Asked about pastor Steven Anderson and gun-toter Chris Broughton’s repeated wishes for President Barack Obama to die, Special Agent Darrin Blackford of the Secret Service sends along this statement:
“We are aware of the situation and appropriate follow up will be conducted.”
Broughton is the member of Anderson’s Faithful Word Baptist Church who brought an AR-15 rifle and a hand gun to an Obama event in Phoenix earlier this month. Anderson later confirmed to TPMmuckraker that just 24 hours before that show of arms-bearing, Broughton attended the pastor’s fiery sermon in which he prayed for “Obama to melt like a snail tonight” for being a “socialist devil, murderer, infanticide.”
And yesterday, Broughton and Anderson took their statements even further, with the pastor saying he’d like Obama to die of brain cancer like Ted Kennedy, and Broughton for the first time publicly saying that he, too, would like the president to be dead.
No word on what form the Secret Service’s follow up will take. And the agency would not comment on a CNN report that it interviewed Anderson.