Staff Members Attacked With Bat at Congressman’s Virginia Office - New York Times
A man armed with a baseball bat and demanding to see Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, attacked and injured two staff aides in a destructive rampage inside the congressman’s Fairfax, Va., office, the latest episode in a surge of political violence across the country.
Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax, was facing charges for one count of felony aggravated malicious wounding and one count of malicious wounding, according to the Fairfax City Police Department.
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Mr. Connolly said in a statement that the individual had committed “an act of violence” and that the two aides had been taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
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Mr. Connolly told CNN that the attacker struck one of his senior aides in the head with the metal bat, and hit an intern — on her first day on the job — in the side with the bat.
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Last year, Mr. Pham filed a federal lawsuit in Virginia against the C.I.A. alleging that the agency had imprisoned him for decades in a “lower perspective based on physics called the book world” and demanding $29 million. The suit, which was handwritten, claimed the agency was “brutally torturing” him with a “degenerative disability” from the “fourth dimension.
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The attack comes amid a rise in threats and violent political speech against members of Congress in recent years. In October, an intruder bludgeoned Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, with a hammer inside their San Francisco home after the attacker shouted, “Where is Nancy?”
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Last month, J. Thomas Manger, the Capitol Police chief, testified on Capitol Hill about the heightened threat climate across the country. Last year, there were more than 7,000 threats against members of Congress.
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