Van Drew excoriates Sentinel over guest column in paper

By STAFF REPORTS

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE – U.S Rep. Jeff Van Drew held a press conference March 15 claiming he received a death threat from a member of the media. 

Van Drew said while he was in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28 at 8:03 p.m. his wife received a voicemail on their home phone from a man who identified himself as John McCall, a longtime member of the New Jersey Press Association (NJPA) and an unpaid contributor to the Ocean City Sentinel.

Van Drew said McCall in the voicemail said, “I would swear to your demise, your demise as a politician, and I believe that you personally are a degenerate. As a member of the New Jersey Press Association, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are deposed if not dead. Anything I can do to basically get you out of office, I will do. You are a traitor Jeff Van Drew and you deserve the fate of traitors.”

Death threats have become more and more common especially for those who are in Congress, Van Drew said.

“What makes this death threat especially despicable and troublesome is that it comes from a member of the media who followed up his death threat with a hate-filled editorial in which he doubled down on the threats and graphically pondered what it would be like to sexually assault my wife and this was printed in the newspaper, in the Sentinel-Ledger,” he said. 

Van Drew read excerpts from a March 10 Ocean City Sentinel guest column entitled “Van Drew’s Nightmare…Police Come Calling” which states Ocean City police went to McCall’s residence. Van Drew acknowledged he called Capitol Police after receiving what he called a death threat.

In a Jan. 13 Ocean City Sentinel column entitled “Hold Trump Loyalist Officials Accountable,” referring to Van Drew switching from a member of the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, McCall states, “this is treason and the penalty for treason is execution. That applies to the great and the small, to presidents, congressmen and small-town councilmen.”

In addition, McCall stated “should conscientious critics take a cue from the armed Republican rioters, storm his house, smash everything, violate his family and walk away laughing? Would that be silly?” Van Drew said.

He said he was accustomed to death threats, but it has nothing to do with his family and the sanctity of his home.

“You don’t do it to family and God help us, hopefully the media or the press has not gotten to the point that they are going to now start printing death threats and disgusting, vile statements from people that should never be quoted,” Van Drew said. 

He said he was calling on the NJPA and Ocean City Sentinel to “forcefully denounce and condemn the threats Mr. McCall made against me and my family” and “to immediately retract his hate-filled editorials and issue an apology to everyone.”

“Until then, any and all legal options are open,” Van Drew said.

Ocean City Sentinel editor and publisher David Nahan issued a response to Van Drew that appears on the commentary page in this week’s newspaper. It is entitled, “Van Drew demands apology; here it is.” In his response – see it in full on page A8 – he does apologize for allowing language in the guest column that made the congressman feel threatened and says the guest column should have been edited to avoid that. 

“Mr. McCall is a freelance writer, not a staff member or a paid contributor to the newspaper,” Nahan said. “I made the decision to run this guest column. I allow those who write guest columns and letters to the editor to provide their views mostly unfettered, but in this case I was not following my own editing standards. Those standards are not to blunt or censor opinions, but to keep them from this type of interpretation. Mr. McCall did not ‘ponder what it would be like to sexually assault’ the congressman’s wife, but he did question how Van Drew could support a president who made a crude comment about women and used a crude analogy. However, I could and should have edited that paragraph to avoid any reference to his wife, someone not in the political arena and not on a public stage. He could have made his point without that reference.”

County Sheriff Robert Nolan said Van Drew did not offer himself or his family up for public service to be the target of threats or violence especially from a column in the newspaper. He said his office takes all threats seriously. 

Van Drew said it was any individual’s right to change their political party or views.

“And I feel more strongly about that than I ever did in my life,” he said. “And nobody should ever be stopped or threatened because they did, that’s Communism, that’s literally Nazism.”

Asked to respond to the accusations against him in the press conference, McCall did not back down in his criticism of Van Drew and said he did not physically threaten him or his wife.

“The phone call he references was a return call to a phone call Van Drew made himself to my personal number. So, as I said truthfully, he instigated the exchange, which he failed to mention in his accusations. His claim to being threatened is smoke,” McCall wrote as part of  a longer response to an emailed request for comment. “If Van Drew understood the English language, he would know the difference between a declarative sentence and an interrogatory sentence.”