A hoax caller claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself in a horrific “swatting” incident at presidential candidate Nikki Haley's home.
Last month, authorities raided the former U.N. ambassador's home in South Carolina before realizing the emergency was faked.
The hoax against Haley, who is challenging front-runner Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, occurred on Dec. 30 in the town of Kiawah Island, a wealthy, gated community of about 2,000 residents.
An unknown person called 911 and “claimed he shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm herself while she was at Nikki Haley's apartment,” Kiawah Island Public Safety Director Craig Harris told city officials.
“It turned out to be a hoax.” “Nikki Haley is not on the island and her son is with her.”
A hoax caller claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself in a horrific beating incident at presidential candidate Nikki Haley's home
The caller said he was at Haley's South Carolina home on Kiawah Island when he dialed 911
Haley's campaign declined to comment. She and her husband purchased the $2.4 million Kiawah Island residence in October 2019, according to local real estate records.
The previously unreported “swatting” incident is part of a wave of violent threats, bombings and other intimidation attempts against government officials, members of the judiciary and election officials since the 2020 election that have alerted law enforcement ahead of this year's U.S. presidential election contest.
Swatting cases have surged in the past two months, targeting both allies and rivals of former President Donald Trump, who is campaigning for a return to the White House.
The targets include figures who have publicly opposed Trump, such as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who excluded him from her state's primary.
Judges and at least one prosecutor handling cases against Trump have been targeted. But Trump supporters like U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also faced attempts to hit her.
Swatting is the act of submitting false reports to police in order to trigger a potentially dangerous response from officers.
Law enforcement experts see it as a form of intimidation or harassment that is increasingly being used against political figures and officials involved in 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 being investigated by all involved,” he wrote.
The email did not mention a suspect or possible motive. In a separate email obtained by Portal, an FBI official in South Carolina told Harris and other law enforcement officials that federal agents were tracking the prank call and planned to initiate a “threat assessment” of the matter.
The former ambassador was not home at the time and neither was her son, officials said
Harris, the FBI and state police did not immediately comment on the incident. Law enforcement has not publicly identified a suspect in the Haley case or other high-profile swatting cases.
Trump, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, has expressed anger over Haley in recent weeks. She 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, claiming he is too old to be president again and calling him “completely unhinged.”
Since November 2023, at least 27 swatting incidents have been documented against politicians, prosecutors, election officials and judges, ranging from Republican state officials in Georgia to hoaxes targeting Democrat Joe Biden's White House residence this month.
Some of the calls have striking similarities. In two cases, a person identifying himself as “Jamal” called police and said he had killed his wife.
One such incident occurred on Dec. 27 at Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott's Florida home, weeks after he endorsed Trump, according to Naples police records.
“I caught my wife sleeping with another guy, so I took 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 residence and determined the call was a fake. Scott was not home at the time of the call.
Nikki Haley (left) hugs her son Nalin Haley at a New Hampshire primary election night rally in Concord, NH, on Tuesday, January 23, 2024
“Jamal’s voice sounded like it was computer generated/artificial,” a Naples police officer wrote in the incident report.
A caller identifying himself as “Jamal” also targeted Georgia Republican Sen. John Albers on Dec. 26, according to an incident report from the Roswell Police Department. In this case, the caller said he shot his wife and demanded $10,000 or he would shoot himself too.
In both cases, the callers were male and spoke with similar accents, according to a Portal analysis of the audio recordings.
A Jan. 7 call to Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a strong Trump supporter, also had some similarities.
The caller told police he was calling from the officer's address in the state capital, said he had shot his wife and added, “He wanted to kill himself and hung up,” according to a Jefferson City Police Department incident report .
According to a statement from the Missouri Secretary of State, Ashcroft, his wife and children were home at the time.
Scott, Albers and Ashcroft did not respond to requests for comment.
Gabriel Sterling, a senior official at the Georgia Department 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 raced to his home.
Marjorie Taylor Greene was among 27 documented swatting incidents against politicians, prosecutors, election officials and judges since November 2023
Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) was the victim of a swatting incident shortly after endorsing Donald Trump
“Now I lock my doors every night,” said Sterling, a Republican who faced a barrage of threats after the 2020 election for denouncing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. “That’s the reality I live in now,” he said in an interview.
Similar intimidation tactics have been used 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 Justice Arthur Engoron, who is presiding over the civil fraud case against Trump and his family's estates holds business.
According to the Nassau County Police Department, law enforcement officers, including a bomb squad, were dispatched at 5:30 a.m. to the judge's home in the upscale Long Island suburb of Great Neck.
However, no explosive device was found and the call was determined to be a hoax. A spokesman for the New York court 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 hearing the criminal case against Trump for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Late in the evening of Jan. 7, police were dispatched to the home, where an unidentified woman told them she was unharmed and there was no one else in the home, according to an incident report reviewed by Portal.
The police cleared the house and found no explosives. The U.S. Marshals Service, which protects federal judges and prosecutors, responded to a request for comment on the incident. Other security risks involved fake bombings.
Police also received a bomb threat against the home of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who was presiding over the Trump Organization's civil fraud trial in New York
According to news reports and state officials, bomb threats were made to state capitols and courthouses in several states over two days in early January, including Minnesota, Arkansas, Maine, Hawaii, Montana and New Hampshire.
In Minnesota, state courts received bomb threats via email, but the threats were deemed false and did not result in a deadlock in court proceedings, court officials told Portal. The FBI said it was investigating the threats.
In a previously released statement on the rise in swatting incidents, the FBI said the people making the fake calls used tactics such as caller ID spoofing technology “to make it appear that the 911 call was coming from the 911 phone.” Sacrifice came.”
The calls were “dangerous to first responders and the victims” and often included fake reports of hostage situations or bomb explosions, the FBI said.
“The community is put in danger when emergency responders rush to the scene and take them away from real emergencies, and officers are put in danger because unsuspecting residents may try to defend themselves.”
The recent swatting incidents follow a wave of violent threats against US election workers following the 2020 election, inspired by Trump's false claims of a stolen election.
Portal documented more than 1,000 intimidating messages between the 2020 and 2021 elections in a series of stories chronicling the campaign of fear against election administrators in more than a dozen battleground states.
A report released Thursday by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice said intimidation continued well into last year. In their survey of state legislators completed in October 2023, 43 percent said they had been threatened in the past three years.
The swatting wave coincides with the most sustained wave of political violence in the United States since the 1970s, according to a Portal investigation last year. This report documented at least 232 politically motivated acts of violence since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The events ranged from riots to fights at political demonstrations to beatings and murders.