Former Milwaukee County sheriff and vocal Trump defender David Clarke found himself temporarily blocked on Twitter after tweeting threatening and aggressive statements about the “lying lib media.”
In one, he tweeted:
“BREAKING NEWS! When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up FAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA’S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown”
The tweet was one of several Clarke sent out in response to stories that emerged Friday about a search warrant request for Clarke’s emails. The request, which was part of a past investigation into his staff’s harassment of an airline passenger who “shook his head at [Clarke] for a prolonged period of time,” was only made public last week, according to USA Today. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in its article about the search warrant, the prosecution had dropped the case.
Some Twitter users appeared to infer that the search warrant meant the investigation was ongoing, or new, but it seems most news outlets, including the Journal Sentinel, were clear that it wasn’t.
“Lying Lib media took a story from LAST MAY & reports this today as new,” Clarke tweeted Friday night.
One or more people then reported Clarke to Twitter for his threatening messages about “punching” the media, which violates Twitter’s terms of service related to calls for violence. According to CNN, Clarke was placed in read-only mode until he deleted three of his tweets.
Clarke, who resigned as sheriff in August, joined the Trump super PAC America First Action in September. Clarke’s Twitter feed is strewn with aggressive statements about immigrants, black crime, and Black Lives Matter. He gained notoriety as an inflammatory figure who said he believed Black Lives Matter would team up with ISIS and called for crackdowns on anti-Trump protesters and suspending habeas corpus for the thousands of Americans he believed to be terrorist sympathizers. In 2016, a prisoner in the Milwaukee County Jail he managed died of dehydration after going a week without water.
