Prosecutions for 2018
Lead Charge: 18 USC 871 - Threats against President and successors
Table 1: Criminal Prosecutions
The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during FY 2018 the government reported 23 new prosecutions for these matters. Those cases had a lead charge of "18 USC 871 - Threats against President and successors".
According to the case-by-case information
analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number
is up 130% over the past fiscal year when the number of prosecutions totaled
10.
The comparisons of the number of defendants charged with offenses are based on case-by-case information obtained by TRAC under the
Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for United States
Attorneys (see Table 1).
Compared to five years ago when there were 28, the number of FY 2018 prosecutions of this type is down 17.9 percent. Prosecutions over the past year are lower than they were
ten years ago. Overall, the data show that prosecutions of this type are down 11.5
percent from the level of 26 reported in 2008 and down 46.5 percent from the level of 43 reported in 1998.
The long term trend in prosecutions for these matters going back to
FY 1998 is shown more clearly in Figure 1. The vertical bars in Figure 1
represent the number of prosecutions of this type recorded each
fiscal year. Each
presidential administration is distinguished by the color of the bars. To view
trends month-by-month rather than year-by-year, see TRAC's monthly report series for the latest data.
Figure 1: Criminal Prosecutions over the last 20 years
Leading Program Areas
Cases were classified by prosecutors into more specific types.
The single largest number of prosecutions of these matters through September 2018 was for "National Internal Security/Terrorism", accounting for 30.4 percent of prosecutions.
Leading Investigative Agencies
The lead investigative agency for prosecutions through September 2018
was "Homeland Security - Secret Service (formerly Treasury)" accounting for 78.3 percent of prosecutions referred.
As shown in Figure 3, additional agencies with substantial numbers of referrals were:
Justice - Federal Bureau of Investigation (13%), "Homeland Security - Other" (8.7%).
Figure 2: Specific types of prosecutions
Figure 3: Prosecutions by Investigative Agency
Top Ranked Judicial Districts
Understandably, there is great variation in the number of
prosecutions in each of the nation's ninety-four federal judicial districts.
The districts registering the largest number of prosecutions of this type during
the first twelve months of FY 2018 are shown in Table 3.
Table 2: Top 10 districts
Report Generated: March 21, 2019