The FBI coordinated with local authorities in mid-February to arrest a heavily armed man who had threatened on social media to kill all Jewish elected officials in Michigan, according to a newly disclosed criminal case.
The man appears to have been a former employee of the University of Michigan.
Jack Eugene Carpenter III, a Tipton resident, had tweeted on Feb. 17 that he was “returning to Michigan and threatening to carry out the death penalty on anyone who is Jewish in Michigan government if they don’t leave or confess,” according to the FBI affidavit.
There are several prominent Jewish elected officials in the state, including Attorney General Dana Nessel, U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin and a handful of state senators and representatives.
Carpenter has been charged with transmitting an interstate threat, for which he could receive up to five years in federal prison, and is being held without bail in federal court in Detroit, according to local reports. He was in Texas when he made the tweets, the FBI said.
On a Twitter account the FBI linked to Carpenter, he claimed to be a former University of Michigan employee who “was fired for refusing to take experimental drugs,” apparently referring to the COVID-19 vaccine. The University of Michigan has more than 6,500 Jewish students, according to Hillel International.
“Probable cause exists” that from his Twitter account Jack Carpenter “made threats of injury and death to members of the government,” FBI Special Agent Sean Nicol wrote in the Feb. 18 affidavit.
The University of Michigan had employed Carpenter for 10 years and let him go in 2021. Carpenter was a systems administrator in the dean’s department of computing in the College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts, the university’s largest college.
The university did not provide details about why he is no longer with the school, citing its policy on personnel matters.
Federal agents determined Carpenter had previously been arrested on assault charges and had stolen one of his guns from his girlfriend. His mother told authorities he was in possession of several firearms, including three handguns, a 12-gauge shotgun and a military-style hunting rifle.
The Twitter account linked to him contains violent threats and anti-Semitic tirades, including threatening allusions to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory linked to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Any Jewish person holding public office in my land after this time is subject to immediate punishment for their participation in an illegal war of aggression using a biological weapon against me,” he wrote. Carpenter also threatened “lethal force” to any police personnel who planned to interfere.
In multiple paranoid manifestos posted on his Twitter feed, Carpenter also declared himself “the King of Israel” and stated that he was forming a new state on his property, which the FBI said he had declared “New Israel.” He also tweeted that if arrested, he planned to “remove attorney due to conflict of interest because they are Jewish (sic).”
Carpenter mentions some public figures in his manifestos, but the only Jew is Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.