July 24, 2025 • 57 mins
In 2016, Nicholas Young became the first American police officer to be arrested and charged with a federal terrorism offense. At trial, jurors were shown mountains of evidence about his collection of nazi memorabilia. But what does that have to do with the gift cards he texted to an FBI informant he thought was a member of ISIS?
Sources:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4559133/united-states-v-young
Helen Taylor (2019): Domestic terrorism and hate crimes: legal definitions and media framing of mass shootings in the United States, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
https://www.academia.edu/81063064/Domestic_terrorism_and_hate_crimes_legal_definitions_and_media_framing_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/11/19/official-allegedly-hinted-at-saudi-torture-of-va-man/d2a5ab07-28dd-4390-a245-c937083178f4/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/13/AR2008091302275.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20210924060335/https://www.nysun.com/national/a-prosecutor-is-called-relentless/82727/
https://harpers.org/2009/03/more-prosecutorial-misconduct-in-the-al-arian-case/
https://theintercept.com/2021/07/17/julian-assange-extradition-gordon-kromberg/
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/16/prosecutors-allege-dubious-isis-nazi-connection-in-terror-sting-case/
https://www.cair.com/cair_in_the_news/va-terror-prosecutor-accused-of-anti-muslim-bias/
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prosecutor_accused_of_personal_animus_in_muslim_terrorism_cases
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Human Rights Watch & Human Rights Institute, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions, (2014).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/human_rights_institute/44
T. Ward Frampton, Predisposition and Positivism: The Forgotten Foundations of the Entrapment Doctrine, 103 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 111 (2013).
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol103/iss1/3
Dru Stevenson, Entrapment By Numbers, 16 J. LAW & PUB. POL’Y 1 (2005)
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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Madeleine Blackman, 2022. "Fluidity of the Fringes: Prior Extremist Involvement as a Radicalization Pathway," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(7)
German, Mike and Beth Zasloff. Policing White Supremacy. The New Press, 2025.
Hoffman, Bruce, and Jacob Ware. God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. Columbia University Press, 2024.
Marc‑André Argentino, Shiraz Maher, Char
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. Nicholas Young was at work on the
morning of August third, twenty sixteen, when federal agents showed
up to arrest him. He appeared before a judge a
few hours later, shackled but still wearing his department issued
uniform pants. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had already
(00:24):
issued a public statement announcing that he'd been fired, but
the reporters in the room all took note of the pants.
Nicholas Young had just become the first police officer in
the United States to be arrested for a federal terrorism offense.
As he was being processed into federal custody, FBI agents
(00:44):
were searching his home, his truck, the backpack he'd been
carrying at the time of the arrest, and his worklocker
number forty five at the Metro Transit Police Department District
two substation. Box after box of evidence was carried out
of his townhouse in northern Virginia. Agents collected nineteen firearms,
(01:05):
eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition, seventy pieces of body armor,
and sixty bladed weapons ranging from daggers to swords, But
they also seized another kind of evidence. Nazi paraphernalia, a
framed portrait of Hitler, a Nazi flag, a tie tack
in the shape of an SS lightning bolt. On his
(01:27):
hard drive, they found photos of a dinner party he'd hosted.
All of the guests were wearing Nazi SS uniforms. The
agent's photographed, inventoried, and packed away dozens of pieces of
evidence that could be used to show that Nicholas Young
was a Nazi, but that wasn't what he was charged with.
He was in prison for supporting ISIS, and there's a very
(01:51):
good argument to be made that he didn't really do
anything at all. I'm Molly Conger in this. It's weird,
little guys. This is a story where nothing happens, no
(02:23):
one really did anything. A lot of the key players
in this story don't even actually exist. The only crime
Nicholas Young stands convicted of is a single count of
providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But he's never met a real terrorist.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
There's no evidence at all that Nicholas Young ever had
contact of any kind with an actual member of ISIS
or al Qaida. He sort of knew a guy who
was recruiting fra al Shabab, but even the undercover agent
investigating them both said Young had nothing to do with that.
The only member of isis Nicholas Young, ever thought he
(03:05):
knew was a confidential human source on the FBI payroll,
and after years of prodding and encouragement, he sent this
friend two hundred and forty five dollars worth of gift
cards to the Google Play app store.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That's all.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I made a note of this case in my messy
collection of odds and ends years ago. Buried somewhere in
this indecipherable mass of text, I wrote Nazi cop joins
isis question mark and paste it in a couple of links,
something to come back to later. I guess it's impossible
to say now what I was thinking when I wrote
(03:43):
most of the things in my little notes app, but
I'm almost positive I first came across this case while
I was just browsing.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I like to see what's out there.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Sometimes I'll just waste a few hours punching in keywords
to search through federal court filings, and I think in
this case the key word was fry Corps. One of
the exhibits in this case is a photograph of Nicholas
Young's truck parked in his driveway, and in the photograph
he can see his vanity license plate, which read FRII Karp.
(04:17):
If you've never driven through Virginia. Vanity plates are hugely
popular here. Almost everybody has one. We have more than
any other state. I think it's because they're really cheap here.
They only charged I think ten dollars a year to
put a personalized tag on your car, and it's fifty
or seventy dollars in a lot of other states, and
Nicholas Young chose to pay ten dollars a year to
(04:38):
drive around northern Virginia advertising his affinity for the Fry Corps.
That's a term for the collection of loosely affiliated nationalists
paramilitary groups that formed in Germany after World War One.
They weren't Nazis technically, since there was no Nazi Party yet,
but many leaders in the Free Corps would go on
(04:59):
to join the Nazi Party, guys like Ernst Rome, Heinrich
Himmler and Rudolph Hess. They were the shock troops for
what was to come, carrying out acts of extra judicial
violence against left wing movements in Germany in the years
after the First World War, and the kind of guy
who romanticizes the idea of joining a nationalist street gang
(05:19):
to beat up leftists is the kind of guy I'm
interested to know more about, especially if that guy is
a cop. So that's how he ended up in my notebook.
But like I said, his fondness for Nazi memorabilia has
nothing at all to do with how he got arrested.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So I made my note and I forgot about it.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
As interesting as I found all of these exhibits related
to his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, there's a very important
question to be asked here. Why was a jury allowed
to see them. We'll get back to that in.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
A minute, but first I should.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Explain how this came ended up in front of a
jury at all. The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent six
years on this case, kind of. They spent six years
trying to connect Nicholas Young to something anything. His first
contact with an FBI agent was in September of twenty ten,
(06:23):
and back in the fall of twenty ten, the agents
were casting a wide net. They were interviewing scores of
people who'd known a man named Zachary Chesser. Chesster was
arrested earlier that summer, for threatening Trey Parker.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And Matt Stone.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yes, that Trey Parker and that Matt Stone, the creators
of South Park. Chesster had taken an interest in Islam
after graduating from high school in two thousand and eight,
and he soon got involved with Revolution Muslim, a website
run by two American Muslim converts that pumped out ro
al Kaita propaganda for an English speaking audience. Plooed guilty
(07:00):
pretty quickly in October of twenty ten, and he was
eventually sentenced to twenty five years in prison. But the
court record in Young's case is pretty vague on the
subject of Zachary Chessar. Intentionally so the prosecutor often refers
to Chesser as a friend of Young's, but in reality
they were barely passing acquaintances.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
But this was the global War on Terror.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And a twenty year old white boy had threatened the
creators of a cartoon over depictions of Muhammad, so a
lot of doors were getting knocked. When agents finally spoke
to Nicholas Young two months after Chessar's arrest, he seemed
shocked by the charges and said if he'd had any
idea Chesser was planning something violent, he would have reported it.
(07:46):
There's no indication in the record that this conversation was
alarming or suspicious. Nicholas Young barely knew Zachary Chesser.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And he was a cop.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
But now Nicholas Young had an FBI file in a
counter terrorism investigation. So three months later, in December of
twenty ten, Young was attending a friend's wedding. At the reception,
a man introduced himself to Young as Khalil and struck
up a conversation. Khalil worked for the FBI. He later
(08:18):
testified that he'd attended the wedding to try to get
close to another man, a man named sale al Barmawi.
The record is again very vague when it comes to
why al Barmawi was the subject of this undercover operation,
and he's never been arrested or charged with the crime,
and it doesn't look like he lives in the United
States anymore. But in two thousand and eight, al Barmawi
(08:41):
was a member of the Muslim Student Association at George
Mason University, so he may have crossed paths with Zachary
Chessar during that single semester that Chesser was enrolled. There After,
Khalil met Young, though he kept in touch for about
a year and a half. The undercover maintained a friendship
with Young, meeting for dinner, watching movies at his house,
(09:03):
going for.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Walks, and just chatting.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
The prosecution emphasized that Young was hanging out in radical
circles and he had dangerous friends, pointing specifically to a
man named Amine al Khalifi, who was later arrested for
attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Alarming, right,
But the government is less forthcoming about the fact that
it was the undercover who introduced Young to al Khalifi,
(09:31):
and the fact that el Khalifi was only arrested after
he was provided with a fake gun and a fake
bomb by the FBI agents who drove him to Washington,
d c. And dropped him off to carry out the
suicide attack they'd planned. I want to get one thing
out of the way here. I'm not defending Nicholas Young,
(09:52):
certainly not defending ISIS. ISIS doesn't actually even come into
the story. There's no real ISIS here. And when it
comes to Nicholas Young, oh, he's a police officer with
a house full of Hitler posters. You know, I'm not
on his side here. That should be obvious, and I'm
not denying that he made some alarming statements throughout the
course of the investigation. In one conversation with the undercover,
(10:15):
he was furious about the way that the FBI had
approached his friends and family when they were asking questions
about whether he knew Zachary Chesser. He allegedly fantasized about
finding out where the female agent lived so he could
kidnap and torture her. That's a very scary thing to say.
But when the undercover submitted his report about that conversation
(10:37):
in March of twenty eleven, he wrote that he didn't
think Young was serious. In other conversations with the undercover,
Young admitted to torturing animals as a child. He talked
about how much he hated the FBI and said that
he believed it was possible to sneak weapons into the
federal courthouse undetected, and he was paranoid who was always
(10:59):
talking about using phones and taking the batteries out of
his phone when he wasn't using it. He said he
was stockpiling weapons, and he hinted that any cop who
tried to search his house would run into problems. But again,
all of these conversations took place in twenty eleven. The
undercover submitted the reports, but nothing rose to the level
(11:20):
of a prosecutable crime. He was talking a lot of shit,
but he owned those guns legally, and he didn't do anything.
It's not my preferred dinner conversation, but legally speaking, fantasizing
about jihad at the chilis in Alexandria, Virginia isn't terrorism.
(11:43):
He did travel to Libya twice in twenty eleven to
provide aid to anti Gaddaffi rebel forces during the Libyan
Civil War. He had a bumper sticker on his truck
that said Libyan Civil War VET Siege of Misrata, And
he really was in miss Rada in April and May
of twenty eleven during some of the most brutal fighting there.
(12:05):
On re entry into the United States after that trip,
he told the ICE agent who interviewed him at the
airport that he'd had to cut his trip short, returning
home ten days earlier than he'd planned because things had
gotten too dangerous there. He returned to Libya a second
time later that year, and he made no secret of
either trip. Both times he was interviewed by a federal
(12:26):
agent at the airport on his way home. When he
was interviewed by the FBI after his second trip to Libya,
they attempted to recruit him as a paid informant, and
he declined.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Again. It doesn't look like.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
He broke any laws here, at least not in the
United States laws. I don't know what Libya's position on
the situation might be, but the FBI was still investigating him.
If they'd found any evidence that he joined a terrorist
organization in Libya, they would have brought it up a trial.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Again.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm super comfortable
with the idea of American cops packing their own body
armor to fly off to some civil war halfway around
the world. But the United States government didn't see fit
to charge him with anything in twenty eleven or twenty twelve,
or twenty thirteen, or twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen. In
(13:22):
twenty twelve, the undercover who'd been hanging out with Young
since twenty ten moved on. One of the other men
that he'd gotten close to was more interesting to the government,
so the agent's focus shifted. Young was interviewed once more
by the FBI later in twenty twelve when he was
crossing the Canadian border after visiting a woman he'd been
romantically involved with, but other than that, the investigation was dormant.
(13:47):
Two years passed before the FBI sent Nicholas Young a
new friend, a confidential human source who called himself Mo.
Young met with Moe twenty times in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
They were close. They didn't just talk about jihad.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
They talked about work, about dating, about Young's struggle to
overcome the depression he'd fallen into after his father's death
in two thousand and seven. He thought they were friends
when they talked about ISIS. It was Mo who brought
it up. In several conversations. Young even tried to cool
his friend's enthusiasm for the group, telling him he didn't
(14:26):
need to join ISIS, and he warned him to be
cautious about what he posted online and who he talked
to about things like this. To be fair, Young did
eventually offer some advice about how to travel overseas without
arousing suspicion, and he agreed to help Mo with his
cover story by sending him a text that would corroborate
(14:46):
the lie that he was going on vacation in Turkey.
Young believed that his friend was going to Syria, and
before Moe pretended to leave for Syria, the pair used
computers at a FedEx store to set up special email
addresses that they could use to communicate during the trip.
Young went to the FedEx store several times over the
(15:07):
next year and a half to send and receive emails.
In December of twenty fifteen, over a year after Mo
pretended to leave for Syria, FBI agents came to Young's
house twice to ask him if he knew anything about.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Mo, and he did lie.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He told agents that he'd had no contact with Mo
since he left for Turkey in late twenty fourteen, and
he had no way of getting in touch with him.
He then emailed Mo to tell him that the FBI
was asking about him, and that right there, that is
a crime. It is a crime to lie to an
FBI agent about a material fact relevant to a criminal investigation,
(15:45):
even if it's a fake criminal investigation. Moe wasn't real,
but Young didn't know that. In those interviews, he was
consciously obstructing what he believed to be a real investigation,
but that wasn't really enough to pull the trigger on
an indictment. They needed him to do something, something they
(16:07):
could take to a grand jury. In July of twenty sixteen,
an undercover agent posing as MO reached out to Young again.
He said, Isis needed gift cards. They needed someone in
the West to buy gift cards and then send them
the codes on the back, and they needed those gift
(16:28):
cards because that's what they used to set up the
messaging accounts that they used to communicate with supporters in
the West. MO said they'd had guys in the UK
who'd been buying the gift cards, but they stopped sending
the codes. Young wrote back, why were the brothers in
UK told to stop?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Inshallah?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
More codes will come your way many sting operations and
setups in this area. He didn't agree to do it
right away. He was cordial, he was inquisitive. He hoped
things would work out for the beast, for his friend,
but he wasn't willing to do it. That same week,
two FBI agents working on the case were texting each other.
(17:10):
The first agent wrote, let's hope he goes one more
step further and his colleague replied just one more step,
to which the first agent responded one huge step with
four exclamation points, and the second agent wrote one small
step for US, one giant leap for slow decline, slow decline.
(17:36):
Sometimes they would just write SD. That was Nicholas Young's
code name. They'd been calling him that for years. In
the summer of twenty sixteen, six years into their investigation,
they were frustrated he was too cautious, too slow, too
unwilling to take a next step. They decided to ratchet
(18:01):
up the pressure. They sent him more and more emails
from MO about the importance of the work he was
doing over there.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
MO told him horror.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Stories about bombings and what was being done to Muslim children.
And as they're goading Young into taking action behind the scenes,
one agent commented that they'd just hit the case with
a defibrillator. After a few days of this convincing, Young
drove to a best Buy in Fairfax, Virginia, and he
(18:29):
bought a handful of Google Play gift cards. Finally, in
July twenty eighth, twenty sixteen, Nicholas Young sent a text
containing twenty two sixteen digit codes, each one from the
back of a Google play gift card redeemable for ten
or fifteen dollars. The total value was two hundred and
(18:50):
forty five dollars. The best Buy receipt was still in
his backpack when he was arrested a few days later.
(19:11):
So he didn't do it right. I mean he did it.
He bought the gift cards. And when he bought the
gift cards, he really did believe their purpose was to
allow ISIS to set up messaging accounts to communicate with
prospective fighters in the West. That's what Moe told him
they were for. There was no coded language. There's no
(19:32):
room for misunderstanding here. Most said they were for ISIS,
So technically yes, that is material support for terrorism. He
doesn't deny that he bought the gift cards or that
he texted the codes to Mow. That's not in dispute.
The real drama in this case is the unhinged trial
(19:53):
strategy pursued by the government. Remember I said at the
top of the episode that I was surprised to see
that the jury had been shown so much evidence of
Nicholas Young's collection of Nazi memorabilia. It was his fondness
for Hitler that first brought this case to my attention,
But ultimately that part of his life had nothing to
do with this case. So how did it wind up
(20:15):
in the record at all? If you're not someone who
spends a lot of time sitting in a courtroom, you
might not be asking yourself that. After all, why wouldn't
a jury get to see all the weird shit they
found in this guy's house? Isn't everything the cops found
in their evidence? I know I'm about to tell you
that the judge in this case was asked that question
(20:37):
and he decided the answer was yes. But typically the
answer to that question is no. Pictures of this guy's
Nazi themed dinner party in two thousand and seven are
very interesting to me, but they don't actually tell a
jury anything meaningful about whether or not he knowingly financed
(20:59):
terrorism in twenty six sixteen. Not to get boring about it,
but this is a pretty textbook example of something that
fails to satisfy the only two federal rules of evidence
that I could name for you off the top of
my head. It's both irrelevant and highly prejudicial. Relevance is
easy to explain. That's rule four oh one, and it
(21:22):
reads evidence is relevant if a it has a tendency
to make a fact more or less probable than it
would be without the evidence, and b the fact is
of consequence in determining the action. That's pretty straightforward. It
does just what it says on the tin. You know,
does seeing this piece of evidence tell you anything about
(21:44):
the facts at issue in this case? Does knowing he
had a Nazi tattoo on his neck give you any
valuable information about the gift cards? It really doesn't easy enough.
I know I'm always telling you I didn't go to
law school, but Rule four h three and its state
(22:04):
court equivalents are something I hear argument about in I
think every case I've ever sat through. Quote the court
may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially
outweighed by a danger of one or more of the
following unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading a jury, undue delay,
(22:25):
wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence. So sometimes evidence
that gets excluded is relevant. It passes the relevance test,
it would help a jury make a determination about the facts,
but it's inflammatory, it's prejudicial. Its probative value, so whether
(22:48):
or not it tells you anything is outweighed by the
prejudicial impact it would have. There's information to be learned
from it, but there's a real likelihood that it could,
for example, make the jury too emotional to be fair
and impartial. Sometimes that means that a jury won't see
particularly graphic crime scene or autopsy photos because those would
(23:12):
upset them without meaningfully adding to their understanding of the case.
In a lot of cases where I hear this argued,
it's usually because the defense doesn't want the jury to
be told about their client's affiliation with a hate group.
They might file emotion ahead of time, asking the court
to prohibit any mention of it, or prohibit the introduction
of evidence that a defendant who did something like assault
(23:35):
a black person or vandalize a synagogue. They might not
want evidence introduced that they have a swastika tattoo or something.
The idea is that you don't want the prosecutor to
be able to flood the jury with a bunch of
images that will leave them thinking, damn, this is a
really bad guy and he needs to be punished. The
(23:55):
jury is supposed to decide if the state has proved
the elements of the case. The jury decides did this
person do this crime not. Is this defendant a good person. So,
even if the evidence might contribute a little bit to
their understanding of the facts of the case, it may
(24:15):
be that this evidence is more likely to sway the
jury into making a decision for the wrong reasons. And,
to be honest, most of the time I hear this argued,
I feel like the jury should have gotten to hear it.
They deserve to hear about the racist shit this guy's
getting up to in his extra curriculars.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
One example that comes to mind right away is during
the lawsuit against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally,
the judge ruled that it was unfairly prejudicial to introduce
evidence about one of the organizer's past. There was plenty
of evidence about statements leading up to, during, and immediately
after the rally, but in a case involving a racially
(24:55):
motivated violent conspiracy, the judge felt it was unfairly pres
judicial to tell the jury that one of the defendants
had previously been convicted of something you could fairly call
a racially motivated violent conspiracy, specifically that he'd want stolen
machine guns from the army and given them to the
clan so they could start a race war. So I
(25:19):
was under the impression that the bar was pretty high
for this kind of thing. So as I'm picking through
the filings in the Nicolas Young case, it seemed very
weird to me that they were able to convince a
judge to let them show the jury so many pictures
of Hitler. What does Hitler have to do with Jihad?
(25:40):
Why would pictures of his Nazi tattoos help a jury
decide if he was guilty of buying a gift card
for Isis. Unfortunately for you, the answer is another boring
bit of legalese. The defense wanted to argue that this
was a case of entrapment. That word doesn't mean when
(26:01):
you think it means. I can promise you, unless you
practice criminal law, I can almost guarantee you that whatever
you think entrapment means is not what a judge thinks
it means. An undercover cop doesn't have to tell you
they're a cop, even if you ask. They can lie
to you about anything and everything. Undercovers and informants can
(26:26):
do illegal stuff with you. It can even be entirely
their idea. They can buy you the gun, put it
in your hand, and drive you to the crime scene.
Almost every scenario you can think of for an undercover
cop is so outrageously over the top. Complicit in the
planning and execution of a crime isn't entrapment.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
It does happen.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
It's rare, but it is technically possible to succeed in
arguing that you're not guilty of a crime because an
agent of the state induced you to do it. It
can work, but it's never worked in a terrorism case.
According to an article in the Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology, I read the whole paper twice before I
(27:16):
realized I know the author, and I probably could have
just asked him nicely to explain it to me in
smaller words. But that's my punishment for getting all my
writing down in the middle of the night. Of the
hundreds of terrorism cases brought by the DJ in the
first decade after nine to eleven, Thomas Frampton wrote quote
in the popular press, the improbability of such plots has
(27:39):
generated skepticism. Several authors have suggested that the FBI, in
its zeal to demonstrate tangible success in the fight against terrorism,
has been improperly manufacturing nonexistent terrorist schemes. The FBI is
catching guys who almost did something they were never going
(28:02):
to do. But despite the fact that almost all of
the terrorism related prosecutions in the United States are based
on sting operations where the would be terrorist was induced, coached,
and aided every step of the way by a copper informant,
no one has ever prevailed in court by asserting an
entrapment defense. So what is entrapment? In order to successfully
(28:30):
argue entrapment, you have to show that a state actor,
so a copper, a paid informant, induced you to commit
the crime, and that you lacked the predisposition to have
done it on your own. The first part's easy. The
informant and the undercover agent coaxed him into it.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It was their idea. They begged and pleaded.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
They spent years insinuating themselves into his life. They got
close to him. The agents were having private conversations behind
the scenes about how to push him over the edge
to actually commit a crime. They were essentially saying to
each other, this guy isn't going to break the law
unless we make him. But the second prong of the
(29:13):
test is slippery. Sure, maybe the government talked you into
committing the crime. But you wouldn't have actually done it
unless you were predisposed to doing things like that. Right,
If you weren't the kind of person who had a
natural predisposition to commit this crime, you wouldn't have This
(29:35):
crime is obviously in your nature. For this part of
the test, there are some courts that use what's called
an objective test, asking the question would this have worked
on a reasonable person? But most courts, including the federal courts,
use a subjective standard. So the question becomes, was this
(29:58):
particular defendant predisposed to committing this crime? Now? I read
a couple of papers, but if you ask me, this
is the law saying does the defendant have bad vibes?
And the answer, it turns out, is always yeah. Determining
(30:20):
whether someone is predisposed towards crime is alarmingly vibes based.
It's not just a question of your criminal history. You know,
have you done something like this before? Have you even
tried to do something like this before? No. It opens
up the door for an exploration of your character, and
(30:42):
that's something that's normally very much off limits in a
criminal trial. As Prampton wrote, quote, the defense is unusual
because it makes a searching inquiry into the defendant's character
or criminal propensities the centerpiece of the criminal trial. This
stands in marked contrast to the traditional focus of Anglo
American criminal jurisprudence, which generally spurns such evidence as irrelevant
(31:06):
to the central issue of moral blameworthiness for a particular
volitional criminal act. In a twenty fourteen report, Human Rights
Watch suggests that it may not even be possible for
an entrapment defense to work in a terrorism case. The
nature of the argument requires the jury to make a
determination about the defendant's character. They're not deciding if the
(31:29):
defendant is guilty or not guilty of the crime. They're
deciding if this is an innocent person.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
This character inquiry makes it exceptionally difficult for a defendant
to succeed in raising the entrapment defense, particularly in the
terrorism context, where inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterizations of
Islam and foreigners often prevail. And that is how we
ended up with dozens of exacts its demonstrating that Nicholas
(32:01):
Young loved Hitler. Young's attorneys tried to keep this evidence
out at emotions hearing. Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg argued
that quote, the Nazi stuff in this case is very
much related to the.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Isis stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
The Nazi stuff is related to the Isis stuff. A
great deal of ink was spilled on the subject in
motions back and forth. But I'm not convinced by Kromberg's argument,
nor that of the expert witness he put on the
stand to explain it to the jury at trial. I'm
not saying that there's no conversation to be had about
(32:47):
the curious phenomenon of cross pollination within online communities of
right wing accelerationists and Salafi jihadists. I'd intended to devote
a little more time to exploring that in this episode,
but I think it's a longer conversation for another day.
There's been some interesting writing in just the last five
years on the nature of this trend within some fringe
(33:09):
online spaces of melding the narrative and esthetics of neo
Nazism and Islamic extremism. The trend itself isn't necessarily new,
but all of the scholarship I can find is fairly recent.
But it is out there, and we've already talked in
passing about several examples of this phenomenon. Remember Brandon Russell,
(33:33):
the founder of Adam Woffen. Back in twenty eighteen, he
was sharing a house in Florida with three other members
of his neo Nazi terrorist organization when one of them,
Devon Arthur's, murdered the other two. Arthur's had recently converted
to Islam. And remember Ethan Melzer, the young Army private
who communicated classified troop movements to someone that he thought
(33:57):
was in Al Qaida because he thought a little had
would help kick off the kind of worldwide violence necessary
for the race war envisioned by his particular brand of
neo Nazism. And in a more general sense, it's not
even all that rare to see your average neo Nazi
terror enthusiasts talking about things like white Shariah or white Jihad,
(34:21):
borrowing the language and symbolism, or drawing inspiration from groups
like al Qaeda or ISIS, And in a broad sense,
they do have things in common. On the extreme end
of both of these ideologies, you have misogyny, homophobia, anti semitism,
glorification of violence. Think about terogram, where you have the
(34:43):
idolization of the mass shooters that they call saints, these
people who have killed and died for the cause. What
is that if not a martyr. White supremacists have been
calling for RAHOA for decades. That's a shortened form of
the phrase racial holy war.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So you can kind of see.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Where the edges of these things could bleed together a
little bit. It's an interesting topic to explore, and there's
not a clear cut answer here about how sincere any
particular actor is. What's a meme, what's a recruitment tactic,
what's trolling? What's just equal opportunity, love of violence? It's
(35:27):
all over the map, and it's evolving. I'll pop a
few links in the show notes to a few papers
on the topic that I thought were interesting. But I'm
going to come back to this when I've had some
time to do a little more reading. So I'm not
saying there's no basis for an argument that Nicholas Young's
interest in Nazi memorabilia could potentially be relevant to his
(35:49):
material support of ISIS. There is room here for a
conversation about some interplay between his belief in these ideologies.
But I am saying that I thought about it. I
considered the facts of the case that are on the record.
I read a pretty significant chunk of the extant literature
on syncretic extremism, and I gotta say I think they
(36:14):
violated the civil rights of this Hitler enthusiast. I take
no pleasure in telling you that Nicholas Young is an
extremely unsympathetic individual. No one is more upset than I
am that I have to tell you that. I don't
think they were fair to the cop with the Nazi tattoos,
and he say some pretty wild stuff about jihad.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
To those informants.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
But I don't think it was proper to present these
two things as reinforcing evidence of one another in a
criminal trial. Again, I'm not even saying there's no possibility
that these things were intertwined for him, but that's not
what they put on the record. This evidence was produced
(36:59):
to counter the entrapment defense. It was produced to show predisposition.
The entire purpose was to show the jury that this
is a bad guy who believes bad things, so he
probably does bad things.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
And that's not how it's supposed to work. For this case.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Doctor Dovid Gartenstein Ross was hired by the prosecution to
prepare a report on quote the relationship between affinity for
Nazism and inclination to support militant Islamic groups. The first
ten pages of the report are I guess they're supposed
to be a resume, but it's in narrative form. It's
(37:54):
not the traditional CV that's submitted to the court when
you offer up an expert. And then what follows is
just a loosely connected series of largely unsubstantiated statements and anecdotes,
and it all somehow adds up to the conclusion that
Nazis and Isis both hate Jewish people, thus making them
(38:15):
ideologically similar in such a significant way that it would
be common and expected for someone to drift from one
worldview into the other. And he ends with the bold
pronouncement that quote, I conclude that evidence in individual's affinity
for Nazism is related to the question of whether that
individual is predisposed to supporting militant Islamist groups. This report
(38:40):
was written shortly after the case was filed back in
twenty seventeen, and at that time there was no meaningful
existing scholarship on this phenomenon. He cites none. It doesn't exist.
The academic writing produced on the topic in the last
few years does recognize the existence of this ideological soup
(39:03):
that exists at the far fringes, But most of the
authors I've read seem to agree that it's not common,
it's not universal, and it's not well documented enough to
make a conclusion like that. When you read a study,
you should look into how it came to be written,
(39:23):
who wrote it, what's their background, what did they study,
where did they work, did someone pay for it?
Speaker 2 (39:31):
What else have they written? Is there any publicly.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Available evidence about their beliefs or their motivations. You can't
always answer all of these questions, and god willing, the
answers are usually pretty mundane. In this case, the report
was paid for by the government. Doctor grtnstein Ross was
paid sixteen thousand dollars for his work on the case.
That in itself isn't unusual or cause for concern. You
(39:57):
often see it presented that way in a trial. You know,
the opposing council insinuating that the expert is only saying
what they've been paid to say. But it's not weird
to pay an expert for their time, and serving as
an expert witness can be a significant time commitment. So
question answered not a huge red plaque. His background appears
(40:19):
to be in Islamic extremism, both as a past participant
and a current researcher. After dabbling briefly in Islamic extremism,
he went to work in a nonprofit called the Investigative
Project on Terrorism. The IPT is one of the leading
purveyors of pseudo academic Islamophobia, and it's cited as an
(40:41):
example of groups with quote thinly veiled political motives typically
infused with poor scholarship and extremely selective reporting in a
twenty fifteen issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism. After a
brief stint there, doctor Grtnstein Ross moved on to the
Foundation for Defense of Democrat, where he's been since two
(41:01):
thousand and seven. The FDD claims to have been founded
in the aftermath of nine to eleven to address the
global threat of terrorism, but the original incorporation paperwork shows
that it was founded in April of two thousand and one,
several months before nine to eleven, and the original stated
purpose of the organization was providing quote education meant to
(41:26):
enhance Israel's image in North America. They revised that mission
statement after nine to eleven, and they've sought to distance
themselves from their original mission as a pro Israel lobbying group,
but public disclosures of their lobbying expenditures show a disproportionate
interest in pro Israel and anti Iran measures. A founding
(41:48):
board member and a primary donor to FDD is Trump
Megadnor and former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus. And. After
Trump's win in twenty sixteen, several analysts of the Foundation left,
claiming the organization was limiting criticism of Trump in their analysis.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been called an
(42:09):
anti Muslim fringe group by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bale.
Farid Hafez, a political scientist at Salzburg University, identified FDD
as a key player in what he calls a transatlantic
network of Islamophobia. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to
Colin Powell, has accused the Foundation of knowingly peddling falsehoods
(42:32):
to push for war with Iran. The progressive think tank
Institute for Policy Studies has noted that while the organization
is quote an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not
criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall
into this category, and for what it's worth, Iran's Ministry
of Foreign Affairs has designated the Foundation as a foreign
(42:54):
terrorist organization. So I guess two can play at that game.
And the prosecutor who put this expert on the stand
is no stranger to accusations of Islamophobia of his own.
Gordon Kromberg has been called a loose cannon by legal
ethicists and has been accused of personal animus against Muslim defendants.
(43:17):
When the subject of a grand jury subpoena requested a
postponement until after Ramadan.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Kromberg called it quote part of the.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Attempted Islamization of the American justice system. According to a
complaint from that individual's attorney, Kromberg quote became agitated in
the court room and said, quote, they can kill each
other during Ramadan, they can testify before a grand jury.
When Ahmed Abu Ali, a United States citizen, was arrested
(43:48):
and tortured in Saudi Arabia, the man's lawyer asked Kromberg
if his client might be returned to the United States
to face pending charges here, and Kromberg reportedly said, quote,
He's no good for us here. He has no fingernails left,
though he denies making light of the fact that Ali
(44:08):
was being tortured. In another case of an American accused
of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Kromberg explicitly instructed the
jury to disregard testimony offered by Muslim witnesses because their
religion teaches that it is acceptable to lie to non believers.
(44:29):
Law professor Wadis Said told The Intercept in twenty twenty
one that Kromberg has a history of provocative stances and quote.
The positions that he has taken are quite tendentious and
even vindictive in terms of his mindset toward the person
he's targeting.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I'm not so naive.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
As to think it's unusual for a prosecutor to exaggerate
for dramatic effect, But I just think it's important to
evaluate the source of a fantastic claim. So when a
man stands in front of a jury and says that
a couple of gift cards should send a man to
prison for fifteen years, you should take a minute to
check out his track record. Perhaps the most egregious bit
(45:09):
of evidence offered at trial was an honest to god lie,
I mean, showing them all the Hitler stuff. That was real.
That was real evidence. He really did have those things
in his home. I just don't think it was appropriate
to use them as evidence in this case. But throughout
the case, Kromberg claimed that Nicholas Young had attended a
(45:29):
neo Nazi rally in two thousand and one, and in
a later article published by doctor Gartnstein Ross in the
Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, he suggests that
this is evidence that Young actually converted to Islam in
two thousand and seven, six years later because of his
interest in Nazism, as evidence by his attendance at this
(45:51):
Neo Nazi rally. The problem is that didn't happen. A
former classmate test In two thousand and one. They were
both taking a course on European racism taught by Professor
Aaron Gillette at George Mason University. As part of a
class project. The two students attended a dinner hosted by
(46:13):
a neo Nazi group where British fascist Mark Catterill would
be speaking. Their professor arranged for them to attend and
even interviewed Catterall after his speech. Mark Catterall was living
in Virginia at the time. Running a group called the
American Friends of the British National Party, and the dinner
was organized by the neo Nazi group National Alliance. And
(46:35):
here's a weird little guy's Easter egg. I think that
this was one of those weekly dinners that was hosted
by Sam Francis at a Thai restaurant in northern Virginia,
those dinners that a Ron Paul Staffer was outed as
occasionally attending, but characterizing a school project, one that had
been signed off on by their history professor as evidence
(46:58):
that the defendant had a history of attending Nazi rallies,
which in turn shows that he's predisposed to trying to
fund isis that's outrageous. Like I said, Nicholas Young is
not a sympathetic character. He's definitely a weird little guy.
There are a lot of salacious details about his interests
(47:20):
that were, in my opinion, improperly presented to the jury
under other circumstances. It's the kind of stuff I would
expect to see in a case where a guy really
did try to do some kind of terrorism, the kind
of terrorism I write about. But they charged him for
buying some gift cards, which he did do sure, but
(47:45):
only after a six year investigation involving hundreds of man hours,
a team of handlers, a two year relationship with an
undercover agent, another two year relationship with a paid informant,
an active encouragement to commit the crime in question. Throughout
the case, the prosecution implied that Young had committed a
(48:06):
wide variety of other crimes. In one filing, it's implied
that he had bomb making materials, but none were presented
as evidence and he wasn't charged with it. There are
repeated assertions that he's been illegally purchasing steroids online and
having them shipped from overseas. They even claim to have
found illegal steroids in his home on the day of
(48:28):
the arrest. He's accused of plotting to smuggle guns into
a courthouse, of plotting to kidnap an FBI agent, of
joining a terrorist organization in Libya, but it wasn't charged
with any of that. Did they think they couldn't prove
those things? Were they padding out the allegations to make
the underlying case look more serious?
Speaker 2 (48:48):
Who knows? In the end, they.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Relied on an anti terrorism statute that is notoriously abused
in sting operations that target Muslim Americans. This former FBI
agent Mike Jerman wrote in his recent book Policing White Supremacy,
the material support for Terrorism statute is quote used in
FBI sting operations that manufacture terrorism threats to produce statistical accomplishments,
(49:18):
so law enforcement resources are disproportionately allocated to combating foreign terrorism,
which then results in agents being quote pressured to demonstrate
their success even if no genuine plots exist. This is
a question I keep running into on the show. What
(49:41):
is terrorism? Whose crimes matter to us more importantly, whose
crimes matter to the government. What kinds of violence are unacceptable?
What kinds of violence are allowed? What message is being
communi in the decisions that they make about who, how,
(50:03):
and when to prosecute and for what. Despite a twenty
seventeen report from the United States Government Accountability Office which
showed that right wing extremists are responsible for three times
the number of domestic attacks as compared to Islamic extremists,
we don't use the same words.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
To talk about these things.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a Bible study
at a Manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South
Carolina FBI Director James Comey said, quote, terrorism is an
act of violence to try to influence a public body
or citizenry.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
So it's more of a political act.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
And again, based on what I know so far, I
don't see it as a political act, not a political act.
Dylan Roof was very clear about his motivations. He had
a manifesto. He intentionally left people alive so they could
(51:08):
tell the story of what happened in that Bible study.
He was trying to incite a race war, a civil
war once again ignited in South Carolina, and fought over
the right of black people to exist freely in the
United States. That feels very political to me, but that's
not how we talk about it. As Bruce Hoffman wrote
(51:30):
in his book God's Guns and Sedition, terrorism as it
is currently defined in American law treats domestic terror and
foreign terror very differently, and in the book he refers
to this case directly, noting that Young was sentenced to
fifteen years in prison. The average sentence for this charge
providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is thirteen
(51:54):
point five years. Domestic terrorism, on the other hand, often
results in significantly shorter sentences, even in cases where we've
used the word, even in cases where the crime is
much more serious. I mean, first of all, you can't
even get charged with an equivalent offense. You are free
(52:15):
to materially support organizations that absolutely should be called a
domestic terrorist organization without consequence. That's allowed. You can't send
a ten dollars gift card to ISIS, but you can
give everything you own to Adam Woffin. Hoffmann lists several
contrasting examples. So Brendan Russell, the founder of Adam Woffin,
(52:36):
was arrested in twenty eighteen after officers found his bomb
making workshop while they were investigating the double homicide committed
inside his home by his roommate. Russell was released in
twenty twenty one after serving most of a three year sentence,
and he immediately got back to work planning another active
domestic terrorism.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
He was convicted.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
Earlier this year for cons firing to take out the
power grid in Maryland, three years for a garage full
of bomb making materials and full knowledge that he was
going to reoffend, but fifteen years for some gift cards.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Writing about the legal.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Double standard of defining terrorism, Australian criminologist Helen Taylor wrote
that quote, the asymmetric use of the terrorism label entrenches
fear of the other. That is, because we only talk
about terrorism when we mean Islamic extremist terrorism, we come
to associate Islam with terrorism. This has obvious negative consequences
(53:42):
for Muslims. Of course, the last twenty five years have
been an unending litany of civil rights violations, but it
also prevents us from appropriately addressing any other form of terrorism.
The inability to recognize terror when it is something other
than Post nine to eleven hysteria leads to right wing
(54:03):
extremist violence being deprioritized. Terrorism investigations are thorough. I mean,
think about Zachary Chesser, right, the FBI spent six years
investigating a man that he spoke to twice over a
year before he made an online threat against the creators
of a cartoon. But right wing extremist violence, because we
(54:27):
can't call it terrorism, is quickly relegated to lone wolf territory,
and there's little attention page of the environment that radicalized
the perpetrator or potential sources of support and encouragement within
his network. If the government put even ten percent of
that energy into investigating and prosecuting far right extremists. They'd
(54:50):
be drowning in prosecutions. It would not take six years
to catch your average American neo Nazi agreeing to engage
in a terrorist act.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
But is that useful? I mean, ultimately, I think the.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Word itself is dangerous territory. In the twenty four years
since nine to eleven, the word terrorism has largely served
as a tool for increasing state surveillance or systematically violating
civil rights and engorging law enforcement budgets, and it hasn't
made a safer But if we're going to use that word,
(55:27):
if we're going to have that framework, we need to
think about what we mean when we say it. As
Taylor writes, quote, labeling an act as terrorism serves as
an official statement about the severity of the crime. It's
a legal framework, sure, but it's a statement about what matters.
(55:49):
Maybe there's no grand theory of change that I can
offer you here. Giving the government more tools for prosecution
probably won't really help. They're already making ideal, logical choices
about how to use the tools they have. I guess
the only real takeaway from this story is that no
one is ever going to text you demanding the codes
(56:11):
off the back of a gift card for any legitimate reason.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Usually it's a scammer.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Pretending to be the irs to scare your grandma into
emptying her savings account. But sometimes it's an FBI agent
pretending to be your friend. Who joined isis? Weird Little
(56:45):
Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Leuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talent of Gry Gigan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
Won't to answer it.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Col Zone Media. Nicholas Young was at work on the
morning of August third, twenty sixteen, when federal agents showed
up to arrest him. He appeared before a judge a
few hours later, shackled but still wearing his department issued
uniform pants. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had already
(00:24):
issued a public statement announcing that he'd been fired, but
the reporters in the room all took note of the pants.
Nicholas Young had just become the first police officer in
the United States to be arrested for a federal terrorism offense.
As he was being processed into federal custody, FBI agents
(00:44):
were searching his home, his truck, the backpack he'd been
carrying at the time of the arrest, and his worklocker
number forty five at the Metro Transit Police Department District
two substation. Box after box of evidence was carried out
of his townhouse in northern Virginia. Agents collected nineteen firearms,
(01:05):
eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition, seventy pieces of body armor,
and sixty bladed weapons ranging from daggers to swords, But
they also seized another kind of evidence. Nazi paraphernalia, a
framed portrait of Hitler, a Nazi flag, a tie tack
in the shape of an SS lightning bolt. On his
(01:27):
hard drive, they found photos of a dinner party he'd hosted.
All of the guests were wearing Nazi SS uniforms. The
agent's photographed, inventoried, and packed away dozens of pieces of
evidence that could be used to show that Nicholas Young
was a Nazi, but that wasn't what he was charged with.
He was in prison for supporting ISIS, and there's a very
(01:51):
good argument to be made that he didn't really do
anything at all. I'm Molly Conger in this. It's weird,
little guys. This is a story where nothing happens, no
(02:23):
one really did anything. A lot of the key players
in this story don't even actually exist. The only crime
Nicholas Young stands convicted of is a single count of
providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But he's never met a real terrorist.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
There's no evidence at all that Nicholas Young ever had
contact of any kind with an actual member of ISIS
or al Qaida. He sort of knew a guy who
was recruiting fra al Shabab, but even the undercover agent
investigating them both said Young had nothing to do with that.
The only member of isis Nicholas Young, ever thought he
(03:05):
knew was a confidential human source on the FBI payroll,
and after years of prodding and encouragement, he sent this
friend two hundred and forty five dollars worth of gift
cards to the Google Play app store.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That's all.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I made a note of this case in my messy
collection of odds and ends years ago. Buried somewhere in
this indecipherable mass of text, I wrote Nazi cop joins
isis question mark and paste it in a couple of links,
something to come back to later. I guess it's impossible
to say now what I was thinking when I wrote
(03:43):
most of the things in my little notes app, but
I'm almost positive I first came across this case while
I was just browsing.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I like to see what's out there.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Sometimes I'll just waste a few hours punching in keywords
to search through federal court filings, and I think in
this case the key word was fry Corps. One of
the exhibits in this case is a photograph of Nicholas
Young's truck parked in his driveway, and in the photograph
he can see his vanity license plate, which read FRII Karp.
(04:17):
If you've never driven through Virginia. Vanity plates are hugely
popular here. Almost everybody has one. We have more than
any other state. I think it's because they're really cheap here.
They only charged I think ten dollars a year to
put a personalized tag on your car, and it's fifty
or seventy dollars in a lot of other states, and
Nicholas Young chose to pay ten dollars a year to
(04:38):
drive around northern Virginia advertising his affinity for the Fry Corps.
That's a term for the collection of loosely affiliated nationalists
paramilitary groups that formed in Germany after World War One.
They weren't Nazis technically, since there was no Nazi Party yet,
but many leaders in the Free Corps would go on
(04:59):
to join the Nazi Party, guys like Ernst Rome, Heinrich
Himmler and Rudolph Hess. They were the shock troops for
what was to come, carrying out acts of extra judicial
violence against left wing movements in Germany in the years
after the First World War, and the kind of guy
who romanticizes the idea of joining a nationalist street gang
(05:19):
to beat up leftists is the kind of guy I'm
interested to know more about, especially if that guy is
a cop. So that's how he ended up in my notebook.
But like I said, his fondness for Nazi memorabilia has
nothing at all to do with how he got arrested.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So I made my note and I forgot about it.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
As interesting as I found all of these exhibits related
to his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, there's a very important
question to be asked here. Why was a jury allowed
to see them. We'll get back to that in.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
A minute, but first I should.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Explain how this came ended up in front of a
jury at all. The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent six
years on this case, kind of. They spent six years
trying to connect Nicholas Young to something anything. His first
contact with an FBI agent was in September of twenty ten,
(06:23):
and back in the fall of twenty ten, the agents
were casting a wide net. They were interviewing scores of
people who'd known a man named Zachary Chesser. Chesster was
arrested earlier that summer, for threatening Trey Parker.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And Matt Stone.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yes, that Trey Parker and that Matt Stone, the creators
of South Park. Chesster had taken an interest in Islam
after graduating from high school in two thousand and eight,
and he soon got involved with Revolution Muslim, a website
run by two American Muslim converts that pumped out ro
al Kaita propaganda for an English speaking audience. Plooed guilty
(07:00):
pretty quickly in October of twenty ten, and he was
eventually sentenced to twenty five years in prison. But the
court record in Young's case is pretty vague on the
subject of Zachary Chessar. Intentionally so the prosecutor often refers
to Chesser as a friend of Young's, but in reality
they were barely passing acquaintances.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
But this was the global War on Terror.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
And a twenty year old white boy had threatened the
creators of a cartoon over depictions of Muhammad, so a
lot of doors were getting knocked. When agents finally spoke
to Nicholas Young two months after Chessar's arrest, he seemed
shocked by the charges and said if he'd had any
idea Chesser was planning something violent, he would have reported it.
(07:46):
There's no indication in the record that this conversation was
alarming or suspicious. Nicholas Young barely knew Zachary Chesser.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And he was a cop.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
But now Nicholas Young had an FBI file in a
counter terrorism investigation. So three months later, in December of
twenty ten, Young was attending a friend's wedding. At the reception,
a man introduced himself to Young as Khalil and struck
up a conversation. Khalil worked for the FBI. He later
(08:18):
testified that he'd attended the wedding to try to get
close to another man, a man named sale al Barmawi.
The record is again very vague when it comes to
why al Barmawi was the subject of this undercover operation,
and he's never been arrested or charged with the crime,
and it doesn't look like he lives in the United
States anymore. But in two thousand and eight, al Barmawi
(08:41):
was a member of the Muslim Student Association at George
Mason University, so he may have crossed paths with Zachary
Chessar during that single semester that Chesser was enrolled. There After,
Khalil met Young, though he kept in touch for about
a year and a half. The undercover maintained a friendship
with Young, meeting for dinner, watching movies at his house,
(09:03):
going for.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Walks, and just chatting.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
The prosecution emphasized that Young was hanging out in radical
circles and he had dangerous friends, pointing specifically to a
man named Amine al Khalifi, who was later arrested for
attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Alarming, right,
But the government is less forthcoming about the fact that
it was the undercover who introduced Young to al Khalifi,
(09:31):
and the fact that el Khalifi was only arrested after
he was provided with a fake gun and a fake
bomb by the FBI agents who drove him to Washington,
d c. And dropped him off to carry out the
suicide attack they'd planned. I want to get one thing
out of the way here. I'm not defending Nicholas Young,
(09:52):
certainly not defending ISIS. ISIS doesn't actually even come into
the story. There's no real ISIS here. And when it
comes to Nicholas Young, oh, he's a police officer with
a house full of Hitler posters. You know, I'm not
on his side here. That should be obvious, and I'm
not denying that he made some alarming statements throughout the
course of the investigation. In one conversation with the undercover,
(10:15):
he was furious about the way that the FBI had
approached his friends and family when they were asking questions
about whether he knew Zachary Chesser. He allegedly fantasized about
finding out where the female agent lived so he could
kidnap and torture her. That's a very scary thing to say.
But when the undercover submitted his report about that conversation
(10:37):
in March of twenty eleven, he wrote that he didn't
think Young was serious. In other conversations with the undercover,
Young admitted to torturing animals as a child. He talked
about how much he hated the FBI and said that
he believed it was possible to sneak weapons into the
federal courthouse undetected, and he was paranoid who was always
(10:59):
talking about using phones and taking the batteries out of
his phone when he wasn't using it. He said he
was stockpiling weapons, and he hinted that any cop who
tried to search his house would run into problems. But again,
all of these conversations took place in twenty eleven. The
undercover submitted the reports, but nothing rose to the level
(11:20):
of a prosecutable crime. He was talking a lot of shit,
but he owned those guns legally, and he didn't do anything.
It's not my preferred dinner conversation, but legally speaking, fantasizing
about jihad at the chilis in Alexandria, Virginia isn't terrorism.
(11:43):
He did travel to Libya twice in twenty eleven to
provide aid to anti Gaddaffi rebel forces during the Libyan
Civil War. He had a bumper sticker on his truck
that said Libyan Civil War VET Siege of Misrata, And
he really was in miss Rada in April and May
of twenty eleven during some of the most brutal fighting there.
(12:05):
On re entry into the United States after that trip,
he told the ICE agent who interviewed him at the
airport that he'd had to cut his trip short, returning
home ten days earlier than he'd planned because things had
gotten too dangerous there. He returned to Libya a second
time later that year, and he made no secret of
either trip. Both times he was interviewed by a federal
(12:26):
agent at the airport on his way home. When he
was interviewed by the FBI after his second trip to Libya,
they attempted to recruit him as a paid informant, and
he declined.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Again. It doesn't look like.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
He broke any laws here, at least not in the
United States laws. I don't know what Libya's position on
the situation might be, but the FBI was still investigating him.
If they'd found any evidence that he joined a terrorist
organization in Libya, they would have brought it up a trial.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Again.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm super comfortable
with the idea of American cops packing their own body
armor to fly off to some civil war halfway around
the world. But the United States government didn't see fit
to charge him with anything in twenty eleven or twenty twelve,
or twenty thirteen, or twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen. In
(13:22):
twenty twelve, the undercover who'd been hanging out with Young
since twenty ten moved on. One of the other men
that he'd gotten close to was more interesting to the government,
so the agent's focus shifted. Young was interviewed once more
by the FBI later in twenty twelve when he was
crossing the Canadian border after visiting a woman he'd been
romantically involved with, but other than that, the investigation was dormant.
(13:47):
Two years passed before the FBI sent Nicholas Young a
new friend, a confidential human source who called himself Mo.
Young met with Moe twenty times in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
They were close. They didn't just talk about jihad.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
They talked about work, about dating, about Young's struggle to
overcome the depression he'd fallen into after his father's death
in two thousand and seven. He thought they were friends
when they talked about ISIS. It was Mo who brought
it up. In several conversations. Young even tried to cool
his friend's enthusiasm for the group, telling him he didn't
(14:26):
need to join ISIS, and he warned him to be
cautious about what he posted online and who he talked
to about things like this. To be fair, Young did
eventually offer some advice about how to travel overseas without
arousing suspicion, and he agreed to help Mo with his
cover story by sending him a text that would corroborate
(14:46):
the lie that he was going on vacation in Turkey.
Young believed that his friend was going to Syria, and
before Moe pretended to leave for Syria, the pair used
computers at a FedEx store to set up special email
addresses that they could use to communicate during the trip.
Young went to the FedEx store several times over the
(15:07):
next year and a half to send and receive emails.
In December of twenty fifteen, over a year after Mo
pretended to leave for Syria, FBI agents came to Young's
house twice to ask him if he knew anything about.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Mo, and he did lie.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He told agents that he'd had no contact with Mo
since he left for Turkey in late twenty fourteen, and
he had no way of getting in touch with him.
He then emailed Mo to tell him that the FBI
was asking about him, and that right there, that is
a crime. It is a crime to lie to an
FBI agent about a material fact relevant to a criminal investigation,
(15:45):
even if it's a fake criminal investigation. Moe wasn't real,
but Young didn't know that. In those interviews, he was
consciously obstructing what he believed to be a real investigation,
but that wasn't really enough to pull the trigger on
an indictment. They needed him to do something, something they
(16:07):
could take to a grand jury. In July of twenty sixteen,
an undercover agent posing as MO reached out to Young again.
He said, Isis needed gift cards. They needed someone in
the West to buy gift cards and then send them
the codes on the back, and they needed those gift
(16:28):
cards because that's what they used to set up the
messaging accounts that they used to communicate with supporters in
the West. MO said they'd had guys in the UK
who'd been buying the gift cards, but they stopped sending
the codes. Young wrote back, why were the brothers in
UK told to stop?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Inshallah?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
More codes will come your way many sting operations and
setups in this area. He didn't agree to do it
right away. He was cordial, he was inquisitive. He hoped
things would work out for the beast, for his friend,
but he wasn't willing to do it. That same week,
two FBI agents working on the case were texting each other.
(17:10):
The first agent wrote, let's hope he goes one more
step further and his colleague replied just one more step,
to which the first agent responded one huge step with
four exclamation points, and the second agent wrote one small
step for US, one giant leap for slow decline, slow decline.
(17:36):
Sometimes they would just write SD. That was Nicholas Young's
code name. They'd been calling him that for years. In
the summer of twenty sixteen, six years into their investigation,
they were frustrated he was too cautious, too slow, too
unwilling to take a next step. They decided to ratchet
(18:01):
up the pressure. They sent him more and more emails
from MO about the importance of the work he was
doing over there.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
MO told him horror.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Stories about bombings and what was being done to Muslim children.
And as they're goading Young into taking action behind the scenes,
one agent commented that they'd just hit the case with
a defibrillator. After a few days of this convincing, Young
drove to a best Buy in Fairfax, Virginia, and he
(18:29):
bought a handful of Google Play gift cards. Finally, in
July twenty eighth, twenty sixteen, Nicholas Young sent a text
containing twenty two sixteen digit codes, each one from the
back of a Google play gift card redeemable for ten
or fifteen dollars. The total value was two hundred and
(18:50):
forty five dollars. The best Buy receipt was still in
his backpack when he was arrested a few days later.
(19:11):
So he didn't do it right. I mean he did it.
He bought the gift cards. And when he bought the
gift cards, he really did believe their purpose was to
allow ISIS to set up messaging accounts to communicate with
prospective fighters in the West. That's what Moe told him
they were for. There was no coded language. There's no
(19:32):
room for misunderstanding here. Most said they were for ISIS,
So technically yes, that is material support for terrorism. He
doesn't deny that he bought the gift cards or that
he texted the codes to Mow. That's not in dispute.
The real drama in this case is the unhinged trial
(19:53):
strategy pursued by the government. Remember I said at the
top of the episode that I was surprised to see
that the jury had been shown so much evidence of
Nicholas Young's collection of Nazi memorabilia. It was his fondness
for Hitler that first brought this case to my attention,
But ultimately that part of his life had nothing to
do with this case. So how did it wind up
(20:15):
in the record at all? If you're not someone who
spends a lot of time sitting in a courtroom, you
might not be asking yourself that. After all, why wouldn't
a jury get to see all the weird shit they
found in this guy's house? Isn't everything the cops found
in their evidence? I know I'm about to tell you
that the judge in this case was asked that question
(20:37):
and he decided the answer was yes. But typically the
answer to that question is no. Pictures of this guy's
Nazi themed dinner party in two thousand and seven are
very interesting to me, but they don't actually tell a
jury anything meaningful about whether or not he knowingly financed
(20:59):
terrorism in twenty six sixteen. Not to get boring about it,
but this is a pretty textbook example of something that
fails to satisfy the only two federal rules of evidence
that I could name for you off the top of
my head. It's both irrelevant and highly prejudicial. Relevance is
easy to explain. That's rule four oh one, and it
(21:22):
reads evidence is relevant if a it has a tendency
to make a fact more or less probable than it
would be without the evidence, and b the fact is
of consequence in determining the action. That's pretty straightforward. It
does just what it says on the tin. You know,
does seeing this piece of evidence tell you anything about
(21:44):
the facts at issue in this case? Does knowing he
had a Nazi tattoo on his neck give you any
valuable information about the gift cards? It really doesn't easy enough.
I know I'm always telling you I didn't go to
law school, but Rule four h three and its state
(22:04):
court equivalents are something I hear argument about in I
think every case I've ever sat through. Quote the court
may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially
outweighed by a danger of one or more of the
following unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading a jury, undue delay,
(22:25):
wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence. So sometimes evidence
that gets excluded is relevant. It passes the relevance test,
it would help a jury make a determination about the facts,
but it's inflammatory, it's prejudicial. Its probative value, so whether
(22:48):
or not it tells you anything is outweighed by the
prejudicial impact it would have. There's information to be learned
from it, but there's a real likelihood that it could,
for example, make the jury too emotional to be fair
and impartial. Sometimes that means that a jury won't see
particularly graphic crime scene or autopsy photos because those would
(23:12):
upset them without meaningfully adding to their understanding of the case.
In a lot of cases where I hear this argued,
it's usually because the defense doesn't want the jury to
be told about their client's affiliation with a hate group.
They might file emotion ahead of time, asking the court
to prohibit any mention of it, or prohibit the introduction
of evidence that a defendant who did something like assault
(23:35):
a black person or vandalize a synagogue. They might not
want evidence introduced that they have a swastika tattoo or something.
The idea is that you don't want the prosecutor to
be able to flood the jury with a bunch of
images that will leave them thinking, damn, this is a
really bad guy and he needs to be punished. The
(23:55):
jury is supposed to decide if the state has proved
the elements of the case. The jury decides did this
person do this crime not. Is this defendant a good person. So,
even if the evidence might contribute a little bit to
their understanding of the facts of the case, it may
(24:15):
be that this evidence is more likely to sway the
jury into making a decision for the wrong reasons. And,
to be honest, most of the time I hear this argued,
I feel like the jury should have gotten to hear it.
They deserve to hear about the racist shit this guy's
getting up to in his extra curriculars.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
You know.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
One example that comes to mind right away is during
the lawsuit against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally,
the judge ruled that it was unfairly prejudicial to introduce
evidence about one of the organizer's past. There was plenty
of evidence about statements leading up to, during, and immediately
after the rally, but in a case involving a racially
(24:55):
motivated violent conspiracy, the judge felt it was unfairly pres
judicial to tell the jury that one of the defendants
had previously been convicted of something you could fairly call
a racially motivated violent conspiracy, specifically that he'd want stolen
machine guns from the army and given them to the
clan so they could start a race war. So I
(25:19):
was under the impression that the bar was pretty high
for this kind of thing. So as I'm picking through
the filings in the Nicolas Young case, it seemed very
weird to me that they were able to convince a
judge to let them show the jury so many pictures
of Hitler. What does Hitler have to do with Jihad?
(25:40):
Why would pictures of his Nazi tattoos help a jury
decide if he was guilty of buying a gift card
for Isis. Unfortunately for you, the answer is another boring
bit of legalese. The defense wanted to argue that this
was a case of entrapment. That word doesn't mean when
(26:01):
you think it means. I can promise you, unless you
practice criminal law, I can almost guarantee you that whatever
you think entrapment means is not what a judge thinks
it means. An undercover cop doesn't have to tell you
they're a cop, even if you ask. They can lie
to you about anything and everything. Undercovers and informants can
(26:26):
do illegal stuff with you. It can even be entirely
their idea. They can buy you the gun, put it
in your hand, and drive you to the crime scene.
Almost every scenario you can think of for an undercover
cop is so outrageously over the top. Complicit in the
planning and execution of a crime isn't entrapment.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
It does happen.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
It's rare, but it is technically possible to succeed in
arguing that you're not guilty of a crime because an
agent of the state induced you to do it. It
can work, but it's never worked in a terrorism case.
According to an article in the Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology, I read the whole paper twice before I
(27:16):
realized I know the author, and I probably could have
just asked him nicely to explain it to me in
smaller words. But that's my punishment for getting all my
writing down in the middle of the night. Of the
hundreds of terrorism cases brought by the DJ in the
first decade after nine to eleven, Thomas Frampton wrote quote
in the popular press, the improbability of such plots has
(27:39):
generated skepticism. Several authors have suggested that the FBI, in
its zeal to demonstrate tangible success in the fight against terrorism,
has been improperly manufacturing nonexistent terrorist schemes. The FBI is
catching guys who almost did something they were never going
(28:02):
to do. But despite the fact that almost all of
the terrorism related prosecutions in the United States are based
on sting operations where the would be terrorist was induced, coached,
and aided every step of the way by a copper informant,
no one has ever prevailed in court by asserting an
entrapment defense. So what is entrapment? In order to successfully
(28:30):
argue entrapment, you have to show that a state actor,
so a copper, a paid informant, induced you to commit
the crime, and that you lacked the predisposition to have
done it on your own. The first part's easy. The
informant and the undercover agent coaxed him into it.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It was their idea. They begged and pleaded.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
They spent years insinuating themselves into his life. They got
close to him. The agents were having private conversations behind
the scenes about how to push him over the edge
to actually commit a crime. They were essentially saying to
each other, this guy isn't going to break the law
unless we make him. But the second prong of the
(29:13):
test is slippery. Sure, maybe the government talked you into
committing the crime. But you wouldn't have actually done it
unless you were predisposed to doing things like that. Right,
If you weren't the kind of person who had a
natural predisposition to commit this crime, you wouldn't have This
(29:35):
crime is obviously in your nature. For this part of
the test, there are some courts that use what's called
an objective test, asking the question would this have worked
on a reasonable person? But most courts, including the federal courts,
use a subjective standard. So the question becomes, was this
(29:58):
particular defendant predisposed to committing this crime? Now? I read
a couple of papers, but if you ask me, this
is the law saying does the defendant have bad vibes?
And the answer, it turns out, is always yeah. Determining
(30:20):
whether someone is predisposed towards crime is alarmingly vibes based.
It's not just a question of your criminal history. You know,
have you done something like this before? Have you even
tried to do something like this before? No. It opens
up the door for an exploration of your character, and
(30:42):
that's something that's normally very much off limits in a
criminal trial. As Prampton wrote, quote, the defense is unusual
because it makes a searching inquiry into the defendant's character
or criminal propensities the centerpiece of the criminal trial. This
stands in marked contrast to the traditional focus of Anglo
American criminal jurisprudence, which generally spurns such evidence as irrelevant
(31:06):
to the central issue of moral blameworthiness for a particular
volitional criminal act. In a twenty fourteen report, Human Rights
Watch suggests that it may not even be possible for
an entrapment defense to work in a terrorism case. The
nature of the argument requires the jury to make a
determination about the defendant's character. They're not deciding if the
(31:29):
defendant is guilty or not guilty of the crime. They're
deciding if this is an innocent person.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
This character inquiry makes it exceptionally difficult for a defendant
to succeed in raising the entrapment defense, particularly in the
terrorism context, where inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterizations of
Islam and foreigners often prevail. And that is how we
ended up with dozens of exacts its demonstrating that Nicholas
(32:01):
Young loved Hitler. Young's attorneys tried to keep this evidence
out at emotions hearing. Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg argued
that quote, the Nazi stuff in this case is very
much related to the.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Isis stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
The Nazi stuff is related to the Isis stuff. A
great deal of ink was spilled on the subject in
motions back and forth. But I'm not convinced by Kromberg's argument,
nor that of the expert witness he put on the
stand to explain it to the jury at trial. I'm
not saying that there's no conversation to be had about
(32:47):
the curious phenomenon of cross pollination within online communities of
right wing accelerationists and Salafi jihadists. I'd intended to devote
a little more time to exploring that in this episode,
but I think it's a longer conversation for another day.
There's been some interesting writing in just the last five
years on the nature of this trend within some fringe
(33:09):
online spaces of melding the narrative and esthetics of neo
Nazism and Islamic extremism. The trend itself isn't necessarily new,
but all of the scholarship I can find is fairly recent.
But it is out there, and we've already talked in
passing about several examples of this phenomenon. Remember Brandon Russell,
(33:33):
the founder of Adam Woffen. Back in twenty eighteen, he
was sharing a house in Florida with three other members
of his neo Nazi terrorist organization when one of them,
Devon Arthur's, murdered the other two. Arthur's had recently converted
to Islam. And remember Ethan Melzer, the young Army private
who communicated classified troop movements to someone that he thought
(33:57):
was in Al Qaida because he thought a little had
would help kick off the kind of worldwide violence necessary
for the race war envisioned by his particular brand of
neo Nazism. And in a more general sense, it's not
even all that rare to see your average neo Nazi
terror enthusiasts talking about things like white Shariah or white Jihad,
(34:21):
borrowing the language and symbolism, or drawing inspiration from groups
like al Qaeda or ISIS, And in a broad sense,
they do have things in common. On the extreme end
of both of these ideologies, you have misogyny, homophobia, anti semitism,
glorification of violence. Think about terogram, where you have the
(34:43):
idolization of the mass shooters that they call saints, these
people who have killed and died for the cause. What
is that if not a martyr. White supremacists have been
calling for RAHOA for decades. That's a shortened form of
the phrase racial holy war.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So you can kind of see.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Where the edges of these things could bleed together a
little bit. It's an interesting topic to explore, and there's
not a clear cut answer here about how sincere any
particular actor is. What's a meme, what's a recruitment tactic,
what's trolling? What's just equal opportunity, love of violence? It's
(35:27):
all over the map, and it's evolving. I'll pop a
few links in the show notes to a few papers
on the topic that I thought were interesting. But I'm
going to come back to this when I've had some
time to do a little more reading. So I'm not
saying there's no basis for an argument that Nicholas Young's
interest in Nazi memorabilia could potentially be relevant to his
(35:49):
material support of ISIS. There is room here for a
conversation about some interplay between his belief in these ideologies.
But I am saying that I thought about it. I
considered the facts of the case that are on the record.
I read a pretty significant chunk of the extant literature
on syncretic extremism, and I gotta say I think they
(36:14):
violated the civil rights of this Hitler enthusiast. I take
no pleasure in telling you that Nicholas Young is an
extremely unsympathetic individual. No one is more upset than I
am that I have to tell you that. I don't
think they were fair to the cop with the Nazi tattoos,
and he say some pretty wild stuff about jihad.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
To those informants.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
But I don't think it was proper to present these
two things as reinforcing evidence of one another in a
criminal trial. Again, I'm not even saying there's no possibility
that these things were intertwined for him, but that's not
what they put on the record. This evidence was produced
(36:59):
to counter the entrapment defense. It was produced to show predisposition.
The entire purpose was to show the jury that this
is a bad guy who believes bad things, so he
probably does bad things.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
And that's not how it's supposed to work. For this case.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Doctor Dovid Gartenstein Ross was hired by the prosecution to
prepare a report on quote the relationship between affinity for
Nazism and inclination to support militant Islamic groups. The first
ten pages of the report are I guess they're supposed
to be a resume, but it's in narrative form. It's
(37:54):
not the traditional CV that's submitted to the court when
you offer up an expert. And then what follows is
just a loosely connected series of largely unsubstantiated statements and anecdotes,
and it all somehow adds up to the conclusion that
Nazis and Isis both hate Jewish people, thus making them
(38:15):
ideologically similar in such a significant way that it would
be common and expected for someone to drift from one
worldview into the other. And he ends with the bold
pronouncement that quote, I conclude that evidence in individual's affinity
for Nazism is related to the question of whether that
individual is predisposed to supporting militant Islamist groups. This report
(38:40):
was written shortly after the case was filed back in
twenty seventeen, and at that time there was no meaningful
existing scholarship on this phenomenon. He cites none. It doesn't exist.
The academic writing produced on the topic in the last
few years does recognize the existence of this ideological soup
(39:03):
that exists at the far fringes, But most of the
authors I've read seem to agree that it's not common,
it's not universal, and it's not well documented enough to
make a conclusion like that. When you read a study,
you should look into how it came to be written,
(39:23):
who wrote it, what's their background, what did they study,
where did they work, did someone pay for it?
Speaker 2 (39:31):
What else have they written? Is there any publicly.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Available evidence about their beliefs or their motivations. You can't
always answer all of these questions, and god willing, the
answers are usually pretty mundane. In this case, the report
was paid for by the government. Doctor grtnstein Ross was
paid sixteen thousand dollars for his work on the case.
That in itself isn't unusual or cause for concern. You
(39:57):
often see it presented that way in a trial. You know,
the opposing council insinuating that the expert is only saying
what they've been paid to say. But it's not weird
to pay an expert for their time, and serving as
an expert witness can be a significant time commitment. So
question answered not a huge red plaque. His background appears
(40:19):
to be in Islamic extremism, both as a past participant
and a current researcher. After dabbling briefly in Islamic extremism,
he went to work in a nonprofit called the Investigative
Project on Terrorism. The IPT is one of the leading
purveyors of pseudo academic Islamophobia, and it's cited as an
(40:41):
example of groups with quote thinly veiled political motives typically
infused with poor scholarship and extremely selective reporting in a
twenty fifteen issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism. After a
brief stint there, doctor Grtnstein Ross moved on to the
Foundation for Defense of Democrat, where he's been since two
(41:01):
thousand and seven. The FDD claims to have been founded
in the aftermath of nine to eleven to address the
global threat of terrorism, but the original incorporation paperwork shows
that it was founded in April of two thousand and one,
several months before nine to eleven, and the original stated
purpose of the organization was providing quote education meant to
(41:26):
enhance Israel's image in North America. They revised that mission
statement after nine to eleven, and they've sought to distance
themselves from their original mission as a pro Israel lobbying group,
but public disclosures of their lobbying expenditures show a disproportionate
interest in pro Israel and anti Iran measures. A founding
(41:48):
board member and a primary donor to FDD is Trump
Megadnor and former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus. And. After
Trump's win in twenty sixteen, several analysts of the Foundation left,
claiming the organization was limiting criticism of Trump in their analysis.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been called an
(42:09):
anti Muslim fringe group by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bale.
Farid Hafez, a political scientist at Salzburg University, identified FDD
as a key player in what he calls a transatlantic
network of Islamophobia. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to
Colin Powell, has accused the Foundation of knowingly peddling falsehoods
(42:32):
to push for war with Iran. The progressive think tank
Institute for Policy Studies has noted that while the organization
is quote an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not
criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall
into this category, and for what it's worth, Iran's Ministry
of Foreign Affairs has designated the Foundation as a foreign
(42:54):
terrorist organization. So I guess two can play at that game.
And the prosecutor who put this expert on the stand
is no stranger to accusations of Islamophobia of his own.
Gordon Kromberg has been called a loose cannon by legal
ethicists and has been accused of personal animus against Muslim defendants.
(43:17):
When the subject of a grand jury subpoena requested a
postponement until after Ramadan.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Kromberg called it quote part of the.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Attempted Islamization of the American justice system. According to a
complaint from that individual's attorney, Kromberg quote became agitated in
the court room and said, quote, they can kill each
other during Ramadan, they can testify before a grand jury.
When Ahmed Abu Ali, a United States citizen, was arrested
(43:48):
and tortured in Saudi Arabia, the man's lawyer asked Kromberg
if his client might be returned to the United States
to face pending charges here, and Kromberg reportedly said, quote,
He's no good for us here. He has no fingernails left,
though he denies making light of the fact that Ali
(44:08):
was being tortured. In another case of an American accused
of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Kromberg explicitly instructed the
jury to disregard testimony offered by Muslim witnesses because their
religion teaches that it is acceptable to lie to non believers.
(44:29):
Law professor Wadis Said told The Intercept in twenty twenty
one that Kromberg has a history of provocative stances and quote.
The positions that he has taken are quite tendentious and
even vindictive in terms of his mindset toward the person
he's targeting.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I'm not so naive.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
As to think it's unusual for a prosecutor to exaggerate
for dramatic effect, But I just think it's important to
evaluate the source of a fantastic claim. So when a
man stands in front of a jury and says that
a couple of gift cards should send a man to
prison for fifteen years, you should take a minute to
check out his track record. Perhaps the most egregious bit
(45:09):
of evidence offered at trial was an honest to god lie,
I mean, showing them all the Hitler stuff. That was real.
That was real evidence. He really did have those things
in his home. I just don't think it was appropriate
to use them as evidence in this case. But throughout
the case, Kromberg claimed that Nicholas Young had attended a
(45:29):
neo Nazi rally in two thousand and one, and in
a later article published by doctor Gartnstein Ross in the
Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, he suggests that
this is evidence that Young actually converted to Islam in
two thousand and seven, six years later because of his
interest in Nazism, as evidence by his attendance at this
(45:51):
Neo Nazi rally. The problem is that didn't happen. A
former classmate test In two thousand and one. They were
both taking a course on European racism taught by Professor
Aaron Gillette at George Mason University. As part of a
class project. The two students attended a dinner hosted by
(46:13):
a neo Nazi group where British fascist Mark Catterill would
be speaking. Their professor arranged for them to attend and
even interviewed Catterall after his speech. Mark Catterall was living
in Virginia at the time. Running a group called the
American Friends of the British National Party, and the dinner
was organized by the neo Nazi group National Alliance. And
(46:35):
here's a weird little guy's Easter egg. I think that
this was one of those weekly dinners that was hosted
by Sam Francis at a Thai restaurant in northern Virginia,
those dinners that a Ron Paul Staffer was outed as
occasionally attending, but characterizing a school project, one that had
been signed off on by their history professor as evidence
(46:58):
that the defendant had a history of attending Nazi rallies,
which in turn shows that he's predisposed to trying to
fund isis that's outrageous. Like I said, Nicholas Young is
not a sympathetic character. He's definitely a weird little guy.
There are a lot of salacious details about his interests
(47:20):
that were, in my opinion, improperly presented to the jury
under other circumstances. It's the kind of stuff I would
expect to see in a case where a guy really
did try to do some kind of terrorism, the kind
of terrorism I write about. But they charged him for
buying some gift cards, which he did do sure, but
(47:45):
only after a six year investigation involving hundreds of man hours,
a team of handlers, a two year relationship with an
undercover agent, another two year relationship with a paid informant,
an active encouragement to commit the crime in question. Throughout
the case, the prosecution implied that Young had committed a
(48:06):
wide variety of other crimes. In one filing, it's implied
that he had bomb making materials, but none were presented
as evidence and he wasn't charged with it. There are
repeated assertions that he's been illegally purchasing steroids online and
having them shipped from overseas. They even claim to have
found illegal steroids in his home on the day of
(48:28):
the arrest. He's accused of plotting to smuggle guns into
a courthouse, of plotting to kidnap an FBI agent, of
joining a terrorist organization in Libya, but it wasn't charged
with any of that. Did they think they couldn't prove
those things? Were they padding out the allegations to make
the underlying case look more serious?
Speaker 2 (48:48):
Who knows? In the end, they.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Relied on an anti terrorism statute that is notoriously abused
in sting operations that target Muslim Americans. This former FBI
agent Mike Jerman wrote in his recent book Policing White Supremacy,
the material support for Terrorism statute is quote used in
FBI sting operations that manufacture terrorism threats to produce statistical accomplishments,
(49:18):
so law enforcement resources are disproportionately allocated to combating foreign terrorism,
which then results in agents being quote pressured to demonstrate
their success even if no genuine plots exist. This is
a question I keep running into on the show. What
(49:41):
is terrorism? Whose crimes matter to us more importantly, whose
crimes matter to the government. What kinds of violence are unacceptable?
What kinds of violence are allowed? What message is being
communi in the decisions that they make about who, how,
(50:03):
and when to prosecute and for what. Despite a twenty
seventeen report from the United States Government Accountability Office which
showed that right wing extremists are responsible for three times
the number of domestic attacks as compared to Islamic extremists,
we don't use the same words.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
To talk about these things.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a Bible study
at a Manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South
Carolina FBI Director James Comey said, quote, terrorism is an
act of violence to try to influence a public body
or citizenry.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
So it's more of a political act.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
And again, based on what I know so far, I
don't see it as a political act, not a political act.
Dylan Roof was very clear about his motivations. He had
a manifesto. He intentionally left people alive so they could
(51:08):
tell the story of what happened in that Bible study.
He was trying to incite a race war, a civil
war once again ignited in South Carolina, and fought over
the right of black people to exist freely in the
United States. That feels very political to me, but that's
not how we talk about it. As Bruce Hoffman wrote
(51:30):
in his book God's Guns and Sedition, terrorism as it
is currently defined in American law treats domestic terror and
foreign terror very differently, and in the book he refers
to this case directly, noting that Young was sentenced to
fifteen years in prison. The average sentence for this charge
providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is thirteen
(51:54):
point five years. Domestic terrorism, on the other hand, often
results in significantly shorter sentences, even in cases where we've
used the word, even in cases where the crime is
much more serious. I mean, first of all, you can't
even get charged with an equivalent offense. You are free
(52:15):
to materially support organizations that absolutely should be called a
domestic terrorist organization without consequence. That's allowed. You can't send
a ten dollars gift card to ISIS, but you can
give everything you own to Adam Woffin. Hoffmann lists several
contrasting examples. So Brendan Russell, the founder of Adam Woffin,
(52:36):
was arrested in twenty eighteen after officers found his bomb
making workshop while they were investigating the double homicide committed
inside his home by his roommate. Russell was released in
twenty twenty one after serving most of a three year sentence,
and he immediately got back to work planning another active
domestic terrorism.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
He was convicted.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
Earlier this year for cons firing to take out the
power grid in Maryland, three years for a garage full
of bomb making materials and full knowledge that he was
going to reoffend, but fifteen years for some gift cards.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Writing about the legal.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Double standard of defining terrorism, Australian criminologist Helen Taylor wrote
that quote, the asymmetric use of the terrorism label entrenches
fear of the other. That is, because we only talk
about terrorism when we mean Islamic extremist terrorism, we come
to associate Islam with terrorism. This has obvious negative consequences
(53:42):
for Muslims. Of course, the last twenty five years have
been an unending litany of civil rights violations, but it
also prevents us from appropriately addressing any other form of terrorism.
The inability to recognize terror when it is something other
than Post nine to eleven hysteria leads to right wing
(54:03):
extremist violence being deprioritized. Terrorism investigations are thorough. I mean,
think about Zachary Chesser, right, the FBI spent six years
investigating a man that he spoke to twice over a
year before he made an online threat against the creators
of a cartoon. But right wing extremist violence, because we
(54:27):
can't call it terrorism, is quickly relegated to lone wolf territory,
and there's little attention page of the environment that radicalized
the perpetrator or potential sources of support and encouragement within
his network. If the government put even ten percent of
that energy into investigating and prosecuting far right extremists. They'd
(54:50):
be drowning in prosecutions. It would not take six years
to catch your average American neo Nazi agreeing to engage
in a terrorist act.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
But is that useful? I mean, ultimately, I think the.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Word itself is dangerous territory. In the twenty four years
since nine to eleven, the word terrorism has largely served
as a tool for increasing state surveillance or systematically violating
civil rights and engorging law enforcement budgets, and it hasn't
made a safer But if we're going to use that word,
(55:27):
if we're going to have that framework, we need to
think about what we mean when we say it. As
Taylor writes, quote, labeling an act as terrorism serves as
an official statement about the severity of the crime. It's
a legal framework, sure, but it's a statement about what matters.
(55:49):
Maybe there's no grand theory of change that I can
offer you here. Giving the government more tools for prosecution
probably won't really help. They're already making ideal, logical choices
about how to use the tools they have. I guess
the only real takeaway from this story is that no
one is ever going to text you demanding the codes
(56:11):
off the back of a gift card for any legitimate reason.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Usually it's a scammer.
Speaker 1 (56:17):
Pretending to be the irs to scare your grandma into
emptying her savings account. But sometimes it's an FBI agent
pretending to be your friend. Who joined isis? Weird Little
(56:45):
Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Leuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talent of Gry Gigan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
Won't to answer it.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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