A man accused of making nearly three dozen threats “to kill the president” in posts on social media and calls to the U.S. Secret Service and White House last year was sentenced Monday to a year and a half in prison.
Diedrich Joseph Holgate, 46, pleaded guilty in May to one count of making a threat to injure another via interstate communications.
He admitted to leaving a voicemail threatening to kill his former employer in Texas in July 2024 after he had been fired from his undisclosed job in 2006.
He was arrested in Oregon in October.
U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon sentenced Holgate to a slightly longer term than the year and two months sought by Assistant Federal Public Defender Megha Deshai.
Holgate’s most recent threat was made on Sept. 7, when he called the Secret Service’s office in Miami and said, “I’m going to kill the president,” according to a federal indictment.
On Aug. 28, he called the Secret Service’s Washington field office and threatened to “kill everybody,” the indictment said. When asked to specify who exactly he was after, Holgate said, “POTUS, FLOTUS and SCOTUS. … I have the right to kill the president. I want to kill you” and added that the president had better call him or “he’s going to die,” the indictment said.
In late June 2024, he told Secret Service office he didn’t care “if it is Trump or Biden” and that he’d “hang everyone for treason.”
Since January 2021, Holgate had left more than 20 similar threats on X and more than 10 messages with the Secret Service, according to the indictment.
Holgate, who lives in Texas, was previously convicted of sending threatening voicemail messages to two judges in Texas’ Travis County in 2018 and sentenced in 2020 to five years in custody.
In that case, physicians testified that he suffered from a mental illness and delusional thinking, and he was found at one point not competent to stand trial, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
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