A toxic political climate and a particularly harrowing incident involving his family ultimately drove former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin)’s abrupt departure from the House earlier this year, the once rising GOP star told The Washington Post in a column published this week.
Gallagher had previously pointed to a swatting incident in announcing his decision to leave the House after eight years, but a piece from Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius sheds new light on the ordeal, which was confirmed by local authorities.
According to the Post, the local sheriff received an anonymous call on Dec. 30, 2023, claiming that Gallagher had been shot and his wife and two young daughters were taken hostage. A SWAT team was sent to the family’s home to find all four safe.
“That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics,” Gallagher told Ignatius.
Gallagher’s departure, which compounded the GOP’s already razor-thin House majority, came as a surprise to many. Wisconsin’s WLUK first reported in April that threats to Gallagher’s family likely played a role.
“This is more just me wanting to prioritize being with my family,” he told reporters at the time. “I signed up for the death threats and the late-night swatting, but they did not. And for a young family, I would say this job is really hard.”
Gallagher, 40, had handily won his most recent election in 2022, getting more than 72 percent of the vote in his district after taking more than 62 percent in the previous three.
The Marine veteran, who was on two tours in Iraq as an intelligence officer, worked for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and on former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s short presidential campaign in 2016 before deciding to run for an open Congressional seat in his hometown Green Bay.
But he ultimately faced backlash among some conservatives and loyalists to former President Trump when he was one of three Republicans to vote against impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February, ultimately causing the effort to fail.
He wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that while he believed Mayorkas’s tenure and handling of the border had been a “disgrace,” he didn’t think impeachment was appropriate.
“Impeachment not only would fail to resolve Mr. Biden’s border crisis but would also set a dangerous new precedent that would be used against future Republican administrations,” he wrote.
Gallagher was also chair of the House select committee on competition between the U.S. and China, a rare area of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.
He said during an interview with Fox News in February that “lifers and careerists” had made Congress dysfunctional. He elaborated on that thought in Ignatius’s piece.
“We’ve turned Congress into a ‘green room’ for Fox News and MSNBC, instead of being the key institution of government,” Gallagher said. “Being a bomb-thrower on TV or crapping on my colleagues has never interested me.”
Gallagher recently started a job working on defense initiatives for Plantir Technologies, a software company cofounded by billionaires Peter Thiel and Alex Karp.
