BERKELEY — A Berkeley man was arrested on suspicion of threatening a federal official last week, just days after he allegedly wrote to a member of Congress he would “gut you like a hog” and kill the member’s family.
Nathanial Blaine Luffman — a former Kentucky resident, according to his Facebook page — was arrested June 27 and is being taken to Oregon to face a single charge of retaliating against a federal official by way of threats. It carries a maximum term of 10 years in prison.
While Luffman’s alleged victim is not named in court records describing the threats, U.S. Capitol Police describe him as an Oregon elected official with an office at a federal building in Portland. The court records also say the suspect has been associated with “other known threatening communications to members of Congress.”
Luffman allegedly wrote emails and sent voicemails to the official. His email told the victim he’d “gut you like a hog” and leave “your kids bowels splayed out across floor blood spattered on the door as you lay dead,” police said.
Luffman also allegedly left a voicemail threatening to “hack to pieces” the official and his daughters, used the hashtag #ObamaForLife and claimed that the official was involved in a plot to assassinate ex-President Barack Obama in Kentucky.
Hours after Luffman’s arrest was entered into the federal court system, Kentucky’s junior senator, Sen. Rand Paul, tweeted, “Thank you to the US Capitol Police for their arrest of the man who recently threatened to kill my family and me.”
Paul did not name the suspect, and calls to his office went unreturned as of 2:45 p.m. Tuesday. Last week, Paul said the man had “threatened to kill me and chop up my family with an axe” and that an arrest warrant had been issued.
Neither prosecutors nor police responded to inquiries about whether the threats to Paul were tied to Luffman.
Thank you to the US Capitol Police for their arrest of the man who recently threatened to kill my family and me.
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 2, 2018
