Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claims he was swatted this week by Child Protective Service agents and separated from his four-year-old twins.
Buttigieg ran to Substack to write a column about the incident.
“Someone decided to hurt our family this week. I’m furious, and I want to share what happened,” he began the posting.
Buttigieg wrote:
You’ve probably heard of “swatting.” It’s a cruel and dangerous kind of hoax that has started happening more frequently in recent years. Someone anonymously calls 911 with a false report of imminent danger, such as a hostage situation, at the home of a public figure. Law enforcement swarms the house, guns drawn, terrifying the unsuspecting homeowner and family and sometimes even leading to deaths or injuries in the confusion. It’s happened to dozens of lawmakers, judges, celebrities, and others. (When I was in the Cabinet, someone attempted to do this to our home, but fortunately the hoax was quickly detected.) It’s become enough of a problem that the FBI now has a dedicated database to track such incidents.
Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Me neither, until a few days ago when a police officer and a CPS worker showed up at our home and politely asked to speak with me.
I showed them in, invited them on the deck so that we could hear each other over the barking dog, and asked what was going on. They explained that there had been an allegation against me, that it concerned our four-year-old twins, and that a forensic interview had been arranged for the children the following day. I could not be present at the children’s interview, nor could any family member sit in. Afterwards, they would come back and interview me. And only then would they tell me anything about the nature of the allegation.
Describing himself as “bewildered and troubled,” Buttigieg went on to reveal that “the CPS worker told me something that made my stomach turn: I was not to be alone around the children, at least until the interview took place the next day.”
“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained,” he wrote.
After a “sleepless night,” he says, the officers told him that an anonymous tipster told police that he had spoken to a woman, and she said that Buttigieg had “committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”
Hellbound and Down 