Iowa inmate gets 2-year term for Obama threat

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - A mentally ill Iowa inmate who told the Secret Service that he would kill President Barack Obama "JFK-style" once he was released will serve two years in federal prison, a judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge John Jarvey issued the sentence to 24-year-old Tommy Eugene Krueger during a hearing in federal court in Davenport.

Jarvey rejected a plea for leniency by the defense attorney for Krueger, who argued his client had a mild mental disability and acted only after another inmate told him he could get better mental health treatment in federal prison if he threatened to kill the president.

Krueger was incarcerated at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Oakdale in December 2010 when he wrote a letter to a federal marshal in Alabama in which he warned he would go to the White House once released to kill Obama because "he is a ... Muslim." He added that he would kill the governor of Iowa afterward and "anybody that get in my way."

The marshal who received the letter forwarded it to the Secret Service, which dispatched an agent to the prison to interview Krueger.

Krueger told the agent that he would attempt to kill Obama "JFK-style" by attacking the president's motorcade, and if that didn't work, he would "wait until the president entered the Oval Office and shoot him through the window from a building across the street," according to a criminal complaint.

Krueger pleaded guilty last year to one count of making threats against the president, acknowledging he wrote the letter, mailed it and meant it to be taken seriously.

Defense lawyer Leon Spies wrote in court documents that Krueger, who has a lengthy criminal history that includes burglary and forgery charges, later acknowledged that writing the letter was "the stupidest idea I've ever had." He said his client wrote the letter with the encouragement and assistance of another inmate because of a misguided belief that it would "lead to a better correctional placement and improved mental health treatment." A prison employee helped him find the address for the marshal in Alabama, he added.

Spies had asked that Krueger be kept out of prison, saying he was vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation because of his mental disability and that supervised release would be punishment enough.

After his guilty plea in December, Krueger was placed in a halfway house in Council Bluffs. He absconded in January, before turning himself in to authorities days later in South Dakota, court records show.