A Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for threatening to kill Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and members of his staff.
Joshua Hall, 23, pleaded guilty on Oct. 28 to one count of making interstate communications with a threat to injure and one count of wire fraud. After his prison sentence, he will serve three years of supervised release, according to a DOJ announcement on the sentencing.
On Aug. 29, Hall placed several calls to Swalwell’s California office, conveying to staff members who answered the call that he had “a lot of AR-15s; that he wanted to shoot the Congressman; that he intended to come to the Congressman’s office with firearms; and that if he saw the Congressman, he would kill him.”
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A staffer of mine—who’s 1 month into her job—received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me. I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) August 30, 2022
While the DOJ announcement does not name Swalwell specifically, he confirmed to CNN on the day Hall pleaded guilty that the threats were aimed at him and his office. He also posted the incident via Twitter.
“A staffer of mine — who’s 1 month into her job — received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me,” Swalwell wrote. “I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.”
Hall made the calls to Swalwell’s office while on a pretrial release pending sentencing for another crime. The Pennsylvania man was charged in June 2021 and pleaded guilty to a 15-month scheme in which he impersonated members of former President Donald Trump‘s family, including his son, Barron Trump, as well as then-White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx.
Prosecutors said Hall “defrauded hundreds of victims” and raised funds for a fictitious political organization that he marketed as raising money for Trump’s reelection from September 2019 to December 2020. Hall used all of the funds he raised — thousands of dollars — for his own living expenses, according to the DOJ.
Hall faced a maximum sentence of five years on the threat charge and up to 20 years on wire fraud, according to Law & Crime. However, prosecutors had requested 27 months, and Hall requested six months followed by another six months of supervised release with inpatient treatment. Hall had previously received inpatient treatment in the past and fled from one such program, according to the DOJ.
A victim impact statement was attached to the sentencing memo, presumably from Swalwell.
“Everyone in the chain of this threat was terrified,” the statement read. “And everyone affected deserves the justice of the caller, HALL, receiving a sentence no less than the maximum.”
Swalwell said that, while he worked in a “somewhat secure building,” his family did not and they had to change their habits due to Hall’s threats.
The statement said that Hall’s threats to the life of an elected representative were “fuel thrown on an already raging fire” during a tumultuous time when the U.S. was experiencing acts of political violence.
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He noted that his intern had to hear the messages first and that if an armed intruder entered the office, the intern would “suffer death first.”
“Mr. Hall is not worthy of mercy for the terror he brought to me, my family, and my staff,” the statement’s last sentence said, calling for the maximum penalty for Hall.
