Jail inmate charged with mail threat to McCain

DENVER (Reuters) - A jail inmate was charged on Friday with sending a threatening letter laced with white powder to U.S. presidential candidate John McCain, triggering a security scare at his Colorado campaign office.

Authorities said the suspect, Marc Harold Ramsey, 39, was pinpointed quickly because the return address included his name, inmate number and location of the jail where he is incarcerated -- as required on all outgoing mail from the jail.

The letter, addressed to McCain and opened by a campaign staffer, arrived at the senator's suburban Denver campaign office on Thursday, prompting its evacuation.

The letter began with the statement: "IFF (sic) you are reading this than you are already dead!"

Several campaign workers went to the hospital as a precaution, and more than a dozen others underwent decontamination procedures at the scene, but no one was injured, authorities said.

McCain, 71, the presumed Republican Party nominee for president, was taking the day off from the campaign at the time, spending the day at his home in Sedona, Arizona.

Within hours, the U.S. Secret Service said the letter had been traced to a Colorado jail inmate with a history of making such threats, and tests of the envelope and its contents turned up negative for hazardous materials.

The precise composition of the powder in the envelope had yet to be determined, officials said.

Ramsey was charged with a single count of mailing a threatening communication, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

He had been held at the Arapahoe County detention center, awaiting trial on charges of perjury and felony menacing stemming from an unrelated murder case, since September. He was later charged with assaulting a guard there.

Since being charged with making the threat, "his mail privileges have been significantly modified now," Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told Reuters.

In an affidavit accompanying the federal criminal complaint, the FBI said Ramsey admitted sending the letter to express anger at the U.S. government over his father's exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange during military service in the Vietnam War.

"Ramsey stated that his father was in Vietnam during the same time as Sen. McCain, and that the government takes care of Sen. McCain, but not his father," the affidavit said.

"A death threat is not a legitimate form of political expression," said U.S. Attorney Troy Eid. He added that federal prosecutors had not verified that Ramsey's father had actually served in Vietnam.

The postal scare came weeks after a U.S. Army scientist committed suicide as federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him in connection with the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York.

(Written by Steve Gorman; editing by Dan Whitcomb)