Who is Gonzalo Curiel? The ‘Mexican’ judge denounced by Trump fought the 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 "
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/politics/donald-trump-tapper-lead/" to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Curiel, for his part, has declined through a clerk to respond to Trump’s attacks; late Thursday, he refused to permit a court filing from an outside party alleging “contemptuous statements” — presumably by Trump — to become part of the official record in the Trump University cases.
But for Vega and other lawyers who have worked with Curiel or appeared before him, Trump’s comments were offensive and wildly off the mark. And they are certain nothing Trump says outside of court will affect the judge’s handling of the lawsuits.
“What’s so ironic is that Gonzalo gave so many years of his life to protecting America from drug traffickers,” said Vega. “He had a credible threat on his life. Do you really think being called [names] by Mr. Trump is going to frighten him? How silly.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/who-is-gonzalo-curiel-the-mexican-judge-denounced-by-trump-fought-the-drug-cartels-175229578.html
