Now Nikki Haley is SWATTED: Man calls 911 claiming to have shot his girlfriend at GOP presidential candidate’s South Carolina home

A hoax caller claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself at the home of presidential candidate Nikki Haley in a terrifying swatting incident.

Authorities went to the former ambassador’s home in South Carolina last month before realizing the emergency was a hoax.

The hoax against Haley, who is challenging front-runner Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, took place on December 30 in the town of Kiawah Island, an affluent, gated community of about 2,000 people.

An unknown person called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at Nikki Haley’s residence,” Kiawah Island Public Safety Director Craig Harris told the council.

“It was determined to be a hoax…Nikki Haley is not on the island and her son is with her.”

The previously unreported “swatting” incident is part of a wave of violent threats, bomb threats and other acts of intimidation against government officials, members of the judiciary and election administrators since the 2020 election, which have alerted law enforcement ahead of the U.S. presidential elections this year. contest.

The number of swatting cases has surged in the past two months, affecting both allies and rivals of former President Donald Trump as he campaigns to return to the White House. Targets include figures who have publicly opposed Trump, such as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has barred him from her state’s primary vote.

Judges and at least one prosecutor handling cases against Trump have been targeted. But Trump supporters like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have also faced swatting attempts.

The hoax against Haley, who is challenging front-runner Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, took place on December 30 in the town of Kiawah Island, an affluent, gated community of about 2,000 people.

Haley’s campaign declined to comment.

An unknown person called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at Nikki Haley’s residence,” Kiawah Island Public Safety Director Craig Harris told city officials on Dec. 30, according to an email obtained by Reuters. in a records request for threats against Haley’s home.

“It was determined to be a hoax…Nikki Haley is not on the island and her son is with her.”

Swatting is the act of filing false reports to the police to provoke a potentially dangerous response from officers.

Law enforcement experts see it as a form of intimidation or intimidation that is increasingly being used to attack political figures and officials involved in the civil and criminal cases against Trump.

In the email, Harris said he was in contact with the South Carolina State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the head of Haley’s security team. “This incident is under investigation by all involved,” he wrote.

The email did not mention a suspect or possible motive. In a separate email obtained by Reuters, an FBI official in South Carolina told Harris and other law enforcement officials that federal agents were monitoring the hoax call and planned to open a “threat assessment” on the case.

Harris, the FBI and state police had no immediate comment on the incident. Law enforcement authorities have not publicly identified a suspect in the Haley case or other high-profile swatting cases.

Haley and her husband purchased the $2.4 million Kiawah Island residence in October 2019, local property records show.

Trump, famous for his inflammatory rhetoric, has expressed anger at Haley in recent weeks. She has lost the first two Republican nominating contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, but has refused to drop out of the race.

Haley has stepped up her criticism of Trump, suggesting he is too old to be president again and calling him “completely unhinged.”

Reuters has documented at least 27 swatting incidents of politicians, prosecutors, election officials and judges since November 2023, ranging from Republican state officials in Georgia to hoaxes this month against Democrat Joe Biden’s White House residence.

Some calls show striking similarities. In two cases in which Reuters reviewed 911 recordings of hoax calls, a person identifying himself as “Jamal” called police to say he had killed his wife.

One such incident targeted the Florida home of Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott on Dec. 27, weeks after he endorsed Trump, according to Naples police records.

“I caught my wife sleeping with another guy, so I grabbed my AR-15 and shot her three times in the head,” the caller said, referring to a popular semi-automatic rifle. Officers checked Scott’s home and determined the call was a hoax. Scott was not home at the time of the call.

“Jamal’s voice sounded as if it was computer generated/artificial,” a Naples Police Department official wrote in the incident report.

A caller identifying himself as “Jamal” also targeted Georgia Republican Sen. John Albers on Dec. 26, according to a Roswell police incident report. In that case, the caller said he had shot his wife and demanded $10,000 or he would shoot himself too. In both cases, the callers were male and spoke with a similar accent, according to a Reuters analysis of the audio recordings.

A Jan. 7 call to Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a strong Trump supporter, also showed some similarities. The caller told police he was calling from the official’s address in the state capital, said he had shot his wife, added he was going to kill himself and hung up on the operator, according to a Jefferson City incident report. Police station. According to a statement from the Missouri Secretary of State, Ashcroft and his wife and children were home at the time.

Scott, Albers and Ashcroft did not respond to requests for comment.

Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia Secretary of State, said that when someone called 911 on Jan. 11 to falsely report a shooting at his suburban Atlanta home, 14 police cars, a fire truck and an ambulance rushed to his home. “Now I lock my door every night,” said Sterling, a Republican who faced a barrage of threats for exposing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election. “That’s the reality in which I live now,” he said in an interview.

JUDGES IN TRUMP CASES ARE SIGNIFICANT

Similar scare tactics have been targeted in recent weeks against judges and prosecutors involved in cases against Trump.

In the early morning hours of January 11, police in Nassau County, New York, received a report of a bomb at the home of Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the civil fraud case against Trump and his family real estate. company. Police officers, including a bomb squad, were dispatched to the judge’s home in the upscale Long Island suburb of Great Neck at 5:30 a.m., according to Nassau County police.

But no explosive was found and it was determined to be a false alarm. A spokesperson for the New York justice system declined to comment on the incident.

Just days earlier, police in Washington, D.C., responded to a false report of a shooting at the home of U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the criminal case accusing Trump of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Late in the evening on January 7, police were sent to the house, where an unknown woman told them she was not injured and that no one else was in the house, according to an incident report reviewed by Reuters. The police cleared the house and found no explosives. The US Marshals Service, which protects federal judges and prosecutors, responded to a request for comment on the incident.

Other security risks involve hoax bomb attacks.

Bomb threats were sent to state capitols and courthouses in multiple states over two days in early January, according to news reports and state officials including Minnesota, Arkansas, Maine, Hawaii, Montana and New Hampshire. In Minnesota, state courts received bomb threats by email, but the threats were deemed false and did not block legal proceedings, court officials told Reuters. The FBI said it is investigating the threats.

In an earlier statement released about the increase in swatting incidents, the FBI said people making the spoofed calls used tactics such as caller ID technology “to give the impression that the emergency call came from the victim’s phone.”

The calls “are dangerous to first responders and to victims,” ​​often involving false reports that hostages have been taken or bombs are about to go off, the FBI said. “The community is put at risk when first responders arrive and remove them during real emergencies, and officers are put at risk because unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves.”

The recent swatting incidents follow a wave of violent threats against US election workers after the 2020 election, inspired by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Reuters documented more than a thousand harassing messages between the 2020 and 2021 elections in a series of stories detailing the campaign of fear against election administrators in more than a dozen battleground states. The harassment continued well into the past year, according to a report published Thursday by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. In the survey of state lawmakers completed in October 2023, 43% reported they had been threatened in the past three years.

The wave of violence coincides with the most sustained wave of political violence in the United States since the 1970s, according to a Reuters survey last year. That report documented at least 232 politically motivated acts of violence since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The events ranged from riots and fights at political demonstrations to beatings and murders. (Alexandra Ulmer reported from San Francisco. Peter Eisler and Linda So reported from Washington. Additional reporting by Ned Parker in New York. Editing by Jason Szep)