'Mexican' judge bashed by Trump fought drug cartels

In the summer of 1997, U.S. marshals in San Diego picked up alarming intelligence: A convicted gunman for the Tijuana drug cartel was overheard saying he had put a “hit” on the federal prosecutor who had sent him to jail.

The claim, made to a fellow inmate turned government informant, was no idle threat, the marshals quickly concluded. After the jail cell was wired, the gunman repeated it, boasting he had gotten approval to assassinate the prosecutor by one of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords, Tijuana cartel chief Benjamin Arellano-Felix.

As a result of that threat, the prosecutor, Gonzalo Curiel, was placed under 24-hour protection by the marshals for a year. He was moved to a naval base, and later, for a while, to Justice Department headquarters in Washington. When he came back to work, so did the gun toting marshals, trailing him wherever he went.

“It was unsettling,” said Gregory Vega, Curiel’s oldest and best friend, who later became his boss as U.S. attorney in San Diego. “That threat was taken very seriously.”

But Vega says Curiel never wavered from his commitment to put Mexican drug traffickers behind bars. “He stayed focused on his job,” said Vega, who later promoted Curiel to chief of the U.S. attorney’s narcotics enforcement division, putting him in charge of all the office’s cases against the drug cartels.

The soft-spoken Curiel, now a federal judge in San Diego, has suddenly found himself in the public spotlight thanks to Donald Trump. In a startling 13-minute digression during a speech last week in San Diego, the presumptive Republican Party nominee tore into the judge, referring to him as a “Mexican” and a “hater” who showed bias against him because he has allowed fraud lawsuits against Trump University to proceed. “I’m getting railroaded by the legal system,” Trump said. “They ought to look into Judge Curiel.”

On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his attacks, telling the Wall Street Journal in an interview that Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the Trump University cases because of his “Mexican heritage.”

“He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico,” he asserted again Friday afternoon to CNN’s Jake Tapper.

eddie wrote:Would it be stating the obvious,  to say that trump doesn't think before he speaks very often?

OP wrote:On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his attacks, telling the Wall Street Journal in an interview that Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the Trump University cases because of his “Mexican heritage.”

Original Quill wrote:

OP wrote:On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his attacks, telling the Wall Street Journal in an interview that Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the Trump University cases because of his “Mexican heritage.”

I'm wondering, does that mean any Anglo judge has a conflict of interest if s/he is sitting on a case involving Hispanics?

Are female judges prohibited from sitting on divorce cases because Hillary has made an issue of women in the workplace?  Indeed, doesn't that prohibit male judges from sitting on the same cases?

Troubling stuff.

Ben_Reilly wrote:I think it's telling, how many Republicans have condemned this. Ryan has all but revoked his endorsement over it, and he's going to continue to be pressured to explicitly do that.

He says he's not even really putting any energy into the presidential race, and that's smart -- he's got to try to limit the damage in Congress. I'm already hearing people talk about this as though it could be a repeat of the 2006 election, in which Democrats won majorities in both houses.