LOS ANGELES
A Twentynine Palms man was sentenced Thursday to a year in federal prison for making thousands of harassing telephone calls to government offices, including threatening to injure congressional staffers and an intern who answered the calls, according to officials.
U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson sentenced Robert Eric Stahlnecker, 48.
Between September and November 2019, Stahlnecker made multiple abusive telephone calls to staff members and interns of multiple members of Congress.
Stahlnecker made more than 10,000 calls to government agencies and elected officials between January and November of last year, according to court documents.
More than half of the defendant’s telephone calls in 2019 were to the Veterans Affairs complaint line (3,600 calls) and the two United States senators from California (2,500 calls), court papers state.
At a two-day trial in February, a federal jury found Stahlnecker guilty of one count of making threats by interstate commerce and five counts of anonymous telecommunications harassment. The jury acquitted him of two counts of threatening federal employees.
According to the evidence presented at trial, on September 26, 2019, Stahlnecker made eight telephone calls within a seven-minute span to the Washington, D.C., office of Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
During the calls, Stahlnecker berated the intern who answered the call, insulted the intern by using vulgar language, and finally, threatened to come to the senator’s office to kill her.
Stahlnecker has been in federal custody since his arrest in this case in December 2019.
“Since 2007…Stahlnecker has been convicted five times for verbally abusing and threatening government employees,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “The convictions, in this case, represent a small fraction of defendant’s decade-long campaign to abuse and threaten government employees.”