Earlier this week, a man named Nicholas John Roske was arrested outside the justice's home carrying a gun and a knife. He admitted to police that he had traveled from California to Washington, D.C., to kill Kavanaugh because of his apparent intention to overturn Roe v. Wade following the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion. Roske was charged with attempted murder.
However, the Times shrugged off the assassination attempt, keeping it off the front page, which drew ire on social media.
During his panel discussion on Friday night, Maher also did not give the Times a pass, calling it a case of "media bias."
"The New York Times buried this," Maher said. "If this had been a liberal Supreme Court justice that someone came to kill, it would have been on the front page."
"And that's what's so disappointing about a paper like The New York Times because they just wear their bias on their sleeves, and if it's not part of something that feeds our narrative, f--- it, we bury it," Maher added.
Three days earlier, Fox News reporter Bradford Betz hadmaintained
In the following days after the assassination attempt, mainstream media largely underplayed the news, instead suggesting that "both sides" of the abortion debate are guilty of violent rhetoric.
By Sunday morning, the story was ignored by all the major Sunday shows except for "Fox News Sunday."
Betz added
Roske had a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape and other items that he told police he would use to break into Kavanaugh's house and kill him, according to a criminal complaint and affidavit filed in federal court in Maryland. Roske said he purchased the gun to kill Kavanaugh and that he also would kill himself, the affidavit said.
Roske, 26, told police he was upset by a leaked draft opinion suggesting the Supreme Court is about to overrule Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case. He also said he was upset over the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and believed Kavanaugh would vote to loosen gun control laws, the affidavit said.
The circumstances of this offender's arrest were rather unusual, as
When he got out of the taxi, Roske was spotted by two U.S. Marshals who are part of round-the-clock security provided to the justices following the leak of the draft opinion last month. But Roske was only apprehended after he called 911 in Montgomery County, Maryland, and said he was having suicidal thoughts and planned to kill Kavanaugh, having found the justice's address online. Roske was still on the phone when Montgomery County police arrived on the scene, according to the affidavit.
Roske outed himself and turned himself in before killing the judge. Were it that this Judge had been so lucky:
A former Wisconsin judge found dead from gunshot wounds at his home Friday had once sentenced the suspect in the shooting to six years in prison.
Retired Juneau County, Wisconsin, Judge John Roemer, 68, was found dead and zip tied to a chair at his New Lisbon, Wisconsin, home, WISN reports. The suspect, Douglas K. Uhde, 56, was found in the basement with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a June 4 press release from the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Uhde was taken to a hospital, where he was in critical condition Saturday. He was declared brain dead the same day but was kept on life support to allow for organ donation, report CNN and a press release. Uhde died Tuesday.
The person who called police had left the home and gone to a neighbor’s house. A neighbor told the Wisconsin State Journal that Roemer lived with two of his sons, and both fled. His wife and another son had died in recent years.
This was not a random hit. Just as the perpetrator, in the Kavanaugh case purportedly from the left, was politically motivated
Uhde reportedly had a hit list of other targets who included Republican U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, according to Reuters.
For those keeping score at home, that would be three Democrats and a Republican. But Mitch McConnell, despite his effectiveness, is despised by Donald Trump and the far right which typically characterize him as a traitor or Republican in Name Only.
Unlike Brett Kavanaugh, Roemer never ascended to the federal judiciary nor was he an active judge. Uhde had carried a grudge for over a decade against a judge who
had sentenced Uhde on a burglary charge in 2005 to six years in prison and nine years of extended supervision. Roemer got the case after an appeals court ruled that another judge had failed to follow the state’s truth in sentencing rules, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Uhde was released from prison in 2020.
Roemer was first elected to the bench in 2004. He retired in 2017 because of his wife’s health problems.
A judge was murdered for sentencing an individual, who had committed armed robbery and had an "extensive prison record," to a mere six years in prison. He was not a "hanging judge."
But he was not among the nine Supreme Court justices. When Nicholas Roske was arrested- before harming a Justice- Congress immediately added security for the chosen nine, in part because of the outcry over the incident. The Democratic Attorney General stated "threats of violence and actual violence against the justices of course strike at the heart of our democracy and we will do everything we can to prevent them and to hold people who do them accountable."
Not the inclusive "judges" but the exclusive "justices." Yet, Bill Maher and Fox News complained that the threat to Brett Kavanaugh was ignored. John Roemer and the tens of thousands of active and retired judges across the nation, serving the public without the power of the conservative media machine behind them, should be so lucky.
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