WASHINGTON — Early one morning in November 2019, Representative Rodney Davis, Republican of Illinois, received a profanity-laden voice mail message at his office in which the caller identified himself as a trained sharpshooter and said he wanted to blow the congressman’s head off.Two years earlier, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, received a similar voice mail message from an irate man who falsely accused her of threatening President Donald J. Trump’s life. “If you do it again, you’re dead,” he said, punctuating the statement with expletives and a racial epithet against Ms. Waters, who is Black.Across the country, the office of Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, received a profane call from a man who said that someone should “put a bullet in her” skull, before leaving his name and phone number.The cases were part of a New York Times review of more than 75 indictments of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016. The flurry of cases shed light on a chilling trend: In recent years, and particularly since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s presidency, a growing number of Americans have taken ideological grievance and political outrage to a new level, lodging concrete threats of violence against members of Congress.The threats have come in almost every conceivable combination: Republicans threatening Democrats, Democrats threatening Republicans, Republicans threatening Republicans. Many of them, the review showed, were fueled by forces that have long dominated politics, including deep partisan divisions and a media landscape that stokes resentment.But they surged during Mr. Trump’s time in office and in its aftermath, as the former president’s own violent language fueled a mainstreaming of menacing political speech and lawmakers used charged words and imagery to describe the stakes of the political moment. Far-right members of Congress have hinted that their followers should be prepared to take up arms and fight to save the country, and in one case even posted a video depicting explicitly violent acts against Democrats.A plurality of the cases reviewed by The Times, more than a third, involved Republican or pro-Trump individuals threatening Democrats or Republicans they found insufficiently loyal to the former president, with upticks around Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and, later, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year. In some cases leading up to Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, callers left messages with lawmakers in both parties warning them to keep Mr. Trump in office or face violence.Nearly a quarter of the cases were Democrats threatening Republicans. Many of those threats were driven by anger over lawmakers’ support for Mr. Trump and his policies, including Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the drive to confirm one of his Supreme Court nominees, Brett M. Kavanaugh.In 2018, for example, a Florida man called the office of Representative Brian Mast, Republican of Florida, nearly 500 times and threatened to kill his children over the congressman’s support for Mr. Trump’s family separation policy at the southern border.Other cases had no discernible partisan leanings or were driven by delusion or wild conspiracy theories, such as the belief embraced by QAnon that Democrats are part of a satanic cult.Overall, threats against members of Congress reached a record high of 9,600 last year, according to data provided by the Capitol Police, double the previous year’s total. In the first three months of 2021 alone, the Capitol Police fielded more than 4,100 threats against lawmakers in the House and Senate, straining the law enforcement personnel tasked with investigating them.“We’re barely keeping our head above water for those investigations,” J. Thomas Manger, the Capitol Police chief, testified last month. “We’re going to have to nearly double the number of agents who work those threat cases.”Threats against members of Congress jumped more than fourfold after Mr. Trump took office. In 2016, the Capitol Police investigated 902 threats; the following year, that number reached 3,939.The threats range from phone calls with gruesome, specific descriptions of violence that have led to jail time for the callers to broad threats posted on social media that juries have dismissed outright.Each threat is reviewed and “thoroughly investigated,” a Capitol Police spokesman said. The reviews include assessments of the potential for targeted violence and the immediate risk to the victim. In some cases, the Capitol Police work in tandem with the F.B.I. to investigate.Two days after the Electoral College confirmed Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in 2020, Ryder Winegar, a former Navy cryptologist living in New Hampshire, called sixBy: Catie Edmondson and Mark Walker
Title: One Menacing Call After Another: Threats Against Lawmakers Surge
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/us/politics/politician-death-threats.html
Published Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 22:49:37 +0000
Read More
UK PoliticsWorld PoliticsVideosPrivacy PolicyTerms And Conditions
