( ticking ) >> this federal judge's son was murdered, her husband wounded, in a brazen and well planned attack on her home. "60 minutes" has learned that same gunman had another jurist on his hit list. >> they found another gun, a glock, more ammunition. but the most troubling thing they found was a manila folder with a workup on justice sonia sotomayor. ( ticking ) >> who holds those responsible for war crimes accountable?

in syria, it's often civilians who have bravely defied a sadistic dictator and the 21st century's worst atrocities. as you'll hear tonight, they have risked their lives to tell the stories of the men, woman and children who continue to be murdered by their own government. ( ticking ) >> democracy has prevailed. >> a month after joe biden was inaugurated, the qanon movement finds itself at a moment of truth. >> where we go one, we go all. >> their prophecy of president trump vanquishing his enemies in an apocalyptic reckoning didn't materialize. >> stop the steal! stop the steal! >> joe biden gets sworn in, and you started seeing chatter online, "i've been conned. this has all been a scam." ( ticking ) >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bill whitaker. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm norah o'donnell. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories and more, tonight on "60 minutes."

( ticking )

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geico. save even more when bundle home and car insurance. >> bill whitaker: half the time, someone is unhappy with a judge's ruling. the normal recourse is an appeal. but, in the caustic atmosphere of today's politics, there's a real chance the disgruntled party will threaten the judge. in the last five years, threats of federal judges have jumped 400% to more than 4,000 last year-- many of them death threats,et now, judges are breaking with tradition and publicly calling

on lawmakers to provide more protection. one of the strongest voices is federal judge esther salas. this past july, she was at home in new jersey, in the basement with her son daniel, cleaning up after his 20th birthday party, when a man disguised as a fedex driver pulled up outside. >> esther salas: danny turned nde said, "let's keep talking. i love talking to you, mom." and it was at that exact moment that the doorbell rang. and before i could stop him, he the next thing i hear is "boom." it just sounded like a mini bomb. and then i hear "no." and then i h"boom, boom, boom." and i just screamed, "what is happening?" when i got upstairs, it was-- it was something no mother should ever see. >> whitaker: daniel, lying bleeding by the door; mark, her husband, on his knees, holding

his side. daniel was barely clinging to life. >> salas: i-- i didn't even know what to do. i remember picking up his shirt and seeing the bullet hole. you know, we were screaming," daniel, hold on" and "don't leave us." and then i just-- as i think about that day, i just-- i realize i was watching my only child fade away. >> whitaker: daniel died on the way to the hospital. mark is lucky to be alive. how seriously injured was he? >> salas: mark was shot three times, in the right chest, left abdomen, in the arm. >> whitaker: a close-knit family, they called themselves the three musketeers. judge salas told us daniel, a college sophomore, was the center of their universe. from his wounds, the f.b.i. said, it appeared daniel had tried to block the gunman.

when did you realize that the attack was meant for you? >> salas: it wasn't until the f.b.i. debriefings. they'd looked at this case inside and out, tell me "ma'am, you were the target. >> whitaker: the shooter was roy den hollander, a 72-year-old lawyer. he harbored deep hatred for women, and left behind a bitter manifesto. he accused judge salas of being a "lazy latina," dragging her feet on his lawsuit. police found his body the next day. he had shot himself. the f.b.i. discovered he had killed another lawyer a week before. then he went hunting for judge salas. >> salas: he knew where, obviously, where i lived. he knew my routes to work. he knew the church we attended. he had daniel's school. he knew baseball games. just a complete workup on me and my family.

>> whitaker: the information e thhud ned. 20 years of wonderful mories,e s exuciating.alas: we're living ey parent's worst nmaou only child, daniel. >> whitaker: last august, in a highly unusual move for a federal judge, judge salas made a personal plea to lawmakers on youtube. >> salas: we may not be able to stop something like this from happening again, but we can make it hard for those who target us to track us down. >> whitaker: since daniel's funeral, judge salas has become

a crusader for federal legislation to scrub judges' personal information from the internet. her mission became more urgent when the f.b.i. discovered a second locker in new jersey belonging to her son's killer. what did they find? what was in the locker? >> salas: they found another gun, a glock, more ammunition. but the most troubling thing they found, was a manila folder with a workup on justice sonia sotomayor. >> whitaker: supreme court justice sotomayor? >> salas: yes. chilling. >> whitaker: what do you think when you find that a supreme court justice was on his list? >> salas: more than on his list, on his sights. they had her favorite restaurants, where she worked out, her friends. >> whitaker: tonight is the first time that plot has been revealed. >> salas: who knows what could

have happened? but we need to understand that judges are at risk. we need to understand that we put ourselves in great danger every day for doing our jobs. this fact has to wake us up. as the first hispanic woman to serve as a district court judge... >> whitaker: jgeal when she was sworn in in 2011. the last judicial security upgrade was 15 years ago, after chicago judge joan lefkow came home one night and found her husband and mother shot dead by a disgruntled plaintiff. the new legislation, to be taken up by the senate, is seeking more than $250 million for home security and 1,000 more deputy marshals. it would erase a long list of personal data online, such as a home address, driver's license, and property tax records. you chose to be a judge. and in becoming a public person, don't you have to give up some

of your personal details for the sake of accountability? >> salas: you're right. i did choose to become a public servant. and if anyone has a problem with what i've ruled in a particular case, they can appeal. if anyone is upset, the courthouse address, you know, it's known to everyone. come to the courthouse. but why do you need to come to r: we show y, but u.s. marshalnow provide round-the-clock security for judge salas. she told us judges are increasingly threatened online. last year, there were 4,200 threats against federal judges. she read us a few of those. >> salas: "we," quote, "must start killing these corruptr li. another one: "the judge is a traitor and has a death sentence." >> whitaker: and this is since the death of daniel? >> salas: this is since daniel's murder in this very house.

one other one just ini. quote, "i will kill you. i just want to get the gun, and" >> state of washington versus the heat of online threats more than senior u.s. district judge james robart. >> no hate, no fear, everyone is welcome here. >> whitaker: emotions were already running high when judge robart temporarily blocked former president trump's first travel ban, barring some muslim travelers. critics posted his home phone and address online. but nothing prepared him for the tsunami of hate when president trump used his twitter bully pulpit to scorn him as a "so- called judge." >> james robart: when you call someone a "so-called" judge, what you do is you attack the judiciary. you may not even have wanted to convey that message, but that's

the message which your 40 million twitter followers took down, which was, you were never authorized to issue this decision. >> whitaker: death threats flooded in. then president trump tweeted again. if i recall, he also said to blame you if there should be a terrorist attack on the country? >> robart: people took that as somehow i was giving permission for their families to be endangered. and then the tone for a number of the messages turned into," w? when the president attacks you? >> robart: i thought he had a right to attack my decision. i don't think that criticizing a judge is acceptable. i recognize ths diute on that. there is no dispute at the point that you start to talk about" i'm going to kill you" or "i'm going to hurt you," or more importantly to me, "i'm going to hurt your family," that's over the line and can't be tolerated.

>> whitaker: judge robart was bombarded with 40,000 messages. investigated. there were so many death threats that u.s. marshals set up camp >> robart: the idea of needing a you know, bomb-sniffing dog to go into a restaurant before we could have lunch, impacts you. but you just try to, you know, not let that bother you. >> whitaker: that actually happened? >> robart: ( laughs ) yes. if you want to know how to be really unpopular with restaurant owners, show up with your dog, which runs around the restaurant barking, and a number of u.s. marshals, who are noticeable. >> whitaker: you're chuckling noor in this? >> robart: ( sighs ) no, i didn't. wr: tn federal investigators uncovered something more ominous. thousands of threats that looked to be from americans, were actually from russia, part of a long game by vladimir putin to

splinter american democracy. >> suzanne spaulding: if putin can undermine a significant segment of the population's willingness to accept a court's decision, then he can cause chaos in this country. >> whitaker: suzanne spaulding ran top cybersecurity operations for both democratic and republican administrations. she told us russia undermines the justice system by fanning some americans' suspicions that judges are partisan. what did judge robart do to put himself in russia's cross hairs? >> spaulding: they attacked him, his decision, as reflecting his personal political preferences, as opposed to following the rule of law. and that leads people to conclude that it is appropriate to make threats of violence. and as we saw in the tragic case of judge salas, to actually

carry out an attack of violence. >> whitaker: how big a threat do you think this is? >> spaulding: you know, i think we got a taste of that on january 6. >> whitaker: spaulding told us, since the siege of the capitol, there's more pressure on law enforcemt to physical aacks. ta e man who answered the online call with a truckload of weapons and a hand-scribbled hit list-- second from the top, an indiana judge. so how do you answer people who will say that, what i say online, even if it's aggressive, it's my first amendment right? >> spaulding: so, you do have a first amendment right to express your opinion, even if it's an unpopular opinion. but threats of violence, incitement to violence, those are things that law enforcement can legitimately look into, particularly when it's against our public servants. >> whitaker: judge salas lives

with those threats. but when the courthouse reopens after the pandemic, she told us daniel would want her to keep going. will you be concerned when you re-enter this courtroom? >> salas: no. we're changed forever. you know, mark and i are-- are different people today, sadly. but as far as what i do on the bench, no, that's not-- i'm-- hollander takehat away fy ethic, and my pride. no. he won't take that. ( ticking ) that's why i'm helping protect myself against some cancers like certain cancers caused by hpv. for most people, hpv clears on its own.

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>> scott pelley: if you have children watching "60 minutes" tonight, that's usually a good thing. but this story is not for them. the images you are about to see are the honest evidence of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century. president biden and his national security team will soon face a horror that erupted a decade ago when many of them were in the obama administration. march will bring the 10th anniversary of the popular uprising that began syria's civil war. the syrian dictator, bashar al-

assad, has gassed the innocent, bombed hospitals and schools, and made thousands disappear. the evidence is hard to watch, but it should be seen. many risked their lives to tell this story, so that, even if assad is never arrested, he will be, forever, handcuffed to the truth. syrian president bashar al-assad did this. these are civilians of a damascus suburb called ghouta. in 2013, ghouta was held by rebels, so the syrian army shelled the neighborhood with internationally-banned nerve gas. 1,400 men, women and children were exterminated. assad had chosen to meet the popular uprising against him, not with diplomacy, not with war ong soiers, but withe terminatie

torture, we have rape. >> pelley: stephen rapp is helping to build cases against assad and his regime. rapp prosecuted war crimes in rwanda and sierra leone and served as u.s. ambassador for war crimes issues for six years, until 2015. will there be justice for what's happened in syria? >> rapp: i'm an optimistic american. i'veeen other situations that we thought were pretty hopeless, where nobody thought there'd ever be justice, where we succeeded. the possibilities are there. and one of the ways that we build toward that is, get the solid evidence now. >> pelley: much of what he calls solid evidence was abandoned in the war zone. more than 900,000 government documents have been smuggled out and archived by the independent the commission is funded, in part, by the u.s. and european union. stephen rapp is the commission's chair.

do the documents that have been collected so far lead all the way to president assad? >> rapp: there's no question they lead all the way to president assad. i mean, this is a top down, organized effort. there are documents with his name on it. clearly, he organizes this strategy. then we see orders down through the system to pick people up. we see reports back. we see reports back wwerebl there are too many corpses stacking up. >> pelley: among the corpses is ahmad al-musalmani, a 14-year- old who was last seen on a bus headed to his mother's funeral. his family told human rights watch that assad's military stopped the bus and found a protest song on ahmad's phone. his family next saw his face, two years later, when this image of his tortured body was smuggled out by the man

concealed in the blue windbreaker. >> caesar ( translated ): our job became solely to takeof dead human beings that had been tortured to death or killed in the different intelligence branches. >> pelley: the photographer's alias is "caesar." he was in the military? we spoke to him with the translation help of mouaz moustafa, of the syrian emergency task force, which works to protect civilians. caesar had been a military photographer for 13 years. in 2011, he was ordered to make a record at morgues that received the dead from assad's secret prisons. we added a masking effect because his images are too horrific for television. the reality of what he saw broke caesar's allegiance to the regime. to protect caesar's identity, these are his words in moustafa's voice. >> caesar ( translated ): it was very clear that they were tortured.

not tortured for a day or two-- tortured for many, many long months. they were emaciated bodies, purely skeletons. there were people, most of them had their eyes gouged out. there was electrocution, you could tell by the dark spots on their body that was used there. there was utilization of knives and also big cables and belts that was used to beat them. and so, we could see every type of torture on the bodies of these individuals. >> pelley: "every type of torture," but the depravity of the gouged eyes leaves to the imagination how maiming was calculated to coerce information. by 2013, the bodies overflowed the morgues and spilled across a parking garage at this military hospital. >> caesar ( translated ): when i would take photographs, i would think, how can this government be capable of doing this to its own people? i would also have feelings of sadness and anger at what i've seen. and, at the same time, a feeling of fear, that at any single

moment, there's no reason that i wouldn't face the very same torture and be photographed later. >> pelley: how did you get the photographs out? >> caesar ( translated ): every single day, i would get on the computer, i would use a flash toll of ephotogthat wke day, load them onto the flash drive and then in a secret and risky way go out from work and reach a close friend of mine, sami, who would then take the flash drive and upload the flash drive on a daily basis onto his personal computer. >> pelley: this is caesar's friend, sami, also an alias. for more than two years, he uploaded the daily flash drive smuggled by caesar. we interviewed sami, again, with the help of mouaz moustafa. >> sami ( translated ): it was a responsibility upon us, upon caesar and i, a responsibility to the syrian people to be able to show them-- prove to them, let them know what has been the

fate of their loved ones. i remember i had a neighbor and her son was a friend of mine. i was looking at his photograph in one of the flash drives that caesar had brought to me that day. and i remember every single day that mother would go back to the intelligence branch asking about her son, asking any information about him. and i couldn't even tell her the truth because we didn't want to be exposed as we were doing this documentation. >> pelley: this is victim 9,700. >> sami ( translated ): that's right. >> pelley: sami pointed out the irony of police-state bureaucracy-- arabic numerals, which one day may be a treasure for prosecutors. we blurred the numbers to protect the families of the dead. >> sami ( translated ): with each body, there's usually three numbers associated with it, their bodies. the first being the number of the detainee, the second is the number of the intelligence branch that tortured that individual to death, and the third number was given by the

doctor which was a sequential number signifying which number of dead body he or she was. >> pelley: you would think that the regime would want to hide all of these things. >> rapp: people are basically covering their backside, following the procedures. and people will follow those procedures at peril of getting in trouble. but in the process of doing it, they're creating some of the strongest evidence that any of us who've prosecuted crimes here or elsewhere have ever seen. >> pelley: how do we know that caesar's photographs are authentic, and actually do show what they purport to show? >> rapp: our own f.b.i. verified the metadata and determined that everything was rock solid, that the whole group of photos represented, real people a >> pelley: the f.b.i. analyzed caesar's images. in the 242 pictures it sampled, the f.b.i. says the "image files exhibit no artifacts or inconsistencies." one prisoner caesar did not photograph is this man, who goes by the alias, ali.

he was imprisoned because of the place of his birth. where were you born? >> ali ( translated ): in columbus, ohio. >> pelley: but you moved to syria as a child? >> ali ( translated ): correct. >> pelley: in 2012, on a trip from the u.s., ali, flew to damascus. it was the second year of the war. he never made it out of the airport. his u.s. passport was a ticket to an underground prison. >> ali ( translated ): one of the high-ranked intelligence officers told me, we don't care if you are american. we can kill you. we can keep you detained forever. >> pelley: three weeks of interrogation seemed like forever. he told us his feet were beaten with plastic pipe until he couldn't stand. others, he said, were suspended on a wall by handcuffs and dowsed with boiling water. but the worst for him was a prisoner he never saw. ali overheard an interrogation-- a boy, judging from the screams. >> ali ( translated ): i heard a

child between 12 and 13 years old screaming, "mama, please help me out from the hell." when he screamed, just after pour water and then i can hear the whipping and hitting by like plastic pipe or like something like that. >> pelley: as capriciously as he was taken, ali was released to his family, who hadn't known for 23 days why he never showed up at baggage claim. torture is one of many war crimes committed by bashar al- th schools and neighborhoods have been leveled by assad, and his ally, russia. assad has used banned chemical

weapons more than 300 times, according to an investigation by the global public policy institute. in all, about a quarter million civilians are dead. 11 million have fd from their s. assad's opposition has committed atrocities too, but the scale cannot be compared. >> caesar ( tr i risked my life and the lives of my family, in order to show and to expose to the entire world the true fac >> rapp: we've got better evidence against assad and his clique than we had against milosevic in yugoslavia, or we had in any of the war crimes tribunals in which i've involved in. to some extent, even better than we had against the nazis at nuremberg, because the nazis didn't actually take individual pictures of each of their victims with identifying information on them. >> pelley: you'd love to go to court-- >> rapp: oh i'd love that, yeah.

this woulde against assad himself. >> pelley: trouble is, assad has nearly won the war.ndthers haved sanctions, but most criminals fewill bri the international criminal court, but that was vetoed by russia and china. impunity, what has the world lost? >> rapp: if the word is that you can commit those crimes, and that you can get away with it, and this is the way that you suppress a popular uprising, then others will do the same thing. the future will be much more dangerous than the past, and a lot of what we built will be destroyed. >> pelley: already destroyed is what syrians built over thousands of years.

assad is condemned to be the monarch of all he surveys. his trial may be distant, but the witnesses are patient. blind witnesses, who challenge the world to see. young witnesses, for whom time no longer matters. they will wait, because a crime buried without justice is never laid to rest. ( ticking ) >> a syrian activist shining a light on his war-torn country. sponsored by cologuard. you're clearly someone who takes care of yourself. ait to screen yofor colon cancer?one because when caught in early stages, it's more treatable. i'm cologuard. i'm noninvasive and detect altered dna in your stool

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