St. Paul man sentenced for leaving threatening voicemail for US Representative

A St. Paul man has been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to leaving a threatening voicemail for a U.S. Representative last year.

Jason Robert Burham Karimi, 32, was sentenced on Tuesday for one charge of interstate communication of a threat, federal court records show. He will serve two years of supervised release once his prison time is up.

Charging documents state that on Jan. 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a voicemail left on the office phone of a U.S. representative from California threatened to “cause you pain in every way possible.”

The caller also alluded to the representative’s house being vandalized and saying that “wasn’t far enough.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home had been vandalized on New Year’s Day, but the criminal complaint redacts the victim’s name.

Investigators with the U.S. Capitol Police Department and the FBI were able to trace the phone number used to leave the voicemail to Karimi, and a federal agent arranged to meet him on Jan. 12. In that interview, Karimi admitted to the agent that he had left a message on the victim’s phone, the complaint states.

Karimi also said the voicemail was meant to cause “political pain” to the representative’s career and not their “physical self.”

He was charged just days after the FBI agent spoke to him. He initially pleaded not guilty but amended his plea to guilty in September.