Federal prosecutors on Thursday requested that the avowed neo-Nazi who was friends on social media with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter be held in a Washington, D.C. jail while he awaits trial on gun charges.
In a court filing submitted Thursday evening, prosecutors claim that Jeffrey Raphiel Clark poses a risk to his community and that the seriousness of the charges against him merit detention.
“The defendant in this case poses a further threat to the public because, interlaced with the defendant’s drug use and possession of firearms, is his glorification and justification of acts of violence directed at racial, religious and LGBTQ communities,” the prosecutors wrote.
“The case against him is overwhelming,” they add.
Clark was arrested on Friday Nov. 9 on two charges of illegally possessing weapons after his relatives notified police about his increasingly erratic behavior and praise for suspected Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers. Clark’s brother Edward, 23, killed himself in the hours after the Oct. 27 massacre at Tree of Life synagogue. The brothers were actively involved in the white nationalist movement, attending events and expressing their hatred for black people and Jews on social media.
The new court documents are brimming with information about their alleged activities, including photographs of guns and ammunition Jeffrey Clark kept in his room along with Nazi flags and military gear. They also contain transcripts of Clark’s interview with an FBI agent following his arrest, in which he allegedly admits he “said some very, very extreme stuff” and even “expressed like support of violence if certain lines were crossed.”
In interviews with FBI agents after his arrest, Jeffrey purportedly said that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter “did it because he’s a white nationalist and he’s mad at Jews.”
“He was upset with what . . . what he sees as Jewish groups destroying America based on what he saw from that caravan, the migrant caravan that was going on, and he decided he wanted to retaliate,” the court filing cites Jeffrey as saying.
The FBI agents ask him about any ties to Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter, but Jeffrey is cited as telling law enforcement that he had no specific memories of them talking, though he “recognized the name” after the massacre occurred.
When the agents purportedly asked about Edward, however, Jeffrey suddenly became tight-lipped.
“Clark was reluctant to talk about his brother Edward,” the filing reads, adding that Clark told the FBI agents that Edward’s suicide was not related to Bowers but rather to his being “black-pilled” by society – a metaphor for a state of despair.
Jeffrey, who the filing states is unemployed, also let the FBI in on his “future plans.”
“The defendant indicated he would like to move to West Virginia to non-violently “take-over” a town with “like-minded white nationalists,” the filing reads.
Jeffrey allegedly remained committed to his neo-Nazism, telling FBI agents that he was “committed to the survival of the white race by any means necessary.”
“I said some very, very extreme stuff, I said some stuff that even like you know, maybe like expressed like support of violence if certain lines were crossed, but I never told anyone to go do anything or ever issued any credible threat or anything like that,” he purportedly told the FBI agents.
Jeffrey allegedly added, when asked about which “lines” he had in mind: “We should take up arms against the government if they take away our guns.”
In a search conducted after Jeffrey’s arrest, law enforcement say they two partly completed AR-15s with modifications for conversion to “complete rifle[s],” along with hollow-point ammo (extra deadly), a noose, and Confederate and Nazi flags.
One of the jarring discoveries was a flyer from the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization linked to the suspects in five murders across the U.S. The black-and-white flyer shows a dancing skeleton stomping on a pile of bodies alongside this text: “THIS DEPRAVITY ONLY BREEDS THEIR WEAKNESS A WEAK OPPOSITION PUTS THEM AT OUR MERCY . . . WE SHOW NONE.”
Atomwaffen believes that Jewish oligarchies and globalist bankers are bent on displacing the white race, and train its adherents to prepare for a coming race war. The group idolizes serial killer Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Read the full filing below:
