As a major storm rushed toward Florida last October, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the time faced a different kind of threat. Police had shown up in force to a rental property she owned as a result of a prank call, in a potentially dangerous attack known as “swatting.”
As back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton sparked a torrent of online conspiracies, FEMA officials faced harassment and death threats, according to hundreds of pages of agency emails and other documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Bloomberg News. The