Threatening the president of the United States is a federal felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States". The law also includes presidential candidates, vice presidents, and former presidents. The Secret Service investigates suspected violations of this law and monitors those who have a history of threatening the president. Threatening the president is considered a political offense. Immigrants who commit this crime can be deported.
Because the offense consists of pure speech, the courts have issued rulings attempting to balance the government's interest in protecting the president with free speech rights under the First Amendment. According to the book Stalking, Threatening, and Attacking Public Figures, "Hundreds of celebrity howlers threaten the president of the United States every year, sometimes because they disagree with his policies, but more often just because he is the president."
Frequency The first prosecutions under the statute, enacted in 1917, occurred during the highly charged, hyperpatriotic years of World War I, and the decisions handed down by the courts in these early cases reflected intolerance for any words demonstrating even a vague spirit of disloyalty. There was a relative moratorium on prosecutions under this statute until the World War II era. The number increased during the turbulent Vietnam War era. They have tended to fall when the country has not been directly embroiled in a national crisis situation.
The number of reported threats rose from 2,400 in 1965 to 12,800 in 1969. According to Ronald Kessler, President George W. Bush received about 3,000 threats a year, while his successor Barack Obama received about four times that amount. This figure has been disputed by Secret Service director Mark Sullivan, who says that Obama received about as many threats as the previous two presidents.
According to the U.S. Attorneys' Manual, "Media attention given to certain kinds of criminal activity seems to generate further criminal activity; this is especially true concerning presidential threats which is well documented by data previously supplied by the United States Secret Service. For example, in the six-month period following the March 30, 1981, attempt on the life of President Reagan, the average number of threats against protectees of the Secret Service increased by over 150 percent from a similar period during the prior year." For this reason, the agency recommends considering the use of sealed affidavits to keep news of threats from leaking to the press.
Incidents Convictions under 18 U.S.C. § 871 have been sustained for declaring that "President Wilson ought to be killed. It is a wonder some one has not done it already. If I had an opportunity, I would do it myself"; and for declaring that "Wilson is a wooden-headed son of a bitch. I wish Wilson was in hell, and if I had the power I would put him there." In a later era, a conviction was sustained for displaying posters urging passersby to "hang [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt".)
In 1935, 52-year-old Austin Phelps Palmer, a mechanical engineer, wrote two letters to President Roosevelt, blaming him for the loss of his $1 million fortune. In one letter, he wrote, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Communist and destroyer of private business. I warn you, if you destroy my business I will strangle you with my own hands. May your soul be exterminated in hell." Months later, newspapers reported that a dumbfounded Palmer was arrested after federal agents, who'd spent months tracking him down, showed up at the doorstep of his luxury apartment. His servant accompanied him to his arraignment, where he was charged with sending threatening letters to the President. Palmer pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
A number of Nazi sympathizers were prosecuted for threatening Roosevelt. In 1940, Edward De Roulhac Blount was arrested for saying he would kill the president at the first opportunity he got. He pleaded guilty to two counts of threatening the president and was sentenced to two to six years in prison. Federal prosecutors found two birthday greetings to Adolf Hitler on Blount's yacht. In 1943, William Thomas Reid, a known Nazi sympathizer, was arrested for telling an associate in the oil business, "President Roosevelt is one guy I hate. If I had the money, I would go to Washington and kill the president and if he ever comes south I will." Reid was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In a 1971 interview, comedian Groucho Marx told Flash magazine, "I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination." U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr. opined, "It is one thing to say that 'I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon' when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian."
In July 2003, the Los Angeles Times published a Sunday editorial cartoon by Michael Ramirez that depicted a man pointing a gun at President Bush's head; it was a takeoff on the 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Eddie Adams that showed South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner (Capt. Nguyễn Văn Lém) at point-blank range. The cartoon prompted a visit from the Secret Service, but no charges were filed.
In 2005, a teacher instructed her senior civics and economics class to take photographs to illustrate the rights contained in the Bill of Rights. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the president's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster." A Wal-Mart photo department employee reported it to police, and the Secret Service investigated. No charges were filed.
In 2007, Purdue University teaching assistant Vikram Buddhi was convicted of posting messages to Yahoo Finance criticizing the Iraq War and stating, "Call for the assassination of GW Bush" and "Rape and Kill Laura Bush". The defense had argued that the defendant never explicitly threatened anyone. He was imprisoned for 4 years and 9 months, and deported to India upon his release.
In September 2009 the Secret Service investigated Facebook polls that asked whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated. Some question has arisen as to how to handle Facebook groups such as "LETS KILL BUSH WITH SHOES" (a reference to the 2008 Muntadhar al-Zaidi shoe incident) which had 484 members as of September 2009; similar issues have arisen on MySpace. Tweets have come under Secret Service investigation, including ones that said "ASSASSINATION! America, we survived the Assassinations of Lincoln & Kennedy. We'll surely get over a bullet to Obama's head," and "The next American with a Clear Shot should drop Obama like a bad habit. 4get Blacks or his claims to b[e] Black. Turn on Barack Obama."
In 2010, Johnny Logan Spencer Jr. was sentenced in Louisville, Kentucky, to 33 months in prison for posting a poem entitled "The Sniper" about the president's assassination on a white supremacist website. He apologized in court, saying that he was, as WHAS news put it, "upset about his mother's death and had fallen in with a white supremacist group that had helped him kick a drug habit."
In 2010, Brian Dean Miller was sentenced in Texas to 27 months in prison for posting to Craigslist: "People, the time has come for revolution. It is time for Obama to die. I am dedicating my life to the death of Obama and every employee of the federal government. As I promised in a previous post, if the health care reform bill passed I would become a terrorist. Today I become a terrorist."
Later in 2010, Michael Stephen Bowden, who said that President Obama was not doing enough to help African Americans, was arrested after making murder-suicide threats against Obama.
On July 19, 2011, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of Walter Bagdasarian for making online threats against Obama. The court found that his speech urging Obama's assassination ("Re: Obama fk the niggar , he will have a 50 cal in the head soon" and "shoot the nig country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? long term???? never in history, except sambos") was protected by the First Amendment.
In 2017, Stephen Taubert, a 59-year-old Air Force veteran and resident of Syracuse, New York, called the office of Senator Al Franken and, in a rant full of racial slurs, said he was going to "hang" former President Barack Obama. On April 29, 2019, United States District Court Judge Glenn T. Suddaby sentenced him to federal prison for 46 months for that crime and for making threats against the life of Congresswoman Maxine Waters and her staff. His sentence came six weeks after a jury found him guilty of threatening to kill a former United States president, transmitting a threat in interstate commerce and making a threat to influence, impede or retaliate against a federal official. At his sentencing, Taubert said "I'm sorry for the offensive language. That's all it was. It does get me upset when I listen to the news and they attack [President Donald Trump]. He's a good person and he's done a lot for this country and the veterans." After his sentencing, Grant C. Jaquith, the United States attorney for the Northern District of New York, said in a statement, "Racist threats to kill present and former public officials are not protected free speech, but serious crimes."
In August 2023, firearms collector and former welding inspector Craig Robertson threatened to assassinate President Joe Biden and the Manhattan D.A. in multiple posts made on Facebook. He was killed while a search warrant was being served by FBI agents on his home.
History The prototype for Section 871 was the British Treason Act 1351 (25 Edw. 3. Stat. 5. c. 2), which made it a crime to "compass or imagine" the death of the king. The statute prohibiting threats against the president was enacted by Congress in 1917. The maximum fine it allowed was $1,000. The law was amended in 1994 to increase the maximum fine to $250,000. Additionally, a 1982 law extended Section 871 to cover former presidents and candidates of major parties by adding Section 879 to Title 18 of the United States Code.