A Phoenix man, David Michael Hanson, is in hot water after being slapped with federal charges for a barrage of disturbing online threats targeting President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as revealed by a tip-off from the Secret Service that uncovered Hanson's menacing posts on social media platform X, where he hurled death threats using hashtags like “#joeAndKamala” between November and December, including claims they would be “brutally murdered,” this according to court documents highlighted by AZ Family.
The Secret Service initially contacted Hanson after he made multiple threatening posts on November 19, with Hanson arguing that his posts were protected under the First Amendment however the Secret Service agent countered that threatening language wasn't protected and that he could face prosecution, leading to a phone conversation where Hanson hung up and defiantly posted that his “email was open” if the Secret Service had any more questions, prosecutors said they then stopped tracking him after that but Hanson surfaced again with more alarming posts in December, stated in the court paperwork; Phoenix police eventually nabbed Hanson at a shelter on Christmas Eve and during questioning, he downplayed his actions as a mere cry for attention.
Meanwhile, threats against public officials have become an unsettling trend, with at least 77 cases of threats against public officials reported last year, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Chapman University discovered they also tracked at least 74 ideologically charged cases in 2022, highlighting a ten-year peak, as per the research cited in the original report.
In a related incident, Iowa resident Mark A. Rissi was sentenced to federal prison for two and a half years after he admitted to threatening an Arizona election official and the state’s former attorney general over what he described as "the theft" of the 2020 Presidential Election; Assistant Director for the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, Luis Quesada, stated after the sentencing, “The FBI works to ensure that threats to election officials will not impact election results, but will result in legal consequences,” as reported by AZ Family.
