Nicholas Roske, 26, may have pled not guilty to the one count of attempting to assassinate a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in this case Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but a recently unveiled FBI search warrant recently revealed some damning evidence.
As Fox News reported, Roske conducted Google searches related to the assassination plot, and discussed it over the Internet with other users:
According to the FBI search warrant obtained by Fox News Digital, 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske Googled various search terms related to the attack, including "how to be stealthy," "assassin skills" and "most effective place to stab someone" in the weeks leading up to the planned attack.
"im gonna stop roe v wade from being overturned," Roske told another internet user in an online conversation, according to the documents.
The other user responded with, "what u tryna do."
Roske said back, "remove some people from the Supreme Court."
The person Roske was speaking with said that "two dead judges ain't gonna do nothing. The whole government is f***** There's no fixing that You would die before you killed them all."
Roske responded, "yeah but I could get at least one, which would change the votes for decades to come, and I am shooting for 3 all of the major decisions for the past 10 years have been along party lines so if there are more liberal than conservative judges, they will have the power."
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Roske also used the online address HelenKiller1969@gmail.com, according to the documents.
"Roske said that he used his Reddit account to ask individuals, who were unknown to him, questions in order to refine his plan to kill the Justice," authorities say in the warrant application.
Chillingly, Roske also planned to potentially target at least two other justices. He was upset about a leaked draft showing that the Court looked to overturn Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which it officially did on June 24, weeks after the foiled assassination attempt. Roske thought that killing Kavanaugh before himself could give his life purpose.
He allegedly traveled from his home in California to Maryland, where Justice Kavanaugh lives with his wife and two daughters. While Roske was armed with a knife, pistol, ammunition, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape, among other things, he had second thoughts and called 911 on himself after he noticed marshals outside of the Kavanaugh residence.
Five justices voted in favor of overturning Roe with, with Chief Justice John Roberts only concurring, as he would have voted to hold up the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban at the heart of the case, but would have not gone so far as to overturn Roe v. Wade.
In such a decision, every vote mattered, and the death of one conservative justice, or several, would certainly have thrown the Court into chaos.
The 911 calls that were released last month, not long after the foiled attempt, confirmed Roske's motivations, which not only had to do with Dobbs, but how Justice Kavanaugh might vote in future cases to do with the Second Amendment.
President Joe Biden failed to directly condemn or even address the assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh, though Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates did send a statement to Fox News saying the president condemned the attempt, but it was full of gaslighting. It's also worth highlighting how Bates argued that day over Twitter with Kayleigh McEnany, the White House Press Secretary under former President Donald Trump, about whether the president had sufficiently condemned intimidation against conservative justices.
A previous Fox News report, from when Roske pled not guilty last month, does quote Attorney General Merrick Garland as saying "This kind of behavior is obviously behavior we will not tolerate. Threats of violence and actual violence against the justices of course strike at the heart of our democracy and we will do everything we can to prevent them and to hold people who do them accountable."
If found guilty, Roske could face life in prison.
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