Chelsea Walsh was in Kyiv as a nurse and aid worker in the early days of the war in Ukraine
At least four times, tips were made to U.S. government agencies including the FBI and State Department that raised suspicions about the actions of a man now accused in the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
What was done in response to these reports that could have stopped Ryan Routh or at least put him under greater scrutiny is not entirely clear but some people are questioning whether enough was done.
Nurse Chelsea Walsh says she never heard back after reporting Routh’s violent behavior in 2022 while he was recruiting foreign soldiers for the war in Ukraine.
“The authorities have definitely dropped the ball on this,” she said. “They were warned.”
Some key points from an Associated Press report:
Walsh met Ryan Routh in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in 2022 when she was a nurse and aid worker and he was there to recruit foreign soldiers to fight the Russians.
Walsh said she watched him grow increasingly angry and unhinged, kicking a panhandler, threatening to burn down a music studio that slighted him and speaking of his own children with seething hatred.
Just as troubling, she said, was Routh’s obsessive, oddly specific plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, describing the various explosives, poisons and cross-border maneuvers that Routh would employ “to kill him in his sleep.”
“Ryan Routh is a ticking time bomb,” she recalled telling U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in an hourlong interview upon returning to the United States at Dulles International Airport near Washington in June 2022. She says she later repeated her concerns in separate tips to both the FBI and Interpol, the international policing group.
