The secretary of state of Arizona, a battleground state in the US presidential election, said growing threats against US election officials are a form of domestic terrorism.
“Terrorism is defined as the threat of violence that has political consequences,” says Adrian Fontes. NBC Meet the Press “This is what happened and we have to accept it as it is,” he said in the episode airing Sunday morning.
Fontes’ comments, first reported by NBC on Friday, were made during Fontes’ participation on a “Meet the Press” panel featuring top election officials from states where voters in November could decide whether Joe Biden seeks a second term or Donald Trump is returned to the presidency.
The Guardian reported Friday that Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, has taken extraordinary measures to protect its staff and vote counters. Election workers have endured a daily influx of hateful and threatening messages via email and social media. Trump and his Republican allies continue to lie that Biden and his Democratic allies fraudulently stole Trump’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Fontes, a Democrat and former Marine, told Meet the Press that the abuse wasn’t enough to personally get him “fired from his job,” but he added: “I’ll say this… [affected] Not just us, but our families as well.
“It’s a problem when we have to tell our neighbors, ‘be careful because your kids have to come if something happens,’ or to have an emergency bag ready, or any number of things that so many people across the country have experienced,” Fontes said. “One of the ways I’ve approached this issue is by telling them a really hard truth, which is that threats against election officials in the United States are domestic terrorism.”
The label of domestic terrorism is one that is routinely debated in the United States by both the political left and right.
For example, federal prosecutors Avoided Federal prosecutors are seeking domestic terrorism sentences for Trump supporters convicted of carrying out the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol after his defeat by Biden, but authorities have been laying the groundwork to bring domestic terrorism charges against mostly liberal activists protesting a proposed training center in Atlanta known as “Cop City.”
Fontes said he is optimistic that the Justice Department is “starting to really step up and prosecute” threats against election officials. Most notably, in March, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for threatening to blow up Fontes’ office in 2021, one of the harshest federal penalties yet handed down for a series of violent threats against poll workers sparked by Trump’s lies about election fraud.
Trump’s attempts to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory are at the center of several of the more than 80 state and federal criminal charges pending against him, including four indictments filed in various jurisdictions.
“We are working with law enforcement agencies across the country to begin to seriously address these issues,” Fontes said of election worker security. “It’s never too little, too late, but we need to face the reality and get to work.”
