Ex-journalist accused over bomb threats

Jewish centres and schools in U.S. targeted

WASHINGTON • Authorities investigating recent bomb threats against Jewish institutions across the country arrested a former journalist on Friday morning and said he was behind at least some of the threats as part of a campaign to harass a woman.

This arrest appears to be the first made in response to a wave of bomb threats at Jewish centres and schools across the country. Headstones have also been vandalized at Jewish cemeteries in Missouri, Pennsylvania and, most recently, upstate New York.

The FBI arrested Juan Thompson, 31, on Friday morning in St. Louis, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.

Thompson is a journalist who was fired from The Intercept for fabricating quotes and misled colleagues in order to cover his tracks. In an editor’s note last year, the publication said Thompson had engaged in “a pattern of deception” and wrote that he created fake email accounts to impersonate people.

“We were horrified to learn this morning that Juan Thompson, a former employee of The Intercept, has been arrested in connection with bomb threats against the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) and multiple Jewish Community Centers in addition to cyberstalking,” Charlotte Greensit, the Intercept’s managing editor, said in a statement Friday. “These actions are heinous and should be fully investigated and prosecuted.”

Greensit said Thompson worked there from November 2014 until he was fired in January 2016.

Thompson was charged with cyberstalking for allegedly communicating at least eight threats to Jewish Community Centers as part of a sustained campaign of harassment targeting a woman.

The woman and Thompson had been in a romantic relationship, and after their relationship ended, he began sending defamatory emails and faxes to her workplace, making false reports of criminal activity by her and making threats to the Jewish centres in her name. Authorities also said some of his threats were made in his own name as a way to show the woman was trying to frame him.

The criminal complaint filed in federal court points to his Twitter page, where he rails on his ex-girlfriend as a nasty “nasty/racist #whitegirl.” Thompson’s page also expresses disdain for President Donald Trump and white people generally. Trump earlier this week condemned the anti-Semitic threats and vandalism, his second such condemnation, but in a meeting with attorneys general he also questioned who was behind it and apparently suggested that it may have been the work of his political opponents.

JACQUELINE LARMA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Flowers rest on a damaged headstone at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia.