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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Bill McLoughlin

Man who threatened to kill Joe Biden shot dead in FBI raid

A man who threatened Joe Biden was shot and killed as FBI agents served a warrant at his home on Wednesday.

Special agents attempted to serve a warrant to Craig Deleeuw Robertson in Provo, south of Salt Lake City. The FBI said Robertson was armed and was shot at 6.15am.

Previously, Robertson had posted threats on Facebook against the US President and a prosecutor pursuing charges against Donald Trump.

On Monday, he posted online that he had heard Biden was coming to Utah and that he was planning to dig out a camouflage suit and begin “cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle”.

Authorities also referenced a post Robertson made last September, where he wrote: “The time is right for a presidential assassination or two. First Joe then Kamala!!!”

Robertson had also made threats against Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, US attorney general Merrick Garland, and New York attorney general Letitia James, authorities said.

The FBI investigation began in March when he threatened Mr Bragg on Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.

(AP)

At the time, he wrote about “waiting in the courthouse parking garage” with a suppressed weapon and wanting to “put a nice hole in his forehead”.

The company alerted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center while his account has since been suspended.

According to court documents, two FBI Agents came to Robertson’s house after the initial warning about him from Truth Social.

They found Robertson wearing a Trump cap and what one agent described in a search warrant affidavit as an “AR-15 style rifle lapel pin”.

According to the affidavit, he told them his initial threat was just “a dream” and demanded they only return with a warrant.

In a Facebook post days later cited in the affidavit, Robertson said: “To my friends in the Federal Bureau of Idiots: I know you’re reading this and you have no idea how close your agents came to ‘violent eradication’.”

In another undated social media post cited in the document, Robertson wrote: “Hey FBI, you still monitoring my social media? Checking so I can have a loaded gun handy in case you drop by again.”

A post from July 21 post unearthed by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, reads: “If I really told you what I’d like to do to Joe Biden Facebook would censor me and the FBI would pay me another visit.”

He made a final post on Tuesday where he wrote: “Perhaps Utah will become famous this week as the place a sniper took out Biden the Marxist.”

On Thursday, Mr Biden is expected to visit a veterans affairs hospital to talk about the Pact Act, which expanded veterans’ benefits, and hold a re-election fundraiser.

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