Man who threatened to ‘put a bullet’ in Omar pleads guilty

It began with a hatefilled call to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington office in March, officials said.

“Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?” Patrick W. Carlineo Jr. asked a member of Omar’s staff on that call, according to a criminal complaint. “Why are you working for her, she’s a (expletive) terrorist. Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her (expletive).”

“I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull,” the staff member also recalled Carlineo, 55, saying, according to the complaint.

On Monday, Carlineo, of Addison, New York, outside Buffalo, pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, and to possessing guns illegally.

Omar responded to Carlineo’s guilty plea in Federal

District Court in Buffalo by urging leniency when he is sentenced. In a letter she posted on Twitter on Tuesday, Omar addressed the judge who will sentence him, asking “for a system of compassion to be applied.”

“Threatening assassination of a public official in our country is dangerous to both the individual and our republic,” Omar wrote, describing the crimes that Carlineo admitted to as “grave” and adding that “threats of political violence and hate speech” were “not unique” to him.

“They are an increasing feature in our public sphere,” Omar, a Somali refugee whose family received asylum in the United States when she was a teenager, added. “We will not defeat it with anger and exclusion. We will defeat it with compassion.”

A member of her party’s progressive wing, Omar — the first woman to wear a hijab on the House floor — has been denounced in some quarters, including by some

Democrats, for embracing the boycott-Israel movement and criticizing supporters of the Jewish state.

She has also emerged as a frequent foil for President Donald Trump. She was among four female freshman lawmakers who Trump said in July should “go back” to the countries they came from.

In an interview with the FBI at his home about a week after he called Omar’s office, Carlineo described himself as a patriot who loved Trump and hated “radical Muslims in our government,” the criminal complaint says. He also told an FBI agent that he believed Omar supported Islamic militant groups, such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and that her election to Congress was illegitimate.

Carlineo is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 14. He faces up to 10 years in prison. He remains free until sentencing under conditions that include a curfew and a restriction against traveling outside western New York.