RISING VIOLENCE: Pennsylvania man charged after threatening to kill FBI agents
A Mercer County, Pennsylvania man who threatened to kill FBI agents after the search of ex-President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate has been charged with influencing, impeding, or retaliating against federal law officers by a U.S. District Court.
46-year-old Adam Bies made online threats, saying, “come and get me you piece of [expletive] feds” and “I am going to [expletive] slaughter you,” according to a federal complaint filed in Pittsburgh on Monday.
According to the FBI affidavit, Mr. Bies issued a variety of threats on Gab after the Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago complex in which agents removed boxes of classified documents. 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.”
The case began when an FBI national threat team received a tip from a domestic terrorism tracking group that someone calling himself “BlankFocus” was issuing threats on Gab.
“If you work for the FBI then you deserve to die,” the poster wrote.
Agents tracked Bies – who made a variety of threats in Gab chats under an alias– through his IP address, leading them to his Falls Road home in rural Pennsylvania’s Mercer County.
“I’ll shoot an SS officer in the head just as quick as I’d shoot a KGB officer in the head,” he said. “Keep that in mind. There are plenty of other letters in the alphabet. Police state scum are police state scum. Period,” Bies had posted.
After FBI Director Christopher Wray discussed the rise in threats the agency has received after the search at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Bies tagged Gab CEO Andrew Gorba in an angry post about warnings he received on the platform about removing threats, saying “I sincerely believe that if you work for the FBI, then you deserve to DIE.”
In another post on Thursday, Mr. Bies referenced a message Gab had issued to him, saying the platform “just gave me an account warning today for saying that a bunch of child-molesting [expletives] at the FBI should be put down,” reports The Post-Gazette.
Bies used the alias “Adam Campbell” in his Gab posts, but was uncovered after an emergency request for information from his ISP. According to the FBI, Mr. Bies said he used the alias “so that corporate ‘Murica can’t google me out of a job.”
Last Wednesday, according to the affidavit, Bies posted:
“HEY FEDS. We the people cannot WAIT to water the trees of liberty with your blood. I’ll be waiting for you to kick down my door.”
The Pittsburgh agent who wrote the affidavit said that he believes Mr. Bies is willing to commit violence against law enforcement, “even if that costs him his own life.”
After appearing in a brief video hearing before a federal magistrate judge on Monday, Bies has been remanded in U.S. custody pending a detention hearing on Thursday.
Original reporting by Torsten Ove at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Follow Ty Ross on Twitter @cooltxchick
