A hoax caller claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself at presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s home in a terrifying crushing incident.
Authorities arrived at the former ambassador’s home in South Carolina last month before realizing the emergency was false.
The previously unreported “hit” incident is among a wave of violent threats, bomb threats and other acts of intimidation against government officials, members of the judiciary and election administrators since the 2020 election that have alarmed law enforcement ahead of this year’s US presidential election. contest.
Squashing cases have increased over the past two months, targeting both allies and rivals of former President Donald Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House. Targets include figures who have publicly opposed Trump, such as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who excluded him from her state’s primary election.
Judges and at least one prosecutor handling cases against Trump have come under attack. But Trump supporters, such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have also faced swatting attempts.
A hoax caller claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself at presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s home in a terrifying swatting incident.
The hoax against Haley, who is challenging front-runner Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, occurred on Dec. 30 in the town of Kiawah Island, a gated, affluent community of about 2,000 people.
Haley’s campaign declined to comment.
An unknown person called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at Nikki Haley’s residence,” Kiawah Island Public Safety Director Craig Harris told city officials on Sept. 30. December, according to an email obtained by Reuters. in a records request for threats to Haley’s home.
‘It was determined to be a hoax… Nikki Haley is not on the island and her son is with her.’
Swatting is the submission of false reports to police to provoke a potentially dangerous response from officers.
Law enforcement experts see it as a form of intimidation or harassment that is increasingly being used against political figures and officials involved in the civil and criminal cases against Trump.
In the email, Harris said he was in contact with South Carolina State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the head of Haley’s security team. “This incident is being investigated by all involved,” he wrote.
The email does not mention any suspects or potential motive. In a separate email obtained by Reuters, an FBI official in South Carolina told Harris and other law enforcement officials that federal agents were tracking the hoax call and intended to open a “threat assessment.” on the matter.
Harris, the FBI and state police had no immediate comment on the incident. Law enforcement agencies have not publicly identified any suspects in the Haley case or other high-profile swatting cases.
Haley and her husband purchased the Kiawah Island residence for $2.4 million in October 2019, local property records indicate.
Trump, famous for his inflammatory rhetoric, has vented his fury at Haley in recent weeks. He has lost the first two races for the Republican nomination, in Iowa and New Hampshire, but has refused to drop out of the race.
Haley has stepped up her criticism of Trump, suggesting he is too old to be president again and calling him “totally unhinged.”
Reuters has documented at least 27 incidents of swatting at politicians, prosecutors, election officials and judges since November 2023, ranging from Republican state officials in Georgia to hoaxes this month targeting Democrat Joe Biden’s White House residence.
Some of the calls have striking similarities. In two cases in which Reuters reviewed 911 recordings of hoax calls, a person who identified himself as ‘Jamal’ called police to say he had killed his wife.
One of those incidents targeted Republican Sen. Rick Scott’s Florida home on Dec. 27, weeks after he endorsed Trump, according to Naples Police Department records.
“I caught my wife sleeping with another guy, so I took my AR-15 and shot her in the head three times,” the caller said, referring to a popular semi-automatic rifle. Officers checked Scott’s home and concluded the call was a hoax. Scott was not home at the time of the call.
“Jamal’s voice sounded as if it was computer-generated or artificial,” a Naples Police Department official wrote in the incident report.
A caller, identifying himself as ‘Jamal,’ also targeted Georgia Republican state senator John Albers on Dec. 26, according to a Roswell Police Department incident report. In that case, his caller said he had shot his wife and demanded $10,000 or he would shoot himself too. In both cases, the callers were men and spoke with a similar accent, according to a Reuters analysis of the audio recordings.
A Jan. 7 call to Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a strong Trump supporter, also had some similarities. The caller told police he was calling from the official’s address in the state capital, said he had shot his wife and added that “he was going to kill himself and hung up on the operator,” according to an incident report. of Jefferson City. Police department. Ashcroft, his wife and his children were home at the time, according to a statement from the Missouri Secretary of State.
Scott, Albers and Ashcroft did not respond to requests for comment.
Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that when someone called 911 on Jan. 11 to falsely report a shooting at his suburban Atlanta home, 14 police cars, a truck Firefighters and an ambulance rushed to his house. . “Now I lock my doors every night,” said Sterling, a Republican who faced a torrent of threats for exposing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election. “That’s the reality I live in now,” he said in an interview.
THE JUDGES IN THE TRUMP CASES ARE THE TARGET
Similar scare tactics have been targeted in recent weeks at judges and prosecutors involved in cases against Trump.
In the early morning hours of January 11, police in Nassau County, New York, received a report of a bomb at the home of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the civil fraud trial. of Trump and his real estate family. business. Police officers, including a bomb squad, were sent to the judge’s home in the upscale suburb of Great Neck, Long Island, at 5:30 a.m., according to the Nassau County Police Department.
But no explosive device was found and the call was determined to be a false report. A spokesman for the New York court system declined to comment on the incident.
Just days earlier, police in Washington, D.C., responded to a false report of a shooting at the home of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is hearing the criminal case accusing Trump of attempting reverse their 2020 election loss. Late in the afternoon on January 7, police were sent to the home, where an unidentified woman informed them that she was unharmed and that no one else was in the home, according to a report from the incident reviewed by Reuters. Police cleared the house and did not find any explosive devices. The U.S. Marshals Service, which protects federal judges and prosecutors, responded to a request for comment on the incident.
Other security fears have involved fake bomb attacks.
Over two days in early January, bomb threats were sent to state capitals and courthouses in several states, according to news reports and state officials, including Minnesota, Arkansas, Maine, Hawaii, Montana and New Hampshire. In Minnesota, state courts received email bomb threats, but the threats were deemed false and did not block court proceedings, court officials told Reuters. The FBI said it was investigating the threats.
In a statement issued earlier about the rise in swatting incidents, the FBI said people making spoof calls were using tactics such as caller ID spoofing technology “to make it appear that the emergency call is coming from the victim’s phone.” “.
The calls “are dangerous to first responders and victims,” and often involve false reports that hostages have been taken or that bombs are about to explode, the FBI said. “The community is in danger when first responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies, and officers are in danger when unsuspecting residents may attempt to defend themselves.”
The recent swatting incidents come after a wave of violent threats against American poll workers after the 2020 election, inspired by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Reuters documented more than 1,000 intimidating messages between the 2020 and 2021 elections in a series of stories chronicling the fear campaign against election administrators in more than a dozen battleground states. A report released Thursday by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice said the bullying continued well into last year. In their survey of state legislators completed in October 2023, 43% reported having been threatened over the past three years.
The landslide coincides with the most sustained wave of political violence in the United States since the 1970s, according to a Reuters investigation last year. That report documented at least 232 acts of politically motivated violence since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The events ranged from riots to fights at political rallies, beatings and murders. (Alexandra Ulmer reporting from San Francisco. Peter Eisler and Linda So reporting from Washington. Additional reporting by Ned Parker in New York. Editing by Jason Szep)