A woman was jailed for nearly 22 years in Washington for sending threatening letters containing homemade ricin to Donald Trump when he was president.
Pascale Ferrier, 56, had pleaded guilty to violating biological weapons prohibitions in letters sent to Mr Trump and to police officials in Texas, where she had been jailed for several weeks in 2019.
The envelope addressed to Mr Trump was intercepted in September 2020 at the White House mail sorting facility in Washington, where US Postal Service personnel flagged it as suspicious and contacted the FBI, according to an FBI affidavit filed then with the charging documents.
Ferrier, a Canadian national, was arrested two days later on the Canada-US border between Buffalo and Fort Erie, Ontario.
She was carrying a gun, a knife and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, authorities said.
Ferrier admitted that she had made ricin at her residence in Quebec, Canada, in September 2020, prosecutors said.
She then mailed the potentially deadly poison, which is derived from processing castor beans, to Mr Trump with a letter that referred to him as “The Ugly Tyrant Clown”.
‘I might use my gun’
The letter read in part: “If it doesn’t work, I’ll find better recipe for another poison, or I might use my gun when I’ll be able to come. Enjoy! Free Rebel Spirit.”
In a winding speech, Ferrier told the judge that she considers herself a “peaceful and genuinely kind person,” but gets angry about problems like unfairness, abuses of power and “stupid rules”.
She spoke about feeling like she had done little to support her values while her children were young, and considered herself to be an “activist” rather than a “terrorist”. She expressed little remorse but said, “I want to find peaceful means to achieve my goals,” she said.
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich noted a “real disconnect” between the Canadian grandmother who has worked toward another degree while behind bars and the crimes Ferrier pleaded guilty to.
But she pushed back on Ferrier’s framing of her actions. “That isn’t really activism,” she said. “I hope you have no desire to continue on this path.”
Ferrier’s sentence of 262 months (21 years 8 months) in prison will be followed by a lifetime of supervised release, the Justice Department said.
