Ade Salim Lilly
Ade Salim Lilly, 35, was sentenced to a year and six months in prison for calling members of Congress thousands of times with harassing intentions.
A New York man was sentenced Tuesday to serve more than a year in prison for repeatedly making thousands of harassing telephone calls to members of Congress and threatening to kill one staffer, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Ade Salim Lilley, 35 of Queens, New York received a sentence of 13 months with three years of supervised release today by Judge Richard Roberts in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Federal prosecutors accused Lilly of making at least seventy-six “pervasive harassing communications” to members of Congress.
Lilly placed 12,612 telephone calls to around 54 Congressional offices nationwide from February of that year until his arrest in November of the following year — making himself “the most prolific democratic process-interfering racist in history,” he later wrote by hand on an apology card.
Of those thousand calls, over 6,526 were to offices within the District of Columbia.
The case is the most recent in a series of threats against public figures, two Eastern Europeans were charged last month for allegedly “swatting” 40 private victims and even targeted on no less than 61 officials.
Were official victims, members of Congress cabinet level executive brand officials and Senior Officers at federal law enforcement agencies (Someone disciplined for not abiding with the very ethics laws he was expected to enforce). State Officials.
“Moreover, this is an election year and in today’s society politicization with political office or view frequently crosses the line of Free Speech rights into true threats to commit violence,” wrote prosecutors in a sentencing memorandum. That would ‘foster a dangerous cultural acceptance of politically-motivated threats and violence,’ the defense contended.
Ade Salim Lilly targeted over 100 Congressional offices with threats, harassment
Prosecutors said Lilly made those calls from Maryland and Puerto Rico. As shown on his harassment timeline, a couple of months ago he moved from Maryland to Puerto Rico.
Court documents said that aides to Members of Congress or interns answered the calls in most cases. In some of the phone calls, Lilly would “get upset and begin cussing out or harassing” those on other end of the line, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors wrote in court records that at one-point Congressional staff kept asking Lilly to stop calling and U.S. Capitol Police also informed Lilly multiple times the calls were prohibited by law because they were unwanted “and due to a harassing nature.”
Court documents also showed that Lilly made at least one phone call in which he threatened to kill an employee of a congressional office in Washington D.C. in October 2022.
In the call, Lilly told a congressional staffer “I will kill you, I am going to run you over,” and also added that he would use a bomb or grenade against her.
In addition to the belligerent phone call, in at least seven instances Lilly called congressional offices that had begun hanging up on him because they realized he was seeking them out. According to court records, Lilly phoned a member of congress more than 500 times over the course of two days in February 2023.
He was not put out of business entirely, his harassment campaign just ended in November 2023 when he was apparently charged and taken away by Capitol Police agents to Puerto Rico.
“Threatening another person’s safety or life is a crime, not protected speech,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said in commenting on Lilly’s guilty plea last month but if you threaten people, and we find out who you are — in this case due to fantastic police work on behalf of the Wellington Central control room staff — we will hold those making such threats accountable.
