A man from New York was sentenced to spend 13 months behind bars for his role in making threatening phone calls to Congress members and some staffers.
In addition to the 13 months in prison, the 35-year-old Ade Salim Lilly will face three years of supervised release, the Department of Justice said in a news release earlier this week.
In May, Lilly pleaded guilty to interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure, as well as making threatening phone calls repeatedly.
Starting in February of 2022, Lilly is alleged to have placed more than 12,000 calls from Puerto Rico and Maryland to the offices of lawmakers in Congress.
Court documents show that he was arrested in November of 2023 in Puerto Rico.
During the phone calls, Lilly berated staffers of Congress members and would “become angry and use vulgar and harassing language towards the individual who answered the phone” after he was told the staffer wouldn’t be able to help him, according to federal prosecutors.
On one call, that happened in October of 2022, Lilly threatened a congressional staffer’s life by saying:
“I will kill you. I am going to run you over. I will kill you with a bomb or grenade.”
Prosecutors further said that in February 2023, the suspect called the office of one lawmaker in Washington, D.C., more than 500 times over just two days.
Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of 18 months in jail for Lilly. In their sentencing memo, prosecutors wrote:
“This is an election year, and more and more often, criticism of a political position or viewpoint crosses the First Amendment line and leads to true threats of violence. The pervasive rise in threats against elected officials creates a real risk that expressions of violence will become normalized.”
- Thomas Manger, the chief of the Capitol Police, gave testimony to Congress last year, during which he said that threats that targeted Congress members had increased roughly 400% over the last six years.
In Virginia last month, a man was charged with issuing multiple death threats on a conservative social media platform against the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republican nominee Donald Trump and Ohio Senator JD Vance, his running mate, have faced threats on social media platforms as well.
A man from Florida was charged in July with writing threats that he’d kill the two.
That man, Michael Wiseman was arrested. The Jupiter Police Department issued a statement following that arrest, saying:
“After investigating the reports and the suspect’s Facebook account, JPD detectives found that Wiseman had made multiple threats against Trump and Vance, who earlier this week became the Republican nominees for President and Vice President, respectively. Threats were also made concerning bodily harm to members of the Trump and Vance families.”
That arrest came less than one week after the failed assassination attempt against Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
