Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, condemned anti-Israel activists who plan to demonstrate outside his private residence in advance of a new ordinance that will bar such protests.
“There are no circumstances that anyone should be allowed to show up at elected officials’ private residences or anyone’s private residences to try to pressure them and intimidate them and threaten them into doing something,” Smith told JNS on Monday.
The Democrat called the planned protest “a campaign of intimidation” that will have no impact on his legislative decision-making.
The activist group Seattle Against War shared a flier for a rally and press conference outside Smith’s Bellevue home, slated for Tuesday night. It called on the congressman to “stop arming Israel.”
“They don’t want to meet and discuss,” Smith told JNS of the activists. “They want to use threats and intimidation to try to silence people who disagree with them.”
He said activists have targeted his neighborhood repeatedly, distributing leaflets to his neighbors that accuse him of murder and burning Israeli and American flags in his driveway.
Smith told JNS that protesters once showed up at 5 a.m., “banging on drums and screaming through a bullhorn.”
“I’m sure they napped the rest of the day,” he said.
“There’s plenty of crimes that have been committed,” he told JNS. “We’ve been battling with the city attorney for Bellevue to actually prosecute these people and for the Bellevue police to actually arrest them.”
“Coming to someone’s personal residence is a threat. It’s well understood when someone says to you, ‘I know where you live,’ that is meant to be a threat, and that is exactly what this is,” the congressman said.
“If the way you choose to resolve your differences is to threaten elected officials and others in their private residences because you agree with their decisions, we have an election process,” he told JNS. “I’m up every two years. They’re not happy with that, recruit a candidate, support that candidate and the election.”
Smith said nonprofit consultant Melissa Chaudhry and former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who are running against Smith in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, have both protested outside his home, which he called “unethical and a bastardization of the democratic process.”
“Both Kshama Sawant and Melissa Chaudhry have decided that intimidating elected officials in their homes is a legitimate way to campaign,” he said.
Sawant’s husband, Calvin Priest, 54, was charged after he allegedly assaulted a 22-year-old woman who works as a staffer for Smith at one of the congressman’s town hall meetings in August 2025. Priest appeared to lead a group of protesters into the meeting at Renton Technical College.
Priest agreed to a continuance order, according to the Renton City attorney.
“If he keeps his nose clean for two years, the charges go away,” Smith said.
‘Not a dialogue’
At a recent Bellevue City Council meeting where the ordinance protecting private residences from protests was passed, a member of Seattle Against War testified that Smith won’t meet with them, leaving disruptive protests as the group’s last resort.
“I have listened to them. I have met with various different groups. I’ve met with these people a couple of times,” Smith told JNS. “But they always just take out their phones and start reading pre-prepared scripts, which insult me and tell me how awful and terrible and horrible I am. It’s not a dialogue.”
Smith said extremists on both the political left and right increasingly use harassment tactics as a tool against public officials.
“The far-right and the far-left have decided that threats and intimidation are another way to try to either drive people out or make them so scared that they acquiesce,” he said. The tactics have not impacted his stance on Israel, he said.
“I’ve been outspoken in opposition to the Iran war, but really the activists want Israel to cease to exist as a country,” Smith told JNS. “They certainly want the United States to stop supporting them in any way.”
“People have been trying to eliminate Israel from the day it was created,” he said. “To judge Israel’s actions outside of that context, which they want to do, whitewashes all of the history to act like Israel’s persecuting Palestinians for the fun of it as opposed to actually fighting a conflict for survival.”
Smith called Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis “bat-sh** crazy people.”
“Once they’re done with Israel, they’re going to move on to other folks, too. They are homicidal, suicidal religious fanatics who are a danger to civilized society,” he said. “Do we really want a world where Hamas is running all of that area?”
“I’m not in love with everything Israel does. In fact, I’ve been critical of them on a number of fronts, particularly when it comes to what’s going on in the West Bank,” he said.
Smith told JNS that he hopes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will try harder to find Palestinians, with whom he can work as an alternative to Hamas, and Lebanese people, who can combat Hezbollah.
The congressman is troubled that he meets people on the left who support the same positions but don’t condemn the anti-Israel activists’ tactics, and who say “We do understand where they’re coming from,” he told JNS.
“The tacit support that so many so-called legitimate people have given to this, including by not prosecuting them, only encourages this,” he said. “If this becomes the acceptable way of getting your point across, then we’re in a downward spiral.”
