Texas man charged with threatening election, government officials in Georgia

The Justice Department on Friday arrested a Texas man and charged him with threatening election and other government officials in Georgia, in the first case brought by a task force formed over the summer to combat such threats, according to court records and a department spokesman. In an indictment, prosecutors alleged that Chad Christopher Stark posted a message on Craigslist on Jan. 5, 2021, saying it was “time to kill” an elections official, whose name is not included in the court documents. “Georgia Patriots it’s time for us to take back our state from these Lawless treasonous traitors. It’s time to invoke our Second Amendment right it’s time to put a bullet in the treasonous Chinese [Official A]. Then we work our way down to [Official B] the local and federal corrupt judges,” Stark wrote, according to the indictment.

Georgia officials, in particular, were targeted by a flood of hostile messages after officials there refused to back then-President Donald Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud. Trump himself called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) the “enemy of the people”, and famously urged Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat, while Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions that the election was rigged. Georgia, though, was hardly an anomaly. Election officials across the country have warned about an ongoing barrage of criticism and personal attacks, which are prompting some staffers to leave. A study by the Brennan Center released in June found that 1 in 3 election officials feels unsafe because of their jobs. “It’s bigger than any one individual threat against one election official because the combined atmosphere of threats across the country to election officials is undermining democracy,” said Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law and a former Justice Department national security official, in an interview before Stark’s arrest.