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WASHINGTON (AP) – The last throes of Donald Trump’s presidency have become ugly, even dangerous.
Death threats are on the rise. Local and state election officials are being driven underground. A Trump campaign lawyer publicly declares that a federal official who defended the integrity of the election should be “drawn and quartered” or simply shot.
Neutral officials, Democrats and a growing number of Republicans who won’t do what Trump wants are caught in a looming post-election backlash, stirred by Trump’s grievances over the election he lost.
“Death threats, physical threats, intimidation – that’s too much, it’s not fair,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who pleaded with Trump to “stop inspiring people to do things of potential violence “. Trump, in response, only insisted on his baseless argument that he had lost unfairly, without discouraging the issues or explicitly calling them out.
Triggering emotions has always been a staple for Trump. His political movement was born in arenas that resonated with songs of “lock up”. His support has been animated over the past four years by his relentlessly mocking manners, his slaps against “the enemy of the people” and his raw talent for demeaning political enemies with insulting nicknames like “Sleepy Joe” Biden. It is one of the most beautiful.
But in the final weeks of Trump’s presidency, the tenor took an even more toxic advantage as a state after the state upheld Biden’s victory, judge after judge dismissed legal challenges from Trump and his cadre of loyalists played on his frustrations. As Biden lays the groundwork for his new administration, Trump is drawing attention to the turmoil he is likely to push forward when he leaves office.
“I don’t think it goes away on January 20,” Eric Coomer, director of security for Dominion Voting Systems, said from the secret location where he hides death threats. “I think this will continue for a long time.”
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said of state officials who fear for their safety.
“They are the ones who should have the courage to step up,” Giuliani said Wednesday in Michigan. “You have to get them to remember that their oath to the Constitution sometimes requires criticism. Sometimes you even have to be threatened. “
For Coomer, the problems started when lawyers for the Trump campaign falsely claimed his company rigged the election.
Far-right chatrooms posted his photo, details of his family and address. “The first death threats followed almost immediately,” he told The Associated Press. “For the first two days, it was your standard online Twitter threats, ‘hang him, he’s a traitor.'”
But then came targeted phone calls, text messages and a handwritten letter to his father, an army veteran, from a suspected militia group saying, “How does it feel to have a traitor for?” a son?” Even now, weeks later and moved to a secret location, Coomer receives messages from people saying they know which city he fled to and vowing to find him.
“It’s terrifying,” he said. “I have worked in international elections in all kinds of post-conflict countries where electoral violence is real and people end up getting killed. And I feel like we’re about to be.
This week, Joe DiGenova, a lawyer for Trump’s campaign, told a radio show that a federal election official who was fired for disputing Trump’s fraud allegations “should be drawn and quartered. Went out at dawn and shot. This, as election officials and electoral system contractors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere have come under grim threats for doing their jobs.
“Threats like these start an avalanche,” said Louis Clark, executive director and CEO of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization. Of diGenova, Clark said, “This is behavior that is befitting a mafia lawyer.”
DiGenova later said he was joking. Fired official Christopher Krebs told the Washington Post: “My lawyers will speak, they will speak in court.
As “anonymous,” former homeland security official Miles Taylor wrote a burning Trump administration insider story, prompting Trump to tell rallies that “very bad things” would happen to this. “traitor”. Now Taylor’s identity is known and he has been assigned a security detail as recommended by the Secret Service due to the nature of the threats against him.
“It’s unprecedented in America,” Taylor said. “It’s not who we are. This is not what an open society is supposed to look like. “
Taylor said bullying has proven to be an effective tool in crushing dissent. “I spoke to former top officials who wanted to speak the truth during the presidential campaign, and many feared it would put their families at risk.”
But such pressure has not silenced some Republicans in Georgia, with revealing results.
Trespassers were found on the property of GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the integrity of his state’s election, resulting in a narrow victory for Biden. And a young Dominion systems entrepreneur has been harassed by death threats. Dominion is the only voting system provider in Georgia, so the company has been a lightning rod.
“There’s a noose in there with his name on it,” Sterling said of the entrepreneur, in a stalemate over the rhetoric and threats that followed the election.
Election security expert Matt Blaze tweeted angrily about the threats.
“It’s just sickening,” he said. “Every conversation I have with the election people we start with the death threats we have received. There’s no excuse for it, no matter what the target, but tackling field technicians and other personnel is a new low. Are you not ashamed?
Sterling, the Republican election official from Georgia said, “Someone is going to be hurt. Someone is going to get shot. Someone is going to be killed. And that is not fair.
Trump last week called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people,” Sterling noted, adding, “It helped open the floodgates to this kind of shit.” In addition to seeing people come and go on her property, Raffensperger’s wife received obscene threats on her cell phone, Sterling said.
In Arizona, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said she faced threats of violence directed at her family and office.
Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said the White House condemns all violence. “What I will say, however, is that the president’s lawyers (have) published their private information,” she said, accusing “leftist organizations”.
“So we see this happening to people on both sides of the argument and there’s never a place for it anywhere,” she said. Indeed, GOP poll watchers said in affidavits in an election dispute that they felt threatened and were laughed at by Democrats.
One key difference, however, is that intimidation against Republican election officials or officials by Trump opponents did not come from above. Biden has largely remained out of the fray even as Trump systematically denigrates the process, election workers, state officials who resist his pressure, and some of the judges.
He has repeatedly gone after Dominion Voting Systems, mistakenly calling it a “radical left-wing corporation” responsible for a “stolen” election – contrary to assurances from state and federal officials that the elections were conducted fairly and remarkably. well in the midst of a pandemic, without any of the massive frauds alleged by the president.
Members of the Trump administration have asserted the legitimacy of the election, although at least one, Krebs, was fired for it. Even Trump’s trusted ally, Attorney General William Barr, told the PA he had seen no widespread fraud.
For Coomer, Dominion’s director of product strategy and security, “this election went incredibly smoothly across the board.”
But sometimes, around Eric Trump’s post-election tweets about Coomer and a bizarre press conference where Trump’s lawyers Giuliani and Sidney Powell made up fabrications about Dominion and called him by his name, the real problem started for him.
Dominion hired a third party for him and was told not to go home.
A few nights ago, he said, he was told in texts that people were watching him and that he had better run. Others had already said that they had rented a house in the city where he was hiding and that they were going to find him.
“It’s a daily thing,” he said, “and no, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since all of this.”
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Associated Press editors Kate Brumback in Atlanta, David Eggert in Lansing, Michigan, and Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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