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Billings man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Sen. Jon Tester – Daily Montanan [1]

['Blair Miller', 'More From Author', '- January']

Date: 2024-01-08  

As part of an agreement with federal prosecutors, a Billings man pleaded guilty on Friday to threatening to kill Montana Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester last year.

Anthony James Cross, 30, pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to threatening to injure and kill Tester. As part of an agreement with the government, prosecutors agreed to drop another count on which Cross had originally been indicted, threatening to kill President Joe Biden, at a sentencing hearing set for May.

Cross was indicted in September by a federal grand jury on allegations he left Tester threatening voicemails in April and made other statements about his hopes to kill Biden.

Further details of the threats specified in court documents during the past few weeks show Cross left voicemails early on the morning of April 17 to both Tester’s Billings and Washington, D.C., offices.

In one, he said that Tester and his family were “gonna die a horrible death,” and in another, he said: “I’m gonna kill every single one of your (expletive) family members,” according to prosecutors.

Eight days later, Google contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation flagging comments made under Cross’s YouTube account in which he threatened to hunt and kill transgender people as well as Biden. When Cross was interviewed by prosecutors, he admitted to leaving the voicemails as well as the YouTube comments, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Court records show that Cross and prosecutors came to the agreement at the end of November, and Cross formally changed his plea at a hearing on Friday. He had originally pleaded not guilty to the counts.

Now that the court has accepted the agreement, Cross faces a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, and three years of supervised release to follow for the count of threatening to injure or kill a U.S. senator.

Cross is scheduled to be sentenced at a hearing set for May 1. He will remain in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service until then.

In August, a Kalispell man was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for similarly threatening to kill Tester in a phone call he made last January.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/01/08/billings-man-pleads-guilty-to-threatening-to-kill-sen-jon-tester/

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