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 [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
