Ex-Hopkins mayoral candidate charged again with threatening a federal officer

Former Hopkins mayoral candidate Robert Ivers is facing fresh charges of threatening a federal officer, three years after his release from prison for vowing to kill a federal judge.

Prosecutors charged Ivers this week in connection with an outburst that followed a court hearing this month in which he was found to have violated the conditions of his 2019 release from prison.

Convicted by a jury of threatening to kill U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright and making threats across state lines, Ivers received a 1 ½-year prison sentence and three years of supervised release. Ivers was called back to federal court on Nov. 17 after allegedly leaving a "profanity-laced voice mail" on his probation officer's work telephone.

Senior District Judge Robert Pratt, an Iowa-based jurist who has presided over Ivers' case, determined that Ivers violated his release terms and imposed a new one-year prison sentence and an additional year of supervised release.

Ivers was ordered released from custody that day because he had accrued credit for time already spent in custody. But, according to charges, he flew into a rage during a meeting with two probation officers after the hearing. An affidavit from a senior inspector with the U.S. Marshals Service cited an order that Ivers turn over his driver's license as one factor that set the 69-year-old man off.

During the encounter, Ivers allegedly pounded on the table with his fists, "began to incoherently scream the word 'hate,'" and repeatedly slammed his chair on the ground until its leg broke, sending him to the floor.

As he exited the interview room, Ivers extended both middle fingers at one of the officers standing close by and loudly yelled a threat to kill the officer, using a racial epithet.

Ivers is now in custody of the Marshals Service. He was scheduled Tuesday for a final hearing on his supervised release terms but Pratt postponed the hearing because of the new criminal case. The judge did not set a new time.

Ivers has a history of making threats and harassing Minnesota judges, and further made racist comments while running unsuccessfully for mayor of Hopkins in 2016.

He sparked outrage during a candidate forum while using racist terms and said a proposed light-rail line into town would bring "riffraff and trash from Minneapolis."

In 2014, Ivers also sent a series of harassing letters to two Hennepin County judges, referring to them as "pig," "trash" and "garbage."

Ivers' threats against Wright stemmed from her ruling against him in a lawsuit he originally filed in 2015 against an insurance company that refused to pay him $100,000 as the beneficiary of two policies taken out by a friend. The company filed a successful countersuit to rescind the policies, alleging that they were obtained using "willfully false or intentionally misleading representations about the [insured's] health and ability to work."

Ivers filed another lawsuit related to the claims in November 2017 and was referred to two volunteer lawyers who told him that they doubted the validity of his claims. This sparked a rage from Ivers who, one lawyer later reported, said, "You don't know the 50 different ways I planned to kill her."

Two deputy U.S. marshals later visited Ivers in West Fargo, N.D., after the lawyer reported the threats, and he screamed at the deputies that the judge stole his life, using an expletive.