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.

  • MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world
    1271·
    9 months ago

    Someone is about to meet the Postal Inspection Service and have a very bad time. You do not fuck with the mail. They will find your ass.

    • Bone@lemmy.world
      931·
      9 months ago

      Unless you’re Louis DeJoy, then you can fuck with the mail all you want with impunity.

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      9 months ago

      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?

      • Bocky@lemmy.world
        211·
        9 months ago

        In that situation, they wouldn’t find them.

        But in many other situations, criminals do dumb things like writing their return address.

        • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
          131·
          9 months ago

          Letter boxes don’t stamp the specific location in most places. And even if they did, you could just use an outgoing box at a large community, or someone’s house mailbox.

              • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
                22·
                9 months ago

                The ones I mentioned pepper almost every London junction. In metro areas, there’s also loads of private installations that can be looked at to help identify and track individuals.

                • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
                  78·
                  9 months ago

                  Well, maybe in the police-state UK. But we don’t have that over here. And even if we did, as I said, they couldn’t narrow down the exact box in the postal code and if it was in a heavy traffic are there could be thousands of people dropping mail off daily.

      • sizzler@lemmy.world
        142·
        9 months ago

        Printed? Your printer leaves a unique pattern on all its documents. Oooh

        Dropped in a mailbox, oooh the neighbour across the road has a ring doorbell

        Didn’t turn off your phone? Ooooh

        • Echo Dot
          11·
          9 months ago

          Let’s be honest though these people probably took a photo of them posting it, and now it’s on up on twitter.

        • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          2·
          9 months ago

          People underestimate how prevalent camera doorbells are now thanks to ring. At my girlfriends place about 75 percent of her neighbors on the block have em. Just installed a eufy for my mom a little while ago and she’s super untech savvy. Her apt building also has about 60 percent door cams.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
            1·
            9 months ago

            Super helpful tool with tracking bad guys…but also it’s just so creepy and dystopian.

            I was trying to see who a stray dog belonged to in my own neighborhood, and pushing the button and talking into these little lenses on every door was so weird.

            Neighborhoods are now enclaves full of suspicious hermits…

      • Echo Dot
        9·
        9 months ago

        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.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      920·
      9 months ago

      I mean, for now, all of these systems are crumbling beneath our feet.

      USPS was extremely reliable. Now I hear from folks “Oh I sent it via mail, no wonder you never got it”.

      This includes the teeth that these systems have

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
          121·
          9 months ago

          He is talking out of his ass. They made the mail more reliable, by removing stupid routes and some unnecessary air mail. It now takes an extra day to send stuff cross country, according to the mailing guidelines… but the previous service guidelines were off by a half or full day anyway for that distance.

  • rosemash@social.raincloud.dev
    38·
    9 months ago

    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

    • Szymon@lemmy.caEnglish
      272·
      9 months ago

      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.

      Trace the money.

      • rosemash@social.raincloud.dev
        103·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          2·
          9 months ago

          Precisely. I think this is absolutely the “paperclip problem.” It’s a machine designed and tuned specifically for engagement + profit. That’s it. Humanity or morals or decency aren’t part of the equation.

          To them, so what if it causes a breakdown of society and generations of smoothbrained internet-addicted feral ghouls? “Look at the ad revenue! Look at the fat happy shareholders! We’re doing such a good job. We’re changing lives.”

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      122·
      9 months ago

      People were sending white powders in the mail before social media.

      Social media exacerbates it, but extremism is a social/ cultural acceptance issue.

      • rosemash@social.raincloud.dev
        9·
        9 months ago

        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

    • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
        1·
        9 months ago

        Today all the rage is businesses going to the cloud…

        Back then we were terrified that one day… ✉️💨…the cloud would come to you.

  • suppenloeffel@feddit.de
    191·
    9 months ago

    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?

    • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
      13·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • somerandomperson1231@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      73·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • suppenloeffel@feddit.de
        8·
        9 months ago

        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.

        Cheers, though!

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
          121·
          9 months ago

          A: You think we should call the ambulance? B: Nah, I didn’t even touch it, and it’s probably nothing anyway.

          “Refused medical treatment”

          • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
            2·
            9 months ago

            B: Nah, I cannot afford medical care. I’m only covered if my life is clearly in danger.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            For the record, you can always call an ambulance for people.

            Even without their consent. And even in the us, there won’t be a cost incurred until they accept treatment (which is why you wind up with absurdly expensive bandaids.)

            So if you think somebody might need some help, it’s better to call than not- this is particularly true if you may have some liability.

            Also, every state has some version of a law that requires calling for aid (that is satisfied by reporting to 911). They’re typically referred to as Good Samaritan laws.

            (If they refuse treatment to professionals, that’s their business, you’re clear of further liability; if the ambulance wants to insist they can either call cops and force the matter; or wait till they go unconscious and exploit implied consent.)

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          You have the right to refuse treatment at any time you want.

          Now, there may be other things going on, like observation and isolation. There’s not a lot that can be done anyhow; until symptoms of something start showing up, most likely the fastest way to verify what treatment is appropriate is to run tests on the powder.

          That’s the kind of thing that gets put at the front of the line.

          Probably just cornstarch or baby powder. But also, both those could conceivably be a carrier for something.

          If I was their boss I’d go with the “and let you spread it to your family?” Guilt trip instead.

    • medgremlin@midwest.social
      2·
      9 months ago

      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.