A California man has been charged with sending death threats to Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is overseeing the Georgia prosecution against Donald Trump over his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.
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The man, Marc Shultz, suggested that Willis “will be killed like a dog” in one of several comments he posted under two separate YouTube live streams, according to the US attorney’s office for the northern district of Georgia.
He was charged with transmitting interstate threats to injure Willis because of her prosecution of the former president, prosecutors said.
The precise circumstances surrounding Shultz’s threats were not immediately clear on Friday. But the canine remark, which came as Trump ramped up his attacks on prosecutors, closely echoed language Trump has used in the past to describe a killing.
“He died like a dog,” Trump said in televised remarks from the White House when describing the death of former Islamic State terrorist group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi following a US special forces operation in Syria.
The threats to Willis increased dramatically after the Fulton county district attorney’s office last year charged Trump and 18 co-defendants with conspiring to violate state racketeering laws as part of efforts to reverse the former president’s 2020 election defeat.
No trial date has been set for the Fulton county case, which has been in limbo for weeks after becoming sidetracked by Trump and his co-defendants, who unsuccessfully attempted to have Willis removed from the case after she had a romantic relationship with her deputy, Nathan Wade. Wade has since resigned from the case.
Trump has a long history of attacking prosecutors as well as judges and potential trial witnesses involved in the numerous criminal cases against him as part of a pugnacious campaign to publicly denigrate his legal woes as politically motivated.
Around the time that Shultz targeted Willis, Trump had for weeks complained that Willis, the first Black woman to hold her position, was racist and “out to get Trump”, in various posts on his Truth Social platform.
The continued attacks on trial participants reached a head in the federal criminal prosecution over his efforts to stop the transfer of power after the 2020 election, when the judge overseeing that case implemented a gag order limiting his abuse.
The presiding US district judge in that case, Tanya Chutkan in Washington, restricted Trump from assailing trial participants if his social media posts harm the integrity of the case, weeks after the judge herself received death threats from a Trump supporter.
While Trump has never been accused of directly inciting harm against prosecutors, his supporters have often engaged in violence or violent rhetoric after officials in the criminal justice system have taken actions against him.
Last summer, after FBI agents swarmed his Mar-a-Lago club to execute a search warrant to retrieve classified documents, an armed Ohio man enraged by the search tried to break into the bureau’s field office near Cincinnati. The man was later killed in a shootout with police.