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MINNEAPOLIS — A West Fargo man is accused of threatening to kill a probation officer after a court hearing connected to a previous case in which he was convicted of making similar threats to a judge.
The U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Minnesota filed on Monday, Nov. 28, a federal charge of threatening to murder a U.S. official against 69-year-old Robert Philip Ivers. He was scheduled to appear Wednesday in court, according to a news release.
The charge stems from a Nov. 17 revocation hearing regarding a 2017 case involving Ivers, the release said. Ivers was convicted on a similar charge when he threatened to kill U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright in Minnesota’s federal court.
The judge ruled against Ivers when he sued a life insurance company, according to Forum archives. Ivers sent several threatening letters that said he was “crazy angry” with Wright, according to the article.
"You don't know the fifty different ways I planned to kill her," Ivers said, according to one attorney cited in the article.
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He was sentenced in September 2018 to 18 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised probation, according to the release.
Ivers was released Aug. 1, 2019, but left a profanity-laden voicemail for his probation officer in September 2020, the release said. That triggered a probation violation and the revocation hearing in November, according to the release.
Judge Robert Pratt ordered Ivers be released since he had credit for time served, but he was put on a year of supervised probation, according to court documents. Ivers was ordered to surrender his driver's license, wear a GPS ankle bracelet and abide by other probation rules, court documents said.
Ivers became agitated in an interview room after the revocation hearing about giving up his driver's license, according to a criminal complaint. He pounded his fists on a table, broke a chair leg, threw his paperwork and repeatedly screamed the word “hate,” the complaint said.
As he left the room, he extended his middle fingers at a probation officer, used a racial slur and threatened to kill the officer, the release said.
He is being held at the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minnesota.
Ivers, who most recently lived in West Fargo, unsuccessfully ran twice for mayor of Hopkins, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. He also garnered media attention in 2016 after calling a light rail project from Hopkins to the Twin Cities "another socialist yeah, yeah, yeah" that would bring in "riff-raff" and "trash" from Minneapolis.
