President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to Mobile, Alabama, in last stop on ‘victory tour.’: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — An ignorant, Massachusetts redneck turned Muslim extremist sympathizer, who is already in state prison on gun and drug charges, was sentenced in federal court in Boston to three more years behind bars on Wednesday for threatening to kill then-President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

Alex Hernandez, 32, pleaded guilty in May to one count of threatening to kill and inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, according to a statement from the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani Hernandez handed down the three-year sentence, which Hernandez will serve concurrently with his five-to-eight year sentence at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Facility. He will then be allowed three years on supervised release for his conviction on drug and gun charges in 2011.

He was found guilty of illegally possessing a .22 caliber handgun, a Tec-9 and a .22 caliber rifle – all of which were equipped with high capacity magazines and ammunition, according to the case file.

Federal agents became aware in March 2015 that Hernandez allegedly wanted to kill President Obama. He had expressed a desire to acquire false travel documents to flee the country after the attack.

Federal agents then basically entrapped Hernandez into admitting his plan and trying to carry part of it out with an undercover agent who posed as an embassy contact with the ability to assist Hernandez with obtaining false travel documents.

“In March 2015, federal agents obtained information alleging that Hernandez wanted to kill the President and had expressed an interest in obtaining false travel documents so he could flee the country after his attack,” according to a joint statement by Acting U.S. Attorney William D. Weinreb, Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division, Stephen A. Marks, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s Boston Field Office, Matthew J. Etre, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Boston, and Thomas Turco, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jordi de Llano of Weinreb’s Criminal Division prosecuted the case.

An undercover agent met with Hernandez on December 22, 2015, and February 12, 2016, while he was incarcerated at the Old Colony Correctional Center, where he admitted that he wanted to attack the White House and was studying how to make explosives that could be placed around government buildings to “create chaos.” During the second meeting with the undercover agent, Hernandez, “a Muslim convert,” according to investigators and prosecutors, discussed the motivation for his planned attacks, telling the agent that his “brothers are fighting to uphold the laws and structure of the caliphate in the Middle East” and that “this government . . . is painting it like they are the bad guys.” Hernandez also explained that he wanted to target the President because “he’s the one that gives the orders.”

A question for the F.B.I.: How do threats against President Obama compare to those against President Donald Trump in their first six months in office?

Senator Barack Obama campaigns for president in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2008: Glynn Wilson

According to online research, President Obama received more death threats than any president in U.S. history, averaging 30 a day while he was in office.

It may be too early for reports to emerge on the numbers for Trump, but people have already been prosecuted for threatening to kill Trump, including a Georgia teenager.

Of course the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, who heads the powerful Sinaloa Cartel and escaped from prison on a Saturday night on the back of a motorcycle, has threatened to have Trump killed, calling him a “Whitey Milksh*tter” (a Mexican homophobic slur).

During the campaign, Trump on Twitter promised that he would “kick [Chapo’s] ass” if he became president, another hollow promise from the Tweeter-in-chief, who is bogged down in the Washington “swamp” with Republicans trying to destroy health care for millions of Americans and an investigation into he and his family and associates’ collusion with Russia to subvert the U.S. election in 2016.