President Obama Targeted in Third Threatening Letter
President Obama was the intended recipient of a letter suspected of containing the poison ricin, following similar letters sent to New York Mayor Bloomberg, law enforcement officials told ABC News.
The letter was intercepted at a White House sorting facility and never reached the President. It has been taken to a lab for further testing, the officials said.
A law enforcement source said the anti-gun control message in the letter, along with the suspicious substance, was similar to a pair of letters recently sent to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as revealed by police Wednesday. The Secret Service confirmed the apparent link between the letters.
The leader of the nation's largest city was threatened anonymously in the letters, sent to Bloomberg's offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., NYPD spokesperson Paul Browne said. An undisclosed number of New York cops who responded to one of the letters now "are being examined for minor symptoms of ricin exposure," but the potentially dangerous substance never reached the mayor.
"The writer, in the letters, threatened Mayor Bloomberg, with references to the debate on gun laws," Browne said Wednesday.
Saying he has a "constitutional and God-given right and I will exercise that right 'til I die," the author warned that the government would have to kill him before he would relinquish his weapons, a source told ABC News.
The letters – with identical text -- were printed from a computer and are postmarked May 20 from Shreveport, La.
Early this morning, Shreveport Mayor Cedric Glover said his city is working with the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to "apprehend those responsible for mailing ricin-laced letters to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg."
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"We are also taking the necessary steps to protect local (Postal Service) and Government Plaza personnel as well as local citizens from any possible harm," Glover said.
One letter was sent to Bloomberg at City Hall in Manhattan. The other was dispatched to the director of Bloomberg's organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in D.C. Browne said preliminary tests on that letter showed it also appeared to contain ricin, though the Washington police report of the incident said that "no hazmat (hazardous) material was found."
Bloomberg, a billionaire who has long crusaded for stricter gun control around the country, responded with a flash of defiance.
"No, I do not feel threatened," the mayor told reporters last night. "This was not the first letter that was sent to anybody. In terms of why they did it - I don't know - the letter referred to our anti-gun efforts. There are 12,000 [people] that are going to be killed this year with guns and 19,000 are going to commit suicide by guns and we are not going to walk away from those efforts."
"I speak for close to 1,000 mayors in the effort against gun violence. This is a scourge against the country and we need to make sure to get this under control," he added.
Asked if he was angry, Bloomberg said he wasn't.
"There are people that do things that might appear irrational - things that are wrong," he said. "But it's a complex world out there. And you just have to deal with that."
One Bloomberg insider told ABC News the mayor himself made the decision to go public with news of the ricin-laced letters as soon as a second, more reliable round of tests returned positive results for the poison.
Boston's mayor, Thomas Menino, a co-director at Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said that Bloomberg was "marked because of his position, and my position, on illegal guns."
"This is not going to stop us. They can make all the threats they want," Menino said today.
At its most dangerous ricin can kill, though it is quite difficult to deliver a dose that intense. The toxin, which comes from castor beans, stops cells from synthesizing proteins so victims can suffer organ failure.
Ricin is relatively easy to make with recipe instructions available online. Experts do caution that people trying to concoct the toxin on their own risk poisoning themselves.
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