A foreign national pleaded guilty Wednesday to a failed attempt at poisoning numerous public officials by mailing threatening letters containing homemade ricin toxins to their homes, including to former President of the United States Donald Trump at the White House in 2020.
Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier, 55, a dual citizen of Canada and France, admitted to making ricin, a highly deadly poison derived from castor beans, at her residence in Quebec, Canada, and mailing it to eight Texas State law enforcement officials and Trump in September 2020, the Justice Department said in a news release.
In her letter to Trump, CNN reported that Ferrier wrote, “You ruin USA and lead them to disaster. I have US cousins, then I don’t want the next 4 years with you as President. Give up and remove your application for this election!”
Ferrier also called Trump “The Ugly Tyrant Clown” in the letter, as noted by BBC.
The letter, which Ferrier referred to as “a special gift,” had traces of her fingerprints identified by the FBI.
“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,” the note read.
In her agreement, Ferrier pleaded guilty to prohibitions with respect to biological weapons in two separate criminal cases at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“There is no place for political violence in our country, and no excuse for threatening public officials or endangering our public servants,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves said in the news release. “We hope this resolution will serve as a warning that using our mail system to send a toxic substance and other threats of this type will cost you your freedom for many years.”
Authorities said Ferrier’s “reckless actions” could have harmed postal employees, first responders, or innocent bystanders.
A tweet was also cited from September 2020 in which Ferrier proposed that someone should “please shoot [T]rump in the face.”
The letters, which Ferrier mailed from Canada, also contained threatening language, and the letter addressed to then-President Trump instructed him to “[g]ive up and remove [his] application for this election.”
Authorities said Ferrier then drove a car from Canada to the Peace Bridge Border Crossing in Buffalo, New York, on September 20, 2020.
Border patrol officials arrested Ferrier and placed her in custody after finding a loaded firearm with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and other weapons.
Ferrier is scheduled to appear in a Washington, D.C., district court in April, where she “will be sentenced to 262 months of imprisonment if the court accepts the plea agreements.”
Ferrier had been previously detained in Texas for approximately ten weeks in 2019 for unlawfully carrying a weapon and using a fake driver’s license, according to jail records reported by BBC.
Ricin has been previously used to target federal law enforcement and officials, including an attempt made by “The Walking Dead” actress Shannon Richardson in 2014, where she mailed the deadly toxin to President Barack Obama and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.