Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Pittsburgh Synagogue Killer’s Lawyers Say The FBI Is Meddling With Witnesses

Lawyers for the man who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October are saying that FBI agents are meddling with witnesses as they prepare for the man’s trial, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

The defense team, led by Judy Clarke — who has represented the man who shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” — wrote in a filing to a federal judge Wednesday that FBI agents are improperly dissuading witnesses to the shooting from speaking with them.

The motion says that multiple witnesses have made contact with the defense team, only to cut off communication after speaking to FBI agents.

The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office did not comment on the story.

The shooter, who told police that he believes Jews are “committing genocide” against white people and was obsessed with the Jewish refugee aid agency HIAS, was charged with 11 murder counts as well as federal hate crime counts. He has pled not guilty.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.