Lawyer Lin Wood probably should be arrested and charged for threatening the assassination of Vice President Mike Pence.
Wood, the Georgia-based conspiracy theorist whose election-related posts at times were eagerly retweeted by President Trump, wrote on Parler on Thursday that it’s time to “Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST.” This came after Wood had already tweeted other times in increasingly harsh language against Pence, calling the vice president a “coward” who would “sing like a bird and confess ALL” once he faced execution for treason.
The reference to killing Pence did not come in a vacuum. Many of the thugs in the mob that stormed the Capitol the day before Wood’s “firing squad” comment had chanted that Pence should be hanged. This was not, therefore, some ill-advised, random comment by Wood, but part of a continuum of direct threats to the vice president.
Great Britain’s Daily Mail Online reports that the Secret Service is investigating Wood’s menacing remarks. Good. The investigation shouldn’t take long. Unless Wood can show that someone hacked his account, he can’t deny having made them. It is explicitly a crime under federal law, punishable by up to five years in prison, to make a threat on the life of the president or vice president. The sentence can be enhanced if the threat is made more than once.
This isn’t hard. Wood is not some random guy spouting off to a friend, saying something vague like, “I wish that man were dead.” Wood is a prominent lawyer who has been one of the foremost people driving the false narrative that the election was stolen, who has said the governor and secretary of state of Georgia should be arrested, who accused Chief Justice John Roberts of aiding a pedophilia ring, and who now repeatedly has said the vice president should be executed. This is malice aforethought. And it is almost certainly illegal.
Once arrested, Wood deserves his day in court and deserves the right to defend himself. But the apparent violation is so obvious that an initial arrest surely seems warranted.
