An Alabama man recently admitted to leaving threatening voicemails for Fulton County officials a week before the election interference indictment against former president Donald Trump was announced in Georgia.
According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 58-year-old Arthur Ray Hanson II called the Fulton County Government service line on Aug. 6, 2023, and left voice messages for District Attorney Fani Willis and Sheriff Pat Labat. These calls took place as news began surfacing that the county was preparing to drop a criminal indictment against Trump and several co-conspirators.
According to court records, in his voice message to message for Willis, he said, “When you charge Trump on that fourth indictment, anytime you’re alone, be looking over your shoulder.”
“I would be very afraid if I were you because you can’t be around people all the time that are going to protect you; there’s going to be moments when you’re going to be vulnerable,” Hanson said in the message.
In the message to Labat, Hanson said, “If you take a mug shot of the president and you’re the reason it happened, some bad (expletive)’s gonna happen to you.”
Willis is the chief prosecutor in a sweeping RICO indictment that alleges that Trump and more than a dozen other people attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
Sheriff Labat’s office booked and processed Trump and his alleged co-conspirators and took his mug shot. Labat had commented publicly that anyone charged in the indictment would be jailed and their mug shot would be taken, per standard protocol.
“I didn’t knowingly know I was threatening anybody,” Hanson told a federal judge on Tuesday, the AJC reports.
A federal grand jury indicted Hanson in October 2023 for making interstate threats via phone. He pleaded guilty in court this week and told the judge overseeing his plea hearing that the investigation of Trump angered him, and he made the phone calls hoping authorities would back down.
“I made a stupid phone call,” the insurance salesman from Huntsville, Alabama, said in court. “I’m not a violent person.”
Prosecutors said they would seek leniency for Hanson since he expressed remorse and took responsibility for his actions. Hanson is facing five years in prison. He will be sentenced at a later date.
Willis, who is at the forefront of the election interference case in Georgia, has faced numerous death threats in the last year.
Hanson’s threat is just one of several messages Willis said she and her family received, including one in which she was called the N-word and a “Jim Crow democrat whore.”
“I am also aware of some equally ignorant voicemails coming in both to the county customer service and my office,” Willis told Fulton County commissioners last August in an email. “I expect to see many more over the next 30 days.”
The day the indictment was announced, Willis left the courthouse in a plainclothes disguise and employed a body double to use the main exit where members of the media were waiting. Her security team set up that exit plan after one unsettling death threat against Willis surfaced on the dark web.
