Crazed MAGA Guys Keep Threatening Violence Even After Trump Calls For Calm ... Oh, He Didn't?
How completely expected!
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on Friday warned that threats against federal law enforcement have sharply increased since last week's FBI search of Donald Trump's trash palace in Florida. In Pennsylvania Monday, a man from Mercer County, in the northwest part of the state, was charged in federal court in Pittsburgh after making multiple social media threats to kill FBI agents. Trump's own social media site, Truth Social, where the guy who tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati posted about his plans, remains a mess of hot garbage , including posts doxxing the federal judge who signed the warrant and at least one FBI agent who purportedly took part in serving the search warrant, Rolling Sone reports.
The information includes their purported home addresses, phone numbers, places of worship, private offices, and similar information about the men’s families and junior employees.
In other words, behavior that's pretty much the norm in far-right social media, but a lot more of it. FBI special agent Brian O'Hare, the president of the FBI Agents Association, told National Public Radio yesterday that while the agency and DHS have long issued warnings about potential threats to federal law enforcement, he couldn't "recall a threat stream similar to this in the last many years" that was aimed quite so specifically and intensely at the FBI.
O'Hare called on political leaders to "publicly denounce violence against law enforcement unconditionally," which is precisely what Donald Trump did not do in a Monday interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Trump sort of pretended to, saying he'd really like to help "turn down the heat" of the national conversation, and immediately reminding his Flying Monkey Hate Brigades who the bad guys are:
There has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there is tremendous anger in the country — at a level that has never been seen before, other than during very perilous times.
So that was nice of him to help out. Trump also called the serving of the warrant a "sneak attack" and warned that "This could get very bad, very fast if the Justice Department didn't "pull back before it's too late." Best heat-turning-down in the history of heat adjustment, so we're sure a sudden, violent outburst of complete calm will erupt at any moment.
DHS, FBI: The Murderous Crazies Have Been Activated
The "joint intelligence bulletin" issued Friday by the FBI and Homeland Security said the agencies had "observed an increase in threats to federal law enforcement and to a lesser extent other law enforcement and government officials" following the search at Mar-a-Lago, andwent on to say that some of the threats circulating on social media were "specific in identifying proposed targets, tactics, or weaponry" and that many named the federal judge who'd signed the warrant.
The memo was issued out of an "abundance of caution," according to federal law enforcement officials who spoke to NBC News, which said the warning "calls on authorities to be vigilant and to be aware of issues surrounding domestic violent extremists, past and present incidents, and past behaviors."
Which is all well and good, wingnuts might insist, although everyone knows that the attack on the Cincinnati FBI field office was a false flag attack that was intended to make MAGA people who've been threatening to kill FBI agents look bad.
Pittsburgh: Creepy MAGA Chud Charged In Threats Against FBI
Adam Bies, a nice patriotic fellow from Mercer County, Pennsylvania, was charged Monday in US District Court with "influencing, impeding or retaliating against federal law officers" after he posted multiple violent threats on the Gab app against the FBI last week, including sentiments like "come and get me you piece of [expletive] feds" and "I am going to [expletive] slaughter you," according to an FBI affidavit. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the deets:
In the affidavit for Mr. Bies, the FBI said he compared bureau agents to the Nazi SS of World War II and the Soviet-era KGB and said everyone at the FBI, from agents to janitors, deserves to die.
"My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop," Mr. Bies wrote on Thursday. "I will not spend one second of my life in their custody." [...]
"If you work for the FBI then you deserve to die," the poster wrote.
The FBI was alerted to the case when a "domestic terrorism tracking group" sent a tip about threats from someone going by "BlankFocus" on Gab. The social media platform replied to the FBI's emergency request for information by providing data on the fake name Bies used to register; he'd apparently said he went with the fake identity "so that corporate Murica' can't google me out of a job." He completely forgot to use a proxy server, so tracking him down by his IP address was a cinch.
Let's all breathe a sigh of relief that our iPatriot warriors are apparently far less tech savvy than some really determined Wonkette trolls and spambots.
Bies offered many fine sentiments about how he'd happily
shoot an SS officer in the head just as quick as I’d shoot a KGB officer in the head. [...] Keep that in mind. There are plenty of other letters in the alphabet. Police state scum are police state scum. Period.
Not surprisingly, after he got warnings about making threats on Gab, he explained that he had to, since all members of the FBI "deserve to DIE," and then he went on to call Gab CEO Andrew Torba a "piece of shit" and dared him to "go ahead and ban me," and for the first time ever, Yr Humble Comments Moderator felt the tiniest smidgen for the moderators at Gab, before remembering the whole place is full of antisemitism and racism.
As of yet, we haven't seen any far-Right figures defending Bies as a free speech warrior who was simply stating his opinion. Nor, for that matter, are we hearing any claims that his arrest too was a false flag attack perpetrated by the Deep State. But then, we haven't been looking.
Truth Social Actually Removes A Post, Wingnuts Furious
In an example of its newfound commitment to not whipping up violent extremism in a way that would get too much attention, Trump's platform Truth Social actually removed a post by former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, that charming fellow who accused the House January 6 Select Committee of perpetrating a "Bolshevistic anti-white campaign." Rolling Stone reports Ziegler had posted
the name of an FBI agent involved in the preparation of the warrant [...] as well as the names of his wife and child, their social media accounts, and the school the child attends.
But don't you get too excited about the development, because although Truth Social removed that one "truth," the full text of Ziegler's post continued circulating on the platform, "complete with contact information for the agent and his family," without any apparent attempts to remove it by moderators. But they got the one high-profile guy, why aren't we giving them any credit for that?
In conclusion, it's a Tuesday in MAGA-land, and we're sure this will all settle down as soon as the DOJ stops pestering Donald Trump and acting like he broke some kind of "laws" by breaking actual laws.
[ NBC News / BBC / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / Rolling Stone ]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please help us keep you on top of all the weirdness with a monthly $5 or $10 donation!
Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .
like that drunk guy on a Saturday night, prancing up and down telling his mates to 'hold me back or I'll kill him' while desperately hoping someone cares enough to actually intervene
That's what I was thinking, too.