The Columbia alumnus and former New York Times reporter was charged with criminal trespassing in the third degree
Bloomberg journalist Jason Kao was among those arrested at Columbia University during a violent takeover of the school’s Butler Library earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
Kao, a graphics reporter for the news outlet and Columbia alumnus, was one of the 81 radicals collared at the library after the violent mob clashed with security officials. During the unrest, rioters injured two, passed out pamphlets endorsing Hamas’s violence, vandalized and damaged the library, and renamed the building after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with the Israel Defense Forces.
“I currently work for Bloomberg News, where I use data and data visualization to cover the news,” Kao wrote on his personal website.
Kao was employed by Bloomberg News as of May 1, based on a social media post from a colleague. A Bloomberg spokesperson told the Free Beacon on Monday that Kao is no longer employed by the company.
An NYPD spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that Kao was cuffed and charged with “criminal trespassing in the third degree,” suggesting he wasn’t simply covering the Butler Library storming as a journalist. Kao did not respond to a request for comment.
Kao, who graduated from Columbia in 2022, previously worked for the New York Times as a reporter in the graphics department. During his time there, Kao squabbled over the paper’s return-to-office policies following the COVID-19 pandemic and participated in a one-day strike in December 2022 to demand double-digit salary increases. He left the Gray Lady in May 2023.
Kao has also worked as a fellow for the Texas Tribune, a graphics editor for ProPublica, and a contributor to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
While his work at the Times and Bloomberg have covered a variety of topics, including the war in Ukraine and New York City’s congestion pricing program, Kao’s personal website is exclusively devoted to negative coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The X account “@cow_portal,” which belonged to Kao, appears to have posted frequently about Israel and Gaza, according to cached Google search results. The account also appears to have been recently nuked, with a colleague tagging him in an X post on May 1, a week before he joined the library raid.
A total of 81 people were arrested during the May 7 library demonstrations, according to a list obtained by the Free Beacon. The miscreants ran the gamut and included repeat offenders, celebrity nepo baby Ramona Sarsgaard, avant-garde artists, and a disproportionately large contingent of people who identify as “they/them.” At least one person arrested was born outside the United States, which could raise Trump administration’s ire.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has made combating anti-Semitism on college campuses a priority. His administration has already canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia as punishment for the university’s failure to rein in anti-Semitism and violent student groups that have openly supported Hamas.
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