Barack Obama Assassination Scare in Tennessee - Assessment of Threat

Assessment of Threat

Secret Service and other authorities said they were treating the plot very seriously, but acknowledged it did not appear to have moved to an advanced stage. Authorities said there did not appear to be any formal assassination plan and said they were unable to immediately assess how capable the men were of carrying out the attack. Federal authorities told the Associated Press they did not believe Schlesselman and Cowart had the means to carry out their threat. Barack Obama did not have any campaign appearances planned for Tennessee. One federal law enforcement official told the AP that plans did not include Obama's schedule or a specific time and place for the assassination because, "I don't think they had that level of detail." Authorities said they made several mistakes during their planning, including drawing too much attention to themselves with their car markings. Authorities also felt their inability to carry out a home robbery together indicated they would be unable to carry out a sophisticated assassination plot. When asked whether the alleged threats were real, Daniel Cowart's lawyer, Joe H. Byrd, told reporters, "White top hats and tuxedos? You tell me."

"They sound crazy, like a really bad movie – Quentin Tarantino gone awry. You listen to that, and you say, 'In a hundred thousand years, they never would have reached Obama.' But the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were."

Fred Fielder, police chief in Helena–West Helena, Arkansas, said the alleged plot in Tennessee particularly concerned him due to the fact that 66 percent of the city's 12,200 population are African American; he said to reporters, "Predominantly black school, take your pick." Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, described the plans and weapons arsenal as frightening, but said, "With the part about wearing top hats...it gets a bit hard to take them seriously." Nevertheless, Potok said "the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were." An editorial in The Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, said the plot emphasized a dark undercurrent of racism still alive in the United States, but said their chances of actually killing Obama were "almost nil. Their plot was so disorganized they appear to be candidates for 'dumb criminals,' not calculating assassins."

Despite initial concerns about the plot, the Obama campaign was not immediately notified of the alleged plot; an Obama aide told ABC News, "They were given no heads up." Concerns were already strong about possible plots against Obama due to his status as the first African American presidential nominee for a major political party. The senator had been receiving Secret Service protection since May 2007, which was the earliest for any candidate, and authorities had already foiled an alleged assassination plot at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.