Christmas Swatting Attempts Target GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Brandon Williams

Peter Wade
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Two Republican lawmakers were targeted with attempted swatting incidents on Christmas Day. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.) both said that local police received a false report of an emergency situation at their homes.

“I was just swatted. This is like the 8th time. On Christmas with my family here,” Greene wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday morning. “My local police are the GREATEST and shouldn’t have to deal with this. I appreciate them so much and my family and I are in joyous spirits celebrating the birth of our savior Jesus Christ!”

“Our home was swatted this afternoon,” Williams posted to X on Monday. “Thanks to the Deputies and Troopers who contacted me before arriving. They left with homemade cookies and spiced nuts! Merry Christmas everyone!”

Swatting is a practice where a person makes a false report to law enforcement in hopes of sending many armed officers to the target’s door. Perpetrators will often use spoofing technology to hide their identity or make it appear that the call to first responders is coming from the victim’s phone. Swatting has become more frequent in recent years as it is used as a form of online harassment. In some instances, it has led to accidental deaths.

According to the Associated Press, a man located in New York phoned Georgia’s suicide hotline around 11 a.m. Monday. He alleged that he had shot and killed his girlfriend at Greene’s address and was intending to kill himself. Police were notified and then reached out to Greene’s private security to check that she was safe, and the officers turned around before reaching her home.

“We determined before our personnel could get to her location that there was no emergency and there was no reason to respond,” Madden said. “Her security detail had it all under control, and there actually was nothing going on.”

Greene has been targeted with attempted swatting eight times during the course of her congressional career, the Rome Police Department confirmed to the AP. She criticized the FBI for not being able to identify the individuals responsible, writing on X, “The FBI can’t seem to figure out who is responsible for the swatting and says the law doesn’t allow them to track them down. The FBI can do so many things, has even abused FISA to spy on hundreds of thousands of Americans, but can not figure out who wants me killed by a hail of bullets fired by a SWAT team responding to murder suicide calls supposedly coming from me.”

In August, a New York man was sentenced to three months imprisonment for making threatening phone calls to Greene’s congressional office in 2022.

Around 2 p.m. on Monday, the Cayuga County Sheriff’s office in central New York received a “report of a reported confessed shooting incident” at Williams’ home, said Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck, according to CNN.

“This report was quickly confirmed to be false,” Schenck added. An investigation is ongoing.

Swatting has become such a concern that the FBI launched a national database this year to track and hopefully prevent such incidents. The database is a “collaborative effort between the FBI and law enforcement partners to track and create a real-time picture of swatting incidents,” the bureau said in a statement. During May and June 2023, the FBI said it tracked 129 swatting incidents nationwide.

“Swatting may be motivated by revenge, used as a form of harassment, or used as a prank, but it is a serious crime that may have potentially deadly consequences,” the bureau said in a 2020 statement.

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