Donald Trump should be detained pending trial for being a threat to the community after Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was the target of threats and swatting following the removal of the former president from the state’s 2024 primary ballot, according to an attorney.
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and frequent critic of Trump, suggested the former president should be jailed while he awaits his four criminal trials, after sending a “signal to his supporters” to target Bellows for disqualifying Trump for running for office in the state for allegedly violating the Constitution’s insurrection clause.
On December 28, Maine became the second state to bar Trump, the frontrunner in the GOP primary, from running for president, after ruling he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment during the January 6 attack. The section states that a person who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after taking an oath of office to support the U.S. Constitution cannot run for office again.
The ruling from Bellows followed on from a similar decision from the Colorado Supreme Court to ban Trump from the 2024 ballots for allegedly supporting or engaging in an insurrection, the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing in relation to the Capitol riot, is expected to appeal both rulings.
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Hours after the decision from Bellows, Trump posted a link on Truth Social to Bellow’s biography on the official Maine government website. Soon after, Bellows stated that she had received “threatening communications,” which she described in an interview with CNN as “unacceptable.”
On December 29, Bellows’ home was also the target of “swatting”—where law enforcement officers and SWAT teams respond at a property to a false emergency call—which she said arrived after a conservative activist posted her address online.
Speaking on his Justice Matters YouTube channel, Kirschner asked “how many times are we going to watch this movie?” before suggesting that Trump should be jailed for posing as a threat to the community because of his public comments.
“There actually is a way to stop this movie from running on an endless loop. That endless loop involving someone acting in accordance with the law, in accordance with their oath of office in accordance with their sworn obligation, someone acting to hold Donald Trump accountable for his misconduct for his crimes, and Donald Trump then immediately posting something that is clearly designed to send the signal to his supporters: ‘get them,'” Kirschner said.
“The law provides that when somebody is on pretrial release in a felony case, Trump is on release in four felony cases, if he poses a danger to the community or any person in the community, he has to be detained pending trial. The law has a way to stop the same old movie from running.
“We need to keep calling on the institutions of government and the good men and women who populate them to stop forcing our nation to watch this movie on an endless loop,” Kirschner added. “Someone tries to hold Donald Trump accountable in accordance with the law, and that person’s life instantly is endangered by Trump. The threats pour in. Police are sent to their homes via false reports. Put a stop to it. Apply the law of pretrial detention as it was intended to be applied.”
Trump’s office has been contacted for comment via email.
Bellows and her husband were not at home when police were called to her address after being the target of a swatting.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Bellows said along with the threatening messages there have also been “dehumanizing fake images” of her posted and online and fake text threads attributed to her in the wake of the ruling to disqualify Trump for running for president in Maine.
“And my previous work taught me that dehumanizing people is the first step in creating an environment that leads to attacks and violence against that person,” Bellows, who worked in civil rights before becoming Maine’s secretary of state, said.
“It is extraordinarily dangerous for the rhetoric to have escalated to the point of dehumanizing me and threatening me, my loved ones and the people who work for me.”
In a statement after the Maine decision, Steve Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, called Bellows a “virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden.
“We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter,” Cheung added.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.