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On Christmas Day 2023, a man called the suicide prevention hotline claiming he had shot his girlfriend and threatening to kill himself. Police barreled toward the address but turned around once before they arrived.
It was a hoax – a swatting call at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s residence.
Five days later, GOP Sen. Rick Scott’s home in Florida was swatted.
Within a month of Donald Trump clinching his second presidential election win, several of his Cabinet picks and administration members were targeted in violent threats, including swatting incidents and bomb threats, his transition team said.
The wave of false descriptions of shootings and violence continued to assail high-level government officials: the federal judge overseeing Trump’s election subversion case, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, then-presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
The threats weren’t legitimate. There were no shootings, no violence.
So, a unit of the Secret Service in its infancy set out six months ago to unmask the layers of burner phones, changing phone numbers and SIM cards that were swatting American officials.
Yet, there was a real, legitimate and “imminent threat” the surge of swatting calls against high-ranking officials posed to the service’s protective operations, said Matt McCool, the special agent in charge for the Secret Service New York field office.
The Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, along with a flurry of other law enforcement agencies – the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the New York Police Department, and other state and local law enforcement – began unraveling the web.
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