(DCNF)—Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh tried — and seemingly failed — to get the Biden State Department to aid in his effort to recruit foreign soldiers for the war in Ukraine, emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show
The records, which were released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), raise questions about who was aware of Routh’s activities and whether there was any formal attempt to follow up with him.
Routh was convicted for attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course in September 2024, just two months after a gunman’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
Despite the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiating an effort in 2022 designed to identify Americans who might turn violent after returning from the war in Ukraine, Routh seemingly was not investigated, Politico reported in September 2024.
Routh self-published a book in 2023 on “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War,” which included a line that seemed to tell Iran it was “free to assassinate Trump.” He was also interviewed in a March 2023 New York Times article about Americans who traveled to Ukraine to volunteer with the war effort.
Another American who met Routh in Ukraine warned U.S. authorities about his threats of violence, informing a Customs and Border Protection official in June 2022 that he was a “ticking time bomb,” the Wall Street Journal reported in September 2024.
“Through aggressive FOIA litigation, CASA has uncovered Ryan Routh’s attempts to communicate with the Biden State Department,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick told the DCNF.
“Several unanswered questions remain regarding these communications,” Fitzpatrick said. “We still don’t know whether the Biden administration responded in any substantive way to Routh and the contents of those communications – the American people deserve answers here and CASA will continue to fight through this litigation to shed as much light on Routh’s officials communications as possible.”
The State Department and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Routh State Dept. Records by Katelynn Richardson
Ukrainian military units denied any ties to Routh after he was arrested for attempting to assassinate Trump.
In one March 23, 2023 email, Routh claimed his team was “already supplying background checks from the US military through Representative Barry Moore of Alabama,” stating there were “5600 soldiers ready to be transported from Pakistan to a neighboring country of Ukraine and bussed into Ukraine to the front lines to fight.” Moore’s office said they never provided this assistance to Routh.
“A staffer in our D.C. office took a meeting with Routh after he visited without an appointment and asked to speak with someone,” Rep. Moore’s communications director Benjamin Martin told the DCNF. “The staffer determined our office should have no further contact with Routh and referred him to the State Department for any potential assistance. Congressman Moore has never interacted with Routh, and our office did not respond to any further outreach.”
Routh indicated in a separate email to then-Ambassador Bridget Brink and Defense Attaché Garrick Harmon on Oct. 29, 2023 that one of his associates spoke with a member of the U.S. Embassy staff.
“Your staff has spoken with [redacted] at great length and most recently had a meeting where he was asked to provide the execution details of the project as well as accounting of how funds would be allocated and spent and he failed to submit those documents to you,” Routh wrote. “I can be back in Ukraine at a moment’s notice and arrange what you need. Because [redacted] did not fulfill his obligation he is ashamed to give me any contact information since he dropped the ball.”
Both emails received an auto reply. Records released to CASA do not indicate whether any official followed up with Routh directly.
Routh’s sentencing is scheduled for Wednesday. During his trial, Routh represented himself and was interrupted numerous times by the judge for veering off-topic.
Routh has requested to be imprisoned in a state with assisted suicide. In court filings, he also suggested that he could be traded in a prisoner swap.
“Do not let me take my own life and it have zero benefit for humanity or mankind,” he wrote in an Oct. 29 filing.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
