There are also growing concerns over the fierce rise in
threats facing elected officials.
Right now, The New York Times is reporting that Capitol
Police hired a team of lawyers specifically to build cases
against anyone threatening members of Congress.
Luke Broadwater is one of the reporters behind that reporting.
He joins me now. Luke,
you write that Capitol Police investigated.
This is an astonishing number to me.
8008 threat cases last year.
That's the second highest total in the
agency's history. What kinds of threats are we talking about?
And and how might prosecutors help,
right? Well, it's really a a wide gamut of threats.
But what's become a staple of life on Capitol Hill
for these lawmakers is their phones,
emails, social media are nonstop,
ringing off the hook with people calling
and threatening them. This happens whenever there's a controversial vote,
whenever Donald Trump
demonizes one of the lawmakers,
whenever they become the target of
a television program or radio host who goes after them.
Their phone lines will blow up with this.
And often times it moves beyond just calls.
People drive by the house.
You saw just recently someone started a fire at Bernie
Sanders office in Vermont.
And so to try to combat this,
Capitol Police have often refer the threats to the Justice
Department.
But what they've found is many times the threats are
not prosecuted.
And so they've taken this step of paying for their
own prosecutors to be installed at three different offices around
the country where they will specifically handle the threat cases
that are referred to them by the Capitol Police.
So far, I understand three lawyers have been hired.
Doesn't sound like a lot right when you're talking about
more than 8000 cases here,
but is this just the beginning?
What's the the long term plan,
right? You're right, three lawyers can only do so much.
So this is just a starting point.
They hope to expand it to other offices.
Already some lawmakers on the Hill are asking for it
to be expanded.
And of course, one of the things these lawmakers are
doing is they're,
they've been designated by the Attorney General as experts on
dealing with threats and how to prosecute threat cases.
So they're doing trainings and briefings for prosecutors around the
country
to try to be sort of a force multiplier so
that no longer will they look at
threats against members of Congress and say,
you know what, that's not as important as a carjacking
or a homicide.
They will actually know how to put the pieces together,
build the case and hold someone accountable.
That's kind of where my question was going because you've
got an election that's like less than eight months away.
You have a lot of very heated races.
I mean, how do police adjust to this heightened threat
environment and sift through what can be noise,
but you don't know necessarily when that one is going
to be a threat to life,
to property?
Yeah, it's it's a very difficult
tasks for the Capitol Police.
They spend a lot of time visiting people's houses,
questioning them, trying to figure out who was who just
got angry or maybe drunk and shot off their mouth
one night and who's really serious about intimidating A lawmaker.
And so they spend a lot of time following up
with people,
questioning them. And even though they invent,
investigate 8000 threat cases a year,
the number of cases they actually refer to prosecutors to
try to hold someone accountable is much,
much smaller. We're talking about hundreds of cases,
not thousands. And so those are the cases they really
want to see prosecuted.
When they think someone's gone beyond just getting angry and
sending an angry e-mail and it's actually trying to intimidate
a lawmaker to try to get a political end,
that's when it crosses into being a threat and being
prosecutable.
Yeah. And maybe the prosecution sends a message to others.
Luke Broadwater, a great reporting and thank you.
Appreciate coming on the program.