On Thursday, Brandon J. Ziobrowski, 33, of Cambridge, Massachusetts was arrested and charged with attempting to solicit hitmen to kill ICE agents for $500 apiece and threatening to kill Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz).
Ziobrowski has allegedly been using Twitter under the alias ‘@Vine_II” to post violent tweets since 2009, according to the arrest report.
For example, he tweeted repeatedly that he wanted to “slit” Senator McCain’s throat and encouraged violence against the police on February 28 of this year, tweeting, “Guns should only be legal for shooting the police like the second amendment (sic.) intended.”
Ziobrowski’s tweets started to call for violence against ICE agents in March of 2018, tweeting, “Thank you ICE for putting your lives on the line and hopefully dying I guess so there’s less of you?”
“I am broke but will scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ice agent. @me seriously who else can pledge get in on this let’s make this work,” Ziobrowski wrote on July 2nd.
MA US Attorney says this is one of his tweets. #wbz pic.twitter.com/4sF6xmOTWa
— Beth Germano (@BethWBZ) August 9, 2018
“The charge of use of interstate and foreign commerce to transmit a threat to injure another person provides for a sentence of no greater than five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000,” the report reads.
Ziobrowski had over 400 followers according to the indictment and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t find his tweets and declare him officially a threat until July 5th and didn’t connect the account to Ziobrowski until July 11th.