Warnings about Ryan Routh, who on Sept. 15 showed up on Donald Trump’s Florida golf course armed with a semiautomatic rifle, were sent to U.S. agencies four times between 2019 and 2023, AP reveals. That no action was apparently taken raises questions of incompetence or Routh being a protected asset.
Reports to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the FBI and Interpol were made by Chelsea Walsh, a nurse in Ukraine in 2022. She said: “The authorities have definitely dropped the ball on this. They were warned.” She had met Routh in Kiev in 2022 when he was there trying to recruit foreign soldiers to fight for Ukraine. She saw him, as AP described it, grow increasingly angry and unhinged, kicking a panhandler, threatening to burn down a music studio that slighted him, and speaking of his own children with seething hatred. Also troubling was his obsessive, oddly specific plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, where he detailed the various explosives, poisons and cross-border maneuvers that he would employ “to kill him in his sleep.” She reported to CBP officials at Dulles International Airport in June 2022 that “Ryan Routh is a ticking time bomb.” They conducted an hour-long interview with her, but she never heard back. She repeated her concerns to the FBI and to Interpol, with no observable results.
Second, the FBI had already been informed about Routh, back in 2019, because he was in possession of a firearm after having been convicted of a felony.
Third, in 2023, Sarah Adams, an ex-CIA officer working with aid groups in Ukraine, reported to the State Department about Routh’s questionable recruiting tactics. After finding out that he was trying to recruit former Afghan fighters with false promises of spots in the Ukrainian military, she drafted a bulletin urging the 50 humanitarian aid groups she was working with in Ukraine to keep him at arm’s length. She also had the private company she was working with send a similar online report to the State Department. “There was plenty to look into. I don’t know if they even assigned someone to work it,” AP quoted her as saying.
