For two Eastern Europeans, swatting the political establishment in the United States over the past few years was pure scripted entertainment.
Lawmakers, election supervisors and “libtard zoomers” were all targets of a conspiracy including Nemanja Radovanovic, from Serbia, and Thomasz Szabo, from Romania, US prosecutors allege. The two allegedly made hundreds of fake bomb threats, ransom demands and threats to officials in the US, wreaking havoc for the victims as well as for local and federal authorities who responded to the calls and messages.
The two individuals did all that with a simple internet connection from across the Atlantic, investigators say.
In an interview with Secret Service investigators before charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and for making interstate threats were brought, Radovanovic admitted to making swatting calls, according to court documents, and detailed the scripts they would use.
“Like, ‘I killed my wife … And I want $10,000 or I’ll kill the man she was cheating on me with,’” Radovanovic said of the scripts. He added that he would demand the money in a briefcase and said the type of weapon he threatened to use was a “15- something. R-15 something.”
Szabo is currently in the custody of the US Marshals, and Radovanovic remains at large. The two men are connected to 500 of the swatting calls to at least 250 police departments authorities about fake threats or emergencies, a US official familiar with the investigation told CNN, attempting to create “massive havoc” for entertainment.
After the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Szabo allegedly made a call to a crisis intervention hotline, warning of bomb threats at the Capitol designed to kill then-President-elect Joe Biden. The group also called in false threats and reports to universities, synagogues and several government agencies.
The calls are designed to force law enforcement to swarm an unsuspecting victim’s home, business or government agency.
Some of these targets include special counsel Jack Smith; Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state; federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the election subversion case against Donald Trump, and nearly 20 congressional lawmakers, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN.
Sterling, who spoke with CNN after being swatted earlier this year, estimated the threat will only grow as the political season heats up. “I anticipate we’ll probably see some more of these as we get closer and closer to the election,” he said. In most cases, he added, “you can’t trace the individual. It’s very, very difficult.”
‘Need the libtards to cry too’
The targets of the calls from Radovanovic and Szabo span across political ideologies and sometimes target private citizens “seemingly at random,” according to court documents.
In one chat exchange between the two men obtained by investigators, Szabo allegedly told Radovanovic to swat someone he said was “a libtard zoomer” who “makes tiktok videos for democrats.” When Radovanovic asked, “What you want to swat him?” Szabo replied, “need the libtards to cry too. we are not on any side.”
Former Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, now with the Washington think tank Center for American Progress, told CNN that swatters are targeting anyone in the political arena.
“You’ve had everyone from Marjorie Taylor Greene on the right to Capitol Hill police officers whose mother was swatted after testifying. So you got people on both sides of the aisle that are victims of this, and folks just don’t really fully appreciate how dangerous this can be,” Jones said.
These calls can be extremely dangerous for the victims as well as law enforcement, who may arrive armed and ready to burst through doors at an unsuspecting victim’s home, depending on the level of the supposed threat callers phone in.
“They rolled out heavy in some of these places,” the US official said of law enforcement’s response to several of the “vicious” swatting calls, which sometimes involved the caller claiming they kidnapped a child and were willing to shoot police who responded.
The two men made these swat calls for fun, the official told CNN, and would livestream their calls and how authorities responded to group chats online.
According to court records, in one call the defendants used a computer-generated voice to make the call. They also tried to conceal where they were calling or messaging from with private networks, calling through the internet and other means.
Swatters say a third party was involved
Radovanovic claimed “he was acting at the direction of a certain third party who supplied him with the ‘script,’ provided him the victim addresses he should use, and dialed the calls for him via an audio-sharing application,” court documents say.
Investigators say they have spoken with the third-party individual, a minor, who confessed to his involvement, saying he would select the victims and dial the number for Radovanovic, who would recite the script.
Naveed Jamali, a former intelligence operative who worked undercover against Russian intelligence, was among the targets in the swatting attack. He echoed the sentiment that the swatters seemed to be reading off a script, telling CNN the call “was dispassionate and cold, and then he moves on to the next one, literally, like the next swat.”
Jamali is one of the unnamed victims in the complaint, he told CNN.
“They were reading from a script. They knew what to say. They knew when to do this,” Jamali said.