An Arizona man charged last month over his alleged vows to “execute every single FBI agent and employee, including the maintenance staff,” among other violent threats to public officials, had several powerful firearms and some 5,000 rounds of ammunition on hand when the feds showed up at his door.
That’s according to a pair of FBI search warrant returns unsealed Sunday and obtained by The Daily Beast, which suggest Michael Lee Tomasi, 37, had the means to carry out the horrific attacks prosecutors say he warned he’d eventually commit. But, as previously unreported court filings also reveal, Tomasi gave arresting agents an intrepid excuse for his alleged behavior: He was drunk.
According to the warrant returns, FBI agents on Dec. 19 seized from Tomasi’s home and Jeep Cherokee:
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- One Smith & Wesson M&P 15 assault-style rifle
- One Remington Model 870 Tactical shotgun
- One Springfield Armory XD-9 semi-automatic handgun
- 2,500 rounds of 9mm ammunition
- 1,500 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition
- 700+ rounds of shotgun ammunition
- 10 magazines loaded with 9mm rounds
- Five 30- and 40-round AR-15 magazines, loaded
- Two unmarked ammunition cans containing 12-gauge, .223, and .270 ammunition
- Four magazines loaded with 223/5.56 rounds
- One box of 9mm ammunition
- One box of 5.56 ammunition
- One bag of shotgun ammunition
- Six Federal 00 buckshot shells
- One “burnt” rifle
- One soft case shotgun bag, containing shotgun rounds
- One black bulletproof vest
A box of handgun ammunition typically contains 50 rounds; a box of rifle ammunition normally holds 20.
All of the weapons were legally purchased, according to court filings. However, prosecutors argued in a detention memo asking for Tomasi to be locked up pending trial, “the totality of circumstances surrounding his violent online threats and the possession of weapons is indicative of danger to the community.”
Tomasi’s attorneys, Joshua Fisher and Woody Thompson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
After being kicked off YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the former indoor golf entrepreneur began posting threats in May 2021 on Patriot.win, an internet forum billing itself as “a never-ending rally of patriots dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” according to an indictment handed down Dec. 12 by an Arizona federal grand jury.
In one posting, Tomasi, under the screen name “Sgt. Cup,” used a homophobic slur to describe former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci, and said he “needs to be tortured to death.” Fauci “is literally worse than Hitler and Moa [sic] combined,” according to the indictment. “His entire bloodline should be killed off.” In another, Tomasi allegedly posted, “I want to rape [U.S. Congresswoman 1] not because of any sexual gratification I get out of it, but because I want to put her through the horror of a violent rape.” In a third, Tomasi, who was living in Colorado at the time, went after Denver District Attorney Beth McCann for dropping a murder charge against a private security guard accused of shooting a protester in self-defense at a right-wing rally two years earlier.
“I’m local[,] I’ll be there tomorrow outside the DA [sic] office,” the post read. “I’m fucking done and someone needs to die for this.”
Over the next two and a half years, Tomasi also threatened to “take care of” a judge who ruled against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, said he’d firebomb the home of a woman who canceled a conservative political group’s dinner reservation, and goaded the FBI to “come to my house and see what happens,” the indictment against him states. “And after they are all dead I will make sure to sin in every possible way before I took my own life so that I could be sent to hell to further torture their miserable fucking souls for eternity. Fuck FBI,” Tomasi wrote, according to the indictment. “But I want them to be fucked to death. Hangings aren’t punishment enough. I want them to die slowly by bleeding out through their assholes.”
In a separate posting, the indictment says Tomasi called FBI agents “terrorists that deserve nothing but to be shot on site [sic],” and said that if any “FBI f*g has a problem with that[,] come to my house and see what happens. Shoot before they even pull their gun out of their trunk and you shoot to kill.” According to the indictment, Tomasi wrote that “anyone who kicks in my door dies. I have more then [sic] ‘guns.’ MEGA KEK,’” namechecking a cartoon “deity” featured in a meme popular among the alt-right.
The vile posts continued through November 2023, according to prosecutors. Tomasi was arrested Dec. 15 in the Scottsdale suburb of Rio Verde, at his grandparents’ home, where he had been living. Upon his arrest, Tomasi was “cooperative with law enforcement upon his arrest, stating that he knew he’d said some bad things online,” according to the detention memo, which was filed by prosecutors on Dec. 20, one day after FBI agents seized Tomasi’s guns and ammo.
Tomasi admitted to agents that he was the one who posted the threats, the detention memo says. He said “he had been drinking heavily around that timeframe,” and that alcohol had historically been a problem for him. Tomasi also denied that his “statements” were in fact threats, according to the memo.
The threats began while Tomasi was living in Denver, where he was one of three co-owners running an indoor golf facility, but “continued and arguably became more extreme and more focused on law enforcement when he moved back to Arizona,” according to the memo. There, he took care of an elderly grandfather and worked at a local golf club, according to a detention memo filed by defense attorneys.
His political postings stretch back at least a decade, with a 2012 YouTube video in which he complained about welfare recipients and accused “gangsters” in the government of “stealing our wealth through inflation” and “robbing our country from us.”
Tomasi last posted on Patriots.win on Dec. 14, when he wrote, “Is it time to shoot our government yet or are we gonna wait it out a little more[?]” In the days preceding, Tomasi posted messages reading, “We need to kill more politicians and jusges [sic]. Make assassinations great again,” “Trump goes i pick off politicians tell [sic] i die its [sic] that simple,” and expressed pride at having been placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s Secondary Security Screening Selection list, writing, “I was so happy and pumped when it happened. Told TSA ‘do you know how much street cred this is gonna get me!’ Laughed the whole way through the process.”
Tomasi remains detained as a flight risk and a danger to the community. He is scheduled to go to trial Feb. 6.
