Inmate #00932-005 Wants Your Vote in November - Or Else

By Jeanne Devon & Matthew Beck

Imagine, if you will, a man in federal prison. He’s not doing time for white-collar crimes or hanging out with the wrong group of kids. We’re talking about threatening judges, police officers, extortion, and phoning in bomb threats.

He pleaded guilty to a whole smorgasbord of felonies. After his tour through the American justice system, he was sent on a mandatory vacation to Club Fed for a long, long time. If he can manage to keep his nose clean and behave, he’ll see the outside world no earlier than 2036.

While some who face long periods of incarceration use that time to further their education, get fit, or learn to carve chess pieces out of soap, these hobbies are a little too normal for our guy.

He decided to dedicate his large amounts of free time to (wait for it) running for Congress. Not in New York, and not to shed light on any particular cause. Just cuz. He’s run for public office in Hawaii, Oregon, and now in Alaska for the second time. Republican, Democrat, he’s done it all. He even ran for Congress in Oregon while at the same time fleeing from the law. 

We present to you: Eric Hafner (aka Inmate #00932-005). If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you voted in the primary like a good citizen, and there was his name, right on the ballot as a “Democratic” candidate. Running for Congress in Alaska despite never having set foot there is apparently a family affair, because his mother, Carol "Kitty" Hafner, did the exact same thing in 2018 and appeared on the primary ballot for U.S. Senate here in Alaska. Can an entire state file stalking charges?

Death to America

According to a 33-count federal indictment, Hafner had beef with a great many people - and we suppose you could chalk them up to grudges - but they were the kind of grudges most people would have gotten over by their mid-twenties. Before we deep-dive, understand that Federal prosecutors stripped the victims’ identities out of the indictment, listing them as “Police Officer 1,” “Attorney 2,” and so on. That’s pretty much standard practice when victims include spouses and…young children. To date, prosecutors have never publicly named the police officers, judges, law firms, or elected officials.

Our story begins in 2007, when a New Jersey cop arrested a teenage Eric Hafner on a juvenile complaint. As one might expect, a prosecutor handled the case, and a judge ultimately signed off on a guilty plea. In 2011, Hafner picked up a municipal court case, and in 2012, a family court judge ruled against him in a case where a local law firm represented the other side. But instead of accepting responsibility and moving on with his life, Eric took out a pen and piece of paper and jotted down a long list of names.

In 2016, with his name on the Hawaii Republican primary ballot for Congress, Hafner hopped a flight from Hawaii to Tokyo and decided to pick up a phone and reach out and touch someone. He phoned a police department and told them that the officer who arrested him deserved to get shot, that his child would get their head bashed in, and that he knew where the police officer lived.

That same day, Hafner threatened to kill a New Jersey state executive branch official because the family court judge in his prior case had been reappointed. He told one of the family court attorneys that he was outside his home with a knife and planned to feed him to his dogs. Then, he called another police department to report that he was at a municipal prosecutor’s house shooting people. Presumably exhausted after a day of making violent threats, Hafner took off for Ireland, and that’s the last time the public record puts him anywhere specific until his arrest three years later.

Federal prosecutors say he spent this entire stretch of time living outside the United States, with threats coming through internet calling apps and anonymous email and text messages. At some point, Hafner decided that the law firm on his family court case owed him a whopping $350k, which he claimed was child support and college money. So, being the deranged, violent, and sick lunatic that he is, Hafner decided to go after one attorney’s wife and their two daughters to collect.

Over a series of emails and calls, Hafner threatened to burn their house down, accused the firm of bribing the family court judge, and described in graphic detail what he would do to the girls if they didn’t pay his extortion demand. According to the indictment, Hafner sent the family an email with the subject line “Pay up or die bitch” and included a list of targets with their names on it.

In a separate email, Hafner confessed, “This won’t be my first murder.”

Then, the bomb threats came. In the span of a few weeks, Hafner had called a judge’s chambers and claimed a car bomb would go off in 30 minutes. He called the law firm to report a fertilizer bomb in their building. He called a state official to report that a bomb in a different official’s office would explode in less than 30 minutes. Aaaand, just for good measure, he called the law firm where his old juvenile prosecutor now worked, telling them that they too had a bomb in their building, and signed off with, “Death to America.”

After an unusually quiet year, Hafner checked back in with an email subject line titled, “Murder coming soon!” promising to personally kill all of his perceived enemies and threatening to cut one daughter's throat with a box cutter. According to the indictment, Hafner had texted the girl directly.

His last threat documented in the indictment came on May 18, 2018, when he emailed the former prosecutor who worked on his case and told him he had nothing left to lose. That was three days after the Oregon congressional primary where Hafner was on the ballot.

Our horror story gets murkier after that. While the feds say Hafner was living abroad during this part of his life, he told New Jersey reporters at the time that he was hiding out in New Jersey, dodging warrants and taunting everyone - “Catch me if you can.”

After the feds finally caught up with him (at the Saipan airport, by his own account), a grand jury handed down a massive indictment - 27 counts of threats, nine of them with intent to extort, and 6 counts of making false bomb threats. Hafner, who will appear on Alaska’s general election ballot in November, pleaded guilty and received a 20-year sentence.

Since Hafner had a “D” next to his name on the primary ballot, you may have actually voted for this violent extremist who gets his rocks off threatening to murder children. More than 6,000 Alaskans did, giving Hafner 3.79% of the vote. That’s enough to swing a tight election. Presumably, you could not have imagined that he’d only seen Alaska on television from his 6x8 prison cell - at the Graybar Hotel in Otisville, NY. But here we are.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can’t have nice things. As we have discovered, from the bottom to the top of government, if there’s a weird loophole or something so bizarre the Founding Fathers never even thought to address, someone will do it. Someone like Eric Hafner.

But now you know, and here is your chance to make sure everyone else knows as well. Yes, running for office from prison is absurd and ridiculous politically. But it’s also very serious. Republicans aren't just rolling their eyes at Alaska's latest nutcase candidate. In 2024, Nick Begich went on Kelly Tshibaka's podcast and nudged Democrats to hand their precious votes to the guy in Cellblock D.

They’re hoping in a tight race that they will prevail in sending Nick Begich (Alaska’s RFK Jr.) back to DC, despite what the actual majority may want. Unaffiliated candidate Bill Hill may not have a D next to his name, but wants the right things for Alaska. But the Republican assignment is to get MAGA sycophant Nick Begich back to DC at all costs. And this tells you as much about the Republicans as it does about Inmate Hafner, perhaps even more.