U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) received voicemails threatening to lynch him and calling him racial slurs after he called for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, he said Saturday.
U.S. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas)
Congressman Green, who is black, played the recordings for about 100 attendees at a town hall in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. They include death threats, racial epithets and graphic language.
“Hey Al Green, we’ve got an impeachment for you. It’s going to be yours,” one caller said. “It’s actually going to give you a short trial before we hang your nigger ass.”
“We’ll lynch all you fuckin’ niggers,” another caller said. “You’ll be hanging from a tree.”
That caller went on to claim no one had called for Barack Obama’s impeachment (they had), even though “he was born in Kenya” (he wasn’t). Trump helped spread the “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. He finally disavowed it last year, though in a September HuffPost/YouGov poll, 39 percent of Republicans still said Obama was not born in the U.S., and 28 percent said they weren’t sure where he was born.
“It does not deter us,” Green said after playing the recordings. “We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to allow this to cause us to deviate from what we believe to be the right thing to do, and that is to proceed with the impeachment of President Trump.”
“When people say that they will lynch you, I think you have to take that seriously,” Green told MSNBC host Joy Reid on Saturday, adding that his team had “extreme security measures” in place for the town hall.
Green on Wednesday called for Trump’s impeachment on the House floor after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia and the question of interference in the 2016 presidential election.
