Suspicious letters reached six members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation and Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin on Friday, putting multiple state and federal offices into the same fast-moving mail scare. The offices contacted authorities after the envelopes arrived, and federal investigators are now treating the mailings as part of a broader case.
The names on the affected district offices were Jake Auchincloss, Katherine Clark, Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton, Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, all Democrats. Galvin’s letter was sent to his Boston office, while the others went to district offices, making this a spread of mailings that touched both election administration and congressional staff on the same day.
The warning had already gone out the day before. In an email Thursday, House Sergeant at Arms William P. McFarland alerted House members and staff to reports of letters with suspicious white powder substances and told them to remain vigilant and follow safe mail handling procedures to help protect staff from potentially harmful materials. That guidance mattered because the next day the letters arrived in Massachusetts offices.
What happened in Seth Moulton’s Salem office shows why the response was immediate. Five staffers left so Salem Police could investigate after the office received a letter from the same address as letters with suspicious white powder sent recently to other lawmakers and election officials. Police and FBI officials tested a white, powdery substance inside the letter but did not identify any substances of concern.
Galvin said his office received an envelope addressed to the Elections Division that matched descriptions of other letters sent to election offices around the country. He also said the division’s work was uninterrupted, and that his staff remained focused on administering the upcoming election. The detail matters because the target was not just a congressional office but a unit tied directly to election administration.
The wider investigation is still in motion. The FBI and US Postal Inspection Service said they are looking into a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including Secretary of State offices and their related election offices, and some of the letters contained an unknown substance. At least four Democratic Senate offices reportedly received similar letters, underscoring that the Massachusetts mailings were part of a larger pattern rather than an isolated episode.
What remains unanswered is simple and important: who sent the letters, and what, if anything, was inside the ones that raised alarms elsewhere. For now, the message from investigators is not panic but caution, and that means every office that handles mail is being asked to treat Friday’s scare as the new standard until the federal inquiry says otherwise.
