Alaska Man Emailed Kidnapping Threat to U.S. Senator, Police Say

An Alaska man threatened to “kidnap and injure” a United States senator, the Capitol Police told a federal judge, in the latest example of elected U.S. officials facing direct threats to their physical safety.

The threat was made on or about Sept. 28 by email through the senator’s website, according to an affidavit submitted to a federal judge in Alaska on Friday by Austin Hunter, a special agent with the U.S. Capitol Police.

The affidavit, which requested an arrest warrant for the Alaska man, used pronouns suggesting that the senator he had threatened was a woman. But it did not name her or the state she represents.

If the senator was from Alaska, she could only have been Lisa Murkowski, a Republican. Representatives for Senator Murkowski declined to comment on Wednesday.

The man accused of making the threat, Arther Charles Graham, was arrested on Oct. 30 in Kenai, Alaska, the warrant said. It cited the offense as interstate communications with a threat to kidnap and injure. An initial hearing was scheduled for Friday in federal court in Anchorage, court documents said.

Mr. Graham told F.B.I. agents who visited him at his home in Kenai in early October that he had threatened the senator by email, according to the affidavit. Mr. Graham told the senator he would “hunt you down, cut the flesh off your body and wear your skin like clothes,” it said.

Mr. Graham, 46, did not respond to requests for comment sent overnight to the phone number and email address that were listed for him in the affidavit. A dispatcher with the Capitol Police said by telephone early Wednesday that no one at the agency was immediately available to comment.

News of the arrest was reported by Seamus Hughes, an expert on federal court records based in Washington, and by NBC News.

Since the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, violent political speech in the United States has increasingly taken the form of direct threats against members of Congress in both parties.

In one case, an Alaska man who pleaded guilty last year to threatening to murder Alaska’s two U.S. senators — Senator Murkowski and Senator Dan Sullivan, also a Republican — was sentenced to 32 months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine.