Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is speaking out in his first interview about being targeted by a child services swatting call, leading to him being temporarily separated from his two children.
"As a family, we're just trying to put this behind us," Buttigieg said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with "Good Morning America" co-anchor George Stephanopoulos.
"I don't know how much of this they're going to remember," he said of his 4-year-old twins with his husband, Chasten. "I know I will. It's one of the most awful moments of my life, and something I wouldn't wish on anybody."
Buttigieg, a high-profile Democratic Party figure and a potential 2028 presidential hopeful, said he hopes the individual who made the allegation is "found and is prosecuted."
"To me, the most important thing going forward is we just cannot allow our politics to keep moving in this direction," he said. "This can't be treated as something that it's just something you accept, something you take on when you choose to go into public service."
"We just can't go on like this," he added.
Buttigieg, who lives with his family in Traverse City, Michigan, said a police officer and Children's Protective Services worker showed up at his home to speak with him about an allegation. According to Buttigieg, the officials would not tell him what the allegation was but said he could not be alone with his children.
Buttigieg said his children were each interviewed alone and that he did not know the circumstances of the allegation until after those interviews were complete.
"The next day, about 24 hours later, that's when they asked me if I had ever been to a location in Alabama, which I've never been to, where an anonymous caller had told CPS that somebody had told him that I had told her that I had committed unspeakable crimes," he said. "And only then did we know that the police agreed that this was not an allegation that was credible, and that we could start going back to normal as a family, which is what we've been trying to do in the days since."
Michigan State Police confirmed in a statement last week that the anonymous report from the person was false.
"False reports are dangerous and divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families," Michigan State Police said in a statement.
Buttigieg told Stephanopoulos he plans to continue his public service work in the wake of the incident, saying, "I'm going to keep working on causes that I believe in."
He added that he has been inspired by the bipartisan reaction to him sharing his story in a blog post published Friday, and hopes there is agreement moving forward that families are left out of politics.
"I'll also say that the response, since we made the decision to speak out about this, has been really extraordinary, hearing from people across the country, not just people I know and have worked with, and our political allies, but actually people from the other side, people in some cases that I campaigned against reaching out or speaking out in solidarity at it," he said. "We have got to be able to agree as a country on at least this fundamental principle that you do not go after people's families, that whatever you think of somebody's politics, however you want to argue or fight about political issues, you leave somebody's children alone."
An NPR report last year found a rise in the number of swatting calls against members of Congress, forcing police to use resources to respond. Over the past several years, President Donald Trump has faced multiple assassination attempts, while in Minnesota last year, a state representative and her husband were killed and a second lawmaker and his wife were wounded in shootings that the state's governor called an "act of targeted political violence."
Buttigieg added that he hopes that moving forward, the country is able to agree on "fairness" and "integrity" in public life. He said swatting calls "can't be treated as something that is just something you accept, something you take on, when you choose to go into public service," adding, "we just can't go on like this."
"This is so far beyond Democrat and Republican stuff," he said. "And we've got to be able to say as a country that we don't have to agree on politics, we don't have to agree on policy, we have to agree that we want some fairness and some integrity and some decency in public life in this country."
