WASHINGTON — A former Maryland resident was sentenced on Tuesday to more than a year in prison for making thousands of threatening and harassing phone calls to dozens of congressional offices throughout the country, according to court records.
According to authorities, Ade Salim Lilly’s telephone harassment campaign involved around 12,000 calls to more than 50 offices of members of Congress over 19 months. They claimed Lilly threatened to kill a congressional staff member during one of the calls.
According to online court records, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sentenced Lilly to 13 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
Prosecutors proposed sentencing Lilly to 18 months in prison, citing the need to discourage others from engaging in similarly dangerous behavior. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger said last year that threats to members of Congress had increased by around 400% in the previous six years.
“This is an election year, and more and more often, criticism of a political position or viewpoint crosses the First Amendment line and leads to true threats of violence,” the attorney general said. “The pervasive rise in threats against elected officials creates a real risk that expressions of violence will become normalized.”
In May, Lilly pled guilty to two charges: interstate communications with a threat to abduct or injure and making repeated phone calls.
Lilly relocated from Maryland to Puerto Rico during his harassment campaign, which lasted from around February 2022 until November 2023. He called one lawmaker’s Washington office more than 500 times in two days in February 2023, prosecutors alleged.
