Federal judge swatting wave (January 2024) — Chutkan, Engoron, and others

What happened

In late December 2023 and through January 2024, a coordinated wave of swatting incidents targeted public officials connected to high-profile legal proceedings — federal judges, state judges, prosecutors, secretaries of state, and others.

Documented incidents included Special Counsel Jack Smith and US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, both swatted on Christmas Day 2023. Chutkan was swatted again at her DC home on January 7, 2024. New York Justice Arthur Engoron was targeted on January 11, 2024. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was swatted on December 29, 2023. Several state attorneys general and other federal officials followed. None of the targets were physically injured in the documented incidents, but each response carried the risk profile of an actual armed law-enforcement engagement at the official's home.

Threats arrived alongside the swattings. Abigail Shry of Alvin, Texas, was federally charged for leaving a death-threat voicemail at Chutkan's courthouse. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced on November 12, 2025 to over two years in federal prison. Other officials in the wave received similar voicemail and email threats, several of which produced federal prosecutions.

How it started

Each documented swatting required two things: the home address of the official, and a means of placing an anonymous call to local emergency services. Both were trivially available. The home addresses of federal judges, state judges, and senior elected officials were — and largely still are — reachable through commercial data brokers, public property records, and adjacent public sources, regardless of whether those officials had filed under existing privacy statutes.

The federal Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act (the Lieu Act) had been signed into law in December 2022, two years before the wave. Some affected federal judges had enrolled in the AOUSC removal program; others had not. Compliance from data brokers was inconsistent and re-listing was common.

A Florida resident was federally charged in May 2024 in connection with dozens of the swatting calls, though the broader pattern of coordinated swatting of officials continued through 2024 and into 2025.

What this means for you

The 2024 wave isn't unique — it's one well-documented chapter in an ongoing pattern. For any official whose work makes enemies (judges, prosecutors, federal LE, state AGs, election administrators), the data-finding step that enables swatting is the part that's been engineered to be cheap.

If you're a federal judge: enroll in the AOUSC removal program under the Lieu Act. If you're a state judge in NJ (under Daniel's Law — the state statute that lets covered judges and officers sue data brokers for failing to remove a home address) or in IL with its Judicial Privacy Act: file the demands. For everyone else (and as a belt-and-suspenders layer alongside the formal programs): continuous broker cleanup closes the gap the legal mechanisms can't reach on their own.

For more on the swatting threat shape, see /swatting. For specifically who Daniel's Law and similar state statutes cover, see /laws/daniels-law.

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