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- Niviane Petit Phelps, a 39-year-old nurse from Miami, was arrested on Friday.
- She is charged with threatening to kill Vice President Kamala Harris, a criminal complaint said.
- Phelps, who is Black, was angered by the false idea that Harris is not really Black, the complaint said.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
A Florida nurse was arrested Friday for threatening to kill Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a criminal complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Niviane Petit Phelps, a 39-year-old mother from Miami, is accused of recording and sending several videos to her jailed husband, in which she discussed murdering the vice president, the complaint, reviewed by Insider, says.
Between February 13 and February 18, Phelps “knowingly and willfully made threats to kill and inflict bodily harm upon the Vice President of the United States,” the complaint says.
A Secret Service special agent intercepted communications between Phelps and her incarcerated husband on JPay, a communications platform that allows non-incarcerated people to communicate with those in jail.
The videos showed Phelps complaining to the camera about her hatred for Harris, President Joe Biden, and others, the complaint says.
In one of the videos, Phelps stated: “Kamala Harris you are going to die. Your days are numbered already.”
In this same video, Phelps also claimed she was paid a large sum of money for her attempt to carry out the job, the complaint says.
“Someone paid me $53,000 just to fuck you up and I’m gonna take the, I’m gonna do the job, okay,” she said.
Another video, according to the complaint, shows Phelps saying: “I’m going to the gun range. … I swear to God, today is your day you’re gonna die. 50 days from today, mark this day down.”
Photographs also picture Phelps at a shooting range, the complaint says. On February 22, she applied for a concealed weapons permit.
Detectives from the Miami-Dade Police Department and Secret Service agents visited Phelps on March 3 with the goal of interviewing her. But Phelps resisted, the complaint said. Another agent went to her house again three days later.
When he asked her about the videos, “Phelps started by saying that she was angry at the time about Kamala Harris becoming Vice President, but that she is ‘over it now.”’
Phelps, who is Black, also told the agent her anger stemmed from the false idea that Harris is not actually Black, the complaint says. The vice president is Black and is of South Asian and Jamaican descent.
Phelps was also reportedly angered by the false claim that Harris had placed her hand on her clutch purse instead of the bible in the process of being inaugurated.
Phelps’ defense attorney, Scott Saul, told the Miami Herald that he did not believe his client to present a “genuine threat” to Harris. “All this case involved was my client venting to her incarcerated husband,” Saul said in a statement to the paper.
“It appears as though personal issues in her life, along with the volatile political landscape perpetuated by some, brought some frustrations out of her,” he wrote. “I do not think that there was ever a realistic or imminent threat upon Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Saul did not immediately return a request for comment from Insider.
Phelps has lost her job as a nurse at a Miami hospital and faces up to five years in jail if convicted, the Miami Herald added.
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