Vice President Kamala Harris during a speech in Washington. PHOTO: Washington Post by Demetrius Freeman.
(c) 2021, The Washington Post – Julian Mark
Just a couple of weeks after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn in, Niviane Petit Phelps recorded a video of herself.
“Kamala Harris, you are going to die,” Phelps said looking at the camera, according to an affidavit. “Your days are already numbered.”
Phelps said someone had paid him $ 53,000 to kill Harris, adding, “I’m going to do the job, OK.”
Over a week, the 39-year-old nurse who lives in Miami Gardens filmed another five videos of threats, according to court documents. She sent them to her husband, who is incarcerated, via JPay, an app that inmates use to communicate with the outside world. Phelps pleaded guilty Friday to six counts of threatening the vice president – one count for every video he made threatening to murder Harris. The mother of three now faces five years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for November 19.
His attorney, Scott Saul, did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post Monday afternoon. In a statement to the Miami Herald, Saul said Phelps would not have followed through on his threats to assassinate the vice president.
Phelps “was draining her emotions during a tumultuous time in her life,” Saul told the newspaper, adding that the threats were limited to her conversations with her incarcerated husband. “
Still, he said, “it has been important for Ms. Phelps to show that she accepts her responsibility while evaluating her aberrational acts.”
After federal prosecutors filed the charges in April, Phelps was fired from her job as a nurse at Jackson Health System, where she had worked for 20 years, the Herald reported.
Among Phelps’ reasons for making the threats, he later told investigators, was that Harris – the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother – was not in fact “Black.”
Phelps also believed in a conspiracy theory that has been disproved, according to investigators, that Harris put his hand on his wallet instead of on the Bible on Swearing-In Day. Phelps found the notion disrespectful, according to his affidavit to federal agents.
According to court documents, on February 13, Phelps recorded two videos. In the first, Phelps says that Harris had “his days already numbered.” In the second, Phelps says that $ 53,000 is Harris’s “number”, referring to the amount of money he had supposedly received to kill the vice president. (Prosecutors are not accusing Phelps of receiving money to harm Harris.)
A day later, Phelps shot two more videos, the affidavit says. In one of them, Phelps said, “I’m going to the shooting range” until the vice president “leaves the chair.” Several days later, Phelps again referenced the $ 53,000 on two other recordings directed at Harris. According to court records, he said in those videos to the vice president – “within 50 days from today you are going to die.”
Using the JPay app, Phelps sent the six videos to her husband, who was incarcerated at the time at the Wakulla Correctional Institution in Crawfordville, Florida. Also, court documents state that on February 20, Phelps also sent her husband a photo of herself smiling, standing and holding a gun, next to a shooting target.
Court records also indicate that a couple of days later, Phelps applied for a concealed weapons permit.
In early March, a federal agent interviewed Phelps at her home, and she told him her reasons for making the video. He indicated, however, that he was “over it” and that “it drained a lot of anger at that shooting range,” according to the affidavit. However, according to the affidavit, when asked what she would have done if the police had not visited her, she replied, “I don’t know.”
Finally, the agent asked Phelps if she had plans to travel to Washington, and Phelps told her that he had no plans to go. But according to the affidavit, her daughter, who was with her in the room, said, “Didn’t we say we were going?”
Phelps immediately replied, “No, we are not going.”
Author Information:
Julian Mark is a reporter for the Washington Post’s Morning Mix team. Before joining the Post, he covered housing and police issues for Mission Local in San Francisco.
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