letter and powder fell out, according to the New York Police Department, exposing the officer and another court employee to the substance, the source said. The New York City Fire Department said the two refused any medical treatment. The threatening letter was first reported by ABC News.
The threat is far from the first against the judge. Police on Long Island responded to a bomb threat at his home last month, hours before closing arguments in the Trump trial were scheduled to begin.
I feel like it would be pretty easy to untraceably send a single letter. False return address, address written slowly with your alternate hand (or printed), dropped in an unmonitored street mailbox a few hours away from your home…how would USPIS find such a person?
I just like the idea that somebody might be stupid enough to put their real return address on the envelope, and your suggestion is the first time that it's occurred to them that they might not need to do that.
I feel like this kind of behavior can be attributed to the unintended consequences of social media engagement algorithms, black boxes taking over peoples minds and turning them into angry thralls, it's like a natural disaster. Trump was basically an internet meme and he evolved into this
American education has also been nerfed to the masses, so critical thinking skills were destroyed. They created a system of useful idiots for control, rather than educating a nation for prosperity. This has been decades in the making.
I don't believe in conspiratorial thinking though. I don't think this happened on purpose. Social media algorithms were built to maximize engagement by collecting user data, the algorithms learned that people engage more if posts amplifying negative emotions are amplified, and that explains how stuff like this happened. It's actually scarier to realize the state of society is because of an accident caused by negligent capitalism rather than tyranny.
It's the level that behavior has been amplified that's scary and unusual, before the internet it was only the most extreme fringe groups. It isn't normal to go online and feel like a 50/50 chance everybody you meet is an extremist. That's a recent thing just sometime within the last 10 years and it's never been like that before ever
In my first IT job, this type of incident was part of our threat model.
This was pre-cloud and our servers were all in the same building.
If an envelope full of white power arrives to the building and the entire building is closed for days to assess and clean, how can we keep the business working remotely with zero lead time? Good times.
A court officer opened the letter and powder fell out, according to the New York Police Department, exposing the officer and another court employee to the substance, the source said. The New York City Fire Department said the two refused any medical treatment.
Uhhh - so two employees were exposed to a yet unknown substance that has to be at least considered to be harmful and were even allowed to refuse medical treatment? Am I missing something here?
shit they'll probably be charged for the medical treatment. Every Americans knee-jerk reaction these days is avoid the hospital and ambulances for fear of medical debt wiping us out.
Until we know what the substance was we could be missing a lot. The letter could have been more of a threat than an attempt. Maybe it's just baby powder or maybe they just didn't breathe any of it in. The powder is probably just presued harmful until proven otherwise. Does that help clarify? In my opinion this article shouldn't have been released in this form. It's to wordy with to little information.
Yeah, the article isn't all that great. Still, the fact that the two exposed employees refused medical treatment suggests to me, that the nature of the substance at least wasn't yet known at that time, since it shouldn't be necessary to even offer that, if the substance was known to be something harmless like baby powder.
If it was actually anthrax, it has an incubation period of 1 to 3 days and a prodromal phase that can last anywhere from 1 to 6 days. Their exposure would have been inhalation which does carry the worst forms of the illness and the worst prognosis, but they'd have at least a couple days before symptoms start showing up and there are antitoxin and immunoglobulin treatments available. There's not really a post-exposure prophylaxis, per se, and giving someone the treatments unnecessarily would be incredibly expensive.
Or one of the two sides trying to shift blame. Either is possible, but we wouldn't be in this predicament if a certain someone had decided to not try and cheat at basically everything in life.