Representative Eric Swalwell says that his chief of staff spends 10 hours a week dealing with threats to his person.
SWALWELL: I receive, you know, a few threats each day. In fact, I have a mailbox, you know, in my email that is just for threatening voicemails or threatening emails that we receive. My chief of staff has been accounting for her time the last couple months with these threats and she believes it's 10 hours a week that she spends working with the FBI in the Capitol Police on threats that were made to me. And then, of course, when they're convicted, you have to send in a victim impact statement. We've had a number of convictions in the last year.
So it's quite time-consuming aside from just, you know, outright, you know, terrifying that someone could do something to your family or your staff and like the anxiety, that that brings every day. It takes away from my job and helping my constituents. If my chief of staff is spending 10 hours a week working on threats, that's time that she's not spending on the priorities of our constituents.
And then, finally, you know, it's costly. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in security for myself and my staff and it almost rewards people who want to make threats because if you make a threat against a member, they have to protect themselves. And so that money is paid out of the campaign account, which then means that they're, you know, you can almost protect yourself or you can protect your re-election, but you can't do both because it's going to be quite costly.
