“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough sees the violence that erupted at the FBI’s Cincinnati office Thursday as an event cut from the same cloth as the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A 42-year-old man – now identified as Columbus, Ohio, resident Ricky Shiffer – tried to breach the FBI offices in Cincinnati on Thursday armed and wearing body armor. After he set off an alarm and fled the scene, a chase and shootout ensued, ultimately resulting in Shiffer being fatally wounded.
Based on social media accounts bearing his name on Truth Social and apparent video footage of him attending a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, Shiffer was a known supporter of Donald Trump with possible ties to extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6 riots. He stormed the FBI offices just three days after the agency executed a legal search warrant on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Addressing the news on Friday, Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski suggested that such outbursts of violence are a result of Trump and his allies’ words and actions, particularly as they relate to the FBI, and the former president’s refusal to cooperate with various ongoing investigations.
“You just get the sense that from the start of this, Trump has known that he’s a corrupt politician who’s been cornered, and so what has he done? He’s refused to release the documents,” Scarborough said. “He could’ve released the documents at any time, and instead he’s been whipping up a frenzy against the FBI and against law enforcement officers, and we saw the consequences of that yesterday, most likely.”
He continued: “If the reporting is correct, sure enough, just as I’ve been warning on this show every day: The irresponsible voices on the Trump right are ginning up hatred against our FBI, against law enforcement agents, against the very people they once claimed to support. And while they’re whipping them into this frenzy, they’re putting the lives – they’re putting targets on the back of FBI agents.”
Citing Shiffer’s death, Scarborough added that he’s “deceased now because he was whipped into a frenzy by these conspiracy theorists. I gotta say, it’s just like Jan. 6.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
