Authorities have arrested an Alaska man, Panos Anastasiou, 76, on charges that he threatened to assault, kidnap, and murder six U.S. Supreme Court justices and some of their family members. Prosecutors allege that Anastasiou sent over 465 threatening messages through the Supreme Court’s website, starting in March 2023, with the threats escalating in violence by January 2024. The messages contained violent and racist language.
The 22-count indictment did not name the justices directly but seemed to target members of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, including Justice Clarence Thomas. Anastasiou’s threats also referenced a “convicted criminal,” likely pointing to Republican former President Donald Trump, who had faced legal proceedings in New York. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland condemned Anastasiou’s actions, accusing him of making “repeated, heinous threats to murder and torture Supreme Court justices and their families” as retaliation for decisions he opposed.
Anastasiou pleaded not guilty after his arrest on Wednesday. His lawyer did not comment, and the Supreme Court has not responded to requests for comment.
The case comes amid a notable rise in threats against federal judges, with serious threats increasing from 224 in fiscal year 2021 to 457 in fiscal 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. The trend reflects a growing national concern, as seen in the case of Nicholas Roske, a California man who awaits trial for attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022.
In one of his threats, Anastasiou expressed a desire to see a justice hanged from a tree alongside the former president. He used racist slurs to target the justice and threatened his “white … insurrectionist wife,” according to court documents. Anastasiou also wrote in May 2024 that he hoped the justice and his wife would be visiting another “disrespectful” justice and his wife when Vietnam veterans like himself would ambush them with AR-15 rifles.
This case emerged after Democratic lawmakers repeatedly called for Justice Clarence Thomas, who is Black, to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack. These calls followed revelations that Ginni Thomas, his white wife, had encouraged efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Anastasiou’s threats also referenced Justice Samuel Alito, whose Virginia home had been in the spotlight after an American flag was photographed hanging upside down there, which Alito attributed to his wife in the wake of the January 6 riot.
