Left: US President Joe Biden speaks at Florida Memorial University on Nov. 1, 2022, in Miami Gardens, Florida (mpi04/MediaPunch /IPX). Right: Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, in Kalamazoo, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio). Inset: Kevin C. Butler (Roanoke County Sheriff's Office).
A 47-year-old man in Virginia will spend several years in prison for repeatedly threatening the lives of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris in a series of vulgar phone calls and messages. U.S. District Judge Thomas T. Cullen on Friday ordered Kevin C. Butler to serve five years in a federal correctional facility, authorities announced.
Following a two-day bench trial, Cullen found Butler guilty on seven counts of knowingly and willfully making threats against the president and successors to the presidency.
"Threats of violence against elected officials affront the political process and the rule of law," acting United States Attorney Robert N. Tracci said in a statement following the sentencing. "This office will seek clear accountability against those who threaten public officials with acts of violence."
According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia, evidence showed that in early December 2022, Butler made several phone calls to a state probation and parole office in which he threatened the lives of then-President Biden and then-Vice President Harris.
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Butler left voicemails vowing to kill the two highest-ranking elected officials in the country, prosecutors said. For example, he threatened to arm himself with a "MAK 90 (a semiautomatic firearm)" and "jump over the fence" outside the White House so he could "kill the President."
The criminal complaint says Butler phoned a state probation officer on Dec. 1, 2022, and left a voicemail stating, "whenever I get the chance, Imma kill the President Joe Biden" and "I'm going to DC one way or another and I'm gonna do it."
That same day, he spoke to a different probation officer and made multiple threats, including telling her he was going to "buy a gun from a street" and "aim it at the Secret Service people," followed by, "I'm just going to kill the President."
In an interview with federal agents, prosecutors say Butler admitted to making the calls. He also explained that he planned to obtain a gun from a friend and travel to the nation's capital, where he would kill multiple Secret Service members to get to the president.
"Butler stated that he is an anarchist and believes that he must kill President Biden because of the evil that has been done by the military and actions taken by former President [Barack] Obama when Biden was the Vice-President," federal agents wrote in a probable cause affidavit included with the complaint.
Butler was convicted in 2014 in the Eastern District of Virginia for making similar threats against then-President Obama and then-Vice President Biden, court records show.