Slow Decline

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband said, your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

I was just completely in shock.

Liz's father murdered.

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It was an unimaginable crime.

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Nicholas Young was at at work on the morning of August 3rd, 2016, 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 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 were searching his home, his truck, the backpack he'd been carrying at the time of the arrest, and his work locker, number 45, at the Metro Transit Police Department District 2 substation.

Box after box of evidence was carried out of his townhouse in Northern Virginia.

Agents collected 19 firearms, 18,000 rounds of ammunition, 70 pieces of body armor, and 60 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 hard drive, they found photos of a dinner party he'd hosted.

All of the guests were wearing Nazi SS uniforms.

The agents 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 good argument to be made that

he didn't really do anything at all.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Guys.

This is a story where nothing happens.

No 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.

But he's never met a real terrorist.

There's no evidence at all that Nicholas Young ever had contact of any kind with an actual member of ISIS or al-Qaeda.

He sort of knew a guy who was recruiting for al-Shabaab, 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 knew was a confidential human source on the FBI payroll.

And after years of prodding and encouragement, he sent this friend $245 worth of gift cards to the Google Play App Store.

That's all.

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 pasted 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 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.

I like to see what's out there sometimes.

I'll just waste a few hours punching in keywords to search through federal court filings, and I think in this case, the keyword was Frycor.

One of the exhibits in this case is a photograph of Nicholas Young's truck parked in his driveway.

And in the photograph, you can see his vanity license plate, which read F-R-I-K-R-P.

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 charge, I think, $10 a year to put a personalized tag on your car, and it's $50 or $70 in a lot of other states.

And Nicholas Young chose to pay $10 a year to drive around Northern Virginia, advertising his affinity for the Freikorps.

That's a term for the collection of loosely affiliated nationalist paramilitary groups that formed in Germany after World War I.

They weren't Nazis, technically, since there was no Nazi party yet.

But many leaders in the Freikorps would go on to join the Nazi Party.

Guys like Ernst Röhm, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Hess.

They were the shock troops for what was to come, carrying out acts of extrajudicial 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 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.

So I made my note and I forgot about it.

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 a minute.

But first, I should explain how this case 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 2010.

And back in the fall of 2010, the agents were casting a wide net.

They were interviewing scores of people who'd known a man named Zachary Chesser.

Chesser was arrested earlier that summer for threatening Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Yes, that Trey Parker and that Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.

Chesser had taken an interest in Islam after graduating from high school in 2008, and he soon got involved with Revolution Muslim, a website run by two American Muslim converts that pumped out pro-al-Qaeda propaganda for an English-speaking audience.

Chesser pled guilty pretty quickly in October of 2010, and he was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison.

But the court record in Young's case is pretty vague on the subject of Zachary Chesser, intentionally so.

The prosecutor often refers to Chesser as a friend of Young's, but in reality, they were barely passing acquaintances.

But this was the global war on terror, and a 20-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 Chesser'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.

There's no indication in the record that this conversation was alarming or suspicious.

Nicholas Young barely knew Zachary Chesser, and he was a cop.

But now Nicholas Young had an FBI file in a counterterrorism investigation.

So three months later, in December of 2010, 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 testified that he'd attended the wedding to try to get close to another man, a man named Saleh 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 a crime, and it doesn't look like he lives in the United States anymore.

But in 2008, Al-Barmawi was a member of the Muslim Student Association at George Mason University, so he may have crossed paths with Zachary Chesser 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, going for walks, and just chatting.

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.

And the fact that Al-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.

I'm 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, 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, 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 in March of 2011, 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.

He was always talking about using burner 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 2011.

The undercover submitted the reports, but nothing rose to the level 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 Chili's in Alexandria, Virginia, isn't terrorism.

He did travel to Libya twice in 2011 to provide aid to anti-Gaddafi 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 Misrata in April and May of 2011 during some of the most brutal fighting there.

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 10 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 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.

Again, it doesn't look like 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.

Again, 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 2011.

Or 2012?

Or 2013?

Or 2014?

Or 2015.

In 2012, the undercover who'd been hanging out with Young since 2010 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 2012 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.

Two years passed before the FBI sent Nicholas Young a new friend, a confidential human source who called himself Mo.

Young met with Mo 20 times in 2014.

They were close.

They didn't just talk about jihad.

They talked about work, about dating, about Young's struggle to overcome the depression he'd fallen into after his father's death in 2007.

He thought they were friends.

When they talked about ISIS, it was Mo who brought it up.

In several conversations, Jung even tried to cool his friend's enthusiasm for the group, telling him he didn't 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, Jung 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 the lie that he was going on vacation in Turkey.

Young believed that his friend was going to Syria.

And before Mo 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 next year and a half to to send and receive emails.

In December of 2015, over a year after Mo pretended to leave for Syria, FBI agents came to Jung's house twice to ask him if he knew anything about Mo.

And he did lie.

He told agents that he'd had no contact with Mo since he left for Turkey in late 2014, 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.

Even if it's a fake criminal investigation, Mo 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 could take to a grand jury.

In July of 2016, 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 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?

Inshallah, 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 best 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.

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.

Sometimes they would just write SD.

That was Nicholas Young's codename.

They'd been calling him that for years.

In the summer of 2016, six years into their investigation, they were frustrated.

He was too cautious, too slow, too unwilling to take a next step.

So they decided to ratchet up the pressure.

They sent him more and more emails from Mo about the importance of the work he was doing over there.

Mo told him horror 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 bought a handful of Google Play gift cards.

Finally, on July 28th, 2016, Nicholas Young sent a text containing 22 16-digit codes, each one from the back of a Google Play gift card redeemable for $10 or $15.

The total value was $245.

The Best Buy receipt was still in his backpack when he was arrested a few days later.

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So,

he did 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 Mo told him they were for.

There was no coded language, there's no room for misunderstanding here.

Mo 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 Mo.

That's not in dispute.

The real drama in this case is the unhinged trial 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 Jung'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 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 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 2007 are very interesting to me, but they don't actually tell a jury anything meaningful about whether or not he knowingly financed terrorism in 2016.

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 401.

And it 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 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 403 and its state 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, 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 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 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 a motion 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 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 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 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 extracurriculars, you know?

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 organizers' past.

There was plenty of evidence about statements leading up to, during, and immediately after the rally.

But in a case involving a racially motivated violent conspiracy, the judge felt it was unfairly prejudicial 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 once stolen machine guns from the army and given them to the Klan so they could start a race war.

So, I 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 Nicholas 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?

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 what 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 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 where an undercover cop is so outrageously over-the-top complicit in the planning and execution of a crime, isn't entrapment.

It does

happen.

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 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 done in the middle of the night.

Of the hundreds of terrorism cases brought by the DOJ in the first decade after 9-11, Thomas Frampton wrote, quote, in the popular press, the improbability improbability of such plots has 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 non-existent terrorist schemes.

The FBI is catching guys who almost did something they were never going 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 cop or informant, no one has ever prevailed in court by asserting an entrapment defense.

So what is entrapment?

In order to successfully argue entrapment, you have to show that a state actor, So a cop or 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.

It was their idea.

They begged and pleaded.

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 gonna break the law unless we make him.

But the second prong of the 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 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 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 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 that's something that's normally very much off limits in a criminal trial.

As Frampton 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 to the central issue of moral blameworthiness for a particular volitional criminal act.

In a 2014 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 defendant is guilty or not guilty of the crime.

They're deciding if this is an innocent person.

Quote, 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 exhibits demonstrating that Nicholas Young loved Hitler.

Young's attorneys attorneys tried to keep this evidence out.

At a motions hearing, Assistant U.S.

Attorney Gordon Kromberg argued that, quote,

the Nazi stuff in this case is very much related to the...

to the ISIS stuff.

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 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 online spaces of melding the narrative and aesthetics 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, the founder of Adam Waffen?

Back in 2018, he was sharing a house in Florida with three other members of his neo-Nazi terrorist organization when one of them, Devin Arthurs, murdered the other two.

Arthurs had recently converted to Islam.

And remember Ethan Melzer, the young army private who communicated classified troop movements to someone that he thought was in al-Qaeda.

Because he thought a little jihad 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 enthusiast talking about things like white Sharia or white jihad,

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 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.

So you can kind of see 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 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 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 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 did say some pretty wild stuff about jihad to those informants.

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 to counter the entrapment defense.

It was produced to show predisposition.

The entire purpose was to show the jury jury that this is a bad guy who believes bad things.

So he probably does bad things.

And that's not how it's supposed to work.

Let's be real.

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For this case, Dr.

David 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 10 pages of the report are, I guess they're supposed to be a resume, but it's in narrative form.

It's 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 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 an individual's affinity for Nazism is related to the question of whether that individual is predisposed to supporting militant Islamist groups.

This report was written shortly after the case was filed, back in 2017.

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 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.

Who wrote it?

What's their background?

What did they study?

Where do they work?

Did someone pay for it?

What else have they written?

Is there any publicly 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.

Dr.

Gartenstein Ross was paid $16,000 for his work on the case.

That in itself isn't unusual or cause for concern.

You often see it presented that way in a trial, you know, the opposing counsel insinuating that the expert is only saying what they've been paid to say, but it's not weird to pay an expert for for their time.

And serving as an expert witness can be a significant time commitment.

So, question answered, not a huge red flag.

His background appears to be in Islamic extremism, both as a past participant and a current researcher.

After dabbling briefly in Islamic extremism, he went to work at 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 example of groups with, quote, thinly veiled political motives, typically infused with poor scholarship and extremely selective reporting, in a 2015 issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.

After a brief stint there, Dr.

Gartenstein-Ross moved on to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he's been since 2007.

The FDD claims to have been founded in the aftermath aftermath of 9-11 to address the global threat of terrorism.

But the original incorporation paperwork shows that it was founded in April of 2001, several months before 9-11.

And the original stated purpose of the organization was providing, quote, education meant to enhance Israel's image in North America.

They revised that mission statement after 9-11, 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 board member and a primary donor to FDD is Trump mega donor and former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus.

And after Trump's win in 2016, several analysts at the foundation left, claiming the organization was limiting criticism of Trump in their analysis.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been called an 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 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 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.

When the subject of a grand jury subpoena requested a postponement until after Ramadan, Kromberg called it, quote, part of the attempted Islamization of the American justice system.

According to a complaint from that individual's attorney, Kromberg, quote, became agitated in the courtroom and said, 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 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 was being tortured.

In another case of an American accused of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Kronberg explicitly instructed the jury to disregard testimony offered by Muslim witnesses because their religion teaches that it is acceptable to lie to non-believers.

Law professor Wadi Saeed told the Intercept in 2021 that Kronberg 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.

I'm not so naive 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 15 years,

you should take a minute to check out his track record.

Perhaps the most egregious bit 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 Jung had attended a neo-Nazi rally in 2001.

And in a later article published by Dr.

Gartenstein Ross in the Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, he suggests that this is evidence that Young actually converted to Islam in 2007, six years later, because of his interest in Nazism as evidenced by his attendance at this neo-Nazi rally.

The problem is,

that didn't happen.

A former classmate testified that in 2001, 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 a neo-Nazi group where British fascist Mark Cotterill would be speaking.

Their professor arranged for them to attend and even interview Cotterell after his speech.

Mark Cotterell 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 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 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 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 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, and active encouragement to commit the crime in question.

Throughout the case, the prosecution implied that Young had committed a wide variety of 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 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 he 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?

Who knows?

In the end, they relied on an anti-terrorism statute that is notoriously abused in sting operations that target Muslim Americans.

As former FBI agent Mike German 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.

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 question I keep running into on the show.

What 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 communicated in the decisions that they make about who, how, and when to prosecute and for what?

Despite a 2017 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 to talk about these things.

When Dylan Roof murdered nine people in a Bible study at Emmanuel 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.

So it's more of a political act.

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 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 in his book, God's Guns in Sedition, terrorism as it is currently defined in American law, treats domestic domestic terror and foreign terror very differently.

And in the book he refers to this case directly, noting that Young was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The average sentence for this charge, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, is 13.5 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're free to materially support organizations that absolutely should be called a domestic terrorist organization without consequence.

That's allowed.

You can't send a $10 gift card to ISIS, but you can give everything you own to Adam Woffen.

Hoffman lists several contrasting examples.

So Brandon Russell, the founder of Adam Woffen, was arrested in 2018 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 2021 after serving most of a three-year sentence, and he immediately got back to work planning another act of domestic terrorism.

He was convicted earlier this year for conspiring 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 15 years for some gift cards.

Writing about the legal 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 for Muslims.

Of course, the last 25 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-9-11 hysteria leads to right-wing 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 can't call it terrorism, is quickly relegated to lone wolf territory, and there's little attention paid to the environment that radicalized the perpetrator or potential sources of support and encouragement within his network.

If the government put even 10% of that energy into investigating and prosecuting far-right extremists, they'd be drowning in prosecutions.

It would not take six years to catch your average American neo-Nazi agreeing to engage in a terrorist act.

But is that useful?

I mean, ultimately, I think the word itself is dangerous territory.

In the 24 years since 9-11, 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 us safer.

But if we're going to use that word, 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.

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 ideological 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 off the back of a gift card for any legitimate reason.

Usually it's a scammer 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 Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio.

It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

It's nothing personal.

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