TOLEDO, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) – A federal grand jury indicted 33-year-old Ohio resident Shannon Mathre for threatening to kill U.S. Vice President JD Vance after an investigation also turned up evidence he was involved in child pornography.
The U.S. Justice Department announced February 6 that Mathre is accused of stating, “I am going to find out where he is going to be and use my M14 automatic gun and kill him,” referring to Vance during the vice president’s January visit to northwest Ohio. He has been charged with “making a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, a successor to the presidency, in violation of Title 18 U.S. Code Section 871(a),” which carries prison time up to five years.
Mathre also faces separate charges for other discoveries made during the investigation, that for approximately three weeks in January he was “engaged in the receipt and distribution of images that visually depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, in violation of Title 18 U.S. Code Section 2252(a)(2), which carries prison time between five and 20 years. He also faces fines of up to $250,000 apiece for each offense.
“Hostile and violent threats made against the Vice President, or any other public official, will not be tolerated in our District,” declared U.S. Attorney David Toepfer of the Northern District of Ohio. “Anyone threatening this kind of action will face swift justice and prosecution. We commend the actions of our local and state law enforcement who collaborated with U.S. Secret Service to take this individual into custody.”
“While arresting this man for allegedly threatening to murder the Vice President of the United States, a serious crime in and of itself, federal law enforcement discovered that he was also in possession of child sexual abuse materials,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said. “Thank you to federal, state and local partners in working together to bring justice twofold to this depraved individual.”
Left-wing violence has long been a topic of concern while Democrats and their allies do little to tone down their most agitated followers.
In December, Congress heard testimony about the role of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in inflaming it by labeling mainstream Christian and conservative organizations as purveyors of “hate.” In 2012, would-be mass shooter Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the lobby of the Family Research Council’s headquarters armed with SPLC’s “hate group” list and planning to, in his own words, “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” Nobody was killed thanks to the intervention of security guard Leo Johnson, who was wounded, but the link between SPLC’s message and a violent left-wing extremist was far more linear than common claims of “dangerous extremism” on the political right.
The conversation about the political left’s tolerance of violent tendencies has intensified ever since Charlie Kirk, the head of campus outreach group Turning Point USA (TPUSA), was murdered last September while speaking at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University. Two days later, authorities apprehended and accused 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of the shooting and detailed how he was motivated by his view of Kirk’s conservative views as “hateful.” Robinson was in a relationship with his male roommate, who was in the process of “gender transitioning.”
The far-left Anti-Defamation League (ADF) took down its controversial “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” which had identified TPUSA as a “hate group,” but many leftists went so far as to express pleasure at Kirk’s death, particularly among academia.