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‘Swatting’ targets all sides, raising fears

by Ella Lee - 01/18/24 6:00 AM ET

Prominent figures and institutions across the political spectrum have been targets of “swatting” incidents in recent weeks, including the prosecutors and judges involved in former President Trump’s legal matters and some of his fiercest allies in Congress.

It hasn’t stopped there. The White House was a target Monday when emergency responders were dispatched to a false alarm after a 911 caller claimed there was a structure fire in the building. President Biden was at Camp David at the time.

And several state officials — such as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause, and Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia secretary of state — have also fallen victim. That’s in addition to several bomb threats that sparked evacuations at state capitols across the country early in the new year.

The trend is raising the alarm among experts in political extremism and emergency management, who say swatting incidents targeting public officials will only continue to increase as Trump’s criminal trials near in the heat of the 2024 election.

“Like a lot of things that become normal and weaponized, [swattings] are sort of trolling tactics,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “They’re intended to not be as heavy or serious — for lack of a better term, almost run-of-the-mill harassment.”

“But it can move from trolling and harassment to a political weapon,” he said.

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Swatting involves prank calling emergency services to report a serious criminal threat, with the goal of drawing a significant law enforcement response.

The first swatting incidents were recorded in the early 2000s, oftentimes among gaming streamers who targeted other gamers in hopes that their opponent’s webcam would catch a live swatting attack, said Lauren Shapiro, a professor at the City University of New York who has researched the phenomenon.

Over time, swatters began harassing celebrities, schools and more recently, public officials, Shapiro said.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing Trump’s prosecution in two federal cases, was the focus of a swatting attempt on Christmas Day. Police in Montgomery County, Md., were told that Smith had shot his wife, stirring a police response before officers were informed by U.S. marshals protecting the prosecutor and his family it was a false alarm.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the firebrand Republican congresswoman who is one of Trump’s most fervent allies, said in a recent post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that she was swatted on Christmas Day for “like the 8th time,” too.

Two judges overseeing cases involving Trump, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington and New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron, were victims of swatting earlier this month.

The spate of swatting incidents follows a rise in threats against public officials, which experts have warned will only continue to worsen in a polarized election year. Whether the two are connected is still unclear, according to Katherine Keneally, head of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“It’s really difficult to determine whether this is reflective of the trends of public officials being threatened or whether it’s people who are using the public officials to just essentially sow chaos,” Keneally said.

While swatters are sometimes aligned with extremist ideologies or groups, they’re also sometimes just “teens who think it’s funny,” she added.

“It could also just be entertainment — a love to humiliate and terrorize people that they don’t like or whose opinions they don’t like, and this is their way of harassing them,” Shapiro said.

But swatting incidents have had serious consequences outside frazzling their victims.

In 2017, a 28-year-old Kansas man was killed by police in his home after a swatter called in a fake hostage situation at his home. The swatter was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty.

A Tennessee man died of a heart attack after police swarmed his house in 2020, guns drawn, following a false report that a woman was shot in the back of the head at his home address. The caller was a minor living in the United Kingdom, according to federal prosecutors.

It also wastes resources, Shapiro said, noting that each incident is estimated to cost between $15,000 and $25,000.

In May, the FBI launched a national database to track swatting incidents, and since then, more than 500 swattings have been reported by law enforcement, the agency told The Hill. Experts agreed that the figure is likely an undercount, given how challenging it is to investigate the tactic.

“That’s probably one of the reasons why this has been going on for the last few weeks and no one’s been arrested,” Keneally said. “It’s because technology has enabled actors to do it in a way that makes it difficult for law enforcement to determine who was actually issuing the swatting.”

Swatting is also notoriously challenging to prosecute, since there is no single federal law criminalizing it, the experts said.

“What they have to do is take this puzzle piece approach and look at the acts in the swatting incident, match it with the element in the law and say, ‘Yes, this one is a match, so we can use this particular law,’” Shapiro said.

But if an incident can’t be cleanly tied to another statute, prosecutors are out of luck, Shapiro said.

Efforts to create federal legislation criminalizing swatting have repeatedly failed. The Interstate Swatting Hoax Act of 2015, Anti-Swatting Act of 2019 and Preserving Safe Communities by Ending Swatting Act of 2021 did not become law after being introduced.

Two Republican lawmakers, Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), on Wednesday introduced legislation to prohibit swatting calls under the federal criminal hoax statute. It would amend the federal criminal hoax statute to establish strict penalties for swatting, including up to 20 years in prison if incidents result in serious injury.

“I do feel hopeful that that is something that could change in the future now that we’re seeing this threat sort of sustain,” Keneally said.