US lawmakers balance security and openness as threats of political violence rise

The Guardian

6 days ago

'Tell Eric Swalwell that we are coming and that we are going to handle everyone. We are going to hurt everyone. We are coming to hurt them.'
The staff at representative Swalwell's California district office had heard the man's voice before. He had called twice in previous weeks to leave revolting, racist threats against the Democratic congressman and his wife in voicemails, according to an FBI criminal complaint released on Monday.
'So, I'm fine with anything at this point. I'm tired of it. I'll just set up behind my .308 and I'll do my job,' he said in one voice recording. The .308 is a reference to a rifle, according to the criminal complaint. 'You want a war? Get your war started.'
Swalwell's staff reported the latest threat. This time, the FBI charged the caller with a crime.
As threats of political violence escalate – and the impact of the political assassination in Minnesota reverberates across the country – lawmakers like Swalwell are re-evaluating how to manage the balance between openness and security.
The instinct of security professionals may be to increase physical security and limit the availability of elected officials to the public. But that approach runs headlong into a conflict with the imperative for politicians to connect with their constituents.
'I'm not going be intimidated. I know the aim of this threat is to have me shrink or hide under the bed and not speak out,' Swalwell told the Guardian. 'This guy's terrorizing the members of Congress, law enforcement and staff, and it just has no place in our civil discourse.'
Swalwell has had to spend nearly $1m on security over the last two years, he said. That money comes out of his campaign accounts.
'When they threaten you and you protect yourself, your family and your staff, you're dipping into your campaign resources,' Swalwell said. 'You have this decision calculus where you can protect your family or you can protect your re-election, but it's been costly to do both.'
The caller, Geoffrey Chad Giglio, was no stranger to the FBI or to the public. Reuters interviewed him in October while looking at violent political rhetoric after the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life, presenting him as a provocateur and an example of the new viciousness.
'I push the envelope,' Giglio told Reuters, adding that he would never hurt anyone. 'If I have to go to jail because somebody thinks I'm really a threat, oh well, so be it.'
Giglio's made his last call to Swalwell's office on 13 June according to the complaint, apparently undaunted after being interviewed by the FBI about previous threats only a few days earlier.
Researchers have been tracking an increase in threats made against lawmakers for years, with the January 6 attack on the Capitol a way station on a dark road.
'We see an increase starting around 2017, 2018,' said Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, who in 2024 published a review of a decade of federal data on intimidation charges against federal elected officials. From 2013 to 2016, Capitol police charged an average of 38 people a year for making threats to lawmakers. By 2017 to 2022, the average had grown to 62 charges a year.
'It's hard to know whether there's an increase in threats to public officials or there's an increase in the level of enforcement that's producing more criminal investigations and ultimately more charges filed in prosecution,' Simi said.
But surveys of public officials at both the state and federal level also indicate an increase in threats.
In a survey of local lawmakers published last year by the Brennan Center for Justice, 'substantial numbers' said they thought the severity of the threats was increasing, said Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center's elections and government program.
'Lawmakers are reporting that it's kind of getting worse, the severity of what's being said in these voicemails, these emails, whatever messages people are getting,' Ramachandran said.
Best security practices have begun to emerge, but the implementation is inconsistent across states, she said. One recommendation is for a specific law enforcement agency to take charge of monitoring and tracking threats against lawmakers, Ramachandran said. The US Capitol police are tasked with responding to threats to federal lawmakers, who may then refer cases to the FBI and the Department of Justice for prosecution. The responding agency at the state level is often less obvious to elected officials. 'A lot of lawmakers we spoke with didn't even know who they're supposed to report these things to,' she said.
Many elected officials said they wanted to balance security with accessibility, Ramachandran said, citing interviews with dozens of local lawmakers in 2023 about security and threats.
'The vast majority of the lawmakers we talked to were really concerned about their constituents not feeling welcome, in terms of coming to visit their offices or going to the state capitol to be heard,' she said. 'There was a repeated concern, of course, for safety of their staff and their families and all of that, and the constituents themselves, but also with not wanting things to be on lockdown and wanting to be accessible to constituents.'
But the assassination of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their Minneapolis-area home last month, has provoked a reassessment of that balance.
At the federal level, the committee on House administration doubled spending on personal security measures for House members last week, allowing congressional representatives to spend $20,000 to increase home security, up from $10,000, and up to $5,000 a month on personal security, up from $150 a month. The committee's chair, Bryan Steil, a Republican from Wisconsin, and ranking member Joseph Morelle, a Democrat from New York, also asked the Department of Justice to give the US Capitol police additional federal prosecutors to help investigate and prosecute threats against legislators.
Federal campaign finance law, as revised in January, provides a mechanism for federal officeholders to spend campaign money for locks, alarm systems, motion detectors and security camera systems, as well as some structural security devices, such as wiring, lighting, gates, doors and fencing, 'so long as such devices are intended solely to provide security and not to improve the property or increase its value'. It also provides for campaign funds to pay for cybersecurity measures and for professional security personnel.
Both Democratic and Republican legislators in Oklahoma sent a letter earlier this month to the Oklahoma ethics commission, asking if state law could be similarly interpreted, citing the assassinations in Minnesota.
Lawmakers in California are also looking for ways to loosen campaign finance restrictions for candidate spending on security.
California has a $10,000 lifetime cap for candidates on personal security spending from election funds – a cap that legislation doubled last year. A proposal by assemblymember Mia Bonta would suspend the cap through 2028, with a $10,000 annual cap after that.
Enhanced home security for Minnesota legislators will be covered by a state budget appropriation for any member asking for it, lawmakers decided last week. This is in addition to state rules enacted in 2021 allowing $3,000 in campaign spending toward personal security.
Minnesota and several other states – including Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and North Dakota – almost immediately removed home address data from state government websites after the Minnesota assassinations. New Mexico had already largely restricted this data after a series of drive-by shootings at lawmakers' homes by a failed Republican candidate in 2022 and 2023.
Restricting public information about lawmaker's residency can be a political headache in some states. Generally, an elected official must live in the district he or she represents. Residency challenges are a common campaign issue, but a challenge cannot be raised if the address of a lawmaker is unknown to the public.
'It is something that I think we as a society are going to have to grapple with,' said Ramachandran. 'It may not be the best idea to enforce those rules about residency requirements by just having the whole general public know where people live and to be able to go up to their house and see if they really live there, right?'
Some states like Nevada are exploring long-term solutions. Nevada's secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, is forming a taskforce to look at ways to restrict access to lawmakers' residential information without interfering in election challenges.
'Political violence has no place in our country,' he said in a statement. 'People, including elected officials, should be able to have differing opinions and go to work without fear of violence or threats.'
The challenge for lawmakers and investigators is crafting a policy to deal with people who because of their behavior are unusual outliers. As angry as people can be about politics, only a tiny few will make a phone call to a legislator to make a threat, and even fewer will carry out that threat.
'The vast, vast majority of Americans are reporting on these surveys that they don't support political violence,' Simi said. 'So those that do are an outlier. But there's some question about whether that outlier is increasing over time. We don't have great data over time, so that's a hard question to answer.'