Man charged with making death threats to Boston Globe over Trump editorials

August 30, 2018

The front page of the Thursday, August 16, 2018 edition of the Boston Globe newspaper reads “Journalists are Not the Enemy” as it sits for sale at Out of Town News on August 16, 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tim Bradbury/Getty Images

BOSTON — A California man has been charged with threatening to kill Boston Globe employees over a Globe-coordinated series of newspaper editorials condemning President Trump’s suggestion that journalists are the enemy, according to federal prosecutors. Robert Chain, 68, of Encino, made more than a dozen threatening phone calls to the Globe’s newsroom between Aug. 10 and Aug. 22, prosecutors said Thursday.

On the day the editorials were published in newspapers across the country, Chain called the newsroom and threatened to shoot Globe employees, according to prosecutors. That threat prompted a police response and increased security at the newspaper’s offices.

“In the past few months, this office has charged people with threatening to bomb a minority commencement ceremony at Harvard, threatening to shoot people at a Second Amendment rally, offering money to anyone who kills a federal agent, and mailing white powder and threatening notes to certain public figures,” U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling said in a news release.

“Anyone – regardless of political affiliation – who puts others in fear for their lives will be prosecuted by this office,” he said. “In a time of increasing political polarization, and amid the increasing incidence of mass shootings, members of the public must police their own political rhetoric. Or we will.”

It was not immediately clear if Chain had an attorney. Prosecutors said he was expected to appear in federal court in Los Angeles Thursday and be transferred to Boston at a later date.

Harold Shaw, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston Division, said Chain’s arrest “should serve a warning to others, that making threats is not a prank, it’s a federal crime.”

“All threats are taken seriously, as we never know if the subject behind the threat intends to follow through with their actions,” he said in a news release. “Whether potentially hoax or not, each and every threat will be aggressively run to ground.”