(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Former Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg said he was accused of “unspeakable violent crimes” against his adopted 4-year-old children in an apparent swatting incident at his home last week.
This week someone targeted my family for harm with a false report. We’re physically OK, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t harmed. I am beyond furious.
Whatever your politics, this is awful, wrong, and can never become normal. https://t.co/72wxaVLzVT
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) June 26, 2026
Buttigieg wrote in a Substack post that a police officer and a representative from Child Protective Services showed up at his home with husband Chasten, and twins Penelope and Gus.
“They explained that there had been an allegation against me, that it concerned our four-year-old twins, and that a forensic interview had been arranged for the children the following day,” Buttigieg wrote. “I could not be present at the children’s interview, nor could any family member sit in.”
While the incident remained under investigation, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor said CPS policy prevented him from remaining at home with the kids.
“I was not to be alone around the children, at least until the interview took place the next day,” he wrote. “They asked if I had relatives nearby or could perhaps stay at a hotel for the night.”
They arranged for the two children to stay at their grandparents’ house for the night, giving Buttigieg plenty of time to stew over the allegations.
“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life,” he wrote. “I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained.”
Buttigieg later discovered that the complaint had been filed by an anonymous caller to CPS who identified herself as “a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama,” he said.
According to the woman’s account, Buttigieg had confessed his prior crimes to her, leading her to feel the children were in an unsafe environment.
After Buttigieg denied ever having been to the town, the officer concluded that the call may have been “politically motivated” and it was not referred for prosecution.
The remainder of the blog post went on to rant about the growing epidemic of political violence (the vast majority of it against Republicans) and to invoke Father’s Day and Pride Month as mitigating factors that made the allegations even more painful.
“And at the most basic level, I worry about how anyone, even in today’s world, could fail to respect the absolutely fundamental principle that whatever you think about someone in politics, you leave people’s kids out of it,” Buttigieg wrote.
Some Republican-identifying individuals such as Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, expressed their sympathies.
“No parent should ever have to go through this, period,” Ramaswamy wrote.
However, some Democrats in response failed to heed the call for civil dialogue that Ramaswamy hoped to model with his classy reply.
“Hmm, Vivek. How do you feel about children molested by your master trump?” wrote user @messi73613. “You seemed to be ok supporting pedophiles. P.S. my support to Buttigieg. I hope his family will be ok.”
Hmm, Vivek. How do you feel about children molested by your master trump? You seemed to be ok supporting pedophiles.
P.S. my support to Buttigieg. I hope his family will be ok.— Vasya Messi🇺🇦💪🇺🇦 (@messi73613) June 27, 2026
BlueAnon’s fringe attempt to link President Donald Trump to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been largely discredited, although stronger evidence supports Epstein’s chummy relationship with former President Bill Clinton and other powerful Democrats.
In 2023, former College Park (Md.) Mayor Patrick Wojahn, a protégée of Buttigieg’s, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on multiple child pornography charges amid allegations that his phone contained images of more than 500 exploited children.
Several top conservative figures have been swatted in recent years, including Headline USA contributor Becca Spinks, who recounted that the perpetrator in her case sounded like a “high-pitched and juvenile with a peculiar accent that was difficult to place.”
Two Eastern European men were arrested following a rash of 2024 incidents, including several at the home of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
While responding to a fake bomb threat at Greene’s home in December 2024, police in Rome, Ga., were involved in a vehicle collision, killing 66-year-old Tammie Pickelsimer.
Buttigieg’s tenure as transportation secretary was largely marked by his apparent disregard for his job duties, with the slogan “Where’s Pete” becoming a popular refrain during a supply-chain logjam, train derailment and multiple airline emergencies.
Immediately following the adoption of the two twins in 2021, he took an extended paternity leave, which may have exacerbated the skyrocketing inflation that plagued the early years of the Biden administration.
Although passed over for a VP nod by Kamala Harris, who deemed him too gay and conniving to be her 2024 running mate, Buttigieg’s name has been floated as a top 2028 presidential contender.
But critics noted that, despite his call for civility when he was personally impacted, Buttigieg made no such public statements following recent assassination attempts on Trump.
Zero times.
Searches of Pete Buttigieg's X posts around both the July 13 and September 15, 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump turned up no denunciations. His timeline showed continued criticism of Trump on other topics instead.
— Grok (@grok) June 26, 2026
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
