Republican Senator Was Target Of JCC Hoaxer
The teen arrested for JCC bomb threats covers his face at a hearing. Image by Reuters
By Naomi Zeveloff April 24, 2017
A Republican senator was a target of the Israeli-American teen charged with making threatening calls to Jewish community centers in the United States, court documents reveal.
Haaretz reported that the indictment, which will be handed down in an Israeli court today, includes details about how the teen called the senator to get him to retract his comments condemning the threatening calls to the JCCs — and planned to plant drugs on the lawmaker if he refused to go along.
The teen allegedly said that he would fine the senator in Bitcoin if he didn’t retract his comments. He threatened to incriminate the senator online. The teen then sent drugs to the politician’s house and threatened to publish photos proving that he had drugs.
The Republican senator was unnamed in the Haaretz report.
The indictment said the teen made 2,000 calls, some of them graphic, to Jewish institutions and individuals. That is far more than the 200 previously revealed.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
