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Over a year removed from government service, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is still regularly threatened, requiring private security to protect her.
In an interview, she said some of the threats are especially real and often spike when she does public events. She is about to begin a tour to promote her new book, Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.
“If I’m in the news for something now, you can see a little spike,” she said.
51iP5j6TruL.jpegAsked about the threats against her and recently Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she said, “It’s horrifying, really.”
Of the justice’s alleged attacker, she said, “He clearly had intentions and had all the obvious things that you would consider using” in an attack, a reference to wrist restraints, tape, and a gun the would-be assassin possessed at the time of his arrest. “Very scary,” she added.
It prompted DeVos to recall a conversation she had with Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who liked to bike to work with little or no security. “He would just kind of do his thing, but I suspect that’s maybe a little different today,” said DeVos.
In her book, published by Center Street and out June 21, DeVos wrote about the threats she faced from her first week as education secretary for former President Donald Trump. They were so bad that she was assigned U.S. Marshals — like those protecting the homes of Supreme Court justices today from pro-abortion rights activists angered over the likely reversal of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision granting a right to abortion.
“I was very reluctant to have a wall of security between me and the students, parents, and teachers with whom I visited,” she wrote in the book.
But the threats were coming in fast and furious from critics of her policy ideas and required action, DeVos added.
She said that because the U.S. Secret Service was stretched covering the sprawling Trump family, the U.S. Marshals Service was assigned to handle her security. During routine safety meetings, they’d tell her what they were up against.
DeVos wrote, “It was deeply unsettling to hear what they found in these assessments. People threatened me with murder, kidnapping, rape, torture. At times, there were thousands of threats — they escalated after I received heavy media coverage. Much of these were just talk, of course. But at any given time, there were a dozen or so threats the Marshals took seriously enough to investigate, talk to the people, meet with them, and even make arrests. They also tracked stalkers — people who consistently showed up at my events. They gave my team and me pictures of them so we would recognize them in the crowd.”
