EXCLUSIVE: Pat Harrigan, a former Green Beret and Republican congressional candidate, told the “Todd Starnes Show” his family has fled North Carolina ahead of the election following a “credible death threat.”
In October, his family’s home was the target of a shooting, which the FBI is investigating. Harrigan’s daughters, 3 and 5, were just feet from where the bullets landed inside the home.
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“The most important thing was that everybody was safe and is safe,” Harrigan told host Todd Starnes Monday. “But as a candidate, you have no recourse. You are on your own when it comes to protection, so I’ve had to send my entire family, my extended family, my wife, my kids, out of state for the duration of this election. It just should not be this way.”
Democrat state Sen. Jeff Jackson, Harrigan’s opponent in North Carolina’s 14th congressional district race, condemned the shots fired, but Harrigan said he rejects that.
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“Jeff Jackson needs to condemn his entire campaign strategy, the approach that has left open this potential for political violence and extremism to capitalize on his rhetoric,” Harrigan said.
“This all started when I won the primary and my opponent started lying about me. This is not just ordinary lies…my opponent says I have profited from the deaths of children. Reprehensible lies like that. That started a kind of cascade of events…a credible death threat,” he explained.
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“My opponent then had the brilliant idea to shoot an ad at one of my homes out in Hickory, North Carolina – right in front of it,” Harrigan noted. “He has filed a complaint against me with pictures of my kids, and then just a couple weeks ago, as my parents were sitting watching television at 11 o’clock at night, a bullet ripped through a window of their home. They were watching my children that night, and my kids were 20 feet away from where that bullet impacted. I mean this has gotten to a level of ridiculousness, and it’s unbelievably frustrating.”
Starnes responded, “this cannot be politics in America.”
“No, it shouldn’t be politics in America,” Harrigan said. “We deserve much better than this. America deserves much better than this and, look, this is the price you pay for politicians taking cheap shots, lying in order to score political points, and my opponent has literally sacrificed the safety and security of my family at the altar of scoring political points.”
Starnes added, “Here you have President Biden putting the target on every single conservative in the nation while at the same time saying, ‘Democrats are the ones who are the true victims of this kind of hate.'”
“Look this is a national problem,” he said. “We need to lower the temperature all across the country. In races where politicians have used very poor judgment and upped the rhetoric in order to score political points, I sure hope that the constituencies across their districts hold them accountable for their reprehensible actions.”
A spokesman for Jackson’s campaign issued the following statement:
“We fully support law enforcement as they investigate this incident and believe any wrongdoing should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We at Team Jackson pulled our ad in an abundance of caution and concern, but to be clear, the home involved in the incident has never been featured in any of our advertising.”