A man who made threatening phone calls to Nancy Pelosi and United States Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas was sentenced to 11 months in prison on Wednesday.
David Allen Carrier, 44, pleaded guilty to two counts of making threats against a federal official, according to a press release from the United States District Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California.
In Jan. 2021, when Pelosi was still the House Majority Speaker, Carrier left a voicemail on her office line in which he threatened to assault her. The call came within a month of the Capitol riots, at which point Pelosi was directing criticism toward Donald Trump for being an “accessory” to the incident which left five people dead. At the time, Pelosi had been inexplicably identified by the far-right as the villain of the riot.
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Then, on June 30, 2022, Carrier called the hotline for Mayorkas’ office and left another threatening voice memo. Carrier’s call came just days after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) wrote a letter to Mayorkas, asking him to not use taxpayer dollars to exacerbate what he called a crisis at the border.
Carrier acknowledged he left the menacing messages with the intent to interfere with Pelosi’s work in Congress and Mayorkas’s duties as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
“Participating in the public political conversation is an important right for all citizens,” said U.S. Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey. “Nevertheless, threatening our public servants is not protected by the First Amendment and corrodes our ability to engage in peaceful and important public discourse. This Office will not tolerate behavior that crosses the line to criminal threats.”
The ruling was handed down by Judge William Alsup, who added three years of supervised release to the sentence, to begin after Carrier is released.
