A Texas woman who threatened the judge in former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago case was sentenced on Friday.
Fifty-year-old Tiffani Shea Gish from Houston left three threatening voicemails on the telephone in the chamber of Judge Aileen Cannon.
Judge Cannon, the U.S. judge for the Southern District of Florida, is handling President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Ms. Gish made the move because she believed Judge Cannon was helping the former president.
She was sentenced to 37 months in jail for using interstate communications to threaten, kidnap, or injure, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Southern District of Texas announced.
She will be put under supervised release for three years after her jail time.
“Upholding the rule of law is one of the main priorities of the Department of Justice, and that means protecting public servants from violence,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Alamdar S. Hamdani said. “Holding Tiffani Gish accountable for her threats to assassinate a federal judge sends a strong message that we have no tolerance for those—who often hide behind a far-off keyboard or phone line—seeking to undermine our democratic institutions by threatening the safety of the people who help those same institutions thrive.
In her first voicemail left on Sept. 1, 2022, under the pseudonym “Evelyn Salt,” Ms. Gish said she was “Trump’s hitman” and threatened that Mr. Trump and Judge Cannon were “marked for assassination.”
In the following voicemails, Ms. Gish said she had ordered snipers and a bomb to Judge Cannon’s house. She further threatened to kill Judge Cannon in front of her children.
The U.S. Secret Service said Ms. Gish had previously made threatening comments toward President Trump.
Ms. Gish admitted to agents from the U.S. Marshals Service that she left the threatening voicemails on Judge Cannon’s chamber phone.
She pleaded guilty in November 2023.
Ms. Gish will remain in custody before she is transferred to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility, Mr. Hamdani’s office said.
Feds Investigating Threats to Witness
Judge Cannon has set a May date for the trial in which investigators accuse President Trump of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and hiding them from investigators.According to prosecutors, President Trump also showed the documents to people without security permission and asked others to help him hide them. It is one of multiple ongoing cases against the former president, who is the frontrunner in the competition for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election.
Special counsel Jack Smith disclosed in a court filing late Wednesday that federal authorities are investigating threats made against a potential government witness in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
The revelation came in Mr. Smith’s Feb. 7 filing, which asks Judge Cannon for permission to file an exhibit ex parte and under seal without the presence or notification of the opposing party.
The filing contains information about a potential government witness and could otherwise possibly endanger that individual, the prosecutor argued.
“The exhibit describes in some detail threats that have been made over social media to a prospective Government witness and the surrounding circumstances,” Mr. Smith wrote in the filing, adding that “those threats are the subject of an ongoing federal investigation being handled by a United States Attorney’s Office.”
“Disclosure of the details and circumstances of the threats risks disrupting the investigation,” Mr. Smith added.
President Trump’s attorneys have objected to any exhibit being filed ex parte and accused Mr. Smith of infringing on the rights of President Trump and the public to open proceedings by filing exhibits ex parte.
