A New York man was sentenced Tuesday to 13 months in prison in connection with threatening phone calls he made to members of Congress and a threat to kill a staffer.
The sentencing of Ade Salim Lilly, 35, included three years supervised release, the Justice Department said in a news release.
Lilly’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Lilly pleaded guilty in May to interstate communications with a threat to kidnap or injure, and making repeated threatening phone calls.
Beginning in February 2022, he made more than 12,000 calls from Maryland and Puerto Rico, to the offices of congressional lawmakers before he was arrested in Puerto Rico in November 2023, according to court documents.
Federal prosecutors said that during the calls, Lilly would berate congressional staffers and “become angry and use vulgar and harassing language towards the individual who answered the phone” when he was informed that the staffer couldn’t help him.
During one call on Oct. 21, 2022, Lilly told a congressional staffer, “I will kill you, I am going to run you over, I will kill you with a bomb or grenade,” prosecutors said.
Over two days in February 2023, Lilly called the Washington, D.C., office of one lawmaker more than 500 times, prosecutors said.
In a sentencing memo seeking 18 months imprisonment, prosecutors referred to rising threats against elected officials.
“This is an election year, and more and more often, criticism of a political position or viewpoint crosses the First Amendment line and leads to true threats of violence,” they wrote. “The pervasive rise in threats against elected officials creates a real risk that expressions of violence will become normalized.”
Last month, a Virginia man was charged with making a series of death threats on a conservative social media site against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have also faced social media threats. In July, a Florida man was charged with written threats to kill Trump and Vance.
Zoë Richards
Michael Kosnar contributed.
