FBI arrests man over threats that Fani Willis 'would be killed like a dog'

04 May 2024

A California man has been arrested and charged with transmitting interstate threats to injure an elected official after comments he allegedly made about Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

According to the Guardian, a federal grand jury in Atlanta indicted 66-year-old Marc Schultz of Chula Vista, California in late April over what it characterized as death threats in two separate livestreams posted to YouTube. In one of the streams, Schultz is accused of saying that the Georgia prosecutor leading the criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump "would be killed like a dog."

Guardian reporters Hugo Lowell and Richard Luscombe noted that the nature of the alleged threat "closely echoed language Trump has used in the past" to describe his successful assassination operation of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Then-President Trump said the terrorist leader "died like a dog" in a 2019 speech (that speech was famously impersonated by comedian Shane Gillis in a viral bit from his 2023 special).

In a DOJ press release, FBI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Keri Farley stated that the alleged threat was a "very serious crime that the FBI will not tolerate."

"Threats of violence against government officials, specifically, threaten the very fabric of our democracy," she stated. "We want everyone to know that if you engage in such behavior, you will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law."

The death threat alleged by the grand jury is far from the first threat against Willis. During proceedings earlier this year in which lawyers representing Trump and his co-defendants unsuccessfully attempted to remove Willis from the case, her father testified that shortly a month after she was sworn in as district attorney, they were "people outside her house, cursing and yelling and calling her the B-word and the N-word."

"Fortunately, the neighbors called the police and disbanded the group," he said. "I hadn't seen anything exactly like it before."

Currently, Willis is still awaiting a trial date to be officially scheduled by Judge Scott McAfee in her sprawling RICO indictment of Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants. While McAfee struck six charges from her indictment earlier this spring, he encouraged her to re-file those specific charges — of solicitation to violate oath of office — at a later date after adjusting the wording to be more specific.

""The Court’s concern is less that the State has failed to allege sufficient conduct of the Defendants – in fact it has alleged an abundance," McAfee wrote at the time. "However, the lack of detail concerning an essential legal element is, in the undersigned’s opinion, fatal."

Both McAfee and Willis are up for reelection this November. Both candidates have to first fend off primary challengers in the May 21 primary election before advancing to the general.

Click here to read the Guardian's full report.

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