An American-German man who threatened to kill President Donald Trump in his social media posts was charged with attempting to firebomb the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.
Joseph Neumeyer, 28, was deported by Israeli authorities to the U.S. on Sunday, the Department of Justice announced in a statement. He was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
“This defendant is charged with planning a devastating attack targeting our embassy in Israel, threatening death to Americans, and President Trump’s life,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “The Department will not tolerate such violence and will prosecute this defendant to the fullest extent of the law.”
The DOJ said Neumeyer showed up at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv last week and spat on a guard unprovoked. The guard attempted to detain him but he escaped, leaving behind a backpack that contained three Molotov cocktails, according to the complaint.
Law enforcement later tracked down Neumeyer in his hotel and arrested him.
A search of a Facebook account believed by the DOJ to be Neumeyer’s revealed that he announced his firebombing plot on the day of the supposed attack.
“Join me as I burn down the embassy in Tel Aviv. Death to America, death to Americans, and fuck the west,” he wrote in a May 19 post.
“Join me this afternoon in Tel Aviv- we are burning down the US embassy,” he wrote in another post, tagging the German embassy in Cairo and the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv might not have been Neumeyer’s only target. The DOJ’s complaint included a series of screenshots showing the suspect’s threats to kill Trump and tech mogul-turned-DOGE chief Elon Musk on Facebook.
“We are killing Trump and Musk now,” he wrote on March 22. “I will hunt you down and kill you both.”
“Donald Trump is being blackmailed by the Russians,” another March 22 post read. “He is among the most corrupt leaders in US history, we are killing him. Elon is working with far right leadership- he is not working for the Americans.”
A week later, Neumeyer wrote: “Trump, We told you we would kill you. – Atlas 🔥”
The charges against Neumeyer were unveiled days after Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a couple working for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum.
The suspect in that shooting, 30-year-old Chicago man Elias Rodriguez, was arrested inside the museum while chanting “Free, free Palestine,” police said.
Neumeyer’s posts against Trump also came to light in the aftermath of a controversy that broke out over an Instagram post by former FBI Director James Comey, which authorities perceived as a threat to Trump’s life.
