Threat to shoot Trump was not written by Mexican man, investigators now say
The Brief
Homeland Security claimed Ramon Morales Reyes threatened to kill Donald Trump, but officials now suspect he was framed.
According to The Associated Press, investigators found the threatening letter's handwriting didn't match Morales-Reyes', casting doubt on the credibility of the alleged threat.
A claim by Homeland Security that an immigrant threatened the life of President Donald Trump has begun to unravel.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced an arrest of a 54-year-old man who was living in the U.S. illegally, saying he had written a letter threatening to kill Trump and would then return to Mexico. The story received a flood of media attention and was highlighted by the White House and Trump's allies. Noem also shared the letter on X along with a photo of Morales Reyes, and the White House also shared it on its social media accounts.
But investigators actually believe the man may have been framed so that he would get arrested and be deported from the U.S. before he got a chance to testify in a trial as a victim of assault, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Law enforcement officials believe the man, Ramon Morales Reyes, never wrote the letter with a message written in light blue ink expressing anger over Trump's deportations and threatening to shoot him in the head with a rifle at a rally.
As part of the investigation, officials had contacted Morales Reyes and asked for a handwriting sample and concluded his handwriting and the threatening letter didn't match and that the threat was not credible, the person said.
What they're saying
In an emailed statement asking for information about the letter and the new information about Morales Reyes, the Department of Homeland Security said "the investigation into the threat is ongoing. Over the course of the investigation, this individual was determined to be in the country illegally and that he had a criminal record. He will remain in custody."
Morales Reyes is a Mexican national who allegedly entered the United States illegally on nine separate occasions between 1999 and 2005.
The backstory
Morales-Reyes had been previously arrested for felony hit-and-run, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct with "a domestic abuse modifier," according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Dig deeper
"We are tired of this president messing with us Mexicans – We have done more for this country than you white people – you have been deporting my family and I think it is time Donald J. Trump get what he has coming to him," the letter read.
EARLIER:Man threatened to shoot Trump in head "for messing with us Mexicans," ICE says
"I will self deport myself back to Mexico but not before I use my 30 yard 6 to shoot your precious president in is head – I will see him at one of his big ralleys [sic]." He reportedly appears to be referencing the .30-06 Springfield rifle.
The letter was received on May 21 and Morales-Reyes was arrested last Thursday, DHS said.
The Source
Information for this article was taken from a Department of Homeland Security news release and FOX News reporting. The Associated Press and previous FOX Local reporting contributed. This story was reported from Los Angeles.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Harvey Weinstein still deciding whether he'll testify in NYC sex assault retrial
Harvey Weinstein is still on the fence about whether he'll take the stand in his own defense in his Manhattan sex assault retrial, his lawyer said Thursday. As Weinstein's Manhattan Supreme Court trial inches to a close, the former Hollywood producer will have to make his decision before the defense rests its case in the coming days. 'It's usually, but not always, the most difficult defense decision to make,' defense lawyer Arthur Aidala said. 'We're gonna make a gametime, more or less, decision.' Aidala said the defense team spent the Memorial Day weekend with Weinstein, who's being held in Bellevue Hospital, to discuss whether he'll testify. 'He thinks that the evidence at this trial has been challenged very forcefully, and many of [the accusers'] stories have been torn apart,' Aidala said. Still, he said, 'There is a part of him that is seriously contemplating whether in a he-said-she-said case, human beings feel obligated to hear the other side of the story. … There's no easy answer.' The trial has featured testimony from three accusers — one-time actress Jessica Mann, former TV production assistant Miriam Haley, and Polish model and aspiring actress Kaja Sokola. Mann and Haley testified at Weinstein's 2020 Manhattan Supreme Court trial, which ended in a guilty verdict and a 23-year prison term. The state's highest court overturned the jury's guilty verdict in that case last year, ruling 4-3 that the trial court judge shouldn't have allowed testimony of 'uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes.' On Thursday, the defense called Helga Samuelsen, who was Sokola's roommate in fall 2005. Sokola testified that when she was a 16-year-old model, Weinstein rubbed her vagina under her pants and underwear in 2002, and two years later, he grabbed her breast in a limo. In 2006, she alleged, he forcibly performed oral sex on her in the Tribeca Grand hotel, while her sister waited at a restaurant table downstairs. Samuelsen testified that Weinstein visited Sokola's apartment in 2005, and Sokola led her to a bedroom, where they stayed behind closed doors for about a half-hour. Prosecutors tried to cast doubt on Samuelsen's credibility, pointing out that she sent a text to Sokola saying she felt 'forced' to sign an affidavit for the defense, and bringing up her connections and friendships in Weinstein's circle. With News Wire Services
33 minutes ago
Can Trump fix the national debt? Republican senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won't bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. 'All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,' said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. 'There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.' The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims" about his tax cuts. Leavitt said that the "blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing." The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury Note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when that growth is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran told reporters recently. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'I don't know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation,' said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. 'These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth.' The White House's inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely deficit increases, with Johnson saying there are enough senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. 'I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,' Johnson said on CNN. The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. 'It's our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly,' Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it's not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional 'growth doesn't even get us close to where we need to be.' The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that's unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully. 'It's treading water,' Tedeschi said.
Fox News
33 minutes ago
- Fox News
Dems ramp up the profanity to rage against Trump
All times eastern Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage
