Biography
Eric G. Hafner (born 1991, New Jersey) is a perennial political candidate serving a twenty-year federal sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, with a projected release in October 2036. A federal complaint charging him with transmitting threatening communications was filed under seal on October 6, 2016. After years living abroad and in hiding he was arrested on September 28, 2019 at the airport on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, appeared two days later before Chief U.S. District Judge Ramona V. Manglona, and was produced in the District of New Jersey on October 23, 2019, where Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni ordered him detained without bail. A federal grand jury indicted him on October 31, 2019 on thirty-three counts — nine of extortionate threats, eighteen of interstate threats and six of conveying false bomb threats — arising from messages threatening to kill or injure New Jersey elected officials, police officers, attorneys and judges and their families. He pleaded guilty on May 17, 2022 to three representative counts, then moved to withdraw the plea; the motion was denied on November 24, 2022 and refused again when he renewed it. He was sentenced on December 7, 2023 to 240 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release. The Third Circuit affirmed on February 27, 2026, upholding both the refusal to let him withdraw the plea and the length of the sentence. He has been in continuous federal custody since his arrest in 2019, and ran for office from prison.
