The more Chelsea Walsh talked to the eccentric fellow American who seemed to pop up in every square and cobblestone street of Ukraine’s capital, the more she got creeped out.
Walsh was in Kyiv as a nurse and aid worker in the early days of the war in Ukraine. Ryan Routh says he was there recruiting foreign soldiers to fight the Russians. But Walsh never saw him make much progress and instead 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.
“There is one person you need to watch,” she said. “And that is Ryan Routh.”
Walsh says she never heard back about her tips and she did not think much more about Routh until she saw him in the news last Sunday as the 58-year-old accused of stalking Donald Trump at the former president's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, in an apparent assassination attempt.
Walsh’s account was one of at least four reports to the U.S. government that, while not direct threats to Trump, raised suspicions about Routh in the years leading up to his arrest. Others included a tip to the FBI in 2019 about Routh being in possession of a firearm after a felony conviction, an online report by an aid worker to the State Department last year questioning Routh's military recruiting tactics, and Routh’s own interview with Customs and Border Protection about those efforts, prompting a referral for a possible inquiry by Homeland Security Investigations.
What was done in response that could have stopped Routh or at least put him under greater scrutiny is not entirely clear. The agencies involved either did not respond to queries from The Associated Press, have no record of such a report or had questions about whether the report warranted further investigation.
But some people are asking whether federal agencies are vigilant enough or even equipped enough to deal with a growing number of potential threats that are brought to their attention every day.
“Federal agencies ought to be on the highest alert to detect and combat these threats,” said Republican Sen Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Congress and the American people need assurance that the federal government is doing all it can."
Walsh, who lives just a few miles from Trump's golf course, said she cannot help but think all of this could have been avoided.
“The authorities have definitely dropped the ball on this,” she said. “They were warned.”
Sarah Adams, an ex-CIA officer who was behind the State Department tip, said she decided to act after learning Routh was trying to recruit former Afghan fighters with false promises of spots in the Ukrainian military.
She said she drafted a bulletin urging the 50 humanitarian aid groups she was helping in Ukraine to keep Routh at arm’s length, and she had her company send a similar online report to the State Department.
“There was plenty to look into,” said Adams, who lives in Tampa, Florida. “I don’t know if they even assigned someone to work it.”
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said there is no record of any complaints about Routh. He said he could not rule out that “someone didn’t have a communication with somebody somewhere.”
Similarly, Customs and Border Protection said it could not confirm Walsh had a meeting with one of its agents because it does not comment on individual cases. The FBI also declined to confirm Walsh’s warning, citing a policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations. Interpol did not respond to a request for comment.
Walsh showed the AP notes that she took while talking to Customs and Border Protection, and a text she sent to a friend about her messages to the FBI and Interpol with a time stamp soon after she sent them.
Routh, a North Carolina construction worker who in recent years moved to Hawaii, was being held on weapons charges related to the Trump case. His federal public defender, Kristy Militello, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
A self-styled mercenary leader, Routh was never shy about speaking out to anyone who would listen about his dangerous, sometimes violent plans to insert himself into conflicts around the world.
He was interviewed by The New York Times, photographed by the AP and other news organizations and appeared in videos from Kyiv making his pitch for foreign fighters. He put out a self-published book last year on Amazon, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War,” in which he writes of the wisdom of a well-timed killing of a world leader to change history.
“You are free to assassinate Trump,” Routh wrote, referring to Iran in retaliation for the former president's decision to abandon the U.S. nuclear deal with that country. Routh went on to describe Trump, whom he had voted for in 2016, as a “fool” and “buffoon” for the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and for pushing a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine.
Walsh said she initially found the wiry, floppy-haired Routh to be just bizarre. But as time went on, she got a darker vibe from the way Routh lurked in the streets, seemed to be everywhere and kept tabs on everyone.
She watched as Routh kicked a homeless man begging for money and then snarled, “The Ukrainians should be paying me for what I am doing here!” She said he talked of his grown children with such hatred — "I wish I never had them” — that it frightened her. She remembers how he threatened to burn down a music studio because people there laughed at him over a song he wrote.
“Ryan was the kind of guy who would blow up a building on Tuesday, just because he felt like it,” Walsh said.
Routh's musings about killing Putin were echoed in his book published last year that describes an even more far-fetched plan for someone with no military experience: launching thousands of weaponized drones to flatten Putin’s many residences.
But in the end, he wrote, the Ukrainians and disaffected Russians he hoped to recruit as accomplices lost their “courage and will” to pull it off.
In 2019, three years before Routh flew to Kyiv to build a foreign legion, the FBI followed up on a tip that he was in possession of a firearm despite felony convictions from years earlier.
But when questioned, the alleged tipster backed off and did not verify providing the initial information. The FBI then referred the matter to Hawaiian law enforcement for further investigation. Honolulu police confirmed this week they were looking into it.
In June 2023, Routh was pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection agents at the Honolulu airport when returning from Ukraine, Poland and Turkey, and asked about his activities overseas.
As first reported by the website Just the News and confirmed in congressional testimony this past week, documents show Routh told them he had been recruiting as many as 100 fighters from Afghanistan, Moldova and Taiwan, and that his wife was paying for his efforts.
Routh also gave agents a business card that claimed he was the director of a group called the International Volunteer Center.
The documents state that the agents referred Routh's case to Homeland Security Investigations for further scrutiny but it declined to pursue the matter.
In congressional testimony Wednesday, Katrina Berger, executive associate director of the agency, noted that it gets hundreds of such requests a day and that Routh’s comments did not rise to the level to take him into “immediate custody.”
Asked specifically to confirm whether a further investigation was declined, she said she was not sure and would look into it.
Routh’s criminal history in his native Greensboro, North Carolina, includes a 2002 arrest for eluding a traffic stop and barricading himself from officers with a fully automatic machine gun and a “weapon of mass destruction,” which turned out to be an explosive with a 10-inch-long fuse.
In 2010, police searched a warehouse Routh owned and found more than 100 stolen items, from power tools and building supplies to kayaks and spa tubs. Police alleged in an affidavit that he was selling the items to purchase crack cocaine.
In both felony cases, court records show judges gave Routh either probation or a suspended sentence, allowing him to escape prison time.
Tracy Fulk, a now-retired Greensboro police officer who arrested Routh in the long-ago armed standoff, said she was not surprised by last week's news about Routh.
“Remembering all the alerts and run-ins and stuff," she said, "he was kind of ‘out there.’”
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Associated Press writers Michael Biesecker, Eric Tucker, Matthew Lee and Rebecca Santana in Washington; Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu; Makiya Seminera in Greensboro, North Carolina; Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Joshua Goodman in Miami; and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org