On Snapchat, Dayton Sauke bragged about his illegal "sawn-off" shotgun and his plans to kill a law enforcement officer at a pro-Trump rally at the Minnesota Capitol last weekend.
"Even if I kill only 1 cop thats more than antifa cop lovers have ever killed," the 22-year-old Owatonna man boasted under a photo of himself smoking a cigarette.
On Friday, the federal agents who had been monitoring Sauke's social media arrested him after Sauke sold an illegal firearm to two undercover agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to federal charges filed Tuesday. Sauke made his first appearance on the felony charge on Tuesday and will remain in custody until his next hearing later this week.
Since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, federal law enforcement has bolstered efforts to find and stop violent extremists across the country leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday. The Minnesota Capitol has gone into a state of lockdown, heavily guarded this past weekend in response to plans of armed protests that never materialized. A bulletin from the FBI's Minneapolis field office warned of credible attacks from members of the anti-government Boogaloo Bois, a group intent on starting a civil war.
Federal sources with knowledge of the case say Sauke appears to be a lone wolf, not tied to any network of extremists. But many of his social media posts reflect an anarchistic ideology similar to the Boogaloo Bois. One social media photo shows Sauke carrying a gun along with the caption "Sic Semper Tyrannis," a Latin phrase co-opted by the Boogaloo movement meaning justice will befall tyrants — the same words uttered by Abraham Lincoln's assassin and that appeared on Timothy McVeigh's T-shirt the day he killed 168 people in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.
On Snapchat and his public-facing Instagram page, Sauke posted photos of himself holding guns alongside anti-leftist sentiments and expressions of a desire to kill someone, namely a police officer or politician. One post shows him burning an American flag with a blue stripe — a symbol of the pro-law enforcement Blue Lives Matter movement — alongside the caption: "Police lives don't matter."
"We're all from the same cloth," he wrote in another post. "Don't be showing out for any politicians we gotta murder every single one of them."
Federal agents began monitoring Sauke last year after a confidential informant said he posted on social media about manufacturing and selling guns. Several posts on Snapchat showed a gun with black tape around the handle. "Went and got me a sawn-off illegal ASL," he wrote.
