Ex-Reporter Charged With Making Bomb Threats Against Jewish Sites -<br />By BENJAMIN WEISERMARCH 3, 2017<br />A former reporter for a news website was charged on Friday with making more than a half-dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers, schools<br />and a Jewish history museum, federal authorities said.<br />“We are committed to pursuing and prosecuting those who foment fear and hate through such criminal threats.”<br />said that its director, James B. Comey, and top bureau officials had held a meeting on Friday with Jewish community leaders to discuss the recent increase in threats to Jewish institutions around the country, and<br />that the investigation into the threats was “a top priority.”<br />Mr. Thompson was arrested on Friday in St. Louis, where a federal magistrate judge<br />ordered him held without bond pending a detention hearing on Wednesday.<br />In a threat made on Feb. 22 to the Anti-Defamation League in New York, the complaint says, a caller, using an untraceable phone number and a tool<br />that disguised the caller’s voice, said there was C-4, an explosive material, in the group’s New York office, and that it would be “detonated within one hour.” The office was immediately searched and no explosives were found.<br />In one threat, made on Feb. 1 against a Jewish school in Farmington Hills, Mich., the complaint says, Mr. Thompson claimed he had placed two bombs in the school<br />and was “eager for Jewish newtown,” an apparent reference to the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman killed 20 students and six school employees.<br />The man, Juan Thompson, 31, of St. Louis, made some of the threats using his own name<br />and others implicating a former girlfriend as part of an effort to intimidate her, the authorities said in a federal complaint unsealed on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
