A Trump supporter from Staten Island has been arrested after saying that he wanted to “blow up” an FBI building and posting violent threats against a slew of other targets, like “anyone that claims to be a democrat” and the celebrants who took to the streets last weekend after news networks called the presidential race for Joe Biden. The Trump supporter — 54-year-old Brian Maiorana — also targeted anti-police brutality protesters who took to the streets across the country last year; Maiorana said the protesters should be targeted with pipe bombs. Maiorana, who was arrested on Tuesday, has been charged with making threatening interstate communications.
Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said that the Justice Department “will not stand idly by when people like the defendant allegedly threaten to kill elected officials, lawful protesters and law enforcement simply because of animus towards the outcome of an election.” DuCharme added that the office that he currently leads “will not tolerate violence or threats of violence used to intimidate others with whom they disagree.”
Maiorana’s violent screeds on social media apparently began last September. His threat against the FBI was one of his more recent pronouncements; this past Sunday, in a message citing the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, Maiorana said that he wanted to attack the FBI and ranted against “the Jew Senator from Jew York,” referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who Trump himself has frequently targeted for belligerent criticism. Among his posts, Maiorana claimed that the election had been “fraudulently stolen from us,” which, while false, is the exact same deluded claim that Donald Trump himself has been making.
In another recent online rant that went up two days after the election, Maiorana said that “carnage needs to come in the form of extermination of anyone that claims to be a democrat,” and on Sunday, amidst pro-Biden celebrations, Maiorana said that “right thinking people need to hit the streets while these scumbags are celebrating and start blowing them away.” Maiorana was arrested by members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is comprised of FBI agents and New York Police Department officers. An anonymous official told The New York Times that agents discovered weapons at Maiorana’s home including “a semiautomatic pistol, parts for a .22 caliber pistol, a Taser, a crossbow and an expandable baton.”
Donald Trump and his allies have frequently claimed that top Democrats like Joe Biden himself are allied with violent rioters. This claim is unequivocally false. In fact, Biden has repeatedly condemned violence in all forms, including the rioting that Republicans have tried to pin on Democrats.
It’s Donald Trump who peddles brazen dehumanization of his opponents, and it’s Donald Trump who now refuses to accept the election results, leading to widespread rejection of these results among his followers. There is no legitimate basis for the rejection of these results by the president — claims from the idea that Republicans have been systematically excluded from observing ballot-counting to the idea that there is some kind of widespread conspiracy to fabricate Biden votes are false.
