The man accused of killing two young employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington pleaded not guilty on Thursday to a long list of charges, including federal hate crimes and murder, in a case that could result in the death penalty.
Standing beside his lawyer in an orange jumpsuit during a brief arraignment hearing, Elias Rodriguez calmly acknowledged that he understood the charges as Judge Randolph D. Moss scheduled the next steps in what both the government and Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers said could be a lengthy and complicated case.
Mr. Rodriguez, 31, was arrested in May in connection with the fatal shooting of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the two embassy employees. They were shot and killed while leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.
Mr. Lischinsky, 30, and Ms. Milgrim, 26, both worked on the embassy’s diplomatic outreach. Ms. Milgrim organized events focused on collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians on problems such as water scarcity. Mr. Lischinsky had bought an engagement ring months earlier and planned to propose.
Before flying from his home in Chicago to Washington in May with a gun checked in his luggage, according to prosecutors, Mr. Rodriguez had become a vehement critic of the Israeli government and its nearly two years of military occupation of Gaza.
Posting online shortly before the shooting, he wrote that the Israeli and American governments’ responsibility for the conditions in Gaza justified “armed action.” Afterward, he stated, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” according to an F.B.I. affidavit.
At the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Elizabeth Mullin, said the team defending him had been overwhelmed by a crushing load of evidence turned over by the government. Christopher Tortorice, a Justice Department lawyer, said there were nearly 1.5 million pages of evidence. Ms. Mullin requested a jury trial and a more extended timeline for the case given its complexity, a request the government agreed was appropriate.
The Trump administration, which has stood by President Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions in Israel despite mounting global criticism of his conduct of the war in Gaza, has vowed to prosecute the case aggressively.
In August, Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News co-host tapped by President Trump to run the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, announced additional hate crime charges against Mr. Rodriguez but declined at a news conference to say whether the government had decided to seek the death penalty.
Judge Moss said on Thursday that he would allow 90 days before holding the next hearing in the case, noting the volume of evidence and the serious undertones of political violence and antisemitism that Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers will be forced to address.
The case comes as Mr. Trump and Republicans work to paint Washington and other Democratic-run cities as overrun by crime and violence.
Last week, Mr. Trump called on the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in all murder cases in Washington and has worked to stoke public fear about crime to marshal political support for deploying the National Guard on the streets of Washington and other cities.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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