Maxine Waters cancels events over death threats after calling for Trump admin to be mobbed, harassed
- California Congresswoman Maxine Waters has cancelled two scheduled events due to receiving death threats after calling for Trump administration officials to be mobbed and harassed in public.
- Republicans and members of Waters' own party pushed back on her remarks, but President Donald Trump drew attention to them and said she called for harm against his supporters.
- Waters denies calling for anyone to be harmed, and says she gets death threats all the time.
California Congresswoman Maxine Waters has cancelled two scheduled events due to receiving death threats after calling for Trump administration officials to be mobbed and harassed in public.
"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere," Waters, a controversial Democrat who has sparred with Trump before, said at a rally.
Fellow Californian and the leader of the Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, joined Republicans in pushing back on Waters with calls to civility.
But President Donald Trump took the blowback up a notch by tweeting that "Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person" had "just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement."
"Be careful what you wish for Max!" Trump concluded.
While Waters had called for gathering a crowd to harass officials in the Trump administration, she did not go as far as calling her supporters to harm individual Trump supporters.
"As the President has continued to lie and falsely claim that I encouraged people to assault his supporters, while also offering a veiled threat that I should 'be careful', even more individuals are leaving (threatening) messages and sending hostile mail to my office," Waters said in a statement, as CNN notes.
Waters said authorities were looking into "one very serious death threat" and several other threats she also called "very serious" in which "individuals threatened to shoot, lynch, or cause me serious bodily harm," according to the statement.
But Waters only referred to an increase in death threats, and made it clear that she receives death threats all the time, CNN reported.
Waters' comments followed Press Secretary Sarah Sanders being kicked out of a restaurant and several other Trump administration officials being confronted in public amid outrage over Trump's former policy of separating and detaining families at the border.