A second suspicious package has been mailed to billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic donor Tom Steyer, FBI officials have revealed.
The package appeared to be similar to a series of mailings of pipe bombs sent earlier to at least 13 Democratic political figures and others who have been attacked by President Donald Trump, including CNN, NBC reported.
The latest package sent to Steyer was intercepted Thursday at a postal facility in Burlingame, California. Steyer was sent a similar package seven days earlier, which was intercepted at the same facility.
“The package was very similar in appearance to the others,” Katherine Zackel, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s San Francisco office, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The package was “rendered safe” off site by bomb tech experts and removed to an FBI lab for further examination, Zackel said. She offered no other details on what was inside.
The suspect in the string of earlier mailings, Cesar Sayoc, has been in jail since Oct. 26. The van he was living in at the time of his arrest was plastered with photos of Trump, images of faces of the president’s critics marked with gunsight crosshairs, and a sign saying “CNN sucks.”
An attorney for Sayoc’s family, Ron Lowy, who also represented Sayoc in earlier criminal cases, said he didn’t believe Sayoc had the mental capacity to carry out a pipe bomb operation alone. Lowy said he may have been prodded by others, or the devices were so crudely made that they wouldn’t function.
Officials have not yet said whether they believe Sayoc is responsible for the packages mailed to Steyer. Earlier this week, postal workers intercepted another package addressed to CNN at a postal facility in Atlanta.
Trump just last Sunday — two days after Sayoc’s arrest — bashed Steyer in a tweet as a “crazed and stumbling lunatic.”
The president was responding to Steyer’s appearance on TV to criticize a tweet by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as a “straight-up anti-Semitic move.” The tweet attacked three Democratic Jewish donors — Steyer, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros — for using their wealth to “buy” the midterm elections. Soros was also sent a pipe bomb last month.
McCarthy deleted the tweet shortly after the bomb was sent to Soros and just days before suspected gunman Robert Bowers allegedly killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in an anti-Semitic attack.