Peter Hasson on June 1, 2018

An admitted pedophile who served 16 months in federal prison for threatening to assassinate the president of the United States is now running for Congress thanks to former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

Nathan Larson is an independent candidate in Virginia who admitted to HuffPost that he’s a pedophile who bragged in blog posts about raping his ex-wife and fantasized online about having sex with young children.

Larson is also a convicted felon who wouldn’t be eligible to run for office in Virginia had McAuliffe not restored Larson’s rights to vote and run for office in 2016.

Larson was sentenced to 16 months in prison in October 2009 for threatening to kill the president.

“I am writing to inform you that in the near future, I will kill the President of the United States of America,” Larson wrote in a Sept. 2008 email to the Secret Service. He then “laid out the reasons why he intended to kill the president and how he intended to carry out the assassination,” the Denver Post reported at the time of his conviction.

Anyone convicted of a felony in Virginia automatically loses the rights to vote and run for office. But McAuliffe restored those rights to tens of thousands of convicted felons in August 2016. And that included Larson, HuffPost first noted on Thursday.

Larson admitted to running a rape-obsessed pedophilia fantasy website, according to HuffPost. Larson claimed online that he had raped his ex-wife and “repeatedly expressed a desire to have sex with infants and children, including his own daughter,” HuffPost reported.

McAuliffe originally issued a blanket clemency order affecting 200,000 felons in April 2016. The state Supreme Court struck down McAuliffe’s order in July 2016, ruling that the governor’s blanket amnesty order exceeded his legal authority.

McAuliffe announced one month later that he was restoring the rights of 13,000 felons. The vice-chair of Virginia’s Board of Elections later told TheDCNF in Nov. 2016 that the true number of felons granted clemency was actually between 50,000 and 60,000. McAuliffe’s term ended in 2018.

McAuliffe is widely thought to be positioning himself for a presidential campaign in 2020.

Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson

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