Foreign national pleads guilty to mailing Ricin to Trump in 2020

A dual citizen of France and Canada on Wednesday pleaded guilty to mailing a threatening letter containing homemade ricin to then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier, 55, admitted to mailing a letter containing ricin she made in her Quebec home to the White House in September of 2020 and sending eight other letters to Texas law enforcement officials, the Department of Justice announced in a press release. The letter to Trump ordered him to abandon his 2020 reelection effort.

The DOJ noted that Ferrier believed the Texas officials to whom she mailed similar letters were connected to her roughly 10-week detention in the state in 2019.

Though she mailed the letters from Canada, she later attempted to enter the United States via Buffalo, N.Y., where Border Patrol officials discovered her in possession of a firearm, ammunition and other weapons.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will hold a sentencing hearing on April 26. Should the court accept the plea deal, Ferrier will spend 262 months in prison, nearly 22 years.

She has further pleaded guilty to eight violations of prohibitions on biological weapons in a separate case against her in Texas, but has agreed to the transfer of that case to the D.C. court for plea and sentencing, per the DOJ.