Mother-of-three faces jail for making series of sinister videos threatening to kill Kamala Harris
A woman who threatened to assassinate Vice President Kamala Harris in a series of videos could be sentenced with up to five years years in prison.
Niviane Petit Phelps, 39, made six recordings in which she said she was going to kill Ms Harris, just a few weeks after the vice president and President Joe Biden were sworn into office earlier this year.
According to an affidavit, Phelps said “Kamala Harris, you are going to die,” in the first video she recorded, continuing: “Your days are numbered already.”
She said someone had paid her $53,000 to kill Ms Harris and added: “I’m going to do the job, okay.”
The Florida nurse made five more threatening videos and sent them to her husband in jail, using JPay, an app inmates use to communicate with those on the outside, reports The Washington Post.
Phelps, a mother of three, pleaded guilty on Friday to six counts of making threats against the vice president. She is due to be sentenced on November 19 and faces up to five years in prison.
Phelps told investigators that one reason for her threats was that she considered Ms Harris, who has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, to not be actually Black.
She also believed the discredited conspiracy theory that Ms Harris put her hand on her purse instead of a Bible on Inauguration Day, an idea she found disrespectful.
Her attorney, Scott Saul, told the Miami Herald that Phelps would not have followed through on her threats but “was just venting as she was going through a tumultuous time in her life”.
In other videos, Phelps said she was “going to the gun range” and according to to court records, told Ms Harris: “50 days from today you will die.”
Court documents show that after sending the videos to her husband, Phelps applied for a concealed weapon permit.
In March this year, Phelps was interviewed by a federal agent, who she told she was “over it now.” However, when asked what she would have done had officials not been made aware of her videos, she replied, “I don’t know.”
