RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Federal disaster workers paused and then changed some of their hurricane-recovery efforts in North Carolina, including abandoning door-to-door visits, after receiving threats that they could be targeted by a militia, officials said, as the government response to Helene is targeted by runaway disinformation.

The threats emerged over the weekend. The Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Monday that it received a call Saturday about a man with an assault rifle who made a comment “about possibly harming” employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency working in the hard-hit areas of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock, in the North Carolina mountains.

Authorities got a description of a suspect’s vehicle and license plate and later identified him as William Jacob Parsons, 44, of Bostic, a small community about 60 miles west of Charlotte. Sheriff’s officials said in a statement that Parsons — who was armed with a handgun and a rifle — was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public,” a misdemeanor. He was released after posting bond.

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878, after the end of Reconstruction and the return of white supremacists to political power in both southern states and Congress. Through the law, Congress sought to ensure that the federal military would not be used to intervene in the establishment of Jim Crow in the former Confederacy.

Despite the ignominious origins of the law itself, the broader principle that the military should not be allowed to interfere in the affairs of civilian government is a core American value. It finds expression in the Constitution’s division of power over the military between Congress and the president, and in the guarantees of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, which were in part reactions to abuses committed by the British army against American colonists.

Today, the Posse Comitatus Act operates as an extension of these constitutional safeguards. Moreover, there are statutory exceptions to the law that allow the president to use the military to suppress genuine rebellions and to enforce federal civil rights laws.

Mark Milley, the US Army general who Donald Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now says the current Republican presidential nominee is a “fascist to the core” and says no person has ever posed more of a danger to the United States than the man who served as the 45th President of the United States.

Milley, a decorated military officer who became a target for right-wing scorn after it became known that he expressed concerns over Trump’s mental stability in the wake of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, is described by journalist Bob Woodward in his new book, War, as incredibly alarmed at the prospect of a second Trump term in the White House. The Independent obtained a copy ahead of the book’s October 15 release date.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a riotous mob of the then-president’s supporters, Woodward writes that Milley insisted on securing a meeting with the then-newly-minted attorney general, Merrick Garland, to urge him to investigate domestic violent extremism and far-right militia movements.

According to Woodward, a senior Department of Justice lawyer said at the time that Milley’s sit-down with Garland might have been the first-ever meeting between a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the country’s top civilian law enforcement official. He writes that the general asked for the meeting because he was “deeply convinced” that Trump remained “a danger to the country” even though he had been forced from office after Biden’s election win.