Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
In February of twenty nineteen, a federal prosecutor in Maryland
made an unusual presentation to a magistrate judge in support
of pre trialed attention. Christopher Paul Hassen had just been
arrested on charges of possession of a firearm by an
unlawful user or addict of a controlled substance. It's kind
of a technicality. If you've been convicted of drug possession,
(00:30):
usually you'd have caught a felony and you can't own
a gun anyway. But he hadn't been, and he wasn't
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
(00:54):
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
(01:18):
shooter manifestos, terrorism manuals, and a list of names. I'm
Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. I thought
(01:50):
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.
(02:14):
It wasn't easy to find a story like that in
my mental rolodex, but I.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Thought you guys deserved a break.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Now, I will admit, upon further reflection, this whole story
isn't exactly as funny as my spotty memory had me
thinking when I started. I think my own recollection of
this being a silly little legal mishap was heavily colored
by my own mental state back in twenty twenty when
I drove to Maryland to watch this sentencing hearing.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
When I drove up to the Federal.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Courthouse in green Belt, Maryland to see Hassen sentencing hearing
on January thirty first, twenty twenty. It's actually my second
trip up to that courthouse that month. Just a week earlier,
i'd been in another courtroom in that massive building for
a detention hearing in another case, three members of the
neo Nazi paramilitary group the Base had just been arrested.
(03:05):
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
(03:29):
the skin of our teeth, avoided being massacred in a
confused crossfire left.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Me feeling a little queasy.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I'm not too proud to admit that I was a
little on edge at that detention hearing. I dug out
my old notebook this weekend to try to remember what
was going on back then, to sort of get back
into that headspace and remind myself of what was going
on in these cases. And apparently I did take notes
pretty good ones. But my only memories of that day
(03:57):
are how clean the bathrooms were, that I walked out
of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck in my tights,
and the look on that FBI agent's face when I
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
(04:19):
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
(04:41):
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,
(05:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Couldn't turn it off.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So god knows what came over me, But I just
I reached over and I did it myself, and you
would have thought I grabbed his gun.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
She just looked scandalized. But I was just trying to
be helpful. You know, I'm a helpful girl. But this
isn't a story about Patrick Matthews, Brian Lemley, and William Bilbrow.
Of course, that hearing has nothing really at all to
do with Christopher Hassen. All that to say, it was
my second time that month driving the nearly three hours
(05:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
And it had been a busy week in between.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Overall, I sat through an eight hour city council annual
retreat and went to a school board budget meeting. You know,
I just can't resist a municipal government meeting. And the
pissant Nazi cry baby who'd spent years threatening me finally
got arrested in a pre dawn raid by the FBI,
but it was for.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Something totally unrelated.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
And I'd put damn near a thousand miles on my
car driving back and forth to this courthouse, even though
I had no real plan for how he's going to
afford to replace my tires. I was having a weird week.
So by the time I was reading this government and
sentencing memo in the hass in case, I was just
looking for a recent to laugh, you know, And like
(06:49):
I said, nobody died, it's safe to giggle a little.
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.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
But like I.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Said, this is a story about Christopher Hassen, not me,
and Christopher Hassen may never have been caught at all
if he just kept his extracurricular interests at home. Evidence
produced in this case includes hundreds of pages of logs
of his computer activity, mostly computer activity he was engaged
(07:28):
in network. Generally speaking, I'm opposed to the idea of
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
(07:49):
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,
(08:11):
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
(08:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
And looking at this report, I.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Can't explain why nothing's set off an alarm in the
IT office before that, but that's what it says, so
I guess we just have to take it as written.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Throughout the report, you can see that.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
He was emailing links and PDFs to himself between his
personal and work email addresses. I don't know why he
was doing that. I wonder if maybe he couldn't access
his personal email at work, and he couldn't access his
work email at home, and he wanted to be able
to pick up where he left off in either location. So,
for example, in the late evening hours of June seventh,
(09:31):
twenty seventeen, he sent himself five emails from his personal
email address to his work email address, and each email
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,
(09:54):
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
(10:17):
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
(10:40):
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
(11:01):
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
(11:24):
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
(11:47):
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
(12:10):
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
(12:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Subject's most frequently visited website from twenty seventeen to twenty
nineteen was the men Going their Own Way migtoe subreddit
at www dot reddit dot com, to which subject made
tens of thousands of total URL visits over a two
plus year period. Will at the MiG toast subreddit, subject
routinely access gender based extremist content that promoted discrimination of
(13:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
So we don't know why they started looking, but they did.
Starting in November of twenty eighteen, the Coastguard started monitoring
his workplace computer activity in real time. They were logging
his keystrokes.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
They set up a hidden.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Camera near his desk to record him during the day,
and then they started reporting their findings to the FBI,
and by January the FBI was worried too. They got
warrants for his email accounts, a warrant for his historical
cell location data, and placed a GPS tracker on his car.
They installed a pole camera outside his home, They searched
(14:07):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:49):
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
(15:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Obviously you know that one.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
But what makes probable cause depends on what you're investigating.
What crime do you think you're going to find evidence
of and why do you think you're going to find
it there? Well, Hassena was charged with having a gun
and a pill problem, So maybe that's what they wrote
down on the affidavit, right, something about.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
The drugs now.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
According to a defense motion to suppress the evidence sees
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
(16:08):
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
(16:30):
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
(16:51):
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
(17:16):
this to anyone. It just stayed there in his recoverable
deleted drafts folder for a year and a half.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Dear friends, maybe that's a bit of a misnomer. Acquaintance
is more likely. Hope this finds you well. I am
dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person
on the earth. I think a plague would be most successful.
But how do I acquire the needed Spanish flu, bachulism, anthrax?
Not sure yet, but we'll find something interesting. Idea the
(17:46):
other day. Start with biological attacks followed by attack on
food supply. Have to research this. Two pronged attacks seems
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
(18:06):
enlist the unwitting help of another power, country would be best?
Who and how to provoke?
Speaker 2 (18:15):
The letter continues, outlining a plan to purchase land in
a remote area, noting that he needs to get off
drugs to clear his mind to plan this attack, and
he needs to start stockpiling food and supplies at multiple
hidden locations.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
He writes that he needs to quote.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Have a serious look end quote at what kinds of
targets would be most effective, speculating that doctors, professors, politicians, judges,
and leftists in general would be a great place to start.
He wants to provoke unrest and then target both sides
of it to exacerbate tension and maximize casualties, to provoke
(18:52):
the government to overreact to escalate the violence, and once
major unrest is underway, he plans to dress as a
cop and execute looters. Please send me your violence that
I may unleash it onto their heads. Guide my hate
to make a lasting impression on this world.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
So be it, he writes.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
The email is signed very respectfully, Lieutenant Christopher P. Hassen,
National Security Cutter Acquisition. Three months later, in September of
twenty seventeen, drafted another letter. This one has a clear recipient,
although there is no concrete proof he ever mailed it.
(19:35):
On September fifth, he did a little online shopping at work.
He purchased eleven books from Amazon, mostly those by Life
Long neo Nazi activist Harold Covington. Covington is a man
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
(19:56):
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
(20:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Being too racist.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Our guy, Frank Sweeney from a few weeks ago, was
deported from Rhodesia for stabbing a guy, but there was
no indication they had any problem with the Nazi stuff.
I don't want to spoil too much now. We will
definitely have to cover Harold Covington eventually. I want to
at least make it clear why it's a little troubling
to be filling your bookshelves with his work. So it's
(21:07):
September twenty seventeen. Hassen is buying a bunch of Covington's novels.
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
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
He must not have.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Been totally sold on Christian identity, though, because records show
he also sent an email that same week to someone
at the Asatru foc Assembly. Far from the harmless, if
sometimes questionable practice of paganism by people of European heritage
who are trying to connect with their ancestral ways of
life or whatever they believe that might be. The Assatru
(23:30):
Focussembly is an explicitly white nationalist organization, and they get
heavy criticism from their fellow Pagans for the racial hatred
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
(23:54):
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
(24:15):
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
(24:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
David Lane was quite the wordsmith. But back to Chris Hassen.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
After spending a few days on his research into Harold Covington,
he did another being search. He searched for formal introduction letter, example,
and he read an article about how to write a letter,
and then he drafted a letter to Harold Covington himself.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Mister Covington, I am writing you regards to your ideas
behind Northwest migration to date, I have read most of
your books and briefly looked at your website. I am
a longtime white nationalist, having been a skinhead thirty plus
years ago. Before my time in the military, a.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Longtime white nationalist and a former skinhead.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
That's quite a revelation. We'll get to that. The letter continues,
My plans are upon retirement to move to the Northwest,
most likely Idaho. While I fully support the idea of
a white homeland, my friends who are still playing it
being a skinhead at forty plus years old, say that
you are an informant. That isn't neither here nor there.
(26:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
So that explains his multiple searches for Is Harold Covington
an FBI informant? Someone had told him that, but he
decided to write to Covington anyway, it seems. Hassen's attorney
emphasizes that this was only an email draft. He wrote
this on his computer, but he never actually sent this
as an email. Harold Covington died in twenty eighteen, so
(26:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
We'll never know.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
And in the letter, Hassen says he's reluctant to start
or join any kind of movement because he's concerned that
they're all just absolutely infested with informants, and he sees
no value in public protests, writing.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
I never saw a reason for mass protests or wearing uniforms,
marching around provoking people with swast, because et cetera. I
was and am a man of action. You cannot change
minds protesting like that. However, you can make change with
a little focused violence.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
His Internet activity does show a casual interest in real
estate in remote areas, looking on several occasions at listings
for cabins in the mountains of North Carolina or Alaska,
as well as looking at properties for sale in Montana, Oregon,
and Idaho, but these searches were relatively few and far between.
They seemed to interest him only sporadically. He would sort
(27:51):
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
(28:12):
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
(28:35):
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
(28:55):
happened one night in Hampton, Virginia in nineteen ninety five
doesn't necessary have any bearing.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
On this case.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
I could have just moved on, but they blacked out
those details, and I wanted them, and I couldn't let
it go, so I figured it out anyway. On February eleventh,
nineteen ninety five, there was an incident. There's a little
bit of a Raschamon situation going on here, with sort
of competing and conflicting accounts. There's you know, self serving
(29:26):
half truths, spotty reporting, faded memories.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It's not a crystal clear picture, but.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
We do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that
a skinhead named Stephen Casey Jones went to prison. He
was convicted by a jury in Hampton, Virginia in September
of nineteen ninety five on two counts of the use
of a firearm in the commission of a felony, attempted
murder and maiming. He spent over a decade behind bars,
(29:53):
serving at least part of his time just down the
road from where I'm writing this now. Of course I
can't find a thirty year old inmate roster. That's not possible.
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.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
No one is smiling.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
He has one arm slung over the woman's shoulders and
his other arm is supporting a little girl.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
She's sort of sitting in the crook.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Of his elbow and the way that his hand is
situated sort of pressing her into his chest to study her.
You can read his knuckle tattoos, Her little pigtails and
cute plaid romper seem so at odds with the letters
h a te spread out over her torso on his fingers.
(30:42):
It's hard to tell in this photo, but I don't
think he had that big swastika tattoo on the side
of his neck back then. But the question I set
out to answer, and I'm getting to it, is how
did this guy from out of state end up here?
And how does stir her Hassen factor into this? Turning
(31:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
It's a neighborhood in Hampton.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
They were looking for the homeowner's seventeen year old daughter,
but it was her father who met them in the
front yard. He told them to leave. They refused, and
then they argued. Stephen Casey Jones reached into his jacket
and pulled out a gun. He pointed the pistol at
(31:36):
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,
(31:58):
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
(32:19):
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,
(32:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Who's the highlight of my wheat?
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (33:01):
I squealed. I was so excited. I love a crossover event.
I just couldn't believe these two paths had crossed so
many years ago, because when I read that name, I
didn't need to look him up. I already know exactly
who Ryan Maziarka is. In twenty nineteen, the FBI paid
(33:35):
Ryan Maziarka a visit. They wanted to get his version
of events about this incident in nineteen ninety five. He
confirmed to them that yes, Hassen had been a skinhead
back then, but he didn't know him really very well.
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
(33:57):
drunk and they.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Ran out of alcohol.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
In his of events, someone suggested that they should go
over to that girl's house because they knew there was
alcohol there and she could.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Get it for them.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
This doesn't quite match up with the accounts provided in
twenty nineteen by the girl in question. Who is now
a grown woman and her mother, And it's very different
from the story that was in the newspaper back when
it happened.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
You see, Ryan.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Maziarka has a history, and that history starts a few
months before that night, in February of nineteen ninety five.
The summer before that, in nineteen ninety four, I and
a couple of his teenage skinhead pals had defaced a
black church. They spray painted white power, you know, leave
or else, and die n words in fluorescent paint all
(34:48):
across the exterior walls of this church. One of the
boys was still a minor, so he got a slap
on the wrist. A second boy, Ricky Hunt, was initially charged,
but his charges ended up getting dropped. It's not clear why.
And in February of nineteen ninety five, Ryan Maziarka had
(35:08):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:14):
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
(36:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
End quote.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Zyklon B is, of course, the side gas used in
the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust, an event Maziarka
says he does not believe happened. After a decision by
the State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull the plate
for offensive content, Maziarka said.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
When I see displays of black pride or black power,
I don't go running to my senator, But as soon
as I get something that represents my race's dominating spirit,
I get put down for it. Apparently I lost all
civil rights in this community.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
He was ultimately unable to return the plates to the DMV.
Somebody stole them off the back of his car while
he was at work, and the FBI interview with the
wife of the man who was pistol whipped back in
nineteen ninety five reveals the presence of a fourth person
who was there that night. She too confirmed that Christopher
(37:55):
Hassen and Stephen Jones were skinheads, but in her interview
in twenty nineteen she mentions the presence of a woman,
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
(38:17):
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
(38:37):
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
(38:59):
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
(39:25):
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,
(39:46):
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
(40:08):
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
(40:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
When the FBI stopped by in twenty.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Nineteen, he admitted to hanging out with Hassen a bit
back in the mid nineties, but he said it was
only ever about their shared love of skinhead music. He
says Hassen was always going on about Hitler, but he
personally didn't really get into that fascist stuff. I know,
it probably seems weird to spend this much time trying
(41:01):
to dissect this incident from nineteen ninety five. That's not
what Christopher Hassen is charged with. It was thirty years ago.
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
(41:22):
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,
(41:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
He doesn't say about what.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
He was worried the government would offer him a deal
in exchange for information, saying he thought the FBI quote
would try to get me to inform. I wouldn't do that,
but I'm just saying I got this thing in my
head where they'd offer me. But he doesn't finish the thought.
The person on the other end of the line interrupted
him before he could finish, saying, quote, there's nothing there
(42:27):
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
(42:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
And it turns out it's pretty.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Hard to track down the exact identity of a guy
named Steve Jones who was either twenty or twenty one
in nineteen ninety five and was from either Tulsa or Atlanta,
depending on the newspaper you're reading, but it can be.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Done in these days.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Stephen Jones is living in Missouri and is a member
of an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence.
Normally I would couch something like that and allegedly or ostensibly,
but I know Stephen Jones is in the Sons of
Silence because the Missouri chapter of the Sons of Silence
has a clubhouse in Saint Louis, and that clubhouse is
(43:43):
owned by a corporate entity that the state of Missouri
dissolved in twenty twenty two because they didn't keep up
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
(44:05):
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
(44:27):
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
(44:51):
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
(45:12):
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
(45:34):
the slogan of the SS.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
But whatever it was.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
That Hassen was worried the government was going to ask
him about, he clearly wasn't willing or able to parlay
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
(46:11):
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
(46:31):
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
(46:55):
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.
(47:18):
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,
(47:41):
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
(48:04):
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
(48:27):
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
(48:48):
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
(49:09):
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
(49:31):
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
(49:52):
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,
(50:13):
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
(50:33):
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
(50:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
A lot of people do.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
And a thousand bullets might sound like a lot of
bullets if you're not a gun owner, but a serious
hobbyist could blow through that in a day at the range.
But overall, the defense sentencing memo rests heavily on this
very narrow angle of the truth. Friends and relatives and
neighbors and co workers sent letters of support saying that's
(51:34):
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
(51:56):
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
(52:18):
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
(52:38):
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,
(52:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
It's not great. I mean it's not.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Great for a lot of reasons. Unders Bravic did murder
seventy seven people, and most of them were children. But
the Manifesto was also just kind of bad. But Hassen
would spend hours at a time, some days reading and
rereading passages of the Manifesto, and then he'd get online
and research topics related to those passages. And while the
(53:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:58):
In just two years, he.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Spent over twelve thousand dollars on holsters, knives, magazines, ammunition, handguards,
camping supplies, survival foods, steel body armour plates, plate carriers,
tactical vests and pouches, firearm repair kits, a firearm barrel,
firing pins, and a thirteen hundred dollars rifle scope. And
that twelve thousand dollars does not include the money he
(54:21):
spent on guns themselves. This was accessories, and As was
already a proficient marksman, but now he's developing an interest
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
(54:42):
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.
(55:03):
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
(55:24):
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
(55:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
I.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Meanwhile, Hassen is going deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole.
He's taking more and more more tramadol and buying more
and more guns, and he knows he needs to get
off the drugs. Not for his family or for his
job or his health. No, he's buying fake urine online
to beat the PIS tests at work. He doesn't care
about that, And I don't know. Maybe he was thinking
(56:16):
about his family, but that's not what's on his computer.
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
(56:38):
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
(57:00):
Brewick lays out the three categories of what he calls traders,
with Category A being the most influential and highest profile targets.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
Now I've got.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
My own copy of the Manifesto and I searched for
Category A. There are at least ninety pages spread across
this fifteen hundred page document in which Brewick expounds on
his theories about category A, B, and C traders to
the white race or whatever. But to be honest, I'm
not a pilled out white supremacist, so it's just not
(57:31):
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,
(57:55):
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
(58:17):
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,
(58:41):
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
(59:04):
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,
(59:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (59:45):
The preparation phase.
Speaker 2 (59:47):
The idea is to ensure that you are maximally aggressive
when it's time to strike.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
But he never did. Did he Hassen didn't.
Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
He was arrested, charged and convicted of a crime that
really just kind of feels like a technicality. It's legal
to have a silencer in most states. He just didn't
do the paperwork. He owned those guns legally, He just
lied on a form about his drug use. Ordering thousands
(01:00:23):
of prescription pain pills from a Mexican pharmacy over the
internet is definitely illegal, no argument there. But if that's
all that was going on, then he needs rehab prison.
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
(01:00:45):
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
(01:01:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
So this is not a criminal charge.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
This is just something you sort of put on top
of the sentencing. You know, it sprinkles on top of
your federal sentence. And typically you see this used in
cases that actually include a charge of terrorism related crime.
That makes sense, but in this case, the prosecutor argued
that terrorism isn't really as well defined in the code
(01:01:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
All that is required is that the crime of conviction
or relevant conduct involved.
Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Or was intended to promote a federal crime of terrorism.
So what he's saying here is that you don't actually
have to charge or convict someone on a terrorism related
crime to use the terrorism sentencing enhancement. All that is
required is that some relevant conduct here was intended to
(01:02:26):
promote a crime of terrorism. And that feels so thin
to me. That feels so tangential. It doesn't feel good.
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
(01:02:46):
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.
(01:03:10):
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
(01:03:31):
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
(01:03:53):
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
(01:04:14):
alone in those views, that white supremacist ideology is deeply
embedded in the soul of this country.
Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Quote. The seeds were.
Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
Planted in sixteen nineteen, and those seeds have grown and
produced dangerous fruit. Mister Hassen is but one leaf that
has fallen from that tree. Maybe one day, we as
a nation will do the hard work of digging up
the roots of that tree. This sentence is in no
way intended to be an attempt at that work. It
simply addresses the conduct of one man end quote. What
(01:04:49):
makes me so uneasy in this case is that do
I think that Christopher Hassen belongs in jail to the
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
(01:05:10):
asking the judge to sentence Hasten for something they didn't
think they could actually charge him for because.
Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
They didn't try.
Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
And if I'm being really honest with myself, that's not
how it's supposed to work. Technically, he was convicted and
sentenced for these concrete criminal actions and given sentences that
technically fall within the guideline range for those crimes, although
with this dubious terrorism enhancement tacked on, they didn't actually
(01:05:42):
charge convict or sentence him for his thoughts and ideas
and beliefs, right.
Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
But they kind of did. And how are you supposed
to feel about that?
Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
I don't know, you have to sit with that, because
the alternative was waiting right, keep that pole camera up
outside his house, keep logging his keystrokes at work, put
a flag on his name so you know if he
buys an airline ticket or gets pulled over, just watch
and wait and hope that you're watching close enough that
(01:06:19):
you can intercept him sometime after he sets up the
sniper's nest, but before he opens fire.
Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
And is that good enough? Can we find peace.
Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
With the idea that technically he went away on a
technicality because they couldn't charge him with what they really
thought he was doing.
Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
I know I promised you something a little lighter instead,
I've left you with this ethical quandary about the nature
and purpose of our justice system. But I think I
remember this case being funny because I just thought it
was outrageously silly, how specific the documentation was that he
was using bing to search for information on how to
make IEDs and also how to write a letter? Does
(01:07:08):
anyone use bing? But my favorite Christopher Hassen case fact
has got to be this one. It's a callback to
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
(01:07:28):
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
(01:07:49):
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.
(01:08:13):
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
(01:08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Weird Little Guys ziproduction of cool Zone Media. For more
from quot Zone
Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Media, visit our website polezonmedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.