Alabama Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening Obama on Twitter
“Free Speech? Let’s Test This! Let’s Go Kill The President!” Britton tweeted on June 29, 2012.
That was followed the next day with, “@BarackObama I wish you were dead.”
But it wasn’t until “an anonymous female caller” contacted the authorities and informed them about the tweets that Secret Service agents interviewed Britton in his Birmingham home last July. According to court papers, Britton admitted posting the threatening statements but said he didn’t intend to harm the president.
He told the agents that he had been drinking and was “just acting stupid.” He even apologized for wasting the agents’ time. Britton was not arrested until nearly three months later, when the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk notified the Birmingham office that he was at it again.
“Let’s kill the president. F.E.A.R.,” he tweeted on Sept. 14, 2012.
F.E.A.R. is an acronym for an anti-government militia, Forever Enduring Always Ready. The group, largely composed of active-duty soldiers based at Fort Stewart in Georgia, was in the news around the time of Britton’s September tweets. Several of its members had been charged with killing two teenagers in an effort to keep their plot to overthrow the government and assassinate the president secret.
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