Woman who posted ricin poison to Trump in 2020 jailed for almost 22 years

A woman was sentenced to 262 months – almost 22 years – in prison for sending threatening letters containing homemade ricin poison to then-President Donald Trump at the White House in 2020, the US Justice Department said.

Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier, 56, a dual citizen of Canada and France, pleaded guilty to violating biological weapons laws earlier this year for sending highly toxic ricin-filled letters to Trump and eight Texas state law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday.

Ferrier had been detained in Texas for 10 weeks in 2019 and she believed the law enforcement officers were responsible for her detention, the Justice Department said in a statement. She had also used the Twitter social media platform “to propose that someone should ‘please shoot [T]rump in the face’,” the department added.

The toxic envelope addressed to Trump was intercepted in September 2020 at the White House mail sorting facility in Washington, where US Postal Service personnel flagged it as suspicious and contacted the FBI, according to an FBI affidavit filed then with the charging documents.

In an unrelated case, letters laced with ricin were also sent in 2013 to then-US President Barack Obama and then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Ferrier, who was arrested two days after posting the letter, admitted that she had made ricin at her residence in Quebec, Canada, prosecutors said. Ricin is a deadly poison made from castor beans.