Solomon Peña, a former Republican candidate for the New Mexico House of Representatives, has been charged with a number of federal offenses in reference to drive-by shootings on the houses of Democratic officers, the Justice Department mentioned Wednesday.

The authorities in New Mexico have mentioned that Mr. Peña, 40, orchestrated the shootings on the houses of 4 Democratic officers within the weeks after he misplaced an election bid in November 2022. No one was injured within the assaults.

Mr. Peña, who was arrested in January, already faces a number of state fees, together with tried aggravated battery and taking pictures at an occupied constructing. The federal fees towards him and two different individuals — Demetrio Trujillo, 41, and Jose Trujillo, 22 — had been unsealed in a court docket in New Mexico on Wednesday and embody a number of firearms offenses and interference with federally protected actions.

Mr. Peña would face a compulsory minimal jail sentence of 60 years if he had been to be convicted of the federal fees, the Justice Department said in a statement.

“There is no room in our democracy for politically motivated violence, especially when it is used to undermine election results,” Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant lawyer common of the Justice Department’s prison division, mentioned within the assertion.

Roberta Yurcic, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Peña on the state degree, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark in a single day. The state trial is expected to start early next year.

Mr. Peña was convicted of housebreaking and larceny in 2008 and served practically seven years in jail in New Mexico. He was launched in 2016.

After the November 2022 midterm elections, Mr. Peña refused to concede even after shedding by a large margin to an incumbent in a district that has lengthy voted for Democrats. Prosecutors say that he additionally visited the houses of a number of county commissioners to induce them to not certify the outcomes.

The shootings on the 4 Democratic officers’ houses befell in December and early January. Two of the officers had licensed the election outcomes.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Peña employed others to hold out the shootings, and that he took half in at the least one in all them — by attempting to fireplace an AR-15 rifle on the house of Linda Lopez, a state senator.

The shootings rattled New Mexico’s political institution. They additionally stoked rising considerations nationwide about political violence after an attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a conspiracy to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, amongst different incidents.