Choke with a charger: Trump official accused of bizarre threat

Former President Donald Trump Jr. speaks to the press after attending wake for NYPD officer Jonathan Diller at Massapequa Funeral Home in Massapequa Park, NY on March 28, 2024,

A pair of conservative pundits marveled on Thursday at the fact that President Donald Trump's Justice Department includes an official who threatened to choke an intern with a charger.

Referring to Leo Terrell, The Bulwark's Sam Stein told his colleague Will Sommer that "he apparently was an editor at the Harvard Crimson, so he was just like, “I’m gonna go spill the beans on Leo here.” This is literally the lead sentence of the story. This gives you a sense of how the story starts out. It’s quite the lead: “On September 16th, Leo J. Terrell threatened to choke a Justice Department intern with a computer charger.”"

Stein continued, "That’s the first sentence of the story. It goes on: “For nearly an hour, Terrell demanded to know why Tejas Billa had left his charger at home. He accused Billa of lying about where it was and threatened to fire him, according to Billa and another intern who witnessed the exchange. Then they said Terrell told Billa that if he brought the charger to work the next day, he would choke him with it.” I’ll stop there. Has that ever happened to you, Will?"

After saying that it had not in his experience, Sommer added that "it’s a little unclear why Leo was supposedly so fired up about it. Maybe this guy’s computer was dead and he’s like, “I don’t have my charger. I left it at home.” But that paints this image of this anti-Semitism task force as this weird, cloistered operation, and Leo’s just terrorizing a handful of interns. Billa went to a woman who manages the office of the Associate Attorney General to report what happened. Her quote to him was, “He’s been terrible, hasn’t he?""

Sommer concluded, "So apparently this was a pattern of behavior. I should note, Terrell denied threatening to fire or choke Billa, but Billa did resign nine days after this incident happened."

Terrell has a very colorful history preceding his work with the Trump administration.

"Leo Terrell, the Department of Justice lawyer who heads the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, has made multiple appearances on the network and other conservative outlets to unapologetically press the Trump administration’s case for deporting Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and for yanking federal funding from the university," wrote Raw Story in 2025.

They continued, "A media-savvy former Fox News contributor, Terrell also uses his X account, which has 2.5 million followers, to help promote Trump’s agenda. But while showcasing his media appearances and sharing other pro-Trump viewpoints on X, Terrell also re-posted two accounts with a history of promoting antisemitism earlier this week."

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