An Officer and A Skinhead

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Speaker 18 In February of 2019, a federal prosecutor in Maryland made an unusual presentation to a magistrate judge in support of pretrial detention.

Speaker 18 Christopher Paul Hassen had just been arrested on charges of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user or addict of a controlled substance.

Speaker 18 It's kind of a technicality. If you've been convicted of drug possession, usually you'd have caught a felony and you can't own a gun anyway.

Speaker 18 But he hadn't been and he wasn't, and he owned those guns legally.

Speaker 18 Hassen was a 50-year-old married father of two and a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard with no criminal history to speak of.

Speaker 18 He was also addicted to Tramadol, an opioid pain medication that he didn't have a prescription for.

Speaker 18 Pretrial detention in a case like this seems a little excessive. You could probably just let him go home, make him turn in his guns, and order weekly drug screenings with pretrial services.

Speaker 18 But there was something else going on here.

Speaker 18 His apartment was packed to the brim with guns, ammunition, and tactical gear.

Speaker 18 And on his computer, they found mass shooter manifestos, terrorism manuals, and a list of names.

Speaker 18 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 18 I thought we could use something a little lighter this week after last week's episode.

Speaker 18 I knew it was a pretty dark one for me to research and write, and I saw some feedback from listeners who said it ruined their day. So, fair enough.

Speaker 18 So, nobody dies this week. Nobody has a hard drive full of child sexual abuse material.
Nobody gets shot or raped. There's barely even any hate crimes.

Speaker 18 It wasn't easy to find a story like that in my mental Rolodex, but I thought you guys deserved a break.

Speaker 18 Now, I will admit, upon further reflection, this whole story isn't exactly as funny as my spotty memory had me thinking when I started.

Speaker 18 I think my own recollection of this being a silly little legal mishap was heavily colored by my own mental state back in 2020 when I drove to Maryland to watch this sentencing hearing.

Speaker 18 When I drove up to the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland to see Hassan's sentencing hearing on January 31st, 2020, it was actually my second trip up to that courthouse that month.

Speaker 18 Just a week earlier, I'd been in another courtroom in that massive building for a detention hearing in another case.

Speaker 18 Three members of the neo-Nazi paramilitary group, The Base, had just been arrested.

Speaker 18 The government alleged they'd been picked up just days before they could carry out a plan to open fire into a large crowd of heavily armed gun owners in the hopes that the chaos would result in mass casualties.

Speaker 18 The event they were targeting was one that I had attended as a journalist. It's the annual Gun Lobby Day in Richmond, Virginia, our state capital.

Speaker 18 The idea that we'd perhaps just by the skin of our teeth avoided being massacred in a confused crossfire left me feeling a little queasy.

Speaker 18 I'm not too proud to admit that I was a little on edge at that detention hearing.

Speaker 18 I dug out my old notebook this weekend to try to remember what was going on back then to sort of get back into that headspace and remind myself of what was going on in these cases.

Speaker 18 And apparently I did take notes, pretty good ones.

Speaker 18 But my only memories of that day are how clean the bathrooms were, that I walked out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck in my tights, and the look on that FBI agent's face when I grabbed his phone.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 It was a small courtroom. It was just a hearing with a magistrate judge on detention.

Speaker 18 And normally in court, I try to sit by myself because I like to sit with my legs sort of folded up underneath me because my feet don't reach the floor.

Speaker 18 And I have my huge hardcover spiral notebook open in my lap and I sort of hunch over it like a little gremlin while I take my notes.

Speaker 18 But it was crowded, so I had to sit next to some federal agent or another.

Speaker 18 And he was having the damnedest time trying to figure out how to turn off his iPhone.

Speaker 18 He just kept locking and unlocking it, locking it and unlocking it, and he couldn't figure out why it wouldn't turn off.

Speaker 18 And, you know, my general preference to never have a conversation with a cop if I can help it is apparently trumped by my inability to sit idly by while someone is very busy being wrong.

Speaker 18 And I remember sitting there trying to explain to him that you have to hold down the volume button and the lock button at the same time until it turns off. It's not that complicated.

Speaker 18 I was trying to explain it. He just kept locking it and unlocking it, turning the volume up and down and locking it and unlocking it, and he couldn't turn it off

Speaker 18 so god knows what came over me but i just i reached over and i did it myself and you would have thought i grabbed his gun you know he just looked scandalized but i was just trying to be helpful you know i'm i'm a helpful girl

Speaker 18 but this isn't a story about patrick matthews brian lemley and william bilbrow of course that hearing has nothing really at all to do with Christopher Hassen.

Speaker 18 All that to say, it was my second time that month driving the nearly three hours to Maryland to sit on a bench in an unfamiliar courtroom.

Speaker 18 And by the time I was there the second time, I was really ruminating on that apparently very nearly successful plot that probably would have claimed my own life among the thousands who would have been shot or trampled if Matthews, Lemley, and Bilbro had been successful.

Speaker 18 And it had been a busy week in between overall. I sat through an eight-hour city council annual retreat and went to a school board budget meeting.

Speaker 18 You know, I just can't resist a municipal government meeting.

Speaker 18 And the piss-ant Nazi crybaby who'd spent years threatening me finally got arrested in a pre-dawn raid by the FBI, but was for something totally unrelated.

Speaker 18 And I'd put damn near a thousand miles on my car driving back and forth to this courthouse, even though I had no real plan for how he was going to afford to replace my tires.

Speaker 18 I was having a weird week.

Speaker 18 So by the time I was reading this government sentencing memo in the Hassan case, I was just looking for a reason to laugh. You know, and like I said, nobody died.
It's safe to giggle a little.

Speaker 18 I'm not saying the whole story is a joke, but you have to find levity where you can. And where would I even be with a little gallows humor?

Speaker 18 And all the better when the would-be hangman is shackled at the ankles.

Speaker 18 But like I said, this is a story about Christopher Hassen, not me.

Speaker 18 And Christopher Hassen may never have been caught at all if he'd just kept his extracurricular interests at home.

Speaker 18 Evidence produced in this case includes hundreds of pages of logs of his computer activity, mostly computer activity he was engaged in at work.

Speaker 18 Generally speaking, I'm opposed to the idea of your employer monitoring your internet history.

Speaker 18 If you're getting your work done, what difference does it make if you take some breaks during the day to look at Reddit or do a little online shopping, you know?

Speaker 18 But Hassan worked for the government. He was using using a government computer on a government internet connection to look at extremist content online.

Speaker 18 And honestly, I have no idea what his day-to-day workplace responsibilities could possibly have been because based on these internet history logs, he was spending hours and hours almost every day looking at things that weren't work.

Speaker 18 And again, in another context, I support time theft, especially from the government, you know, rock on.

Speaker 18 But he wasn't scrolling social media.

Speaker 18 The investigation began in November of 2018.

Speaker 18 Something he did on his work computer set off an internal flag.

Speaker 18 They never say exactly what it was that ended up getting him flagged.

Speaker 18 The Coast Guard's internal threat assessment report covers his internet activity from July of 2016 through his arrest in February 2019, but that report was created retroactively.

Speaker 18 They didn't actually start monitoring him until something happened in November 2018.

Speaker 18 And looking at this report, I can't explain why nothing set off an alarm in the IT office before that,

Speaker 18 but that's what it says, so I guess we just have to take it as written.

Speaker 18 Throughout the report, you can see that he was emailing links and PDFs to himself. between his personal and work email addresses.
I don't know why he was doing that.

Speaker 18 I wonder if maybe he couldn't access his personal email at work and he couldn't access his work email at home, and he wanted to be able to pick up where he left off in either location.

Speaker 18 So, for example, in the late evening hours of June 7th, 2017, he sent himself five emails from his personal email address to his work email address. And each email had an attachment.

Speaker 18 He was checking out the anarchist cookbook, you know, a classic.

Speaker 18 He sent himself a PDF called U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook.

Speaker 18 And these next three, well, I think you will get why I'm confused he didn't get flagged until a year later. Because he emailed himself PDFs called Emailing Anon, How to Make Semtex,

Speaker 18 and one called Home Workshop Explosives by Uncle Fester.

Speaker 18 And a document just called the Terrorists Handbook, which is mostly instructions on how to make IEDs.

Speaker 18 I guess he was smart enough to understand that he shouldn't download these at work.

Speaker 18 So he emailed them to himself so he could read them there.

Speaker 18 Semtex is a plastic explosive originally developed by the Czech military that has become quite popular with terrorists.

Speaker 18 And Uncle Fester is a 75-year-old man named Steven Preisler who was arrested last year in Wisconsin for making meth.

Speaker 18 In case you were wondering,

Speaker 18 I spent hours combing through these reports, trying to make some sense of them.

Speaker 18 And the only thing I can figure that really changed in November of 2018 that may have triggered his employer to start looking at his computer activity was a sudden intensification of his interest in Russia.

Speaker 18 And this wasn't entirely new. The report shows activity going back to early 2017 for searches like Russian far right, Russian nationalists immigrate to Russia.

Speaker 18 In June of 2017, he spent an entire workday accessing what the report calls, quote, extensive pro-Russian and neo-fascist content, end quote.

Speaker 18 He searched for things like national Bolshevism and Fourth Political Theory, which is the title of a book by Alexander Dugin that was a favorite of American neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach.

Speaker 18 In March of 2018, he spent another full workday clicking around websites with pro-Russian neo-fascist content, but none of that triggered any kind of internal alarm on his account.

Speaker 18 The activity logs for November 2018, though, show his first searches for and visits to Sputnik News and RT, which are Russian state-run media sites.

Speaker 18 This is another one of those questions we're just not going to get an answer to, but my gut reaction to the way those things coincide is that maybe there was an automatic flag placed on some particular website, and and maybe it was a website that is Russian state-owned media.

Speaker 18 Or maybe somebody at work just saw him dicking around at his desk and reported him. We'll never know.

Speaker 18 But apparently, there is no internal monitoring system that automatically reports you to the Coast Guard for being on Reddit all day every day, so browse away, I guess.

Speaker 18 The Coast Guard's 120-page internal threat assessment report outlining the concerning computer activity over that two and a half year period starts out with a summary of his findings, which includes this incredible paragraph.

Speaker 24 Subject's most frequently visited website from 2017 to 2019 was the Men Going Their Own Way, MIGTO subreddit at www.reddit.com, to which subject made tens of thousands of total URL visits over a two-plus year period.

Speaker 24 While at the MIGTO subreddit, Subject routinely accessed gender-based extremist content that promoted discrimination of women or hatred towards women on a daily basis.

Speaker 24 Due to the persistence of the behavior, subjects' routine daily activity in browsing the Migto subreddit is not included in this chronology of activity.

Speaker 18 So we don't know why they started looking, but they did.

Speaker 18 Starting in November of 2018, the Coast Guard started monitoring his workplace computer activity in real time.

Speaker 18 They were logging his keystrokes. They set up a hidden camera near his desk to record him during the day.

Speaker 18 And then they started reporting their findings to the FBI.

Speaker 18 And by January, the FBI was worried too.

Speaker 18 They cut warrants for his email accounts, a warrant for his historical cell location data, and placed a GPS tracker on his car.

Speaker 18 They installed a poll camera outside his home. They searched his desk at work.

Speaker 18 And on February 15th, 2019, They arrested him in the parking garage outside of Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 18 When he appeared in front of a magistrate judge a week later, the government was really only talking about these charges for possession of the tramadol that they found in his desk and the charge for possessing the firearm while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance.

Speaker 18 That is, as the judge noted, a pretty unremarkable charge.

Speaker 18 That's not really the kind of crime that warrants real-time surveillance, secret cameras, parking lot ambush arrests, and pre-trial detention.

Speaker 18 But with that real-time access to his computer activity at work, the investigators saw what they interpreted as a shift.

Speaker 18 He'd spent years accumulating knowledge and supplies, reading manifestos, buying guns, and now it seemed like he was preparing for something.

Speaker 18 So, when an FBI agent writes out an affidavit in support of a search warrant, he has to tell the judge what he's looking for for and why.

Speaker 18 He needs probable cause, obviously, you know that.

Speaker 18 But what makes probable cause depends on what you're investigating. What crime do you think you're going to find evidence of and why do you think you're going to find it there?

Speaker 18 Well, Hassan was charged with having a gun and a pill problem, so maybe that's what they wrote down in the affidavit, right? Something about the drugs.

Speaker 18 No.

Speaker 18 According to a defense motion to suppress the evidence seized pursuant to those searches, which was unsuccessful, quote,

Speaker 18 Agent Harrison asserted he had probable cause to believe the warrants would produce evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C.

Speaker 18 Section 1111, murder in federal jurisdictions, 1114, murder or attempted murder of officers or employees of the United States, 351, assassination of cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, or Supreme Court justices, and 371, conspiracy to commit the foregoing crimes.

Speaker 18 That is not what he was charged with.

Speaker 18 The government's motion for detention calls the charges that they actually filed, that drug stuff, quote, the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 18 And they opened their memo with a pretty bold statement, writing,

Speaker 18 the defendant is a domestic terrorist. bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect government conduct.

Speaker 18 And so instead of sending the defendant on his way with court orders to behave himself until his trial, the government said there is absolutely no way to assure the safety of the community except to keep him in custody.

Speaker 18 And this is where it becomes clear that this case was never about pain pills.

Speaker 18 On June 2nd, 2017, Christopher Hassan wrote, then deleted an email draft. He never sent this to anyone.
It just stayed there in his recoverable deleted drafts folder for a year and a half.

Speaker 24 Dear friends, maybe that's a bit of a misnomer. Acquaintance is more likely.
Hope this finds you well. I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth.

Speaker 24 I think a plague would be most successful, but how do I acquire the needed Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax? Not sure yet, but we'll find something.

Speaker 24 Interesting idea the other day. Start with biological attacks followed by attack on food supply.

Speaker 17 Have to research this.

Speaker 24 Two-pronged attack seems it might be more successful. Institute a bombing sniper campaign.
What can I do? I will not do nothing. Seems inevitable that we are doomed.

Speaker 24 I don't think I can cause complete destruction on my own.

Speaker 18 However, if I could enlist the unwitting help of another power, country, would be best. Who and how to provoke?

Speaker 18 The letter continues, outlining a plan to purchase land in a remote area, noting that he needs to get off drugs to clear his mind to plan this attack, and he needs to start stockpiling food and supplies at multiple hidden locations.

Speaker 18 He writes that he needs to, quote, have a serious look, end quote, at what kinds of targets would be most effective, speculating that doctors, professors, politicians, judges, and leftists in general would be a great place to start.

Speaker 18 He wants to provoke unrest and then target both sides of it to exacerbate tension and maximize casualties, to provoke the government to overreact to escalate the violence.

Speaker 18 And once major unrest is underway, he plans to dress as a cop and execute looters.

Speaker 18 Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads. Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world.
So be it, he writes.

Speaker 18 The email is signed, very respectfully, Lieutenant Christopher P. Hassen, National Security Cutter Acquisition.

Speaker 18 Three months later, in September of 2017, he drafted another letter.

Speaker 18 This one has a clear recipient, although there is no concrete proof he ever mailed it.

Speaker 18 On September 5th, he did a little online shopping at work. He purchased 11 books from Amazon.
mostly those by lifelong neo-Nazi activist Harold Covington.

Speaker 18 Covington is a man who deserves his own episode.

Speaker 18 He was a member of the American Nazi Party in his youth and was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1973 after just two years.

Speaker 18 Accounts vary a little bit here. One 1980 New York Times article says he, quote, accepted an early honorable discharge after getting into a tavern brawl with blacks, end quote.

Speaker 18 I didn't realize we were still saying that in 1980. I don't really care for that, New York Times.
But the real problem here is that the paper was accepting Covington's own account of things.

Speaker 18 That was his version of why he wasn't in the army anymore. He was actually pushed out of the army because of his habit of handing out neo-Nazi pamphlets to his fellow soldiers.

Speaker 18 He also has the distinction of being the only man I've ever heard of who was deported from Rhodesia for being...

Speaker 18 too

Speaker 18 racist.

Speaker 18 Our guy Frank Sweeney from a few weeks ago was deported from from Rhodesia for stabbing a guy, but there was no indication they had any problem with the Nazi stuff.

Speaker 18 I don't want to spoil too much now.

Speaker 18 We will definitely have to cover Harold Covington eventually, but I want to at least make it clear why it's a little troubling to be filling your bookshelves with his work.

Speaker 18 So it's September 2017. Hassan is buying a bunch of Covington's novels.

Speaker 18 He saves a copy of Covington's Northwest Front handbook to his Google Drive account, and he's spending some time on Covington's website learning about his idea for the Northwest Territorial Imperative.

Speaker 18 This is the idea that American white supremacists should all move out to the Northwest and settle in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and start taking control of local governments, eventually turning the entire region into a white ethnostate.

Speaker 18 Covington didn't invent the idea, of course, but he was one of its biggest boosters. He founded the Northwest Front and wrote a bunch of books about the topic to try and make it a reality.

Speaker 18 After reading up on Covington and the Northwest Imperative, Hassan looked at some areas in Washington and Idaho on Google Maps. Then he did a Bing search for, is Harold Covington FBI informant?

Speaker 18 Hassan spent most of the next workday browsing Reddit, as he did every day, and doing a little research on Christian identity.

Speaker 18 It's a twisted theology that has really almost nothing to do with the Christianity you're familiar with. It preaches that white Europeans are God's true chosen people.

Speaker 18 Racial purity is valued above all else. Racial mixing is a violation of God's law.
Christian identity believers yearn for a white ethno-state, and some of them are willing to kill for it.

Speaker 18 It was Richard Butler's devotion to Christian identity that led him to found the Aryan Nations and establish a large Nazi compound outside of Curtaline, Idaho.

Speaker 18 Butler's dedication to establishing a sovereign Aryan territory in the Pacific Northwest is what inspired Harold Covington to name the plan outlined in his Northwest Front Handbook after him, calling it the Butler Plan.

Speaker 18 That's something Hassan probably learned when he conducted a Bing search at his work computer for the Butler Plan after spending all afternoon reading about Christian identity.

Speaker 18 He must not have been totally sold on Christian identity, though, because records show he also sent an email that same week to someone at the Asatru Folk Assembly.

Speaker 18 Far from the harmless, if sometimes questionable, practice of paganism by people of European heritage who are trying to connect with their ancestral ways of life or whatever they believe that might be, the Asatru Folk Assembly is an explicitly white nationalist organization, and they get heavy criticism from their fellow pagans for the racial hatred that's built into its founding doctrines.

Speaker 18 But Hassan wrote to someone at the Folk Assembly asking if they had any members in his local area, and he expressed a willingness to drive up to 200 miles to participate in group meetings.

Speaker 18 He ends the email signing off, not by saying, you know, sincerely or best wishes or thank you or some normal way of ending an email, but instead he writes, 14 words, Chris Hassen.

Speaker 18 The 14 words refers to the slogan coined by David Lane, the neo-Nazi domestic terrorist who died in prison for his role in the assassination of Jewish broadcaster Alan Berg.

Speaker 18 It's commonly used in a wide variety of Nazi spaces. It's one of the few things most white nationalists seem to agree on.
They love the 14 words.

Speaker 18 And this isn't actually the first time I've seen it used as the closing of a letter.

Speaker 18 For the record, if we must, the 14 words are, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

Speaker 18 And then there's sort of a second 14 words, and you can use them both, you know, if you're super into it.

Speaker 18 The latter half is, because the beauty of the white Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 that's really beautiful stuff. David Lane was quite the wordsmith.

Speaker 18 But back to Chris Hassen.

Speaker 18 After spending a few days on his research into Harold Covington, he did another Bing search. He searched for formal introduction letter example.

Speaker 18 And he read an article about how to write a letter. And then he drafted a letter to Harold Covington himself.

Speaker 24 Mr. Covington, I am writing you regards to your ideas behind Northwest migration.
To date, I have read most of your books and briefly looked at your website.

Speaker 24 I am a longtime white nationalist, having been a skinhead 30 plus years ago before my time in the military.

Speaker 18 A longtime white nationalist and a former skinhead? That's quite a revelation.

Speaker 18 We'll get to that. The letter continues.

Speaker 24 My plans are upon retirement to move to the Northwest, most likely Idaho.

Speaker 24 While I fully support the idea of a white homeland, my friends who are still playing at being a skinhead at 40-plus years old say that you are an informant. That is neither here nor there.

Speaker 24 It is not an accusation. The person who told me this served a 12-year prison sentence and never ratted me out, so I will not dispute him, nor will I accuse you.

Speaker 18 So that explains his multiple searches searches for, is Harold Covington an FBI informant?

Speaker 18 Someone had told him that.

Speaker 18 But he decided to write to Covington anyway, it seems.

Speaker 18 Hassan's attorney emphasizes that this was only an email draft. He wrote this on his computer, but he never actually sent this as an email.

Speaker 18 Harold Covington died in 2018, so he's not around anymore to ask if he ever got a letter in the mail.

Speaker 18 But his mailing address is printed right there on the cover of the Northwest Front Handbook, so Hassan may have drafted the letter in his email and then printed it out at home or handwritten the final version and sent it in the mail.

Speaker 18 We'll never know.

Speaker 18 And in the letter, Hassan says he's reluctant to start or join any kind of movement because he's concerned that they're all just absolutely infested with informants.

Speaker 18 And he sees no value in public protest, writing,

Speaker 24 I never saw a reason for mass protests or wearing uniforms, marching around, provoking people with swastikas, etc. I was and am a man of action.
You cannot change minds protesting like that.

Speaker 24 However, you can make change with a little focused violence.

Speaker 18 His internet activity does show a casual interest in real estate in remote areas, looking on several occasions at listings for cabins in the mountains of North Carolina or Alaska.

Speaker 18 as well as looking at properties for sale in Montana, Oregon, and Idaho. But these searches were relatively few and far between.
They seemed to interest him only sporadically.

Speaker 18 He would sort of check in on the idea every couple of months compared to his daily obsession with in-cell ideology, buying guns, studying mass murder under Sprevix Manifesto, and eventually building his target list.

Speaker 18 But before we move on, I want to revisit something he said in that letter. Not the stuff about the white homeland, that's pretty straightforward.

Speaker 18 He said he hesitated to reach out to Covington because someone told him that Harold Covington was a snitch.

Speaker 18 And whoever told him this was someone he considered incredibly trustworthy because apparently this guy did 12 years behind bars and never ratted him out.

Speaker 18 The government alludes to this person and this underlying incident that put him in prison a couple of times, but it's all either terribly oblique or heavily redacted.

Speaker 18 And when I see a government redaction over something that I would like to read, I consider that a personal challenge. Someone has thrown down the gauntlet.

Speaker 18 I mean, ultimately, whatever happened one night in Hampton, Virginia in 1995 doesn't necessarily have any bearing on this case. I could have just moved on.

Speaker 18 But they blacked out those details, and I wanted them, and I couldn't let it go. So I figured it out anyway.

Speaker 18 On February 11th, 1995,

Speaker 18 there was an incident. There's a little bit of a Rashaman situation going on here with sort of competing and conflicting accounts.

Speaker 18 There's, you know, self-serving half-truths, spotty reporting, faded memories.

Speaker 18 It's not a crystal clear picture, but we do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a skinhead named Stephen Casey Jones went to prison.

Speaker 18 He was convicted by a jury in Hampton, Virginia in September of 1995 on two counts of the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, attempted murder, and maiming.

Speaker 18 He spent over a decade behind bars serving at least part of his time just down the road from where I'm writing this.

Speaker 18 Now, of course, I can't find a 30-year-old inmate roster, that's not possible, but I do have a Buckingham County record of a marriage license issued in 2002 and a photo of the happy couple.

Speaker 18 No one is smiling. He has one arm slung over the woman's shoulders, and his other arm is supporting a little girl.
She's sort of sitting in the crook of his elbow.

Speaker 18 And the way that his hand is situated, sort of pressing her into his chest to steady her, you can read his knuckle tattoos.

Speaker 18 Her little pigtails and cute plaid romper seem so at odds with the letters H-A-T-E

Speaker 18 spread out over her torso on his fingers.

Speaker 18 It's hard to tell in this photo, but I don't think he had that big swastika tattoo on the side of his neck back then.

Speaker 18 But the question I set out to answer, and I'm getting to it, is how did this guy from out of state end up here? And how does Christopher Hassan factor into this?

Speaker 18 Turning to the newspaper archives, we can start to lay out the story. That night in February of 1995, a couple of skinheads rolled up to a house in Buckrow Beach, a neighborhood in Hampton.

Speaker 18 They were looking for the homeowner's 17-year-old daughter, but it was her father who met them in the front yard. He told them to leave.

Speaker 18 They refused.

Speaker 18 And then they argued.

Speaker 18 Stephen Casey Jones reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.

Speaker 18 He pointed the pistol at the girl's father, putting it right in his face and pulled the trigger. But it didn't fire.

Speaker 18 By the grace of God or pure luck, or because it was a cheap, poorly maintained weapon stored inside the sweaty pocket of a skinhead swastika covered jacket, the gun didn't fire.

Speaker 18 So instead, he beat the man around the head with the gun, leaving him concussed, permanently damaging his hearing, and cutting open his head pretty bad. He needed 10 stitches.

Speaker 18 And the police report says that Christopher Hassen was standing right there next to Jones. when all of this went down.

Speaker 18 Newspaper accounts name only two of the men who were there that night and they don't actually specify exactly how many of them there were, just that it was several or a group, you know, a group of skinheads.

Speaker 18 Stephen Casey Jones was there, of course, he was arrested.

Speaker 18 But there's no mention in the newspaper at all of Christopher Hassen.

Speaker 18 Now, I thought I knew the Hassan case pretty well top to bottom from following it when it happened, but I'd never explored this aspect of the story before.

Speaker 18 And I tell you, when I found a 30-year-old newspaper article naming the third man who was there that night in 1995,

Speaker 18 he was the highlight of my week. Ooh, I squealed.
I was so excited. I love a crossover event.
I just couldn't believe these two paths had crossed so many years ago.

Speaker 18 Because when I read that name, I didn't need to look him up.

Speaker 18 I already know exactly who Ryan Mazziarka is.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 18 In 2019, the FBI paid Ryan Mazziarka a visit. They wanted to get his version of events about this incident in 1995.

Speaker 18 He confirmed to them that, yes, Hassan had been a skinhead back then, but he didn't know him really very well.

Speaker 18 He said on the date in question, he was hanging out with Jones and Hassan, and the three of them were drinking. And a few hours in, they were pretty drunk and they ran out of alcohol.

Speaker 18 In his version of events, Someone suggested that they should go over to that girl's house because they knew there was alcohol there and she could get it for them.

Speaker 18 This doesn't quite match up with the accounts provided in 2019 by the girl in question, who is now a grown woman and her mother.

Speaker 18 And it's very different from the story that was in the newspaper back when it happened.

Speaker 18 You see, Ryan Mazziarka has a history, and that history starts a few months before that night in February of 1995.

Speaker 18 The summer before that, 1994, he and a couple of his teenage skinhead pals had defaced a black church.

Speaker 18 They spray-painted white power, you know, leave or else, and die N-words in fluorescent paint all across the exterior walls of this church.

Speaker 18 One of the boys was still a minor, so he got a slap on the wrist. A second boy, Ricky Hunt, was initially charged, but his charges ended up getting dropped.
It's not clear why.

Speaker 18 And in February of 1995, Ryan Mazziarka had just been convicted.

Speaker 18 And he was facing the possibility of some real jail time under a new hate crime statute here in Virginia.

Speaker 18 They weren't looking for booze that night. They were looking for Ricky.

Speaker 18 The teenage girl they were there to question was Ricky's girlfriend.

Speaker 18 In her statement to the FBI in 2019, she said they believed they were looking for Ricky that night, quote, because they wanted to cause trouble, end quote.

Speaker 18 Newspaper articles from the time state outright that Mazziarka was looking for Ricky because he wanted to fight him.

Speaker 18 Mazziarka ended up getting two years for the church vandalism. He caught a conviction that same year for having a sawed-off shotgun, but for some reason they let him slide on that one.

Speaker 18 He didn't get any additional jail time for it.

Speaker 18 And in 1997, he shows up in the local paper again.

Speaker 18 So he's fresh out of jail and he needed to register his car. You You know, there's a lot of errands you just can't run when you're locked up and going to the DMV is one of them.

Speaker 18 So it's 1997 and he's getting a new license plate.

Speaker 18 Vanity plates are huge in Virginia. I'm not really sure why, but we have more of them than any other state.
I think it's because they're like a little cheaper here than they are in some other states.

Speaker 18 I think some states charge a lot of money for it and it's a pretty nominal fee here, but We just love to pay the DMV a little extra money to put some kind of personal message on the back of our cars.

Speaker 18 And for Ryan Maziarka, the personal message he wanted to drive around town with was Zyklon B.

Speaker 18 He told the newspaper that he enjoyed the attention the plate got, saying, quote, I want people to ask me what it is, to tell them it's a big lie, end quote.

Speaker 18 Cyclon B is, of course, the cyanide gas used in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust, an event Maziarka says he does not believe happened.

Speaker 18 After a decision by the State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull the plate for offensive content, Maziarka said,

Speaker 24 When I see displays of black pride or black power, I don't go running to my senator. But as soon as I get something that represents my race's dominating spirit, I get put down for it.

Speaker 24 Apparently, I lost all civil rights in this community.

Speaker 18 He was ultimately unable to return the plates to the DMV.

Speaker 18 Somebody stole them off the back of his car while he was at work.

Speaker 18 And the FBI interview with the wife of the man who was pistol whipped back in 1995 reveals the presence of a fourth person who was there that night.

Speaker 18 She too confirmed that Christopher Hassan and Stephen Jones were skinheads. But in her interview in 2019, she mentions the presence of a woman,

Speaker 18 the girlfriend of someone whose name is redacted. These reports are all heavily redacted, but they are typed in monospace font, which means every character has an identical width.

Speaker 18 So when you're typing on your computer, you're almost certainly using a variable width font.

Speaker 18 So the letter I, for example, takes up less width on the page than the letter M, so different letters have different widths.

Speaker 18 But in a monospace font, Every character takes up the same amount of space, so you can more or less tell how many characters are being obscured obscured by a redaction.

Speaker 18 And so in this instance, the redaction here is too long to say Jones and too short for it to say Stephen Jones. And Hassan's name isn't redacted in the documents.
His name is just there.

Speaker 18 So that just leaves Mazziarka.

Speaker 18 So maybe the woman in the van was Ryan's girlfriend.

Speaker 18 Whoever she was, though, she seemed to be calling the shots.

Speaker 18 According to what the victim's wife told the FBI years later, when the woman in the van demanded they all get back in the vehicle to leave, Hassan obeyed.

Speaker 18 The witness recalled hearing him say, yes, ma'am, as he climbed back in.

Speaker 18 It's hard to pin down exactly if Mazziarka was already dating back then the woman who has been his common-law wife for decades now, but by 2000, they were both contributors to Resistance, the quarterly magazine for Resistance Records, a white power music label.

Speaker 18 And by 2000, the company had been acquired by National Alliance under William Luther Pierce, and the magazine's staff and most of its guest contributors were affiliated with the group.

Speaker 18 Shortly after William Luther Pierce died in 2002, corporate pilings reflect a series of changes to the neo-Nazi organization's leadership structure.

Speaker 18 I got into a little bit of that period of power struggle in the episode about Kevin Alfred Strome.

Speaker 18 In paperwork filed with the Virginia Corporation Commission in 2003, Ryan Mazziarka is listed as National Alliance's treasurer, and he remained on the board until he was pushed out in a lawsuit in 2014.

Speaker 18 His wife, Angela Forbes, had been handling orders for the skinhead streetwear you could buy from an ad in Resistance magazine since 2000.

Speaker 18 And by 2002, the ad copy directed the buyer to make out the money orders to her personally,

Speaker 18 not to National Alliance.

Speaker 18 I guess what I'm getting at here is I don't don't think he was telling the truth when the FBI stopped by in 2019.

Speaker 18 He admitted to hanging out with Hassen a bit back in the mid-90s, but he said it was only ever about their shared love of skinhead music.

Speaker 18 He says Hassen was always going on about Hitler, but he personally didn't really get into that fascist stuff.

Speaker 18 I know it probably seems weird to spend this much time trying to dissect this incident from 1995.

Speaker 18 That's not what Christopher Hassen is charged with. It was 30 years ago.
A lot of you probably weren't even born then.

Speaker 18 But the FBI was really interested in it. They sent agents out to talk to a lot of people about this, trying to figure out what happened that night.

Speaker 18 A month after Hassan was arrested, an agent spoke with the assailant himself, Stephen Casey Jones.

Speaker 18 And immediately after that interview, Jones contacted a member of Hassan's family to say he'd been visited by an agent.

Speaker 18 And we know this because that unnamed family member in turn called Hassen immediately to tell him about the phone call they had gotten from Stephen Casey Jones. And jail phone calls are recorded.

Speaker 18 When Hassan heard that the FBI had spoken to Jones about him, his reply was,

Speaker 18 oh shit.

Speaker 18 Hassan was very concerned that Jones would think that he'd been talking, but he doesn't say about what.

Speaker 18 He was worried the government would offer him a deal in exchange for information, saying he thought the FBI, quote, would try to get me to inform.

Speaker 18 I wouldn't do that, but I'm just saying I got this thing in my head where they'd offer me.

Speaker 18 But he doesn't finish the thought.

Speaker 18 The person on the other end of the line interrupted him before he could finish, saying, quote, there's nothing there to inform, and they could never prove anything.

Speaker 18 And I kind of doubt that anyone was worried the FBI was interested in this 30-year-old closed case involving non-life-threatening injuries to a victim who has since passed away of unrelated causes, right?

Speaker 18 They're not talking about this thing from 1995. Stephen Jones was convicted and he served his time.
He can't be tried for that again. It's over.

Speaker 18 That can't be what Hassan was worried they'd make him talk about.

Speaker 18 So this raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Speaker 18 And it turns out it's pretty hard to track down the exact identity of a a guy named Steve Jones, who was either 20 or 21 in 1995 and was from either Tulsa or Atlanta, depending on the newspaper you're reading, but it can be done.

Speaker 18 And these days, Stephen Jones is living in Missouri and is a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence.

Speaker 18 Normally, I would couch something like that in an allegedly or ostensibly, but I know Stephen Jones is in the Sons of Silence because the Missouri chapter of the Sons of Silence has a clubhouse in St.

Speaker 18 Louis. And that clubhouse is owned by a corporate entity that the state of Missouri dissolved in 2022 because they didn't keep up with their annual paperwork.

Speaker 18 But the last time they did file paperwork, that corporate entity, Bad Influence Inc., listed a Stephen Casey Jones as its president.

Speaker 18 Photos of Jones taken more recently than the decades-old picture of him in his Virginia prison jumpsuit show an an older Stephen Jones, bearded now and heavyset.

Speaker 18 He's usually wearing his leather motorcycle vest with a regional enforcer patch just above his one percenter patch, a designation used by motorcycle clubs that embrace criminality.

Speaker 18 The line work is blown out now. It's faded and muddied by the years, but you can still just make out hate spelled across his knuckles.

Speaker 18 The Department of Justice has listed the Sons of Silence as a criminal organization for at least 20 years.

Speaker 18 The group's official logo is a bald eagle on top of a stylized letter A, which looks remarkably like the Anheuser-Busch A, but I don't know if the beer companies ever considered suing over it.

Speaker 18 But you also see a different logo sometimes.

Speaker 18 SS Bolt with S-Y-L-S-O-S.

Speaker 18 Written down the lightning bolts. It stands for support your local sons of silence.

Speaker 18 One recent photo of Jones with his wife shows her sporting some Sons of Silence merchandise. It's a gray t-shirt with the outline of the state of Missouri with S-Y-L-S-O-S written inside.

Speaker 18 And next to the image, in this sort of Germanic-looking antique-style font, the shirt reads,

Speaker 18 Meine Era Heist Troia.

Speaker 18 My honor is loyalty.

Speaker 18 That was the slogan of the SS.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 10 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 15 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 7 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 27 Meet Lisa, a mom of two who loves the holidays, but not the endless to-do list.

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Speaker 18 But whatever it was that Hassan was worried the government was going to ask him about, he clearly wasn't willing or able to parlay it into a deal.

Speaker 18 He ultimately pled guilty to two counts of owning unregistered silencers, one count of possession of a firearm while unlawfully using controlled substances, and one count of possession of a controlled substance.

Speaker 18 And because he pled out rather than take the case to trial, everything we know about the case against Christopher Hassan comes from those initial detention hearings and the sentencing memos filed after the plea.

Speaker 18 There is this myth that the courts are some kind of final arbiter of the truth. What the court determines to be fact simply is now legally true, right?

Speaker 18 If someone is acquitted of a crime, it can be slanderous and defamatory to say otherwise, even if you were the victim of that crime and your own recollection is at odds with the verdict.

Speaker 18 But there's a difference, I think, between arriving at the truth and decreeing it.

Speaker 18 And I would argue that the courts are not really equipped to locate the truth. They just rule on which version presented to them is going to be legally true from now on.

Speaker 18 So at this stage in the case, both the defense and the prosecution write these long memos explaining to to the judge why the defendant deserves a particular sentence. He's legally guilty now.

Speaker 18 The court accepted his plea, so that's the truth. He's guilty.

Speaker 18 But what kind of punishment he deserves requires the court to consider these competing truths. Was he a loving family man who left his youthful indiscretions in the past decades ago?

Speaker 18 A responsible gun owner who just had a little trouble with pills?

Speaker 18 Or was he an avowed lifelong white supremacist who, after years of study and stockpiling weapons, was in the early stages of preparing for a massive terrorist attack?

Speaker 18 Is there room for something in between?

Speaker 18 The defense paints Hassan as the former, obviously. The memo begins with a bit of biography.

Speaker 18 Hassan served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1994, when he was honorably discharged after several overseas deployments during the First Gulf War.

Speaker 18 He struggled to adapt to civilian life and enlisted in the Army National Guard in Virginia barely six months months after leaving the Marines.

Speaker 18 But this memo skips right to his enlistment in the Coast Guard in 1996, and it leaves out the fact that he transferred from the Virginia National Guard to Arizona in 1995.

Speaker 18 He told the psychologist who examined him in this case that he moved to Arizona in 1995 so he couldn't be made to testify against Stephen Casey Jones.

Speaker 18 The defense memo and many of the letters written by his friends and family mention that he had no issues working with colleagues of all races and mentioning a particular black coworker he befriended in 2001.

Speaker 18 The memo waxes poetic for an entire page about his loving and supportive relationship with his children, both grown by now and with military careers of their own.

Speaker 18 His children shared anecdotes about fond childhood memories of their father's love and care for them.

Speaker 18 Buried deep in the report prepared by the defense's psychologist, though, there is a passing mention that his daughter's decision to marry in secret caused immense strain in the family.

Speaker 18 In her letter, his daughter writes that Hassan met his grandson for the first time when she brought the boy to the jail for a visit.

Speaker 18 There's no mention in this memo, but the man his daughter married in secret is not white.

Speaker 18 Was this on his mind when he typed best N-word killing gun into a search engine?

Speaker 18 What was he thinking about when he googled, I think my wife is an N-word lover?

Speaker 18 The defense says that Hassan's abuse of Tramadol got out of hand after he moved to Maryland in 2016. He'd gotten a promotion and moved from North Carolina to accept a position in D.C.

Speaker 18 at Coast Guard headquarters. He and his wife were going through a little bit of a rocky period, having trouble adjusting to their kids leaving home, and They separated for a while.

Speaker 18 She didn't join him in DC right away, and they reconciled after about a year, but they spent that first year he was in DC apart.

Speaker 18 The memo says he was lonely. He was having a hard time adjusting to city life and he hated commuting.

Speaker 18 He hated sitting at a desk all day and so he became increasingly dependent on a drug he'd been abusing since 2012.

Speaker 18 His wife had a prescription for Tremadol for a chronic pain condition, but Now he was turning to illegal online pharmacies to buy hundreds of pills at a time.

Speaker 18 The defense hired a medical doctor who diagnosed Hassan with opioid use disorder and offered an expert opinion that such a condition can cause serious mood disturbances, which is true, right?

Speaker 18 But in the memo, the attorney stops just short of outright claiming that being addicted to opiates makes you Google where do most senators live while you're shopping for rifle scopes.

Speaker 18 They do make some valid points about the fact that it isn't that weird to own a ton of guns, a lot of people do, and a thousand bullets might sound like a lot of bullets if you're not a gun owner, but a serious hobbyist could blow through that in a day at the range.

Speaker 18 But overall, the defense sentencing memo rests heavily on this very narrow angle of the truth.

Speaker 18 Friends and relatives and neighbors and coworkers sent letters of support saying, that's just not the Chris Hassan I know.

Speaker 18 One coworker wrote, unless the definition of white nationalists has changed, Christopher Hassan is not one, noting that he'd worked successfully with black and Hispanic colleagues for years.

Speaker 18 There was even a letter submitted that was written by a man who'd shared a cell block with Hassan while he was in pretrial detention.

Speaker 18 The handwritten letter said he'd gotten to know Hassan over the last few months and he'd had no issues with anyone on their quad. They play chess together, work out, and share food.

Speaker 18 And the man adds helpfully that as a black person, he'd never felt that Chris was prejudiced in any way.

Speaker 18 There were multiple letters from priests and lay ministers who'd been meeting with Hassan in jail.

Speaker 18 Apparently, he was Catholic again, despite his exploration of Christian identity, a satru, and a couple of months where he was really seriously considering converting to Russian Orthodoxy.

Speaker 18 But in jail, he's Catholic again. He confessed and received communion.
And a priest wrote to the judge that they'd been meeting weekly and found Hassan's contrition to be genuine.

Speaker 18 The defense asked for a sentence of time served, immediate release, and three years of supervision. He just needs treatment.
He was never going to hurt anyone.

Speaker 18 The government had something very different in mind.

Speaker 18 The bulk of the material produced in this case outlining his online activity was filed alongside this sentencing memorandum. And with everything on the table, a very different picture starts to form.

Speaker 18 In early 2017, Hassan began obsessively studying Anders Bravex manifesto.

Speaker 18 It's a sprawling 1500 pages, part diary, part manual. There's big chunks of plagiarized content from other sources.
It's

Speaker 18 not great.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's not great for a lot of reasons. Anders Brevik did murder 77 people, and most of them were children.
But the manifesto was also just kind of bad.

Speaker 18 But Hassan would spend hours at a time some days reading and rereading passages of the manifesto, and then he'd get online and research topics related to those passages.

Speaker 18 And while the defense was telling the truth when they argued that he'd always been a gun enthusiast, his purchasing history shows a distinct change in his spending habits after he became obsessed with the manifesto.

Speaker 18 In just two years, he spent over $12,000 on holsters, knives, magazines, ammunition, handguards, camping supplies, survival foods, steel body armor plates, plate carriers, tactical vests and pouches, firearm repair kits, a firearm barrel, firing pins, and a $1,300 rifle scope.

Speaker 18 And that $12,000 does not include the money he spent on guns themselves. This was accessories.

Speaker 18 And Asin was already a proficient marksman, but now he's developing an interest in long-range shooting. He bought a sniper rifle.

Speaker 18 He took it to the shooting range and recorded the rifle's performance in a little notebook after he read online that snipers use a paper log called a sniper data book to document the performance of a particular rifle under different conditions, things like temperature, wind, elevation, and anything else that would affect the external ballistics of a bullet.

Speaker 18 He searched for information on subsonic rounds, ammunition that doesn't break the sound barrier.

Speaker 18 Sometimes snipers use it because it makes it more difficult to determine where the shots are coming from.

Speaker 18 He searched for information about frangible rounds, ammunition that breaks apart on impact, that can make it impossible for law enforcement to learn anything about the gun it was fired from.

Speaker 18 And he bought all the materials he would need to make silencers at home. And then he did.

Speaker 18 And all this time, he's obsessively searching for things like how to rid the U.S. of Jews, how can whites rise up, how to bring down U.S.
government.

Speaker 18 And he's reading the Unibombers Manifesto. And he's reading the book written by Eric Rudolph.

Speaker 18 You probably know Eric Rudolph as the 1996 Olympics bomber, but he was also a Christian identity extremist who bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.

Speaker 18 And meanwhile, Hassan is going deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole. He's taking more and more Tramadol and buying more and more guns.
And he knows he needs to get off the drugs.

Speaker 18 Not for his family or... for his job or his health.
No, he's buying fake urine online to beat the piss tests at work. He doesn't care about that.

Speaker 18 And I don't know, maybe he was thinking about his family, but that's not what's on his computer.

Speaker 18 On his computer, it's clear that he wanted to get off the drugs to clear his mind so he could focus on preparing his attack.

Speaker 18 And in January of 2019,

Speaker 18 it was starting to look like he might be working up to it.

Speaker 18 He'd been reading Undersbrevik's manifesto like it was the Bible for years now.

Speaker 18 Analysis of his computer activity showed showed that he returned to it often and would supplement his reading with additional research on the topics it contained.

Speaker 18 And on January 3rd, 2019, he opened the manifesto on his computer.

Speaker 18 And he searched the text for the term category A to read a passage where Brevek lays out the three categories of what he calls traders.

Speaker 18 with category A being the most influential and highest profile targets. Now, I've got my own copy of the manifesto, and I searched for category A.

Speaker 18 There are at least 90 pages spread across this 1500-page document in which Brevek expounds on his theories about category A, B, and C, traitors to the white race, or whatever.

Speaker 18 But to be honest, I'm not a pilled-out white supremacist, so it's just not interesting to me.

Speaker 18 But Hassan seemed persuaded by Brevik's rambling, and he started making a spreadsheet.

Speaker 18 And consistent with Brevek's advice to target politicians, journalists, Marxists, and non-profit leaders, he filled in names on his Excel spreadsheet.

Speaker 18 He lists some journalists and political commentators, MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Ari Melber, CNN's Don Lemon and Van Jones.

Speaker 18 One cell just says, Joey, in all caps, but based on corresponding internet activity, he'd been googling Joe Scarborough. And then he searched for, where is Morning Joe filmed?

Speaker 18 And then he found Joe Scarborough's home address. And then he spent about 35 seconds just sort of zooming in and out on the satellite image of the house in Google Maps.

Speaker 18 For politicians, he selected a wide variety of senators and congressional representatives. He wrote down Hellosi and Schumer, though he spelled it wrong.
And some targets just got...

Speaker 18 crude nicknames like Senator Blumenjew, which seems to refer to Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Speaker 18 He was also considering targets like Ilan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Kristen Gillibrand, and DSA, like he just wrote the acronym, presumably referring to the organization Democratic Socialists of America.

Speaker 18 He would later find personal information for two female members of the organization's National Political Committee.

Speaker 18 And that same week, he queried the Brevik Manifesto again, this time for the word steroids.

Speaker 18 Hassan's computer records show he made quite a few online purchases for steroids, human growth hormone, and testosterone.

Speaker 18 And they found a lot of human growth hormone in his apartment. A blood test performed when he was arrested, though, showed no trace of anything except the tramidol.

Speaker 18 In Brevik's manifesto, he recommends beginning a six-week steroid cycle once you've got all your supplies together and you're finished planning your attack and you're entering the preparation phase.

Speaker 18 The idea is to ensure that you are maximally aggressive when it's time to strike.

Speaker 18 But he never did, did he?

Speaker 18 Hassen didn't strike. He was arrested, charged, and convicted of a crime that really just kind of feels like a technicality.

Speaker 18 It's legal to have a silencer in most states. He just didn't do the paperwork.

Speaker 18 He owned those guns legally. He just lied on a form about his drug use.

Speaker 18 Ordering thousands of prescription pain pills from a Mexican pharmacy over the internet is definitely illegal. No argument there.
But if that's all that was going on, then he needs rehab, not prison.

Speaker 18 And if this case had gone to trial, they almost certainly would not have been allowed to admit most of this material.

Speaker 18 It's inflammatory and prejudicial and not directly germane to the actual criminal charges here. The defense was right about that, legally speaking.
A jury would not have seen all of this.

Speaker 18 But a judge is allowed to consider uncharged conduct at sentencing. And at sentencing, the government did something a little unusual.
Hassan is obviously not charged with any crime of terrorism.

Speaker 18 He didn't derail a train or join ISIS or, you know, terrorist stuff.

Speaker 18 But there's something called a terrorism sentencing enhancement. So this is not a criminal charge.

Speaker 18 This is just something you sort of put on top of the sentencing, you know, sprinkles on top of your federal sentence.

Speaker 18 And typically you see this used in cases that actually include a charge of terrorism-related crime. That makes sense.

Speaker 18 But in this case, the prosecutor argued that terrorism isn't really as well defined in the code as you might think.

Speaker 18 Writing that there is actually no requirement that the defendant have committed a federal crime of terrorism, just that the conduct was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion or to retaliate against governmental conduct.

Speaker 18 All that is required is that the crime of conviction or relevant conduct involved or was intended to promote a federal crime of terrorism.

Speaker 18 So what he's saying here is that you don't actually have to charge or convict someone on a terrorism-related crime to use the terrorism sentencing enhancement.

Speaker 18 All that is required is that some relevant conduct here was intended to promote a crime of terrorism. And that feels so thin to me.
That feels so tangential.

Speaker 18 It doesn't feel good.

Speaker 18 But they argue that the conviction on the counts related to those illegal silencers are inextricably linked to his searches for things like most liberal senator, where do most senators live in DC?

Speaker 18 Do senators have Secret Service protection? Are Supreme Court justices protected? All while he's training to use a sniper rifle and making his own silencers.

Speaker 18 So they're saying that that is relevant conduct here. That's not what he was charged with.
It's not what he was convicted of. But there's relevant conduct here that has terrorism vibes.

Speaker 18 This is a vibes-based enhancement.

Speaker 18 Ultimately, Judge Hazel was unmoved by the four hours of testimony from a psychologist hired by the defense to opine that Hassan was never really going to hurt anybody.

Speaker 18 Hazel said from the bench that zooming in and out on a satellite image of someone's house feels like pretty convincing evidence that you are targeting particular individuals and said that, quote, there is little doubt in the court's mind that the defendant was planning to carry out a mass casualty assault in furtherance of his white nationalist views.

Speaker 18 Now, forgive me, but I couldn't stomach the $30 price tag for the official transcript of that sentencing hearing, so I'm relying on my own handwritten notes here.

Speaker 18 But before Judge Hazel pronounced Hassan's 13-year sentence, he made it clear that he was, quote, not seeking to protect the public from his views, end quote, but from his actions,

Speaker 18 adding that the defendant is not alone in those views, that white supremacist ideology is deeply embedded in the soul of this country.

Speaker 18 Quote, the seeds were planted in 1619, and those seeds have grown and produced dangerous fruit. Mr.
Hassan is but one leaf that has fallen from that tree.

Speaker 18 Maybe one day we as a nation will do the hard work of digging up the roots of that tree.

Speaker 18 This sentence is in no way intended to be an attempt at that work. It simply addresses addresses the conduct of one man.

Speaker 18 End quote.

Speaker 18 What makes me so uneasy in this case is that, do I think that Christopher Hassen belongs in jail to the extent that anyone belongs in jail?

Speaker 18 I guess sort of my own views on prison abolition aside, that, you know, if anyone belongs in jail, then yeah, he... seemed like he was planning something, right?

Speaker 18 But the government was clearly asking the judge to sentence Hassan for something they didn't think they could actually charge him for because they didn't try.

Speaker 18 And if I'm being really honest with myself, that's not how it's supposed to work.

Speaker 18 Technically, he was convicted and sentenced for these concrete criminal actions and given sentences that technically fall within the guideline range for those crimes, although with this dubious terrorism enhancement tacked on.

Speaker 18 They didn't actually charge, convict, or sentence him for his thoughts, ideas, and beliefs, right?

Speaker 18 But

Speaker 18 they kind of did.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 how are you supposed to feel about that?

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 18 You have to sit with that.

Speaker 18 Because the alternative was waiting, right?

Speaker 18 Keep that poll camera up outside his house. Keep logging his keystrokes at work.
Put a flag on his name so you know if he buys an airline ticket or gets pulled over.

Speaker 18 Just watch and wait and hope that you're watching close enough that you can intercept him sometime after he sets up the sniper's nest, but before he opens fire.

Speaker 18 And is that good enough? Can we find peace with the idea that technically he went away on a technicality because they couldn't charge him with what they really thought he was doing?

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 18 I know I promised you something a little lighter, and instead I've left you with this ethical quandary about the nature and purpose of our justice system, but I think I remember this case being funny because I just thought it was outrageously silly how specific the documentation was that he was using Bing to search for information on how to make IEDs and also how to write a letter.

Speaker 18 I don't, does anyone use Bing?

Speaker 18 But my favorite Christopher Hassan case fact

Speaker 18 has got to be this one. It's a callback to the first episode of this show, actually.

Speaker 18 On the spreadsheet where he was tracking his steroid cycles, he had the top row of the spreadsheet merged into one continuous cell all across the top of the sheet.

Speaker 18 So underneath it's all this technical nonsense about dosages and timing and things like a reminder to Take a shotgun of 1,000 units of E3D in the last three weeks of cycle to prep your testes.

Speaker 18 I don't know what you're preparing your testicles for, that's not my business, but at the top of the spreadsheet, it says, quote,

Speaker 18 to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

Speaker 18 And that is the only place I have ever found that quote in a federal court filing. And I spent some time looking.
You know, I did. I can't find this in any other federal criminal case.

Speaker 18 It's not clear if Hassan knew who really said that or if he was suffering from the common but mistaken idea that it was Voltaire, but given his other online activity, I think he probably knew it was a Nazi pedophile.

Speaker 18 And that's all I have for you about Christopher Hassen, but our journey through his life and internet history did introduce some exciting new characters in the weird little guy's extended universe.

Speaker 18 I hope you'll stick around to find out more about the man who was too racist for Rhodesia or the teenage skinhead who ended up in charge of the black metal label that funded a Nazi hate group for years.

Speaker 18 Weird Little Guys is the production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 27 Meet Lisa, a mom of two who loves the holidays but not the endless to-do list.

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Speaker 17 Para los grandes, para los chicos,

Speaker 32 So, usually, on OK Storytime, our audience will send in their relationship problems, and the OK Storytime squad gives some good advice goofily. But today, we're not giving out our usual advice.

Speaker 32 Our producer Riley says we're giving something else. So, what are we doing today, Riley? They were playing a little game.

Speaker 38 Oh, okay.

Speaker 25 Game, says the man.

Speaker 39 I bought special gifts for you guys from eBay. Each one picked with one of you in mind.
Yeah, Dakota, if you want to guess.

Speaker 32 All right, there is a gift at my feet.

Speaker 25 Open that thing. And now it is in my hands.

Speaker 18 Oh!

Speaker 32 I feel like it's got to be our resident gamer keto.

Speaker 25 This is the rectangle of childhood.

Speaker 32 It's a portable game console.

Speaker 25 I used to have this as a kid.

Speaker 32 This game console, I used to play all the time. And, you know, when your mom came into the room when you were a kid and like you're pretending to sleep.

Speaker 38 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 37 But Riley, what a thoughtful gift.

Speaker 25 Yeah, right. Thank you so much.

Speaker 38 Riley, you're crushing it.

Speaker 37 But we have one more gift. Yeah, we got another one.

Speaker 38 Grab it. Let's open it.

Speaker 19 Boom. Oh, camera.

Speaker 38 An old-timey camera.

Speaker 25 That's right. Classic.
This is awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 32 Because you know how I love to take pictures on my travels.

Speaker 39 Yeah, you're always somewhere.

Speaker 32 Whether it's in Kyrgyzstan with some nomad or just New York, you know, with a nice little piece of trash or a wrap.

Speaker 25 Nice picture of taking pictures with the birds.

Speaker 25 So, Riley, you got all this from eBay, dude. eBay.

Speaker 39 It was really fun finding it with you guys. Like, I had very specific things for each one of you.

Speaker 19 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 38 It was all there.

Speaker 25 Thanks, Riley, and thank you, eBay.

Speaker 39 And guys, shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 29 eBay, things people love. This is an iHeart podcast.