The 70-year-old who threatened to kill Donald Trump was arrested in New York

The Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office said a 72-year-old man who warned US officials of his plan to kill Donald Trump before and after the 2020 presidential election was arrested Monday morning.

Monday’s court document in support of the arrest warrant said Thomas Welnicki, 72, had “knowingly and intentionally threatened to kill, kidnap and inflict bodily harm” on the former US president.

The suspect, who was detained by agents of the Secret Service – the agency specifically responsible for protecting US presidents and vice presidents – was due to be brought to justice on Monday.

According to the document, the man called at least three times, between September 24 and December 2, 2021, to the New York Bureau of the Secret Service to express his intentions, requesting information about protecting Donald Trump and by claiming they possessed a firearm in the past.

“I will do everything in my power to make sure he is dead,” The New Yorker, a resident of Rockaway Beach, Brooklyn, warned Trump “Hitler” in a November 2021 phone conversation.

The septuagenarian had already made threats in the summer of 2020, before the presidential elections and the Capitol police in Washington, to make sure that he would “get the guns and bring down” Donald Trump if the latter lost the ballot and did not admit defeat.

On January 4, 2021, two days before the invasion of the Capitol by Trump militants, an unprecedented attack that killed five people, this time the suspect left two messages on the voicemail of the Secret Service office in Long Island, another New York neighborhood. Then he threatened to kill Donald Trump and 12 members of Congress, whom he did not identify.

United States history has been marked by the deaths of four presidents who were assassinated during their tenure, from Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963.