Jose Roberto Ramirez, age 28 of Illinois, pled guilty this morning to one felony count of threatening an FBI agent.
The hearing took place at the federal courthouse in downtown St. Paul. Your corespondent was there.
The incidents occurred back in January of this year, following an anti-ICE riot in Minneapolis.
I wrote about his case back in February, after Ramirez was picked up in Illinois and shipped to Minnesota to face charges.
Ramirez found identifying information about the FBI agent (“Victim A”) online, and sent a series of threatening and specific texts and phone messages.
The presiding judge today, Donovan Frank, proceeded to read some of these sent messages into the record, including this transcript of a voice mail sent by Ramirez to the agent.
In his line reading, the judge omitted the agent’s name, but he read the remainder of the Ramirez transcript without the redactions I have included, above. In court, Ramirez confirmed that those were his words. To his credit, the judge’s rendering of the unfiltered transcript would make a fine sample on the next Snoop Dogg album.
To be clear, the above voicemail was just one of many of even more specific and explicit violent threats against the agent, which I will not reprint here, in the interests of decorum.
In the normal course of things, under the terms of the plea agreement, Ramirez would be facing a prison term of 2-and-a-half to 3 years, owing to the nature of the offense and his past criminal history back in Illinois.
Here, the prosecution is willing to back a “time served” sentence that will result in just nine months behind bars. Ramirez will likely be released at his sentencing, currently scheduled for late October.
