An aspiring country singer and diehard MAGA fan set out to defend Donald Trump’s honor, but wound up in handcuffs instead.
North Carolina insurance salesman and semi-pro musician Stephen Jike Williams, who performs simply as Jike Williams, allegedly vowed to execute fact checkers for the “defamation and slander” of the ex-president. When the FBI showed up at his door, Williams threatened the life of a female agent assigned to investigate, according to a criminal complaint first obtained by The Daily Beast.
He then followed up a few days later with additional death threats on TikTok, in a video titled, simply, “Fuck the FBI,” the feds say.
Williams, 42, is now charged with threatening to murder a federal law enforcement officer and transmission of interstate threats. The complaint against him, which was unsealed Friday in North Carolina federal court, says that Williams was incensed over, variously, the 2020 “stolen” election, vaccine mandates, his TikTok account getting suspended, and liberals pushing “anti-Trump propaganda.”
Williams’ court-appointed lawyer, Corey D. Buggs, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Williams’ troubles began with a Sept. 18 email to the Good Information Foundation, a left-leaning nonprofit founded after the 2020 election to fight mis- and disinformation.
“You are hereby ordered by we the people under the laws of the constitution to cease and desist all defamation and slander of Maga [sic] Republicans and Donald Trump,” the message read, according to the complaint. “This is Treason an act of war and we will treat you accordingly. You have till [sic] the end of the month to print a retraction whistle blow on yourself or I will shut you down personally.”
The email went on: “Lethal action will be necessary if any physical detainment is attempted when I shut you down. Leave peacefully or your children will forget who you are.”
On Sept. 19, the Good Information Foundation’s lawyer forwarded the email, which Williams had allegedly sent from his personal account, to the FBI. Agents in the Washington Field Office sent the bureau’s investigative assessment to the bureau’s Greensboro Resident Agency Office for follow-up, the complaint states.
On Oct. 3, “a female FBI agent… and a male Task Force Officer”—that is, a local cop deputized to assist in federal investigations—“attempted to interview Williams at his residence,” it explains.
The pair were in plainclothes and showed up in an unmarked car at Williams home in the rural town of Stokesdale, according to the filing. When they pulled into the driveway, Williams bolted from his front porch and ran toward the vehicle.
“Why the fuck are you on my property?” Williams shouted, according to the complaint.
The female agent showed Williams her credentials, which “instantly made [him] very angry, and he began yelling that the Department of Justice and the FBI hired a Russian agent to steal the election,” it says.
Williams continued screaming into the window of the car, spittle hitting the agent sitting inside, the complaint continues, adding that the task force officer “advised Williams to stop spitting on” the agent.
“Williams stepped back and continued being irate and hostile,” states the complaint. “Williams called [the agent] a ‘bitch’ multiple times and stated [the task force officer] should arrest [the agent] and have her executed for treason and sedition. Williams stated to [the agent], ‘I’m going to take you out.’”
When the two warned Williams that he could be charged criminally for threatening a federal agent, he allegedly began screaming over and over, “Get the fuck off my property!”
The agent and the task force officer left without interviewing Williams about the threatening email to the Good Information Foundation, according to the complaint.
On Oct. 6, the FBI agent, whose name is redacted in the complaint for her safety, a separate filing reveals, updated a staffer at the Good Information Foundation with news of the aborted meet with Williams a few days earlier.
During the call, the agent “learned that Williams’s email… was in response to a TikTok video made by a social media influencer that was asked by the Good Information Foundation to produce anti-Trump rhetoric,” the complaint states. “In the video, the influencer exposed that the Good Information Foundation was paying influencers to post videos and requiring them to use preestablished talking points, one of which the representatives of the Good Information Foundation could not provide any factual support for.”
The staffer told the agent that the foundation in fact used “an outside company to hire social media influencers to create videos that aligned with their information and beliefs about former President Donald Trump,” the complaint goes on.
They had received “multiple emails” in response to the TikTok video, but Williams’ “was the most egregious,” according to the complaint. (The “influencer” in question appears to be a lawyer who in September claimed he had been offered $400 by The Good Information Foundation for an anti-Trump Instagram post.)
On Oct. 7, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received a tip from a person identified in the complaint only as “J.K.”
“J.K. reported that they had observed a TikTok video in which a male subject was threatening to kill FBI agents,” the complaint says, noting that J.K. provided a link to the offending clip.
Williams had posted the video, titled, “Fuck the FBI,” in response to the bureau’s visit to his home a few days earlier, according to the feds. In it, he parroted Trumpian claims about the FBI being “corrupt,” and said “all agents are considered to be ‘enemy combatants.’”
“I’m not playing with the fucking FBI,” Williams allegedly said in the two-minute-eighteen-second video. “They’ve been put on fucking notice, if you step back foot on my fucking property, I ain’t gonna sit there and talk to you. I’m going to bust your fucking head open with fucking .308s, man. I’m going to kill every single one of you, stack you up in your cars, and drive you back to headquarters and finish the fucking job… They are absolutely out of control. Stand up to em, fight em, shoot em on sight.”
In a series of follow-up videos, Williams boasted of having “kicked [the FBI] out of the yard,” and detailed his shooting skills. He also held forth on the “new world order, and said he was upset because one of his TikTok accounts had been suspended.
“I’m ready to shoot fucking FBI agents, CIA agents, and any federal law enforcement agent working for Joe Biden or anybody like [German economist and World Economic Forum founder] Klaus Schwab… Australian police, any of them,” Williams said in the video, according to the feds. “Execute those motherfuckers on sight. If they wanna fucking de-populate, de-populate them.”
Williams went on, complaining that the government wants to “take away our weapons,” as well as people’s “ability to communicate,” and that a “purge” of the citizenry was in the offing. (None of this is true, according to Second Amendment experts.) He threatened to assassinate Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and asked why he wasn’t allowed to display his rifles on TikTok but “they’ll show you a syringe that kills little kids in their sleep.” (None of this is true, according to medical experts.)
He ended the video by exhorting viewers to “Fucking fight, man. Fight!”
Williams was arrested Friday and detained pending a detention hearing on Nov. 23. If convicted on both counts, he faces more than a decade in prison.