WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Maryland resident was sentenced Tuesday to more than a year in prison for making thousands of threatening and intimidating phone calls to dozens of congressional offices across the country, court documents show.
Ade Salim Lilly’s telephone harassment campaign included about 12,000 calls over 19 months to more than 50 offices for members of Congress, prosecutors said. They said Lilly threatened to kill a congressional staffer during one of the calls.
According to online court records, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sentenced Lilly to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of parole.
Prosecutors recommended that Lilly be sentenced to 18 months in prison, arguing that it was necessary to deter others from engaging in similar threatening behavior. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger testified last year that threats against members of Congress had increased by about 400 percent in the previous six years.
“This is an election year, and increasingly, criticism of a political position or viewpoint crosses the line under the First Amendment and leads to actual threats of violence,” prosecutors wrote. “The pervasive increase in threats against elected officials creates a real risk that acts of violence will become normalized.”
Lilly pleaded guilty in May to two counts: interstate communications involving threats to kidnap or injure and making repeated telephone calls.
Lilly moved from Maryland to Puerto Rico during his campaign of intimidation, which lasted from approximately February 2022 to November 2023. He called a Washington lawmaker’s office more than 500 times over a two-day period in February 2023, prosecutors said.
