A Virginia man has been charged with posting repeated death threats against Vice President Kamala Harris on social media, the authorities said on Monday.
The man, Frank Lucio Carillo, of Winchester, Va., was arrested on Friday and appeared in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, Va., on Monday to face a charge of making threats against the vice president of the United States. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison.
The arrest came after the F.B.I. discovered nearly 20 threats against Ms. Harris from an account linked to Mr. Carillo on the social media site GETTR, according to filings in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.
The threats included promises to kill Ms. Harris and her family, to pluck out her eyes with pliers and to burn her alive. “Kamala Harris needs to be put on fire alive I will do it personally if no one else does it I want her to suffer a slow agonizing death,” Mr. Carillo said in one post on July 27.
In an affidavit supporting Mr. Carillo’s arrest, the F.B.I. cited “4,359 posts/replies made by ‘joemadarats1’ targeting various public officials” over the past year, including Vice President Harris, President Biden, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, and Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder who became known for rejecting claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from former President Donald J. Trump.
The threats against the vice president were made days after Ms. Harris replaced Mr. Biden to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, according to court records.
In a statement on Monday, Christopher R. Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said: “Open political discourse is a cornerstone of our American experience. We can disagree. We can argue, and we can debate. However, when those disagreements cross the line to threats of violence, law enforcement must step in.”
The F.B.I. began its investigation of Mr. Carillo after it was notified by its Phoenix office of a GETTR user that had threatened Mr. Richer, the Maricopa County official, according to the affidavit.
The F.B.I. found that Mr. Carillo had also written “numerous other posts about firearms and shooting people” and had made violent threats against, among others, Muslims, “illegals” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada.
In February, Mr. Carillo said in a post that he had an AR-15 assault rifle, “LOCKED AND LOADED.” As the F.B.I. searched Mr. Carillo’s home last week, federal agents recovered a pistol and an AR-15, which the affidavit said he had purchased in February. They also recovered thousands of rounds of ammunition.
After he was arrested, Mr. Carillo was quoted in the F.B.I. agent’s affidavit as requesting an attorney, and then saying, “This is all over a comment, huh?”
Mr. Carillo’s lawyer’s name was not immediately available.
Records show that Mr. Carillo described himself as unemployed and disabled when he filed for bankruptcy in Virginia in 2018. He previously resided at addresses in Pennsylvania and New York.
The number of threats against public officials has been on the rise in recent years and Mr. Carillo’s arrest comes weeks after a Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate Mr. Trump at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
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