William Braddock
In they-deserve-each-other news, a Republican candidate for the House seat being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) informed a conservative activist in a private phone call he is going to have his GOP primary rival killed, Politico reported on Thursday, June 17, 2021 (see story here), and she promptly sought an injunction against him.
William Braddock (photo, left), 37, who identifies himself as a lawyer and Marine Corps veteran, allegedly “was secretly recorded threatening to send ‘a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad'” to make fellow nutjob Anna Paulina Luna (photo, right) “disappear,” the U.K.-based tabloid Sun said (here).
Crist, a former Florida governor (bio here) and he only respectable character in this melodrama, is giving up his House seat to run for governor again in 2022. He was first elected to the House from a Tampa-area district in 2016, re-elected in 2018 with 57% of the vote, and beat Luna, a protégé of the notorious Matt Gaetz, in 2020 with 53% of the vote.
Luna’s background includes posing for men’s magazines and doing commentary for Newsmax, a far-right outlet that promotes pro-Trump election conspiracy theories. Luna acquired some minor notoriety in 2019 by harassing Kamala Harris at an airport (video below), which she has sought to parlay into a political career despite having no qualifications for public office or any idea of what she’s babbling about.
The idea of trying to win an election by murdering one’s opponent isn’t new, of course. See, e.g., Vladimir Putin vis-a-vis Alexei Navalny. Even here in allegedly more-civilized America, the practice isn’t unknown. See, e.g., the strange case of Byron “Low Tax” Looper (details here and here), who carried out such a scheme, but didn’t get away with it. Braddock might want to research what happened to Looper before carrying out his threat to have Luna killed.