WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Oyer posted a video on YouTube accusing Missouri Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley of fueling a wave of hate messages and death threats directed at her after she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Hey everybody,” Oyer said in the video. “I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week.”

Blanche has been nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as attorney general. Schmitt and Hawley are members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for taking an initial vote on the nomination before it can advance to the full Senate.

In the video, Oyer displays images of several emails she said she received. Many appeared to come from fake email addresses and included messages such as, “Die in hell you pos,” “I hope you die tragically,” and “Let’s hope somebody murders your family and gets clemency,” along with other threatening messages containing obscenities.

“Two Republican senators with a political agenda rage-baited their followers into believing nasty and dangerous lies,” Oyer said, referring to Hawley and Schmitt.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s July 16 hearing included five witnesses, among them Oyer, who served as the Department of Justice’s pardon attorney for 13 years. The pardon attorney’s office reviews clemency petitions and provides recommendations through the Justice Department process, while the president retains constitutional authority to grant clemency. In written testimony submitted to the committee, Oyer said Blanche fired her after she refused to restore firearm rights for actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a close friend of Trump.

The hearing was intended to examine Blanche’s pending nomination. Schmitt and Hawley, however, did not question Oyer about Blanche. Instead, they pressed her about a recommendation she made to President Joe Biden to commute the federal death sentences of 40 people to life in prison without parole.

“You personally recommended commuting all 40 death sentence cases, an even broader action than Biden took,” Schmitt said during the hearing.

Biden ultimately commuted 37 of the death sentences.

Schmitt could not be reached immediately for comment, but a spokesperson responded on his behalf.

“(Liz Oyer’s) disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns and were so extreme that even Joe Biden’s autopen handlers couldn’t stomach them,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Hawley confronted Oyer with photos of the parolees, many of whom had committed violent acts of rape and murder. He also showed photos of the victims and referred to them by name. In an interview with the Missourian, Hawley said those victims, rather than Oyer, were the real victims.

“The people who were murdered, and devastated and raped by the criminals that she recommended that President Biden give clemency to, those folks are the real victims here,” Hawley said. “I was proud to tell their stories.”

Oyer said in her video that Hawley misrepresented her by claiming she had sympathy for the people who committed the crimes.

“That is dangerous misinformation, and Josh Hawley knows it,” Oyer said in the video.

Responding to Oyer’s criticism, Hawley said he had read from memos Oyer sent.

“She tried to weasel her way out of it, and say she hadn’t said this or that,” Hawley said. “We have the memos, and I put them in the record.”

This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.