A teacher’s ‘kill Kavanaugh’ tweet gets her placed on leave

A teacher in Minnesota has been placed on paid leave after posting a threatening tweet about Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“So whose gonna take one for the team and kill Kavanaugh?” read the tweet, which was posted Saturday, the day the Senate voted to confirm him, according to WCCO, a CBS affiliate in Minneapolis. The tweet and the account that posted it have since been deleted. The FBI and the local county sheriff’s department have said they are aware of the incident.

“Over the weekend, the district has received a complaint regarding an employee,” Mark A. Zuzek, the superintendent of Intermediate School District #917, said in a statement. “The employee has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”

The district did not release the employee’s name. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the woman was a special-education teacher in Rosemount, a suburb of about 24,000 south of Minneapolis.

The tweet comes amid a tense political environment; the bitter confirmation battle over Kavanaugh resulted in an outpouring of threats directed at the figures involved in the proceeding.

Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor whose accusation of sexual assault engulfed the nomination in controversy, has faced threats so severe that she and her family left their home and have not returned. And during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh spoke about a violent email that his wife had received. Last week, a man in Florida was arrested for threatening to kill Democrats and “weak” Republicans who stood in the way of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, officials said.

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