A 30-year-old New Hampshire man has been arrested after prosecutors accused him of threatening to kill presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Tyler Anderson of Dover is charged with making an interstate threat. He appeared in federal court in New Hampshire on Monday afternoon and is being held pending a detention hearing on Thursday.
If convicted, Anderson could face up to five years in prison, followed by up to three years of supervised release, plus a fine of up to $250,000, according to federal prosecutors.
Anderson threatened to “blow” Ramaswamy’s “brains out” in a text message sent in a response to one from the candidate’s campaign informing him of an event Monday morning in Portsmouth, according to charging documents.
He also wrote that he was “going to kill everyone who attends and then [expletive] their corpses,” documents show.
The documents did not identify Ramaswamy or his campaign as the target. But Ramaswamy’s campaign said in a statement that his security team “worked closely” with law enforcement in apprehending Anderson.
“We’re going to let the investigators do their work and figure out who this person is and what their motives might be,” a Ramaswamy spokesperson said. “We will, however, say this: we constantly hear about January 6 and ‘violence’ and ‘extremism on the right’ from the media, but the same media goes silent when the target is a Republican.”
Anderson also allegedly admitted to sending “similar threatening text messages to multiple other campaigns,” according to court documents.