Top Trump administration officials boasted Thursday about thwarting an alleged terrorist plot to attack New York state lawmakers at the state’s Capitol, but one rebel Republican lawmaker is crying foul and accusing the Justice Department of manufacturing a conspiracy.
On Wednesday, a 35-year-old woman and resident of Albany was arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on a charge for providing material support to a terrorist organization. News of the arrest was made public on Thursday, with her federal criminal complaint revealing details of the supposed terror plot.
According to the Justice Department, the woman was accused of swearing her allegiance to ISIS – the jihadist militant organization formed in the wake of 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq launched on false pretenses – and communicated to FBI informants that she wanted to carry out an attack on the New York State Capitol and “kill the senators while they are meeting.”
But Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), whose defiance of President Donald Trump saw him defeated in his GOP primary against a Trump-backed opponent, characterized the entire ordeal as a sham.
“The FBI gave her the bomb and the gun and the funds to spend at Home Depot,” Massie wrote Friday in a social media post on X. “The government literally encouraged and enabled this terrorist plot in order to foil it.”
He then shared comments from Emmy-nominated news videographer and journalist Ford Fischer who said he'd found details buried within the federal criminal complaint raised questions as to how much FBI informants may have encouraged the suspect to communicate their intentions to carry out the attack.
“This picture is the place you want to taget (sic)” reads a message from an FBI informant to the suspect, posing as an ally to ISIS, along with a photo of the New York State Capitol.
“Yes in the yellow,” the suspect allegedly responded.
Critics have long accused the DOJ and FBI of using similar tactics in other high-profile cases. In the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a jury acquitted several defendants amid allegations that FBI informants and agents had fabricated much of the underlying threat themselves. A Human Rights Watch review similarly found that nearly half of federal terrorism convictions since 9/11 stemmed from informant-based cases, with almost a third involving informants who played an active role in orchestrating the plot itself.
