A correspondent investigating Operation Fast and Furious today received a death threat with a friend of his as the target.

Details of the death threat

The home office of Examiner.com, in Denver, CO, received a threatening letter addressed to David Codrea, National Gun Rights Examiner. Codrea describes its contents as unprintable on Examiner.com. The letter (see here) is actually incoherent, illogical, and well-nigh incomprehensible. Is it a truly credible threat? A poor attempt at satire? Only you, the reader, can decide that for yourself. (Warning: the text has language that some readers might find personally offensive, excessively crude, or both. Parental judgment and discretion are advised.)

But it does have a key paragraph that makes it a threat in any cop’s book:

We are not going to let you ‘disappear’ until you are a Darwin award winner safely dead.

The Darwin Awards go out each year to those persons who managed to get themselves killed in incredibly stupid ways.

The letter arrived in a plain No. 10 envelope without a return address. (The postmark came from Oakland, California.)

The death threat directed at Stewart Rhodes, head of Oath Keepers, and addressed to David Codrea, care of Examiner.com, arrived in this envelope. Photo: David Codrea/Examiner.com

The envelope is addressed to “Gun Rights Examiner” at the Denver office. The letter is addressed to Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers. Oath Keepers is an organization of law-enforcement officers who have pledged never to obey an order that violates the Constitution. All LEOs take some version of the Constitutional Oath:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States…against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Or the military version ends:

and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

What does Oath Keepers have to do with Operation Fast and Furious?

Messrs. Rhodes and Codrea are personal friends. More to the point, Oath Keepers firmly believes that Operation Fast and Furious is not, and never was, a misguided operation gone disastrously wrong. It is a willful attempt to flood a foreign country with weapons from America. Its purpose: to skew the statistics on weapons flowing from America into Mexico. And the purpose of that is twofold:

1. To excuse draconian gun-control laws in the United States, and
2. To scare the US Senate into ratifying the United Nations Convention on Small Arms.

The second motive might explain why, thus far, the United Mexican States has not (yet) filed any lawsuit against the United States government. They certainly would have standing to sue. If the Mexican civilians who have died of wounds from “Fast and Furious” guns is not a good enough “injury in fact,” nothing would qualify. So if they don’t sue, then they want that UN treaty as much as Barack H. Obama does.

Who sent the threat?

No one knows. Mr. Codrea said that he would turn over the envelope and letter to the FBI when Mr. Rhodes said the word. Mr. Codrea has sealed the envelope and the letter in a larger container to preserve its value as criminal evidence.

The text of the letter strongly suggests (but does not prove) that it comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Mr. Codrea has criticized SPLC before, for:

1. Smearing Oath Keepers,
2. Accusing them of promoting hate for hate’s sake, and
3. Ignoring those who do promote hate for hate’s sake.

The motive of SPLC, or someone connected with them, for sending such a threat is either:

1. General—because Oath Keepers opposes Barack Obama, SPLC’s friend, or:
2. Specific—because Oath Keepers, Codrea, and Mike Vanderboegh are getting too close to the truth about Operation Fast and Furious.

But Codrea and his colleague Anthony G. Martin (National Conservative Examiner) did not consider all the possibilities. The ranting letter could have come from anyone—including the government itself.

Featured image: the Constitution of the United States. Photo: National Archives.

Related:

• A Journalist’s Guide to Project Gunwalker, Parts One, Two, Three, and Four
• Fast and furious subpoenas
• Fast and Furious is not Gunrunner
• Fast and furious cover-up
• Fast and furious unraveling
• Fast and furious throw-downs