On Sunday, Matthew Harrigan, the President and CEO of PacketSled, Inc., posted specific threats to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump on Twitter and Facebook. The company's board placed Harrigan on administrative leave on Monday and announced his "resignation" very early Tuesday morning.
That a company CEO could do what Harrigan did has to be national news, right? Well, not yet. Searches on the company's name at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday morning at the Associated Press's main national site, its Big Story site, and at the New York Times returned no results, even though the tweets involved occurred about 1-1/2 days ago. And where are the lamentations about the "climate of hate" which might have brought such a person to do something so completely unhinged?
PacketSled is a startup company which provides clients "a breach detection, network forensics, and incident response platform that deploys in 15 minutes."
One suspects that the Secret Service might have responded to Harrigan's threats even faster than PacketSled's deployment benchmark, given how blatant and specific they were, with a taunt added for good measure (f-words cleaned up for this site; to be clear, the originals contain them; larger image is here; HT Gateway Pundit via Instapundit):
In a separate tweet 11:22 p.m. tweet on Election Night, Harrigan wrote, "Really San Diego? Trump? Go f*** yourself San Diego." Perhaps very early returns that evening had Trump leading, but Hillary Clinton ultimately won San Diego County with 56 percent of the vote to Trump's 39 percent.
I suppose the now-former PacketSled President might take a bit of comfort in that final result as he contemplates how to pick up the pieces of his career and, depending on whether he engaged in any actual preparations to do what he clearly threatened to do online, stay out of prison.
In an attempt to salvage what couldn't be salvaged, Harrigan claimed that "My recent facebook comment was intended to be a joke, in the context of a larger conversation, and only privately shared as such." One of these days people are going to learn that "private" Facebook posts only remain that way as long as everyone who can see them keeps them private. Good luck with that. But it does beg the question: Who else among Harrigan's friends and family sees any humor in this?
I don't recall a President and CEO of any company threatening the life of any other U.S. president in my lifetime, especially as directly, publicly and repeatedly as Harrigan did — which certainly makes what he did news.
So what are the AP and the Times waiting for?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
