Virginia Man, Frank Carillo, Threatened to Kill Kamala Harris, Authorities Say

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Virginia Man, Frank Carillo, Threatened to ***** Kamala Harris, Authorities Say

A Virginia man has been charged with posting repeated ****** threats against Vice President Kamala Harris on social media in the days after she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, 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 ******* 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 ***** Ms. Harris and her family, to pluck out her eyes with pliers and to ***** her alive. “Kamala Harris needs to be put on ***** alive I will do it personally if no one else does it I want her to suffer a slow agonizing ******,” Mr. Carillo said in one post on July 27.

Ms. Harris’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Carillo also threatened other officials and groups, prosecutors said. 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 President Biden, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, and Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County, Ariz., recorder who became known for rejecting claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from former President Donald J. Trump. Investigators tied the account belonging to Joe Madarats to Mr. Carillo.

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on Monday, Christopher R. Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said: “Open political discourse is a cornerstone of our ********* experience. We can disagree. We can argue, and we can debate. However, when those disagreements cross the line to threats of *********, 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 ********* people” and had also 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 ******** rifle, “LOCKED AND LOADED.” As the F.B.I. searched Mr. Carillo’s home last week, federal agents recovered a ******* 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 a lawyer, and then saying, “This is all over a comment, huh?”

Mr. Carillo’s lawyer’s name was not immediately available.

Court 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.

Mr. Carillo created the GETTR account used to make the threats in June of 2023, the authorities said. The email address associated with the account that bore the name Joe Madarats was created in January 2021, according to the affidavit supporting Mr. Carillo’s arrest.

The social media site GETTR is one of several of its kind. Like Gab and Parler, it was created by ************* entrepreneurs as an alternative to mainstream social media sites such as X, and it caters to right-wing Americans, including some of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Some of these sites were used by people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Like Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media company, GETTR was formed after the events of Jan. 6. It was launched by Jason Miller, a former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, in July 2021 and saw a huge spike in its number of users at the end of that year.

It has since been outpaced by competitors, namely Truth Social, and has been roiled by controversy: Last year, one of its key investors, a ******** real estate mogul, was arrested on

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. The site did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The number of threats against public officials has dramatically increased in recent years, with officials at all levels around the country targeted by members of the public who experts say have a broad range of political views.

Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the ******* States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018.

Experts say social media platforms that amplify outrage play a role, and they can turn even little-known public employees into potential scapegoats. Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political *********, said this year that although instances of political ********* in the ******* States remain rare compared to in other countries, there have been enough of them to render threats of ********* “credible.”

Days before Mr. Carillo’s arrest, an Atlanta man pleaded guilty to making ****** threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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