Man charged for allegedly threatening to kill President Trump in social media post
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(WASHINGTON) — A suburban Chicago man was federally charged for allegedly threatening to kill President Donald Trump on social media, according to court records unsealed on Monday.
Trent Schneider, 57, of Winthrop Harbor, was charged via criminal complaint with making a threat in interstate commerce to injure a person, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.
Following his arrest Monday morning, a federal judge in Chicago ordered that he remain detained in federal custody, prosecutors said. Schneider is next scheduled to appear in court for a detention hearing on Thursday.
According to the complaint, in a “selfie-style video” posted to Instagram on Oct. 16, Schneider allegedly said, “I’m going to get some guns. I know where I can get a lot of f—— guns and I am going to take care of business myself.”
“I’m tired of all you f—— frauds. People need to f—— die and people are going to die. F— all of you, especially you, Trump. You should be executed,” he allegedly said in the video, according to the complaint.
The video also allegedly included a caption that stated, in part, “THIS IS NOT A THREAT!!! AFTER LOSING EVERYTHING and My House Auction date is 11.04.2025 @realDonaldTrump SHOULD BE EXECUTED!!!”
Schneider allegedly posted the same video and caption approximately 18 times between Oct. 16 and Oct. 21, according to the complaint.
A “concerned citizen” in Florida who viewed the video on Oct. 16 reported it to law enforcement, according to the complaint.
Schneider faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison if convicted, the DOJ said.
Attorney information was not immediately available.
A photo of Taylor Taranto from a detention memo released by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. (U.S. District Court)
(WASHINGTON) — A day after the Justice Department withdrew a sentencing memo that described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” the convicted Jan. 6 participant accused in the case is scheduled to appear at a sentencing hearing Thursday.
Federal prosecutors Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were informed Wednesday that they would be put on leave after filing the memo in the case of Taylor Taranto, who was convicted on firearms and threat charges related to a June 2023 arrest near the home of former President Barack Obama, after Taranto was pardoned by President Donald Trump over his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
“On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum said. “Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building.”
The memo also detailed how Taranto traveled to former President Obama’s home only after a Truth Social post from then-former President Trump that included Obama’s address.
It’s unclear if Valdivia or White were given a reason for their suspensions, though the moves come following months of turmoil in the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office where multiple career prosecutors faced removals or demotions related to their involvement in prosecuting the more than 1,500 defendants charged in connection with the Capitol attack.
Late Wednesday, the Justice Department, in a highly unusual move, withdraw the original sentencing memo and replaced it with one in which the references to Jan. 6 and Trump’s Truth social account were eliminated.
Taranto was scheduled to appear at Thursday’s sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump-appointed judge who has described the Jan. 6 attack in serious terms.
Following Trump’s reelection victory in November, Judge Nichols said it would be “beyond frustrating and disappointing” if Trump were to pardon Jan. 6 defendants.
Trump subsequently granted sweeping pardons and commutations to all Jan. 6 defendants on his first day in office.
(AUSTIN, Texas) — Police in Austin, Texas, said they’ve finally identified the man who killed four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in 1991 in a crime that has haunted the city.
Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas and Amy Ayers were attacked in the shop and all shot in the head, lead detective Daniel Jackson said at a news conference on Monday.
The girls were left nude and tied up, and there was evidence of sexual assault, he said. The building was set on fire before the killer fled the scene, Jackson said.
Jackson, who took over the case in 2022, said this June he started researching a spent .380 casing found at the scene.
“It had not been submitted into the NIBIN system in many years. NIBIN is a National Integrated Ballistic Information Network — it’s kind of like CODIS [the Combined DNA Index System] for shell casings,” Jackson explained.
In July, Jackson learned of a hit in NIBIN: It appeared the same gun was used in an unsolved murder in Kentucky, which shared “similar details” with the yogurt shop murders, he said.
“But aside from the MO [modus operandi] and the NIBIN hit, there are no obvious links,” he said.
Since 2008, investigators have also tried many DNA testing strategies, Jackson said, conducting new searches over the years as DNA databases have grown. From the scene, investigators had obtained the suspect’s Y-STR, which is y chromosome DNA, he said.
Jackson said police reached out to labs that conduct Y-STR typing and “asked if they can manually search against our unknown profile — and we got a match.”
“The South Carolina state lab was the only lab in the country that responded that they had a match … the full profile and every allele was the same,” Jackson said.
In August, that lab found a match to a 1990 sexual assault and murder in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson said. “And this was the profile that they had: Robert Eugene Brashers,” he said.
Austin police then retested the Y-STR DNA from under Ayers’ fingernails, he said. “It was directly compared to Brashers’ profile — and it matched,” Jackson said.
Before the yogurt shop murders, Brashers had served time in prison for shooting a woman, and he was granted parole in 1989, Jackson said.
DNA also links Brashers to multiple “unsolved murders and sexual assaults across the country,” Jackson said. “He’s good for sexual assaults and murders throughout the ’90s that he never had to stand trial for.”
Brashers died by suicide in 1999 after a standoff with officers, police said.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis called the murders “one of the most devastating and haunting cases in the city’s history.”
Barbara Ayres-Wilson, mom of victims Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, said at Monday’s news conference, “I’m full of gratitude. It has been so long, and all we ever wanted for this case was the truth.”
“We never wanted anyone to go to jail or be charged with anything that they did not do — vengeance was never it,” she said. “It was always the truth.”
At the news conference, Travis County District Attorney José Garza addressed the four suspects who were arrested in 1999.
“There are still investigative steps that are underway. That being said, the overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the guilt of one man and the innocence of four,” he said. “If the conclusions of that investigation are confirmed, the Travis County District Attorney’s Office will take responsibility for our role in prosecuting these men, in sending one to death row and one to serve life in prison. If the conclusions of APD’s investigations are confirmed, as it appears that they will be, I will say I am sorry, though I know that that will never be enough.”
(NEW YORK) — A 350-billion-year-old rock discovered on the Red Planet is “the closest we’ve come to discovering ancient life on Mars,” according to NASA.
Potential signs of microbial life were found in a rock sample collected by the rover in 2024 from an ancient dry riverbed on Mars’ Jezero Crater — an area of rocky outcrops on the edges the Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing to the canyon billions of years ago, NASA officials announced in a press conference on Wednesday.
The sample, named “Sapphire Canyon,” contains potential biosignatures, which are substances or structures that might have a biological origin, NASA said.
“To be clear, it’s not life itself, but a signature, like seeing a fossil or leftovers from a microbial process,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday. “It could have been formed billions of years ago. We’re sharing this first result with the world and inviting continued analysis.”
The finding is the closest astronomers have ever come to discovering life on Mars, Sean Duffy, acting NASA administrator, told reporters in Wednesday’s news conference.
“The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” he said.
The sample was collected in 2024 from a rock named “Cheyava Falls.” The arrowhead-shaped rock measures about 3.2 feet by 2 feet and contains what appears to be colorful spots that could have been left behind by microbial life.
Fox said the leopard-spotted rock had never been seen before on the Martian surface. Using the rover’s organic chemical detector to analyze the spots, scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found iron, phosphorus and sulfur arranged in patterns consistent with minerals like vivianite (hydrated iron phosphate) and greigite (iron sulfide) that could have “potentially been made by ancient life.”
Higher-resolution images revealed a distinct pattern of minerals arranged into reaction fronts — or points of contact where chemical and physical reactions occur, according to NASA.
NASA said that vivianite is frequently found on Earth around decaying organic matter and in sediments and peat bogs. Greigite is produced by certain forms of microbial life on our planet.
“On Earth, these minerals are often byproducts of microbial metabolisms. Non-biological explanations exist, but this is the strongest evidence yet for a possible biosignature on Mars,” said Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University, who is one of the experts involved in the project. “To be certain, we must eventually return these samples to Earth.”
Hurowitz said that other non-organic reasons could explain the findings, but added that “The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms.”
The findings were released on Wednesday in a peer-reviewed scientific journal article published in Nature.
The formation’s sedimentary rocks are composed of clay and silt — materials that are “excellent preservers” of past microbial life on Earth, NASA said.
The discovery was “particularly surprising” because the sample was taken from the youngest sedimentary rocks the mission has investigated, contrary to an earlier hypothesis that assumed signs of ancient life would be confined to older rock formations, according to NASA.
NASA said the only way to confirm the findings is to return the sample to Earth. However, the Trump administration has recommended eliminating the funding for a program that would have returned Mars samples to Earth.
“This is a potential biosignature. That means it could have a biological origin, but more study is required. These findings are the result of decades of strategic exploration, thousands of scientists, and missions building on each other,” said Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration at NASA.
Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been studying the red planet’s Jazero Crater region ever since. It’s collected and analyzed 30 samples so far and has room for six more.
“NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil,” Duffy said in a statement.
