On the same day a federal grand jury indicted Donald Trump on charges of hoarding classified documents after his election loss, a local man upset at the FBI for raiding the former president’s house to retrieve those records admitted to threatening to murder agents.
Adam Bies, who lives in rural Mercer County, pleaded guilty Thursday to 14 counts related to threats he made in the wake of the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.
Bies, 47, is lucky he’s still alive to enter a plea.
After the Pittsburgh FBI SWAT team and its state police counterpart showed up at his house last August, he emerged with an assault weapon. He put it down after they told him to. Had he not, an agent testified, the scenario would have “turned out differently” — meaning they would have killed him.
That was the fate of another man angry at the bureau over the Florida search. He tried to breach the office of the Cincinnati FBI. Police later shot him after a standoff.
Over the course of three days after the raid, Bies went online and made a series of vile threats.
In one posting he said, “Come and get me you piece of shit feds. I can’t wait to watch you bleed out you pedophile scumbags. Every single one of you deserve a painful death.”
He compared the FBI to the Nazi SS and the Soviet KGB. He said he wanted everyone at the FBI to be killed — even the janitors.
He also indicated he was willing to die in a shootout, saying, “My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop” and vowing not to spend “one second” in jail.
He was wrong on both counts. He didn’t shoot it out with the FBI when he had the chance, and he did go to jail after a magistrate judge ordered him detained. Now he’s certain to get prison time.
The investigation started when an FBI national threat team received a tip from a group that tracks domestic terrorists that someone calling himself “BlankFocus” was issuing threats on the social media platform Gab. In addition to wanting to kill FBI agents, he also threatened the CEO of Gab.
Bies, a self-described “adventure photographer,” had previously been active online before the Trump raid in rants against COVID-19 vaccines, loss of jobs to foreigners and his hatred of liberals.
Just before the FBI came to his house, he had also texted his intentions to his girlfriend that he wanted to kill FBI and IRS agents and would shoot it out. He told her he wanted to leave the children of FBI agents without parents.
When the law officers arrived, he grabbed his gun and “walked toward confrontation,” in the words of a prosecutor at his detention hearing.
But in the end, he surrendered and later told agents he was sorry for what he’d done. In addition to his assault rifle, he had 12 other guns in the house and a compound bow that he had threatened to use on FBI agents.
U.S. District Judge William Stickman said he’ll sentence Bies in the fall.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
