Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said Thursday she’d been targeted by a “heavily armed” individual whom the FBI arrested in February for allegedly threatening to kill Jewish members of the Michigan government.
A recently unsealed criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan last month, identified Tipton, Michigan, resident Jack Eugene Carpenter III as the author of the violent threats, issued via Twitter.
“I’m heading back to Michigan now threatening to carry out the punishment of death to anyone that is jewish in the Michigan govt if they don’t leave, or confess,” he tweeted on Feb. 17, according to the complaint.
“Because I can Legally do that, right?”
Carpenter’s mother told Michigan State Police her son was in Texas at the time and had recently asked her for money to travel back to Michigan. When she refused, she said he became angry and pledged to “sell some [silver]” to raise the necessary funds instead.
Per the complaint, the next morning he tweeted: “I’ll be coming back to Michigan, still driving with expired plates. You may want to let everyone know, and Wayne County sheriff as well, any attempt to subdue me will be met with deadly force in self-defense.”
The document indicates that Carpenter had already been under investigation for allegedly stealing a handgun from his girlfriend and that he had previously been arrested on suspicion of assault.
His mother told authorities that Carpenter was in possession of three handguns, a 12-gauge shotgun and two hunting rifles, one of which the complaint identifies as a “military style” weapon.
In addition to allegedly targeting Nessel, Carpenter also named Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in various online screeds, as well as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the nation’s top infectious disease expert during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The FBI has confirmed I was a target of the heavily armed defendant in this matter,” Nessel said in a tweet Thursday. “It is my sincere hope that the federal authorities take this offense just as seriously as my Hate Crimes & Domestic Terrorism Unit takes plots to murder elected officials.”
A spokesperson for the University of Michigan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Carpenter was let go in 2021 after working at the school for 10 years.
While the university didn’t address the specific circumstances of his departure, a Twitter account identified as Carpenter’s makes repeated references to COVID-19, vaccines and various far-right conspiracy theories, including QAnon and baseless denials of the results of the 2020 presidential election.