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Feds arrest Michigan man who plotted to kill Jewish elected officials in the state
(JTA) – The FBI coordinated with local authorities in mid-February to arrest a heavily armed man who had threatened to kill all Jewish elected officials in Michigan on social media, according to a recently unsealed criminal case.
The man appears to have been a former employee of the University of Michigan.
Jack Eugene Carpenter III, a resident of Tipton, Michigan, had tweeted on Feb. 17 that he was “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,” according to the FBI’s 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 a 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 employee of the University of Michigan who “was fired for refusing to take experimental medication,” 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” Carpenter’s Twitter account “made threats to cause injury and death to Jewish members of the Michigan government,” FBI Special Agent Sean Nicol wrote in the Feb. 18 affidavit.
This is the latest antisemitic threat to emerge in the state of Michigan. In December a man in suburban Detroit was charged with ethnic intimidation after screaming antisemitic profanities at a local synagogue preschool. The state has also been home to a growth in violent extremist movements, including a group recently put on trial for plotting to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; one of the leaders of that effort was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
The University of Michigan had employed Carpenter for 10 years and let him go in 2021, a spokesperson for the university told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A review of the university’s publicly available salary disclosure information shows Carpenter was a systems administrator in the computing department at the dean’s office of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the school’s largest college.
The university did not elaborate on Carpenter’s employment or why he was no longer with the school, citing its policy on personnel matters.
Federal agents determined that Carpenter had previously been arrested on assault charges and had stolen one of his handguns 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 Feb. 17 tweet by Carpenter directly threatening to kill Jewish elected officials, as quoted by the FBI, was not visible on the public Twitter account linked to him as of March 1. But a stated intent to return to Michigan that was also quoted by the FBI was visible, as were many other violent threats and antisemitic rants, including threatening allusions to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccine was developed by Jews as a means of controlling the world.
“Any Jewish person holding a public office on my land after that time is subject to immediate punishment for their participation in an unlawful war of aggression using a biological weapon against me,” he wrote. Carpenter also threatened any law enforcement personnel who planned to interfere with him with “deadly force.”
In multiple paranoid manifestos posted to his Twitter, Carpenter also declared himself “the King of Israel” and declared that he was forming a new state on his property, one the FBI said he had declared “New Israel.” He also tweeted that, should he be arrested, he planned to “get the lawyer removed due to conflict of interest because they are Jewish.” Carpenter mentions some public figures by name in his manifestos, including Whitmer; Anthony Fauci; Chris Cuomo; and multiple University of Michigan personnel, all of whom he planned to target for “crimes against humanity”; the only Jewish figure he mentions is Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
Carpenter also made references to several prominent right-wing conspiracy theories, including the QAnon movement and the belief that President Joe Biden was not lawfully elected. In one tweet, Carpenter threatened to have Twitter CEO Elon Musk “publicly hanged.”
Carpenter further said he would “grant a brief reprieve to any Zionist Christian or Zionist Jew” who wished “to return to the country to which you actually owe allegiance.”
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The post Feds arrest Michigan man who plotted to kill Jewish elected officials in the state appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Says ‘Clock Is Ticking’ for Iran
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened consequences for Iran if its leaders do not act quickly.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
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Netanyahu Warns Israel Prepared for ‘Any Scenario’ with Iran, Vows to Defeat Drone Threat in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Speaking at a special government meeting marking Jerusalem Day at the Knesset Museum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces in Lebanon are holding and clearing territory while confronting a growing threat from fiber-optic FPV drones. He said he convened a special team with the defense minister and civilian and military experts, telling them they have “no budget limit” to find a solution. “Whatever it costs, it costs,” Netanyahu said, adding that he has “no doubt that Israel will be the first country to deliver a complete solution to this problem.”
Netanyahu also said he would speak with President Donald Trump to hear his impressions from his trip to China and discuss Iran and various regional scenarios. “There are certainly many possibilities; we are prepared for any scenario,” he said, adding that Israeli authorities remain vigilant regarding Iran.
Over the weekend, Israel eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom Netanyahu described as “number one in Hamas’s military wing” and a “master murderer,” responsible for the killing, injury, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Netanyahu said Israel now controls 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and reiterated that the operation’s objective is to ensure Gaza will “never again pose a threat to Israel.” He added that Israel has fulfilled its promise to return all hostages, including “the hero of Israel, the late Ran Gvili.”
“Every single architect of the massacre and the hostage-taking will be eliminated down to the last one, and we are very close to completing this mission,” he said.
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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