It kinda seems like a KC guy on Twitter might have helped identify the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Soros-CNN mail bomber?
Federal authorities have arrested a man in Florida in connection with the string of bombs sent this week to people routinely vilified by Donald Trump and right-wing American media. His name is Cesar Altieri Sayoc, and he is a registered Republican whose Twitter feed is filled with incoherent right-wing media talking points about George Soros. Like this:
Yesterday, a photo of the package sent to Joe Biden was obtained by a FOX affiliate in Philadelphia. It showed that the bomb was addressed to “Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.” Out of curiosity, a Twitter user named @jayhawk618 yesterday punched Biden’s full name into Twitter to see what it turned up. Among the search results was the account of someone named Cesar Altieri. Here’s the Biden post from that account on September 18.
I spoke to @jayhawk618 this afternoon by phone. He lives in Kansas City and understandably doesn’t want his identity revealed in a story involving lunatics sending bombs in the mail. He explains, “I thought it was weird that he used Biden’s full name on that package. So I searched the full name on Twitter, and it returned a few things, and one of them was this clear death threat to Joe Biden. So I thought that was kind of interesting.”
Several of the bomb packages gave Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the return address, with Schultz’s name consistently spelled incorrectly as “Shultz.” So @jayhawk618 then searched Cesar Altieri’s username and “Shultz,” which turned up additional unhinged right-wing tweets from Altieri in which he misspelled Schultz’s name.
At that point, @jayhawk618 responded to the post yesterday, writing “Umm…hey,” tagging the FBI, the New York office of the FBI, and the Secret Service. This morning, Sayoc was arrested in Florida.
Short of comment from the FBI, there’s no way of knowing, of course, if his tweet was any help to authorities. But he did send that tweet a day before the mail bomber was arrested.
“I didn’t hear from anybody, so I don’t necessarily have any reason to believe they used my tip,” he says. “It just seemed apparent that what I saw on his [Sayoc’s] Twitter was clearly a death threat, so regardless of anything, the thing to do was report it.”
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