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Eugene

(62,626 posts)
Thu Feb 20, 2020, 11:28 PM Feb 2020

'All traitors must die': Feds charge man for threatening whistleblower attorney

Source: Politico

'All traitors must die': Feds charge man for threatening whistleblower attorney

The man allegedly emailed the attorney in November, calling him a “traitor” who “must die a miserable death.”

By NATASHA BERTRAND
02/20/2020 12:37 PM EST

Federal prosecutors in Michigan have charged a man with making a death threat against one of the attorneys for a whistleblower who initiated the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, according to newly unsealed court records.

The man, Brittan J. Atkinson, allegedly emailed the attorney in November, calling him a “traitor” who “must die a miserable death.” The attorney, Mark Zaid, confirmed to POLITICO that he received the email the day after Trump held up Zaid’s photo and read some of Zaid’s tweets during a rally.

“All traitors must die miserable deaths,” reads the email to Zaid that was sent on November 7. “Those that represent traitors shall meet the same fate. We will hunt you down and bleed you out like the pigs you are. We have nothing but time, and you are running out of it. Keep looking over your shoulder. We know who you are, where you live, and who you associate with. We are all strangers in a crowd to you.”


Atkinson has been charged with violating laws governing interstate communications, which prohibit “any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another” and is punishable by up to five years in prison.

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Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/man-charged-threatening-whistleblower-attorney-116379

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Source: Washington Post

‘We will hunt you down’: Man threatened whistleblower’s attorney, prosecutors say

By Reis Thebault
2/20/2020, 9:25:03 p.m.

President Trump was standing at a lectern adorned with the executive office seal, addressing an arena packed with thousands of his most strident supporters, when he paused his standard rally stump speech and reached into his suit coat.

Last year, as he harangued the “hyperpartisan impeachment witch hunt” and the whistleblower who helped launch it, Trump unfolded a printout of a just-published Fox News story and waved it at the crowd in northern Louisiana.

“Look at this character. They just handed me this story,” the president said of the article, which detailed old tweets by Mark Zaid, one of the attorneys representing the intelligence official who sounded the alarm on Trump’s involvement in pressuring Ukraine to investigate a political rival.

The 2017 posts were critical of the president and mentioned the need for “#rebellion.” Before reading them aloud, Trump called Zaid “a sleazeball.” He ended his digression by saying: “These people are bad people, and it’s so bad what they do to our country. They rip the guts out of our country.”

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/20/whistleblower-attorney-threatened/
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