Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he and his family were the subject of an investigation by police and Child Protective Services after an anonymous report — later determined to be false — alleged his children were at risk. Buttigieg, widely seen as a potential candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, described the experience in a Substack post published Friday, June 26, calling it a politically motivated hoax.
Buttigieg lives in Traverse City, Michigan, with his husband, Chasten, and their twin four-year-old children. He said a police officer and a CPS worker came to his home and informed him of an anonymous complaint claiming the children were in danger. He was unable to see his twins for roughly 24 hours while authorities investigated the report.
As part of the inquiry, both children were required to undergo forensic interviews at which no family member was permitted to be present — a standard protocol in abuse investigations, but a wrenching one for a family that, by the state's own conclusion, had done nothing wrong. The Michigan State Police confirmed they deemed the complaint unfounded.
Authorities have not publicly identified a motive or a suspect, and the Michigan State Police said they had no additional information to share about who made the report or why. Buttigieg noted that the incident occurred during Pride Month and shortly after he had shared photographs of his family on social media to mark Father's Day, a juxtaposition he suggested was unlikely to be coincidental.
The episode fits a broader pattern of 'swatting' and false reports used to harass public figures, in which anonymous tips trigger an outsized law-enforcement response at a target's home. Such tactics have increasingly been directed at politicians, election officials and other prominent individuals, exploiting the obligation of police and child-welfare agencies to respond to credible-sounding complaints.
For Buttigieg, who served as Transportation Secretary throughout the Biden administration and ran for president in 2020, the decision to detail the ordeal publicly carries clear political resonance as he weighs another national campaign. By framing the incident as an attempt to intimidate his family, he sought to turn a private trauma into a statement about the climate facing public officials and their relatives.
The case also underscores the difficulty agencies face in screening malicious reports. Child Protective Services and police are generally required to investigate allegations that a child may be in danger before they can conclude that a tip is baseless — a safeguard for genuinely at-risk children that can also be exploited by those seeking to harass a family, as Buttigieg said happened to his.