An Officer and A Skinhead

and he owned those guns legally. Hassen was a fifty year old married father of two and a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard with no criminal history to speak of. He was also addicted to tramadol, an opioid pain medication that he didn't have a prescription for pre trial attention In a case like this seems a little excessive. You could probably just let him go home home, make him turn in his guns, and order weekly drug screenings

with pre trial services. But there was something else going on here. His apartment was packed to the brim with guns, ammunition, and tactical gear, and on his computer they found mass shooter manifestos, terrorism manuals, and a list of names. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. I thought we could use something a little lighter this week after

last week's episode. I know it was a pretty dark one for me to research and write, and I saw some feedback from listeners who said it ruined their day. So fair enough, So nobody dies this week, nobody has a hard drive full of child sexual abuse material, nobody gets shot or raped. There's barely even any hate crimes. It wasn't easy to find a story like that in my mental rolodex, but I.

The government alleged they'd been picked up just days before they could carry out a plan to open fire into a large crowd of heavily armed gun owners in the hopes that the chaos would result in mass casualties. The event they were targeting was one that I had attended as a journalist. It's the annual gun lobby Day in Richmond, Virginia, our state capital. The idea that we'd perhaps just by the skin of our teeth, avoided being massacred in a confused crossfire left.

grabbed his phone. So it was a small courtroom. It was just a hearing with a magistrate judge on detention, and normally in court, I try to sit by myself because I like to sit with my legs sort of fold it up underneath me because my feet don't reach the floor. And I have my huge hardcover spiral notebook open in my lap and I sort of hunch over it like a little gremlin while I take my notes.

But it was crowded, so I had to sit next to some federal agent or another, and he was having the damnedest time trying to figure out how to turn off his iPhone. He just kept locking and unlocking it, locking it and unlocking it, and he couldn't figure out

why wouldn't turn off? And you know, my general preference to never have a conversation with a cop if I can help it is apparently trumped by my inability to sit idly by while someone is very busy being wrong, and I remember sitting there trying to explain to him that you have to hold down the volume button and the lock button at the same time until it turns off. It's not that complicated. I was trying to explain it.

He just kept locking it, unlocking it, turned the volume up and down and locking it, unlocking it, and he.

do with Christopher Hassen. All that to say, it was my second time that month driving the nearly three hours to Marilyn to sit on a bench in an unfamiliar courtroom, and by the time I was there the second time, I was really ruminating on that apparently very nearly successful plot that probably would have claimed my own life among the thousands would have been shot or trampled if Matthews, Lemley and Bilbro had been successful.

I'm not saying the whole story as a joke, but you have to find levity where you can, and where would I even be with a little gallows hue, And all the better when the would be hangman is shackled at the ankles.

your employer monitoring your Internet history. If you're getting your work done, what difference does it make if you take some breaks during the day to look at Reddit or do a little online shopping, you know. But Hassen worked for the government. He was using a government computer on a government Internet connection to look at extremist content online.

And honestly, I have no idea what his day to day workplace responsibilities could possibly have been, because based on these Internet history logs, he was spending hours and hours almost every day looking at things that weren't work And again, in another context, I support time theft, especially from the government, you know, rock on, but he wasn't scrolling social media. The investigation began in November of twenty eighteen. Something he did on his work computers set off an internal flag.

They never say exactly what it was that ended up getting him flagged. The Coastguard's Internal Threat Assessment report covers his Internet activity from July of twenty sixteen through his arrest in February twenty nineteen, but that report was created retroactively. They didn't actually start monitoring him until something happened in November twenty eighteen.

had an attachment. He was checking out the Anarchist Cookbook, you know, a classic. He sent himself a PDF called US Army Improvised Munition's Handbook and these next three well, I think you will get why I'm confused. He didn't get flagged until a year later, because does he emailed himself PDFs called emailing a non how to make semtechs in one called home Workshop Explosives by Uncle Fester, and a document just called the Terrorist's Handbook, which is mostly

instructions on how to make IEDs. I guess he was smart enough to understand that he shouldn't download these at work, so he emailed them to himself so he could read them there. Semtex is a plastic explosive originally developed by the Czech military that has become quite popular with terrorists. And Uncle Fester is a seventy five year old man named Stephen Preisler who was arrested last year in Wisconsin

for making meth. In case you were wondering, I spent hours combing through these reports trying to make some sense of them. And the only thing I can figure that really changed in November of twenty eighteen that may have triggered his employer to start looking at his computer activity was a sudden intensification of his interest in Russia, and this wasn't entirely new. The report shows activity going back to early twenty seventeen for searches like Russian far right

Russian Nationalists immigrate to Russia. In June of twenty seventeen, he spent an entire workday accessing what the report calls quote extensive pro Russian and neo fascist content end quote. He searched for things like national Bolshevism and Fourth Political Theory, which is the title of a book by Alexander Dugan that was a favorite of American neo Nazi Matthew Heinbach.

In March of twenty eighteen, he spent another full workday clicking around websites with pro Russian neo fascist content, but none of that triggered any kind of internal alarm on his account. The activity logs for November twenty eighteen, though, show his first searches for and visits to sput News and RT, which are Russian state run media sites. This is another one of those questions we're just not going

to get an answer to. But my gut reaction to the way those things coincide is that maybe there was an automatic flag placed on some particular website, and maybe it was a website that is Russian state on media, or maybe somebody at work just saw him dicking around at his desk and reported him. We'll never know, but apparently there is no internal monitoring system that automatically reports you to the Coastguard for being on Reddit all day,

every day, so browse away, I guess. The Coastguard's one hundred and twenty page internal Threat Assessment report outlining the concerning computer activity over that two and a half year period, starts out with a summary of his findings, which includes this incredible paragraph.

women or hatred towards women on a daily basis. Due to the persistence of the behavior, subject's routine daily activity in browsing the MiG toast subreddit is not included in this chronology of activity.

They installed a pole camera outside his home, They searched his desk at work, and on February fifteenth, twenty nineteen, they arrested him in the parking garage outside of Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, d C. When he appeared in front of a magistrate judge a week later, the government was really only talking about these charges for possession of the tramadol that they found in his desk and the charge for possessing the firearm while being an unlawful user

of a controlled substance. That is, as the judge noted, a pretty unremarkable charge. That's not really the kind of crime that warrants real time surveillance, secret cameras, parking lot ambush arrests, and pre trialed attention. But with that real time access to his computer activity at work, the investigators saw what they interpreted as a shift. He'd spent years accumulating knowledge and supplies, reading manifestos, buying guns, and now

it seemed like he was preparing for something. So when an FBI agent writes out an affidavit in support of a search warrant, he has to tell the judge what he's looking for and why he needs probable cause.

pursuant to those searches, which was unsuccessful. Quote Agent Harrison asserted he had probable cause to believe the warrants would produce evidence of violations of eighteen usc V. Section one one one one murder in federal jurisdictions one one one four murder or attempted murder of officers or employees of the United States, three five to one, assassination of Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, or Supreme Court justices, and three seven

to one conspiracy to commit the foregoing crimes. That is not what he was charged with. The government's motion for detention calls the charges that they actually filed that drug stuff quote the tip of the iceberg. And they opened their memo with a pretty bold statement, writing, the defendant is a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to

human life that are intended to affect government conduct. And so instead of sending the defendant on his way with court orders to behave himself until his trial, the government said there is absolutely no way to assure the safety of the community except to keep him in custody. And this is where it becomes clear that this case was never about pain pills. On June second, twenty seventeen, Christopher Hassen wrote, then deleted an email draft. He never sent

this to anyone. It just stayed there in his recoverable deleted drafts folder for a year and a half.

it might be more successful. Institute a bombing sniper campaign. What can I do? I will not do. Nothing seems inevitable that we are doomed. I don't think I can cause complete destruction on my own. However, if I could enlist the unwitting help of another power, country would be best? Who and how to provoke?

I may unleash it onto their heads. Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world.

who deserves his own episode. He was a member of the American Nazi Party in his youth and was discharged from the US Army in nineteen seventy three after just two years. Accounts very a little bit here. One nineteen to eighty New York Times article says he quote accepted an early honorable discharge after getting into a tavern brawl with blacks end quote. I didn't realize we were still saying that in nineteen eighty. I don't really care for

that New York Times. But the real problem here is that the paper was accepting Covington's own account of things. That was his version of why he wasn't in the army anymore. He was actually pushed out of the army because of his habit of handing out neo Nazi pamphlets to his fellow soldiers. He also has the distinction of being the only man I've ever heard of who was deported from Rhodesia for.

He saves a copy of Covington's Northwest Front Handbook to his Google Drive account, and he's spending some time on Covington's website learning about his idea for the Northwest Territorial Imperative. This is the idea that American white supremacists should all move out to the Northwest and settle in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana and start taking control of local governments, eventually

turning the entire region into a white ethno state. Covington didn't invent the idea, of course, but he was one of its biggest boosters. He founded the Northwest Front and wrote a bunch of books about the topic to try and make it a reality. After reading up on Covington and the Northwest Imperative, Hassen looked at some areas in Washington and Idaho on Google Maps. Then he did a

bing so for is Harold Covington. FBI informant has since spent most of the next work day browsing Reddit and as he did every day, and doing a little research on Christian identity. It's a twisted theology that has really almost nothing to do with the Christianity you're familiar with. It preaches that white Europeans are God's true chosen people. Racial purity is valued above all else. Racial mixing is

a violation of God's law. Christian identity believers yearn for a white Ethno state, and some of them are willing to kill for it. It was Richard Butler's devotion to Christian identity that led him to found the Aryan Nations and establish a large Nazi compound outside of Kurdalene, Idaho. Butler's dedication to establishing a sovereign Aryan territory in the Pacific Northwest is what inspired Harold Covington to name the plan outlined in his Northwest Front Handbook after him calling

it the Butler Plan. That's something Hassen probably learned when he conducted a being search at his work computer for the Butler Plan after spending all afternoon reading about Christian identity.

that's built into its founding doctrines. But Hassen wrote to someone at the FOCU assembly asking if they had any members in his local area, and he expressed a willingness to drive up to two hundred miles to participate in group meetings. He ends the email, signing off not by saying you know sincerely, or best wishes or thank you, or some normal way of ending an email, but instead

he writes fourteen words Chris Hassen. The fourteen words refers to the slogan coined by David Lane, the neo Nazi domestic terrorist who died in prison for his role in the assassination of Jewish broadcaster Alan Bergh. It's commonly used in a wide variety of Nazi spaces. It's one of the few things most white nationalists seem to agree on. They love the fourteen words, and this isn't actually the first time I've seen it used as the closing of

a letter. For the record, if we must, the fourteen words are we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. And then there's sort of a second fourteen words, and you can use them both, you know, if you're super into it. The latter half is because the beauty of the white Aryan woman must not perish from the earth, So that's really beautiful stuff.

It is not an accusation. The person who told me this served a twelve year prison sentence and never rated me out, so I will not dispute him, nor will I accuse you.

as an email. Harold Covington died in twenty eighteen, so he's sign around anymore to ask if he ever got a letter in the mail, But his mailing address is printed right there on the cover of the Northwest Front Handbook. So Hassen may have drafted the letter in his email and then printed it out at home or handwritten the final version and sent it in the mail.

They seemed to interest him only sporadically. He would sort of check in on the idea every couple of months, compared to his daily obsession with in cell ideology, buying guns, studying mass murder, unders Brave's manifesto, and eventually building his target list. But before we move on, I want to revisit something he said in that letter, not the stuff

about the White homeland. That's pretty straightforward. He said he hesitated to reach out to Covington because someone told him that Harold Covington was a snitch, and whoever told him this was someone he considered incredibly trustworthy, because apparently this guy did twelve years behind bars and never read it him out. The government alludes to this person and this underlying incident that put him in prison a couple of times,

but it's all either terribly oblique or heavily redacted. And when I see a government reaction over something that I would like to read, I consider that a personal challenge. Someone has thrown down the gauntlet. I mean, ultimately, whatever happened one night in Hampton, Virginia in nineteen ninety five doesn't necessary have any bearing.

But I do have a Buckingham County record of a marriage license issued in two thousand and two and a photo of the happy couple.

And how does stir her Hassen factor into this? Turning to the newspaper archives, we can start to lay out the story. That night in February of nineteen ninety five, a couple of skinheads rolled up to a house in buck Row Beach.

and pulled out a gun. He pointed the pistol at the girl's father, putting it right in his face and pulled the trigger, but it didn't fire, by the grace of God or pure luck, or because it was a cheap, poorly maintained weapons stored inside the sweaty pocket of a skinhead swastika covered jacket, the gun didn't fire, so instead he beat the man around the head with the gun, leaving him concussed, her really damaging his hearing and cutting

open his head pretty bad. He needed ten stitches, and the police report says that Christopher Hassen was standing right there next to Jones when all of this went down. Newspaper accounts name only two of the men who were there that night, and they don't actually specify exactly how many of them there were, just that it was several or a group, you know, a group of skinheads. Stephen Casey Jones was there. Of course he was arrested, but

there's no mention in the newspaper at all of Christopher Hassen. Now, I thought I knew the Hassen case pretty well topped to bottom from following it when it happened, But I'd never explored this aspect of the story before. And I tell you, when I found a thirty year old newspaper article naming the third man who is there that night in nineteen ninety five.

He said, on the day in question, he was hanging out with Jones and Hassen, and the three of them were drinking, and a few hours in they were pretty drunk and they.

but his charges ended up getting dropped. It's not clear why. And in February of nineteen ninety five, Ryan Maziarka had just been convicted and he was facing the possibility of some real jail time under a new hate crime statute here in Virginia. They weren't looking for Booze that night. They were looking for Ricky. The teenage girl they were

there to question was Ricky's girlfriend. In her statement to the FBI in twenty nineteen, she said they believed they were looking for Ricky that night, quote because they wanted to cause trouble end quote. Newspaper articles from the time stayed outright that Maziarka was looking for Ricky because he wanted to fight him. Maziarka ended up getting two years for the church vandalism. He caught a conviction that same year for having a sawed off shotgun, but for some reason,

they let him slide on that one. He didn't get any additional jail time for it. And in nineteen ninety seven he shows up in the local paper again. So he's fresh out of jail and he needed to register his car. You know, there's a lot of errands you just can't run when you're locked up, and going to the DMV as one of them. So it's nineteen ninety seven and he's getting a new license plate. Vanity plates are huge in Virginia. I'm not really sure why, but

we have more of them than any other state. I think it's because they're like a little cheaper here than

they are in some other states. I think some states charge a lot of money for it, and it's a pretty nominal fee here, but we just love to pay the DMV a little extra money to put some kind of personal message in the back of our cars, and Ryan Maziarka the personal message he wanted to drive around town with was zyklon B. He told the newspaper that he enjoyed the attention the plate got, saying, quote, I want people to ask me what it is to tell them it's a big lie.

the girlfriend of someone whose name is redacted. These reports are all heavily redacted, but they are typed in monospace font, which means every character has an identical width. So when you're typing on your computer, you're almost certainly using a variable width font. So the letter I, for example, takes up less width on the page than the letter M,

so different letters have different widths. But in a monospace font, every character takes up the same amount of space, so you can more or less tell how many characters are being obscured by a redaction. And so in this instance, the reaction here is too long to say Jones and too short for it to say Stephen Jones, and Hassen's name isn't redacted in the documents, his name is just there,

so that just leaves masi arca. So maybe the woman in the van was Ryan's girlfriend, whoever she was, though she seemed to be calling the shots, according to what the victim's wife told the FBI years later, when the woman in the van demanded they all get back in the vehicle to leave, hasn't obeyed. The witness recalled hearing

him say yes, ma'am as he climbed back in. It's hard to pin down exactly if Maziarka was already dating back then the woman who has been his common law wife for decades now, but by two thousand they were both contributors to Resistance. The quarterly magazine for Resistance records a white power music label, and by two thousand the company had been acquired by National Alliance under William Luther Pierce, and the magazine's staff and most of its guest contributors

were affiliated with the group. Shortly after William Luther Piers died in two thousand and two. Corporate pilings reflect a series of changes to the Neo Nazi organization's leadership structure. I got into a little bit of that period of power struggle in the episode about Kevin Alfred Strom. In paperwork filed with the Virginia Corporation Commission in two thousand and three, Ryan Maziarka is listed as National Alliance's treasurer, and he remained on the board until he was pushed

out in a lawsuit in twenty fourteen. His wife, Angela Forbes, had been handling orders for the skinhead street wear you could buy from an ad in Resistance magazine since two thousand and By two thousand and two, the ad copy directed the buyer to make out the money orders to her personally, not to National Alliance. I guess what I'm getting at here is I don't think he was telling the truth.

A lot of you probably weren't even born then. But the FBI was really interested in it. They sent agents out to talk to a lot of people about this, trying to figure out what happened that night, a month after Hassen was arrested, and agent spoke with the assailant himself, Stephen Casey Jones. And immediately after that interview, Jones contacted a member of Hassen's family to say he'd been visited

by an agent. And we know this because that unnamed family member in turn called Hassen immediately to tell him about the phone call they had gotten from Stephen Casey Jones, and jail phone calls are recorded. When Hassen heard that the FBI had spoken to Jones about him, his reply was, oh shit. Hassen was very concerned that Jones would think that he'd been talking, but.

The person on the other end of the line interrupted him before he could finish, saying, quote, there's nothing there to inform and they could never prove anything, and I kind of doubt that anyone was worried the FBI was interested in this thirty year old closed case involving non life threatening injuries to a victim who has since passed away of unrelated causes. Right, they're not talking about this thing from nineteen ninety five. Stephen Jones was convicted and

he served his time. He can't be tried for that again. It's over. That can't be what Hassen was worried they'd make him talk about. So this raises there's a lot more questions than it answers.

with their annual paperwork. But the last time they did file paperwork, that corporate entity, Bad Influence, Inc. Listed A Stephen Casey Jones as it's president. Photos of Jones taken more recently than the decades old picture of him in his Virginia prison jumpsuit show an older Stephen Jones, bearded

now and heavy set. He's usually wearing his leather motorcycle vest with a regional enforcer patch just above his one percenter patch, a designation used by motorcycle clubs that embrace criminality. The line work is blown out now. It's faded and muddied by the years, but you can still just make out hate spelled across his knuckles. The Department of Justice has listed these Sons of Silence as a criminal organization

for at least twenty years. The group's official logo is a bald eagle on top of a stylized letter A, which looks remarkably like the Ennheuser Busch A. But I don't know if the beer company's ever considered suing over it. But you also see a different logo sometimes SS bolts with sp LSOs written down the lightning bolts that stands for support your local Sons of Silence. One recent photo of Jones with his wife shows her sporting some Sons

of Silence merchandise. It's a gray T shirt with the outline of the state of Missouri with s y l SOOS written inside and next to the image in this sort of Germanic looking antique style font The shirt reads mine eira heist troya. My honor is loyalty. That was the slogan of the SS.

it into a deal. He ultimately put to two counts of owning unregistered silencers, one count of possession of a firearm while unlawfully using controlled substances, and one count of possession of a controlled substance, and because he pled out rather than take the case to trial, everything we know about the case against Christopher Hassen comes from those initial detention hearings and the sentencing memos filed after the plea. There is this myth that the courts are some kind

of final arbiter of the truth. What the court determines to be fact simply is now legally true. Right, if someone is acquitted of a crime, it can be slanderous and defamatory to say otherwise, even if you were the victim of that crime and your own recollection is at

odds with the verdict. But there's a difference, I think, between arriving at the truth and decreeing it, And I would argue that the courts are not really equipped to locate the truth a just rule on which version presented to them is going to be legally true from now on. So at this stage in the case, both the defense and the prosecution right these long memos explaining to the judge why the defendant deserves a particular sentence. He's legally guilty.

Now the court accepted his plea, so that's the truth. He's guilty, But what kind of punishment he deserves requires the court to consider these competing truths. Was he a loving family man who left his youthful indiscretions in the past decades ago, a responsible gun owner, who just had a little trouble with pills. Or was he an avowed, lifelong white supremacist who, after years of study and stockpiling weapons, was in the early stages of preparing for a massive

terrorist attack. Is there room for something in between? The Defense paints Hassen as the former. Obviously, the memo begins with a bit of biography. Hassen served in the Marine Corps from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety four, when he was honorably discharged after several overseas deployments during the First Gulf War. He struggled to adapt to civilian life and enlisted in the Army National Guard in Virginia barely

six months after leaving the Marines. But this memo skips right to his enlistment in the Coast Guard in nineteen ninety six, and it leaves out the fact that he transferred from the Virginia National Guard to Arizona in nineteen ninety five. He told the psychologists who examine him in this case that he moved to Arizona in nineteen ninety five so he couldn't be made to testify against Stephen

Casey Jones. The Defense memo and many of the letters written by his friends and family mentioned that he had no issues working with colleagues of all races, and mentioning a particular black coworker he befriended in two thousand and one. The memo waxes poetic for an entire page about his loving and supportive relationship with his children, both grown by

now and with military careers their own. His children shared anecdotes about fond childhood memories of their father's love and care for them buried deep in the report prepared by the defensive psychologists, though there is a passing mention that his daughter's decision to marry in secret caused immense strain in the family. In her letter, his daughter writes that Hassen met his grandson for the first time when she

brought the boy to the jail for a visit. There's no mention in this memo, but the man his daughter married in secret is not white. Was this on his mind when he typed best N word killing gun into a search engine? What was he thinking about when he googled I think my wife is an N word lover. The defense says that Hassen's abuse of tramadol got out of hand after he moved to Maryland in twenty sixteen, he'd gotten a promotion and moved from North Carolina to

accept a position in D at Coast Guard Headquarters. He and his wife are going through a little bit of a rocky period, having trouble adjusting to their kids leaving home, and they separated for a while. She didn't join him in DC right away, and they reconciled after about a year, but they spent that first year he was in DC apart. The memo says he was lonely. He was having a hard time adjusting to city life, and he hated commuting.

He hated sitting at a desk all day, and so he became increasingly dependent on a drug he'd been abusing since twenty twelve. His wife had a prescription for tramadol for a chronic pain condition, but now he was turning to illegal online pharmacies to buy hundreds of pills at

a time. The defense hired a medical doctor who diagnosed Hassen with opioid use disorder and offered an expert opinion that such a condition can cause serious mood disturbances, which is true right But in the memo, the attorney stops just short of outright claiming that being addicted to opiates makes you google where do most Senators live while you're shopping for rifle scopes. They do make some valid points about the fact that it isn't that weird to own a ton of guns.

just not the Chris Hassen I know. One coworker wrote, unless the definition of white nationalists has changed, Christopher Hassen is not one, noting that he had worked successfully with black and Hispanic colleagues for years. There was even a letter submitted that was written by a man who'd shared a cell block with Hassen while he was in pre

trial attention. The handwritten letter said he'd gotten to know Hassen over the last few months and he had no issues with anyone on their quad, but they played chess together, work out and share food, and the man adds helpfully that as a black person, he'd never felt that Chris was prejudiced in any way. There were multiple letters from priests and lay ministers who'd been meeting with Hassen in jail.

Apparently he was Catholic again, despite his exploration of Christian identity Asatru and a couple of months where he was really seriously considering converting to Russian Orthodoxy, but in jail he's Catholic again. He confessed and received communion, and a priest wrote to the judge that they'd been meeting weekly and found Hassen's contrition to be genuine. The defense asked for a sentence of time served, immediate release in three years of supervision. He just needs treatment. He was never

going to hurt anyone. The government did something very different. In mind, the bulk of the material produced in this case outlining his online activity was filed alongside this sentencing memorandum, and with everything on the table, a very different picture starts to form. In early twenty seventeen, Hassen began obsessively studying unders Bravi's manifesto. It's a sprawling fifteen hundred pages, part diary, part manual. There's big chunks of plagiarized content from other sources.

and research topics related to those passages. And while the defense was telling the truth and they argued that he'd always been a gun enthusiast, his purchasing history shows a distinct change in his spending habits after he became obsessed with the Manifesto.

in long range shooting. He bought a sniper rifle. He took it to the shooting range and recorded the rifle's performance in a little notebook after he read online that snipers use a paper log called a sniper data book to document the performance of a particular rifle under different conditions, things like temperature, wind, elevation, and anything else that would

affect the external ballistics of a bullet. He searched for information on subsonic rounds, ammunition that doesn't break the sound barrier. Sometimes snipers use it because it makes it more difficult to determine where the shots are coming from. He searched for information about frangible rounds, ammunition that breaks apart on impact that can make it impossible for law enforcement to learn anything about the gun it was fired from. And he bought all the materials he would need to make

silencers at home, and then he did. And all this time he's obsessively searching for things like how to rid the US of Jews, how can whites rise up? How to bring down US government? And he's reading the unibomber's Manifesto, and he's reading the book written by Eric Rudolph. You probably know Eric Rudolph as the nineteen ninety six Olympics bomber, but he was also a Christian identity extremist who bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.

On his computer, it's clear that he wanted to get off the drugs to clear his mind so he could focus on preparing his attack, And in January of twenty nineteen, it was starting to look like he might be working up to it. He'd been reading unders Braby's Manifesto like it was the Bible for years now. Analysis of his computer activity showed that he returned to it often and would supplement his reading with additional research on the topics

it contained. And on January third, twenty nineteen, he opened the Manifesto on his computer and he searched the text for the term category A to read about passage where Brewick lays out the three categories of what he calls traders, with Category A being the most influential and highest profile targets.

interesting to me. But Hassen seemed persuaded by Breveck's rambling, and he started making a spreadsheet, and, consistent with Brevieck's advice to target politicians, journalists, Marxists, and nonprofit leaders, he filled in names on his Excel spreadsheet. He lists some journalists and political commentators MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Ari Melber,

CNN's Don Lemon and Van Jones. One cell just says Joey in all caps, but based on corresponding Internet activity, he'd been googling Joe Scarborough and then he searched for where is morning Joe filmed? And then he found Joe Scarborough's home address, and then he spent about thirty five seconds just sort of zooming in and out on the satellite image of the house in Google Maps. For politicians, he selected a wide variety of senators and congressional representatives.

He wrote down Helosi and Schumer, though he spelled it wrong. Some targets just got crude nicknames, like Senator Bloomin Jew, which seems to refer to Senator Richard Blumenthal. He was also considering targets like ilan Omar, Alexandria Casio Cortez, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Kristin Gillibrand, and DSA like he just wrote the acronym, presumably referring to the organization Democratic Socialist of America.

He would later find personal information for two female members of the organization's national political Committee, and that same week he queried the Brevic Manifesto again, this time for the word steroids. Hassen's computer records show he made quite a few online purchases for steroids, human growth hormone, and testosterone, and they found a lot of human growth hormone in his apartment. A blood test performed when he was arrested, though,

showed no trace of anything except the tramadol. In Brevick's manifesto, he recommends beginning a six week steroid cycle once you've got all your supplies together and you're finished planning your attack and you're entering.

And if this case had gone to trial, they almost certainly would not have been allowed to admit most of this material. It's inflammatory and prejudicial and not directly germane to the actual criminal charges here. The defense was right about that. Legally speaking, a jury would not have seen all of this, but a judge is allowed to consider uncharged conduct at sentencing. In that sentencing, the government did something a little unusual. Hassen is obviously not charged with

any crime of terrorism. You didn't derail a train or join isis or you know, terrorist stuff. But there's something called a terrorism sentencing enhancement.

That makes sense, but in this case, the prosecutor argued that terrorism isn't really as well defined in the code as you might think, writing that there is actually no requirement that the defendant have committed a federal crime of terrorism, just that the conduct was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against governmental conduct.

But they argue that the conviction on the counts related to those illegal silencers are inextricably linked to his searches for things like most liberal senator? Where do most senators live in DC? Do senators have Secret Service protection? Are Supreme Court justices protected? All while he's training to use a sniper rifle and making his own silencers. So they're

saying that that that is relevant conduct here. That's not what he was charged with, that's not what he was convicted of, But there's relevant conduct here that has terrorism vibes. This is a vibes based enhancement. Ultimately, Judge Hazel was unmoved by the four hours of testimony from a psychologist hired by the defense to opine that Hassen was never

really going to hurt anybody. Hazel said from the bench that zooming in and out on a satellite image of someone's house feels like pretty convincing evidence that you are targeting particular individuals, and said that quote, there is little doubt in the court's mind that the defendant was planning to carry out a mass casualty assault in furtherance of

his white nationalist views. Now forgive me, but I couldn't stomach the thirty dollars price tag for the official transcript of that sentencing hearing, so I'm relying on my own

handwritten notes here. But before Judge Hazel denounced Hassen's thirteen year sentence, he made it clear that he was quote not seeking to protect the public from his views end quote, but from his actions, adding that the defendant is not alone in those views, that white supremacist ideology is deeply embedded in the soul of this country.

extent that anyone belongs in jail? Like as sort of my own views on prison abolition aside that you know, if anyone belongs in jail, then yeah, he seemed like he was planning something, right, But the government was clearly asking the judge to sentence Hasten for something they didn't think they could actually charge him for because.

the first episode of this show. Actually on the spreadsheet where he was tracking hysteroid cycles. He had the top row of the spreadsheet merged into one continuous cell all across the top of the sheet, So underneath it's all this technical nonsense about dosages and timing and things like a reminder to take a shotgun of one thousand units of E three D in the last three weeks of cycle to prep your testes. I don't know what you're

preparing your testicles for. That's not my business. But at the top of the spreadsheet it says, quote to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you were not allowed to criticize. And that is the only place I have ever found that quote in a federal court filing, and I spent some time looking, you know, I did. I can't find this in any other federal criminal case. It's not clear if Hassen knew who really said that, or if he was suffering from the common but mistaken

idea that it was Voltaire. But given his other online activity, I think he probably knew it was a Nazi pedophile. And that's all I have for you about Christopher Hassen. But our journey through his life and internet history did introduce some exciting new characters. In the Weird Little Guy's

extended universe. I hope you'll stick around to find out more about the man who was too racist for Rhodesha, or the teenage skinhead who ended up in charge of the black metal label that funded a Nazi hate group for years.