The Mercer County man accused of threatening to murder FBI agents on Gab last week emerged from his house with an assault weapon in his hands when the FBI arrived Friday night, an agent testified Thursday, but ultimately dropped the gun after commands to put it down.
At a federal detention hearing for Adam Bies on Thursday, prosecutors presented that testimony and other evidence of potential violence, including the presence of 12 other guns in the house, to show that Bies is a danger to the community and should be locked up pending trial.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan agreed.
”Threatening to shoot the FBI is a threat to the community,” she said. “I will grant the government’s request for detention.”
In commenting on Bies’ emergence from the house with a rifle while FBI and state police SWAT teams waited outside, she said “thank God” Bies put the gun down or there could have been a deadly shootout.
The judge noted that Bies is accused of making a series of violent threats online over three days as well as sending texts to his girlfriend on the day of the arrest indicating that he wanted to shoot IRS and FBI agents.
Bies was indicted Tuesday on 14 counts related to seven vile online death threats against the FBI he made on Gab in response to the bureau’s search of Donald Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8.
Agent Gregg Frankhouser testified that agents and police arrived at Bies’ house at 11 p.m. Friday with lights and sirens, then called him on his cellphone 16 times while repeatedly asking him on their public address system to come out. After 30 or 40 minutes, he walked out onto a side porch with an AR-style rifle in his hands.
Agents told him to drop it several times, and he did.
Had he not, Frankhouser said, “It would have ended differently.”
Bies’ 12-year-old son came out soon after. A search of the house turned up 12 other guns, including shotguns, pistols and rifles. In one of Bies’ Gab posts, he had threatened to kill FBI agents with a compound bow.
At the Mercer state police barracks, Frankhouser said, Bies acknowledged his Gab posts sent Aug. 10, 11 and 12. Under questioning by Bies’ public defender, Sarah Levin, the agent said Bies told him “he was sorry and that he didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Bengel said that Bies should be detained as both a threat and a risk to flee.
He said that when the FBI announced its presence at his house on Friday, Bies went to the basement, got his gun and “walked toward confrontation” rather than come out immediately and unarmed.
Bies is charged with seven counts of interstate threats and seven counts of influencing or retaliating against a federal officer by making threats.
The indictment says that the day after the search at Trump’s estate, Bies posted to his Gab account, “Is it time for civil war yet? Seriously, how much longer before we finally do what needs to be done?”
The grand jury charged Bies with individual counts for specific posts he made against the FBI over three days.
Count one, for example, pertains to an Aug. 12 post in which the FBI said Mr. Bies wrote, “Come and get me you piece of [expletive] feds. I can’t wait to watch you bleed out you pedophile scumbags. Every single one of you deserve a painful death.”
