James von Brunn, the white supremacist who officials say shot dead a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, last year, was planning to target a senior White House adviser, Time magazine reported Thursday.

In a report on domestic extremism in the US, Time correspondent Barton Gellman dropped a bombshell: Shortly after the museum shootings, authorities learned that von Brunn had been targeting senior White House adviser David Axelrod.

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“Authorities did not disclose … how close the country had come to a seismic political event,” Gellman reported.

Von Brunn, authoritative sources say, had another target in mind: White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a man at the center of Obama’s circle. The President was too hard to reach, in Von Brunn’s view, but that was of no consequence. “Obama was created by Jews,” he wrote. “Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.” The episode sent a jolt through the FBI and DHS. Von Brunn had demonstrated motive, means and intent to kill one of the President’s closest aides. The Secret Service assigned Axelrod a protection detail and took other, undisclosed steps to broaden its coverage. The DHS put out bulletins to state and local law-enforcement agencies on the tactics, warning signs and other lessons of the case.

On June 10, 2009, 88-year-old von Brunn allegedly shot and killed Stephen Tyrone Jones, a security guard at the Holocaust Museum. Von Brunn reportedly said he wanted to draw attention to the notion that the Holocaust never happened. He died in jail in January before his trial could begin.

AOL News notes that, in the summer of 2009, Axelrod was seen around Chicago with a Secret Service detail — an unusual development, given that someone in Axelrod’s position could only get a detail if the president signed an executive order.