Matthew J. Perry Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Columbia. Travis Lang, 47, was given a $25,000 bond Friday after being charged with threatening to kill the president. (Abraham Kenmore/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — A man charged with threatening to kill President Donald Trump might be able to await trial on home detention, a federal judge decided Friday.
Travis Lang, a 47-year-old from Irmo, pleaded not guilty last week to sending a message saying he would kill Trump.
In federal court Friday, a Secret Service agent detailed Lang’s history of threatening politicians in local, state and federal offices of both parties, dating back to at least 2020. The threats continued even after agents visited his home and warned him to stop, according to testimony in court.
Lang’s bond to get out of the Lexington County jail was set at $25,000. But when that might happen and where he would go next is not yet known. Before paying bond, Lang must complete a mental health evaluation in state court. That will determine whether Lang is released to his apartment or to a mental health treatment facility, his attorneys said.
If released to go home, Lang will be subject to tracking on a GPS monitor, and officers will install software on his electronic devices to monitor his social media usage. He will not be allowed to contact any public officials, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paige Gossett said.
Jury selection in his trial is set to begin May 7.
Prosecutors said the threat Lang’s charged with was a direct message over Facebook to his 23-year-old son on Feb. 17.
In it, Lang claimed he had been tortured and provoked “to kill myself and Donald Trump,” said Matt Reisenweber, a senior special agent with the Secret Service who investigated the case. “I hope the money was worth it,” continued the message read by Reisenweber.
The agent did not say what money Lang was talking about or whether he was referencing a specific incident.
Whether Lang’s message is a “true threat” remains unanswered, since Lang didn’t send the message directly to the person he was threatening, defense attorney Jeremy Thompson argued Friday.
“To me, it sounds more like a cry for help than a threat he plans to carry out against the president,” Thompson said.
Making a threat directly to the president would be difficult for most people, since few people have direct access to the president, prosecutor Scott Matthews said.
The Secret Service must take all potential threats seriously, Matthews said, especially after two assassination attempts against Trump last year.
In July, a 20-year-old gunman shot Trump in the ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The then-director of the Secret Service resigned later that month amid outrage over her agency’s failure to prevent the shooting, which killed one rallygoer and injured two others. In a second attempt in September at Trump’s private golf course in Florida, agents discovered the gun before it was fired.
“We know every threat cannot be taken lightly,” Matthews said.
Posts read in court go back to 2020
Lang had a history of threatening posts, Reisenweber said. None of the posts remain on Lang’s public social media accounts.
“President Donald Trump, I could in fact threaten your life by killing you on an open table,” read one post from Oct. 13, 2020, that Reisenweber read to the courtroom Friday.
On April 20, 2021, Lang wrote to Biden’s account on X, asking, “Does your administration run counter to the mission at hand?” Reisenweber did not say what that “mission” referred to. Lang went on to cite the law about threatening to kill a president, calling it his “sacrifice.”
“I am going to kill you, given the opportunity,” Reisenweber said the post concluded.
Two years later, on April 13, 2023, Lang posted on X that, if elected president, he would issue an executive order to execute Biden and Trump, as well as former vice presidents Kamala Harris and JD Vance, for “abuse and misuse of office,” Reisenweber said.
The post came two months after Lang filed to run as a Republican in the 2024 presidential election and put $6,000 of his own money into his campaign account, according to Federal Election Commission data. The account shows no other money raised, and he didn’t even appear on his home state’s ballot. He told investigators he also ran for president in 2020, though the FEC does not show any record of that.
When Secret Service agents, including Reisenweber, visited Lang’s home after the post in April 2023 to warn him against making more threats, Lang told the agents he would continue to do it anyway, Reisenweber said.
Lang’s alleged threats were not limited to presidents and vice presidents, Reisenweber said.
Irmo man pleads not guilty to threatening President Trump, denied bond
Four days after sending the message to his son, Lang emailed his wife’s divorce attorney to say he “would like the new version of the CIA internal assassination guide,” because his was “outdated.” He included a screenshot in the email of a decades-old government handbook that included instructions on how to kill someone, Reisenweber said.
Lang’s threats extended to other officials, Reisenweber said.
He made similar posts about Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, and he repeatedly sent emails Reisenweber described as threatening to state Attorney General Alan Wilson, a Republican, and Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, a Democrat, the special agent told the court.
Lang was also barred from Statehouse grounds after harassing legislators, Reisenweber said. He did not specify when that ban began or which legislator alerted security to Lang’s visits.
In December, Lang posted a photo of two handguns and loaded magazines to his Facebook page, though it was unclear when the photo was taken, Reisenweber said. A probate court in 2021 ruled that Lang was mentally ill and not allowed to buy or own guns and ammunition, the agent said.
Originally from Kansas, Lang moved to Irmo around 2013 to work on the V.C. Summer nuclear power plant, Reisenweber said. He was laid off when the expansion project was abandoned by its utility owners in 2017.
Since then, he has not had a stable job. Recently, Lang has been doing deliveries for online ordering app DoorDash to make money while he goes through a divorce, Reisenweber said.