By Rob Kuznia, Majlie de Put, Alex Leeds Matthews, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard and Yahya Abou-Ghalaza
By the time the FBI first showed up at Kevin Patrick Smith’s home in early February, he’d already left dozens of threatening voice messages for US Senator Jon Tester.
“You stand toe to toe with me, I rip your head off. You die.”
FBI agents admonished Smith – who lived about a mile from the Montana Democrat’s office in Kalispell – to stop the threats, which were making the senator’s staff members afraid to come to work. But the middle-aged contractor couldn’t bring himself to stop. After 10 days, he resumed the calls in ramped-up fashion, leaving messages that now alluded to guns.
All said, Smith left about 60 messages for Tester’s office, sometimes over the din of a TV or radio blaring in the background. Aside from some vague accusations (“you’re pedophiles and you’re criminals”), Smith’s threats contained few specifics about why he was so angry.
When FBI agents returned to arrest Smith in late February, they confiscated four shotguns, five rifles, eight pistols, a home-made silencer and nearly 1,200 rounds of ammunition. Smith pleaded guilty to threatening to injure and murder a US Senator and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.
His case is but a drop in a tidal wave of menacing behavior in recent years that has rattled the offices of public servants and is on a path to collide with what is shaping up to be the most politically toxic presidential election in modern memory.
As the 2024 campaign revs up – and on the heels of indictments against the Republican frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, who has verbally attacked some of his courtroom adversaries – the ongoing onslaught of violent messages, particularly to federal lawmakers and other public officials, threatens to disrupt the American machinery of government.
Though the threatscape to members of Congress and other public servants appears to…
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