Canadian woman sentenced 22 years for sending poisonous letter to Donald Trump

A woman Pascale Ferrier who was determined to stop the then US President Donald Trump by using ricin-intoxicated letters has been sentenced to 22 years after she pleaded guilty in January to the biological weapons charges, as she regretted her failing plan.

The ricin-contaminated letter was bound for Donald Trump in 2020 but was intercepted by the FBI before it was delivered to the White House.

Pascale Ferrier — who is a dual national of France and Canada — told the court that she regretted that her plan had failed and that she “couldn’t stop Trump”.

Ferrier, of Quebec, also said that she saw herself as an activist, not a terrorist.

“I want to find peaceful means to achieve my goals,” Ferrier stated.

The FBI detected her fingerprints on the letter to Trump — who is bidding again for the Oval Office — which urged him to drop out of the presidential race.

“I found a new name for you: ‘The Ugly Tyrant Clown’,” she wrote in the letter, according to FBI charging documents.

The 56-year-old was sentenced by district Judge Dabney Friedrich to 262 months in prison under which she will be deported from the US after serving her time under detention and faces lifetime supervision if she ever returned.

Judge Friedrich told the Canadian woman that her actions were “potentially deadly and harmful to you, harmful to society, harmful to the potential victims”.

She also reported to admit sending the same tainted letters to eight Texas law enforcement officials.

The US justice department statement indicated that back in 2019, she was in the state for about 10 weeks for illegally carrying a weapon and driving without a valid license. She blamed those officials for that detention.

Pascale Ferrier was taken into custody while she was crossing the border into Buffalo, New York in September 2020. Officials at that time said that she had a gun, knife, and rounds of ammunition.

Later on, she admitted to making ricin — a kind of toxic substance that is created from the waste material of castor beans — and contaminating the letters at her home in Quebec.

Currently, there is no antidote to ricin as it can cause death within 36 to 72 hours.