For the second time in a week, federal agents threaten critics of the Trump regime in upstate NY

Here we go again. Last week Michelle Breidenbach of Syracuse.com reported that a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, had been handed a threatening letter by two federal agents.

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The letter, which claimed she had endangered ICE personnel, was almost certainly the result of her having written an Instagram post calling on Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Minneapolis protester Renee Good, to be indicted. Ross had already been publicly identified in the press. (The Syracuse incident was the subject of my newsletter last week for paid supporters, which I’m now offering for free.)

Now we learn that two federal agents showed up at a home in Rochester, New York, last Tuesday to deliver a warning about an email that David Streever had sent to Todd Lyons last February. At that time Lyons was the interim director of ICE; he’s since left that post. Breidenbach reports that Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter, so the letter was left with his wife, Hilary Brandt Streever, an Episcopal priest.

When Streever and his daughter landed in New York, a federal agent who said he was named Trevor Pitts showed up at his hotel and told a clerk at the front desk that he was looking for Streever. The clerk — God bless New York — didn’t confirm that Streever was there.

Here is the email Streever told Breidenbach that he sent to Lyons in January. As you can see, it’s harsh (appropriately so) but doesn’t contain a whiff of a threat:

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

Believe it or not, I know Streever slightly. Back in 2011, I interviewed him for my book “The Wired City,” which is mostly about the New Haven Independent, a pioneering nonprofit digital news outlet.

We were talking about how the Independent had managed to harness user comments to extend its journalism and foster civic engagement. (Those were the days!) I described Streever as “a Web designer, bicycling activist, and minor city official who comments frequently,” and I quoted him as supporting the Independent’s move at that time to crack down on abusive comments.

One chilling aspect to Streever’s story and that of the poll worker, Paigelynne Gonyea, is that they took place in one location, upstate New York, and were reported by a journalist who is tracking these incidents.

It makes you wonder how many other places where this is happening under the radar. The intended message to all of us is to watch what we say, write and do. The message we should take away is something that Streever wrote in a public Facebook post on Sunday: “Please realize that our voices do carry and we have power even in the face of atrocity.”