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- Federal agents say a man who applied for a job at the FBI lied about running a Twitter account full of offensive memes.
- Abdulwahab Humayun, who was arrested on Tuesday on charges of lying to federal agents, “frequently posted publicly viewable content that was violent or threatening in nature,” an affidavit said.
- The tweets, posted by @AmericanEmirate, include flattering references to Jihadism and jokes about mass shootings.
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A man who applied for a position at the FBI lied about running a Twitter account full of offensive, anti-Semitic, and pro-Jihadist memes, federal agents said in an affidavit filed Monday.
Abdulwahab Humayun was arrested on Tuesday on one count of lying to federal agents. Humayun, who was born in 1998 and graduated from George Mason University in May, lied to the FBI about the Twitter account where he “frequently posted publicly viewable content that was violent or threatening in nature,” according to the affidavit obtained by Insider.
The account, @AmericanEmirate, had 2,209 followers as of Friday morning. Many of the tweets, which federal prosecutors say were penned by Humayun, are considered “sh-tposts,” which are ironic and sometimes offensive memes posted for the purpose of trolling.
In an April 2019 tweet, which was referenced in the affidavit, the user posted a picture of Yoda from “Star Wars” with the text, “DO JIHAD, I MUST… KILL INFIDELS, I WILL.”
The case, filed by the US District Court in Virginia, was first reported by The Daily Beast on Thursday. Humayun’s attorney did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Federal prosecutors allege that Humayun applied to a position with the FBI's Collegiate Hiring Initiative in September 2019. In January 2020, while conducting a background check on the applicant as part of the hiring process, the agency opened an investigation into his @AmericanEmirate account.
Screenshot/Twitter
In October, the FBI conducted another interview with Humayun under the guise of another step in the application process. According to the affidavit, agents asked Humayun for information about his Twitter use, and Humayun said that he had used two different Twitter accounts, but did not mention @AmericanEmirate. The affidavit alleges that Humayun locked the Twitter account after the interview to make his posts private to users not following him.
The affidavit includes 10 examples of memes Humayun allegedly posted between 2018 and 2020 that showed a "historical pattern of nonspecific threats of violence and menacing images."
One particularly disturbing tweet, posted on September 4, included a picture of a gunman with the words, "POV," meaning "point of view," a popular meme construction, and "YOU'RE A CHARLIE HEBDO CARTOONIST," referencing the January 2015 shooting at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people and injured another 11.
The account's final tweet before Humayun's arrest, posted on December 5, depicted Dwayne Johnson telling a caricature of a Jewish man, "Take it easy Yahudi. They're just Islamist memes."
Court documents show that Humayun waived his right to a preliminary hearing, which was originally scheduled for Friday afternoon. It was not immediately clear when Humayun would next appear before the court.
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