'I want to pull the lever': Trump supporters issue violent new threats against Pence
"Extremist" supporters of thrice-indicted ex-President Donald Trump are reigniting the January 6th, 2021 rallying cry to "hang Mike Pence" on a right-wing digital forum, Rolling Stone reported on Wednesday.
"Chilling calls for violence against the former vice president were rising to the top of the comments thread" on TheDonald.win following United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith's four-federal-felony-count Tuesday indictment of Trump for allegedly conspiring to subvert American democracy, according to Rolling Stone's Tom Dickinson and Jana Winter.
TheDonald.win, Dickinson and Winter noted, "became a hub of plotting for the unrest at the Capitol, and a place where members of the then-Trump administration monitored their success in firing up the base."
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Smith noted in his forty-five-page complaint that Pence refused to comply with demands from Trump and his unnamed co-conspirators that he block the congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory in the 2020 election. This, Dickinson and Winter found, sparked violent rage among Trump's internet loyalists.
"The top comment on the Pence post called for divine retribution against the 'traitor.' It reads: 'May GOD Strike him down for his lies and treachery to the American People.' But as other commenters piled on, they fantasized about a public execution of Pence at a gallows. 'I want to watch his toes dangle in the breeze,' wrote user BigMikesHairyDong," observed Dickinson and Winter, who came across even darker vitriol on the platform which originated on Reddit until that site shut it down.
"'I want to stand beside you as witness,' wrote user Totally_Passable adding, 'I want to pull the lever,'" the correspondents read. "This user made clear he didn't want the violence to end with Pence: 'I long for the day we the people pull these traitors… out of their seats screaming, knowing full well what is coming to them, and why its [sic] coming.'"
Dickinson and Winter noted that the government is "poised to respond to credible threats of violence," which law enforcement officials told them are also being directed at Smith, the grand jury that approved the criminal charges, and Judge Tanya Chutkan for the District of Columbia, to whom Trump's case was randomly assigned.
READ MORE: Trump: Pence 'didn’t understand' he 'had power' to overturn the election
Dickinson's and Winter's article continues at this link (subscription required).
