Barack Obama served two full terms as president of the United States — eight years in the most protected office on earth. And during those eight years, at least 11 documented assassination-related threats and plots were made against him. Most Americans never heard about a single one.
A Newsweek investigation surfaced the full scope of what happened: the plots were real, they were documented, and they were quietly neutralized without the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that similar threats against other presidents received. Some of the incidents were deeply alarming in scale.
In November 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired multiple rifle rounds directly at the White House, with bullets striking the residence itself. That same year, four active-duty U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia formed a domestic militia called FEAR — Forever Enduring Always Ready — and plotted to overthrow the government and assassinate Obama. The group reportedly spent $87,000 on weapons and explosives in preparation. In 2014, a man jumped the White House fence, entered the building with a knife, and was tackled and arrested inside. Obama and his family had left by helicopter just minutes earlier.
The incidents didn’t stop there. In 2013 alone, two separate ricin-laced letters were mailed targeting the president. A man in Maine was arrested for building a radiation-dispersal device specifically intended to kill Obama. An ISIS-inspired plot originating in Brooklyn was foiled by federal authorities. Threatening content ranged from poems posted on white nationalist websites to a Craigslist post that read, plainly, “it is time for Obama to die.” The documented threats spanned the full eight years of his presidency.
So why didn’t America hear about them? Experts point to several converging factors. None of the plots came close to succeeding — the Secret Service, FBI, and local law enforcement shut them down before they could materialize. Many unfolded during the Obama years, before today’s era of viral saturation, where a single security incident reaches tens of millions of people within minutes via social media. And by multiple accounts, Obama himself made a deliberate choice not to amplify the threats publicly, viewing the attention as potentially emboldening to others.
The contrast with more recent assassination attempts against Donald Trump has drawn renewed attention to this history. Trump’s attempts — including a gunman who opened fire at a Pennsylvania rally in July 2024 and a second incident at a Florida golf course — happened in semi-public spaces crowded with cameras and witnesses, in a radically more volatile political climate, in an era where footage goes viral before the smoke clears. The structural conditions were almost entirely different.
None of this diminishes the seriousness of what happened. Eleven documented threats against a sitting president — including a militia with $87,000 in weapons — is not a footnote. It is a chapter of American history that was reported quietly, resolved effectively, and largely forgotten. The country’s memory of the Obama years doesn’t include any of it — not because it didn’t happen, but because it was never told.