A New York man was sentenced on Sept. 3 to 13 months in prison for making more than 12,000 harassing phone calls to offices of congressional lawmakers and threatening to kill a staffer.
Ade Salim Lilly, 35, was arrested in November 2023. He pleaded guilty in May to interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure someone, and for making repeated threatening phone calls.
Between February 2022 and November 2023, Lilly made more than 12,000 phone calls to 54 offices of members of Congress, more than half of them to offices in the District of Columbia, the DOJ stated.
Prosecutors said that during these calls, Lilly “would become angry and use vulgar and harassing language” toward the congressional staff members or interns who answered the phone.
In one of his calls in October 2022, Lilly threatened a congressional staff member, saying, “I will kill you, I am going to run you over, I will kill you with a bomb or grenade,” the DOJ stated.
In February 2023, Lilly allegedly made more than 500 calls to an unnamed congressional representative over a two-day period.
The DOJ stated that congressional staff members had repeatedly told Lilly to stop calling. U.S. Capitol Police also told him multiple times that his calls were “prohibited by law” because of their harassing nature.
Man Arrested for Threatening Kamala Harris
Last month, a Virginia man, Frank Lucio Carillo, was arrested and charged with making multiple violent threats against Vice President Kamala Harris on the social media platform GETTR.The alleged threats were posted six days after President Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection and endorsed Harris to take over at the top of the Democratic ticket.
According to the complaint, Carillo’s GETTR account mentioned Harris 19 times, with many posts containing profanity and graphic threats. He also targeted other officials, including Biden, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Arizona’s Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, and others, the complaint stated.
