West Vir­ginia man faces prison time for threat­en­ing emails to Fau­ci, oth­er health of­fi­cials

NI­AID di­rec­tor An­tho­ny Fau­ci gained hero sta­tus amid the pan­dem­ic, earn­ing Amer­i­cans’ trust and even Time mag­a­zine’s Guardian of the Year ti­tle. But he and oth­er fed­er­al health of­fi­cials have al­so faced in­tense threats, ac­cord­ing to charges brought by the US De­part­ment of Jus­tice.

A West Vir­ginia man is fac­ing up to 10 years in prison af­ter threat­en­ing Fau­ci, for­mer NIH di­rec­tor Fran­cis Collins, and HHS as­sis­tant sec­re­tary for health Rachel Levine via email, the DOJ said on Mon­day. Thomas Patrick Con­nal­ly, Jr., plead­ed guilty on Mon­day to us­ing an anony­mous email ad­dress to threat­en the of­fi­cials for per­form­ing their of­fi­cial du­ties, in­clud­ing dis­cussing Covid-19 test­ing and pre­ven­tion.

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