Man Who Sought to Assassinate Kavanaugh to Plead Guilty

This post was originally published on this site

Nicholas Roske is the California man who traveled across the country in 2022 with the intent of assassinating Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He made it to Kavanaugh’s house and then changed his mind when he saw secret service agents near the house. After talking to his sister by phone, he called the police on himself and was arrested. 

Roske had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him but today his attorneys revealed he will change his plea to guilty.

The California man accused of plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh intends to plead guilty, his attorneys said in a letter to a federal judge filed in court Wednesday morning.

Nicholas Roske, 29, will admit to trying to assassinate a justice of the United States, according to the letter. Roske was scheduled to be tried in the case in June in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

The letter sent to the judge in his case says he will plead guilty to one count of trying to assassinate Kavanaugh and stipulates that if the case were to go to trial, he would lose.

The problem for Roske’s attorneys is that their client confessed to everything both on the 911 call made from Kavanaugh’s neighborhood and shortly thereafter when speaking to the police. In January his attorneys made a last ditch effort to have all of that evidence suppressed.

Defense lawyers for Roske released a bevy of new details about his arrest and interrogation as they urged a judge to block prosecutors from introducing much of the key evidence in the case. That evidence includes Roske’s statements to police and the FBI, as well as the fact that he carried two bags to Kavanaugh’s Maryland home containing a Glock pistol, a knife, zip-ties and pepper spray…

The legal motions submitted to U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte argue that police lacked a warrant to search Roske’s belongings after they arrested him in the early morning hours of June 8, 2022. They also contend that Roske wasn’t given Miranda warnings before being questioned at the scene and that his statements weren’t voluntary because he was suffering from a mental health crisis while being interrogated at a police station in Bethesda…

“My plan was to kill Mr. Kavanaugh and then myself,” Roske told FBI agents, according to a transcript attached to one of the defense motions.

The documents filed by his attorneys in January also revealed that Roske was motivated by the release of a draft Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“I’ve been suicidal for a long time, and when I saw that the leaked draft, it made me upset and then it made me want to — I don’t know,” Roske allegedly said. “I was under the — I was under the delusion that I could make the world a better place by killing him.”…

“And was it just the leaked decision that made you angry, in what way?” an interrogator asked. I’m just curious. You don’t need to answer that. It has nothing to do with anything.”

To which Roske allegedly replied: “From a civil rights perspective.”

Roske also said he was worried the Supreme Court might loosen restrictions on guns so he decided to become a pro-abortion, anti-gun assassin. He found information about where Kavanaugh lived online:

Roske said he found the name of Kavanaugh’s Maryland neighborhood on Wikipedia and got a more precise address by looking at news coverage of abortion-rights protests at Kavanaugh’s home following publication of the draft opinion.

“There was an article that had a picture of the family’s house and [I] looked at the house number,” he told FBI agents. “So I just came out here.”

You may recall there was a group of protesters calling themselves “Ruth Sent Us” who encouraging people to march to the homes of several of the conservative justices at this time. The group posted a map with pins near the homes of each of the conservative justices. Those pins did not include exact locations but they also posted TikTok videos which did include house numbers. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

While the map did not contain house numbers, the group also posted Tik Tok videos of protesters at each of the six homes. In several cases those videos showed protesters slowly walking past a sign or mailbox with the house number. In others cases they simply showed the house. The Tik Tok videos were linked on the same site with the map so anyone making a small amount of effort to connect the dots could find the exact residence in each case. Yesterday Google took down the group’s map for violating its terms of service.

Roske doesn’t mention a map or TikTok, he claims he saw house numbers in a photo published with an article. I’m not sure which story that was. The Washington Post did publish a story about one of the protesters and that story included photos taken near Kavanaugh’s home, but I don’t see a street address visible in those photos. So my best guess is that Roske got the exact address from the Ruth Sent Us website but there are other possibilities.

Roske’s trial was set to being in June but a hearing on whether to suppress the evidence of his confessions and the search of his belongings was coming up soon. It looks like someone realized he was going to lose on those requests and that meant there was plenty of evidence to convict him. He’s now facing a maximum sentence of life in prison, plus a possible fine. No word yet on when his sentencing will take place.

Given what is happening in the Luigi Mangione case, you have to wonder if Nicholas Roske would have become another leftist folk hero if he’d followed through with his plan. It’s a definite possibility.