Liar, Liar

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It was a Sunday afternoon in January of 2024 when the doorbell rang at a journalist's home in North Carolina.

Jordan Green, a reporter whose coverage of far-right extremism at Raw Story I greatly admire, had been working on a story about a neo-Nazi group called 2119,

and they knew it.

This wasn't the first time the subjects of his work had tried to threaten and intimidate him, and it wouldn't be the last.

But on that particular day, it was just a pizza.

It's sort of a juvenile thing to do, and in any other context, it's a harmless prank that mostly just hurts the pizza delivery driver.

It's happened to me a couple of times, this mysterious pizza you didn't order.

You're just standing there with your front door open, confused at first, before the realization washes over you.

The delivery driver isn't at the wrong house.

This isn't your pizza, you know that, but it isn't your neighbor's pizza either.

It's a warning.

Someone wants you to know, we see you.

We know where you are.

We know where you think you're safe.

And we're thinking about you.

Today, it's just a pizza you didn't want, but we want you to know.

The next time you hear something on your front porch, it could be something different.

The next day, a photo of Green standing on his front door appeared online, posted by an extremist group.

Someone had been outside, sitting in their car, snapping pictures with a telephoto lens when he opened the door.

But what the watcher didn't know is that he was being watched, too.

Anti-fascist researchers were able to identify the owner of that vehicle as 20-year-old Kai Liam Nix, a soldier stationed at Fort Liberty.

Digging through mountains of leaked materials from the white supremacist group Patriot Front, researchers and journalists were able to match Nix to the pseudonymous posts made by a Patriot Front recruiter using the name Patrick.

When Nix was asked by New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick if he had any involvement with Patriot Front or with the group that had been harassing Jordan Greene, he denied it, saying, that is a hate group.

And you can't be in the military and a hate group at the same time.

And that's true.

Well, it's half true.

The other half will have to wait for a verdict.

Because Nix was right that as a specialist in the United States Army, he was not allowed to be a member of Patriot Front.

When he backed out of a meeting with Kirkpatrick after that phone call, the reporter called the Army.

Nix wouldn't be answering any more of the reporter's phone calls.

He'd been arrested.

But he wasn't arrested for pizza pranks.

He was arrested for lying.

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

Kai Nix was arrested in August of 2024 and charged with dealing firearms without a license, possession of stolen firearms, and one more thing, which is the thing we're going to be talking about today.

It's something I think is a little more interesting than a guy who can't be bothered to buy his guns at the store like a normal person.

Guys like this getting arrested for having a gun they shouldn't have are a dime a dozen.

But the other charge on the indictment is something a little more unique.

He was charged with making a materially false statement to the United States government.

According to the indictment, he falsely claimed, quote, he had never been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government and which engaged in activities to that end.

And the statements and representations were false because, as the defendant then and there knew, he had been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government and which engaged in activities to that end.

Which is kind of a mouthful.

But what that boils down to is actually a single checkbox on a 136-page form that hundreds of thousands of Americans fill out every year.

The Standard Form 86, or SF86 for short.

It's the basic questionnaire you fill out as the starting point for a background investigation for a security clearance.

It's required when enlisting in the military and for many jobs with the federal government or with private companies that work on government contracts.

It's pretty thorough, but most of the questions aren't really surprising stuff.

You know, your name, your date of birth, everywhere you've lived for the last 10 years, along with contact information for a landlord or a neighbor who would remember remember you, everywhere you've worked for the last 10 years, and someone who would remember you from that job.

The form also requires you to provide information about all of your immediate family members, where they live, where they work, and how often you have contact with them.

You have to provide detailed information about any contacts you have with foreign nationals, any business and property interests that you have, particularly those outside of the United States, and any international trips you've taken.

I remember years ago, in another lifetime, practically, getting contacted out of the blue by some dour federal agent who needed to speak with me about a girl I barely remembered.

We'd had a couple of classes together in college.

We weren't close or anything.

But one summer when I was still in college, we were both in Germany at the same time and we spent an afternoon together.

I was visiting family friends.

I think she was doing some kind of summer program, an internship or something, honestly, I don't know.

But this was the era of putting your whole life on Facebook and she saw that I was in Germany and reached out about getting together and catching up.

And a few years after that fairly unmemorable afternoon, she was getting a security clearance for some kind of government job, and there I was sitting in a coffee shop being asked if we'd ever had any conversations about overthrowing the government of the United States.

I was so innocent then, I remember thinking, is that even a kind of conversation people have?

I think we went to a beer hall.

That was, of course, years before I found out I had a gluten intolerance and well before I had a hard drive full of neo-Nazi manifestos.

It was a different time.

Come to think of it, maybe they don't always talk to everyone you ever got a beer with in Germany, and it maybe had something to do with the afternoon I spent in a holding cell at the Munich airport later that summer after a slight miscommunication with the German federal police, but That's neither here nor there.

I got that sorted out.

What I'm saying is the form is very long and it asks you about everyone you've ever met and everywhere you've ever been.

And you can't lie.

You really,

really can't lie.

It's not like lying on a job application or patting your resume a little bit where if you get found out, maybe you get fired.

This is not a matter of professional ethics.

We're not talking about you not getting the job.

We're talking about up to five years in federal prison Because it is a federal crime to lie, even by omission, on that form or in any of the subsequent interviews during the background investigation process.

You don't have free speech in these conversations.

You have to tell the truth.

And buried deep in that form, after pages and pages of tedious stuff like trying to find a phone number for the landlord at your college apartment, you have to check yes or no.

to question 29.4.

Have you ever been a member of an organization dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States government and which engaged in activities to that end with an awareness of the organization's dedication to that end or with the specific intent to further such activities?

And then on the next page, you check yes or no again for question 29.5.

Have you ever been a member of an organization that advocates or practices commission of acts of force or violence to discourage others from exercising their rights under the U.S.

Constitution or any state of the United States with a specific intent to further such action?

Again, kind of a mouthful.

And if you check yes to either of those questions, you have to provide the contact information for the hate group you were in, but I'm not sure anyone ever checks yes.

If you've checked yes to either of those questions and then successfully gotten a security clearance, I'd love to hear from you.

Reach out.

But think about the wording of that question.

Have you ever been a member of a group that advocates for the use of force to discourage others from exercising their rights.

That's pretty broad.

White supremacist groups routinely engage in rhetoric about forcing the collapse of the government, about making journalists afraid to write, making activists afraid to protest, about making black people and Jewish people and queer people afraid to walk down a public street or enter a house of worship.

And it's not just talk.

Plenty of these groups regularly engage in direct action to actually achieve these goals.

Patriot Front specifically is currently being sued in federal court in North Dakota, Virginia, and Massachusetts for engaging in conspiracy to violate people's civil rights.

So this is not a hypothetical.

This is already happening.

But Kai Nix checked the no-box.

The government contends that he should not have.

His attorney told the New York Times that we should avoid rushing to judgment in this case.

and Mr.

Nix looks forward to making his presentation in court.

So we won't talk about Kai Nix, not not today.

He is, as we all are when an indictment comes down, innocent until proven guilty.

But the story got me thinking about that charge, about lying on your SF-86.

It's a concept I'm familiar with, but in the course of my work, I've actually only seen it a few times.

So we can't talk about Kai.

He'll have his day in court.

But we can look at the cases of the handful of guys whose names I've jotted down over the years who caught checking no when they should have checked yes when they were asked about their involvement in trying to overthrow the government or systematically violate civil rights.

Because for as many Nazi Marines as I could rattle off to you off the top of my head, I can only think of four other cases where someone involved in extremist activity was actually charged and convicted specifically for lying on an SF-86.

And I think there's as much to be learned by exploring the possible reasons why we don't see this charge more often as there is from looking at the cases where we do.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's vanishingly rare for someone to get charged for lying on an SF-86.

It does happen, just not usually in the kinds of cases I'm looking at in my work.

So if you ever find yourself filling one out, you should probably tell the truth.

Just a quick skim for charges under this statute returns some fun hits.

A guy in Ohio failed to mention his checking account in a Thai bank when he was applying for a job at NASA.

He got a year of probation and a $10,000 fine.

A congressional staffer got into some hot water for leaving out his history of tax troubles.

A former Fox News guest commentator thought his long-running lie about having been in the CIA would be just as effective when he applied for a security clearance as it was when he was lying to your parents on TV.

A couple of DEA agents were convicted for leaving out their side hustle, which happened to be running a strip club in New Jersey where a lot of people were buying and selling drugs.

So it does happen.

People are getting charged with this, but it mostly happens to government employees who were not completely transparent about their foreign bank accounts or trips to China.

But if every person enlisting in the military is filling out this form, if every guy who makes it through the process and shows up at basic training is checking checking no to both of those questions, how are there so many white supremacists in the military?

Actually enforcing this one little paperwork technicality, really coming down hard on guys who said no when they should have said, yes, I violate people's civil rights every weekend when I get together with the boys, would go a long way toward rooting out extremists in the military.

If they had good reason to believe they might catch a federal felony for it, they might be less likely to take that risk when enlisting.

Because whether or not I personally believe the justice system really has justice in mind all the time, if you take them at their word, one of the stated reasons for punishing individuals for crime is the idea that seeing someone else get punished for a particular crime, knowing that that possibility is on the table, will deter others from committing the same crime.

So if every guy in a white supremacist street gang or an underground Nazi terror cell had good reason to believe he would get caught for this, if he knew he would get caught trying to enlist to get free training on how to become a better killer, it might make it a less attractive option.

But the government doesn't really use this particular tool very often.

Some of the hesitation to bring the charge is almost certainly just the simple fact that no federal prosecutor will take a case he isn't 110% sure he's going to win.

Almost every federal criminal case ends in a guilty plea.

They just don't file charges that they think you'll fight.

And there is a lot of gray area built in from the start with this, right?

So what is an organization?

What is membership?

It sounds silly, but like the interpretation of the language here really matters in court.

Because they can't prosecute you for an ideology.

It's not illegal for you to be racist.

The The problem is acting on those feelings in an organized way to intentionally violate the rights of others and then lying about it.

The language here is clear.

It's not about what you believe.

The question is asking if you're a member of an organization that does or believes these things, right?

They're not asking what's in your heart.

It's asking you very specifically about your associations and the activities and stated goals of an organization you belong to.

So to satisfy the basic elements of this charge, they have to be able to prove that the organization exists, that it advocates for overthrowing the government or interfering with people's civil rights, and that a particular guy really was a member.

And that's actually a lot harder than it might sound.

Some white supremacist organizations really do exist on paper.

So groups like the now defunct Identity Europa are actual corporate entities.

Identity Europa even had tax-exempt status with the IRS.

There were written applications for membership, a multi-step interview process to approve an application.

They collected member dues, they put those dues in a bank account, and they filed annual paperwork with the IRS and the state of California.

So that's very clearly a membership organization, and you can theoretically prove on paper that someone applied or paid dues.

The Traditionalist Worker Party, the also now defunct neo-Nazi organization that was once led by Matthew Heinbach, not only incorporated as a nonprofit, but they registered as a political party with the Federal Election Commission.

When the group came to Charlottesville in 2017 to beat my neighbors in the streets, they expensed their lodging to the party.

The helmets they were wearing with their matching black uniforms were purchased from a company that makes workplace safety supplies and expensed to the party as rally materials.

It's all right there on their quarterly finance reports filed with the federal government.

Vanguard America, the group that Patriot Front grew out of, did have corporate filings that you can look to and say, yes, this is an organization that exists.

But when they were sued for their involvement in the Unite the Right rally, they claimed they were unable to produce any membership records.

And these days, a lot of groups aren't very formal at all, in large part because they feel like creating these kinds of records only means those records will exist when a subpoena shows up.

So organizations like Patriot Front, for example, don't really exist on paper.

There's no LLC, there's no registered agent you can serve papers on, there's no business checking account where member dues are deposited.

But they do have a clear leader and organizational structure, and multiple courts have ruled that Patriot Front exists as an entity in a sufficient enough fashion to be sued as one, as evidenced by their mountain of lawsuits.

A prosecutor could relatively confidently point to things like purchases made of patches and stickers and shirts and other Patriot Front-branded materials, or produce messages in group chats about membership vetting and group activities, or dig up concrete evidence of things like the purchase of airline tickets or vehicle rentals for attending group events, or look at footage of a particular person marching in formation in uniform with the group and say, this is clearly someone who is a member of a group.

But groups like Adam Waffen are even more gray.

They don't sell branded merch, they aren't getting together in huge groups wearing matching outfits.

They operate quietly, in the dark, in small cells.

The line between group member and just a a guy sharing an ideology with another equally shitty guy quickly blurs and disappears.

And then there's the problem of timing.

In order for a charge like this to stick, you have to be able to pinpoint the moment a man joined a clandestine organization and that moment had to be before he signed his name at the bottom of that form.

There are military regulations prohibiting membership in extremist organizations, but if he joined that organization after enlisting, that's a military discipline issue, not a federal crime.

And it's kind of a mixed bag.

Plenty of guys joined the military already radicalized.

They know they want to start a race war and they feel like the military is a great place to get the skills they'll need.

But white supremacist groups also see young military men as ideal candidates for recruitment and target them specifically.

So maybe they were telling the truth when they enlisted, but they joined a hate group after they got there.

If you listened to the episode a few weeks back about the gun trafficking ring out of Camp Lejeune, you probably remember that only one of those Marines had terrorism in mind when he enlisted, but he recruited a bunch of his fellow Marines into the cell once he got there.

And back to the issue of these organizations being so informal, you can't subpoena a membership list that doesn't exist.

But to bring this kind of charge, you need to be able to prove that he was an active member of the organization on the date the form was signed.

Sometimes that's obvious.

Brandon Russell from a few episodes ago, the founder of Adam Waffen, who's back in prison awaiting trial for a conspiracy to destroy critical infrastructure, he had absolutely already founded Adam Waffen before he signed up for the Florida National Guard.

Or in the case of Ethan Melzer, a soldier convicted for leaking classified troop movement information to a foreign terrorist organization with the intent of having his own unit ambushed and killed.

He was already involved with the Order of Nine Angles when he enlisted in the army.

As a member of that neo-Nazi Satanist cult, he joined the military as part of what the group calls an insight role.

Members infiltrate organizations of all types, although frequently it's the military, with the intent to gain training and experience in order to provide cover for committing acts of violence, to identify like-minded individuals for recruitment, and ultimately to subvert the group from within.

We'll have to talk about that case in particular another time because it deserves more than a passing mention, but it really highlights what I think is the third reason you don't see this particular charge brought against white supremacists in the military very often.

By the time it's obvious that he lied about being in a violent white supremacist organization, we are unfortunately talking about a more serious situation than his paperwork.

When it was time to indict Ethan Melzer, prosecutors were looking at a potential international incident in Turkey and the attempted murder of an entire unit of U.S.

Army paratroopers, Not paperwork.

Liam Collins, the ringleader of that gun-trafficking neo-Nazi paramilitary group, was explicit about the fact that he joined the Marines in order to learn the skills he thought he'd need for the coming civil conflict that he hoped to provoke.

And there was clear evidence that he'd already started forming the group prior to enlisting.

The corps members even met up once in person the summer before he went off to Paris Island.

But legally speaking, at what point did that group of guys become an organization?

Right?

So when they went camping that summer, was that loose collection of guys already a formal enough membership organization?

Hard to say.

Later in the case, there was some acknowledgement that one of the co-conspirators definitely did lie on his SF-86.

Jordan Duncan, one of the five men convicted for their involvement in that gun trafficking scheme, had left the Marines and gone to work for a military contractor.

So he'd actively been involved in this group for two years when he filled out an SF 86 in 2020 to renew his top secret clearance, which he successfully did.

Transcripts of hearings in Duncan's case show a handful of mentions of the fact that if he'd been honest during that renewal process, his clearance would not have been renewed.

Another way of saying that he wasn't honest would be to say that he lied, but he was never charged with that.

Because what would it really really add to that case to tack on this particular charge when the prosecutor already had this mountain of evidence about much more concrete criminal acts, right?

Talking about lying means you have to prove state of mind, you have to prove, you know, what did he know and when did he know it?

It's a little bit more nebulous than being able to say, this is a gun that he put in the mail.

That's very concrete.

So they just didn't need this.

More often, you'll see an extremist in the military just get discharged.

Quietly, if they can help it, or coinciding with a more serious set of criminal charges.

There was no press release when Tyler Dykes was discharged from the Marine Corps under other than honorable conditions in 2023.

His discharge only came into public knowledge when I wrote it down in my little notebook at a bond hearing a few months later, after he was arrested for his participation in the 2017 Unite the Right rally.

He had enlisted in the Marines after attending that Nazi rally and was an active duty Marine when he entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

He is currently serving a 57-month sentence for assaulting police officers during the January 6 riots.

Matthew Bellinger was discharged from the Marines in 2021 specifically for his involvement in extremist activity.

But that didn't become public knowledge until he was arrested a year later for a scheme involving paying a New York City police officer to make straw purchases of guns Bellinger couldn't himself legally buy.

Documents filed in that case show that Bellinger was already deeply involved in an Adam Waffen-adjacent neo-Nazi group when he joined the Marines.

The group was called Rape Krieg, named for its core belief that sexual violence is a powerful tool to control and terrify your enemies, but also a useful tool to increase the production of white babies to populate the coming ethnostate.

Prior to his enlistment, Bellinger and other Rape Krieg members had conducted surveillance of a synagogue they hoped to shoot up or burn down.

Though he was never charged with lying on his security clearance application, I can't imagine he was transparent about his weekend hobby of plotting synagogue shootings with his cadre of Nazi pals who thought they could rape their way into a white utopia.

Vassilios Postolis, another now former Marine, was convicted at his court-martial for making false statements.

He got 28 days in the brig and was discharged from the Corps upon his release, but never faced any charges in the civilian justice system, though he presumably did not disclose to the Marine Corps recruiter that he was affiliated with Adam Woffin.

So if there's no interest at the Department of Justice to charge any of those men with failing to disclose their hate group affiliations on their SF-86,

who does get charged with it?

And why?

Well, the short answer is there's not actually any way for me to answer that question.

I don't have any secret insight into the charging decisions made by federal prosecutors, but I can at least walk you through the reasoning behind the wild guesses I'm about to make about the four cases I do have where a guy in a hate group popped this charge.

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Two former members of the group Vanguard America have been convicted for failing to disclose that information when applying for security clearances to work civilian jobs.

Again, you have to fill out the SF-86 for any security clearance, and clearance is sometimes required for civilian jobs.

Decker Ramsey had been a member of both Vanguard America and a group called Aryan Underground, but failed to mention either group when he successfully applied for a security clearance needed for an engineering job at a defense contracting company.

He resigned the position before the charge was even filed.

The investigation seems to have tipped him off that it was coming and he planned to plead guilty.

This one, to be honest, is a bit of a mystery to me, even after more time than I should have spent digging.

I found a handful of photos of Ramsey at anti-immigration rallies in Huntington Beach in the summer of 2017, but the extent of his involvement with Vanguard America remains elusive to me.

The case was resolved so quickly that the government never had to put any evidence on the record.

It's possible the government came across Decker Ramsey in the course of another investigation into some other member of Vanguard America, but he wasn't charged with anything else, and he appears to have been telling the truth when he said he was done with that kind of stuff.

His quick cooperation and voluntary discontinued involvement with the groups closed the case pretty quickly.

He walked away with a felony record, but no jail time.

Fred Arena, on the other hand, has a very visible record of involvement in the movement, and it is abundantly clear why he was charged for lying about it repeatedly.

He too lied about being a member of Vanguard America when applying for a security clearance for his civilian job.

He was working at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia.

And look, maybe it's unfair for me to say this, but

this is a very stupid man.

That's unkind, I don't know, Fred, but looking at the timeline of this case, you can only conclude that he only ended up doing prison time because he actively chose to make the worst possible choice at every turn.

After the abysmal failure of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, its primary organizer, Jason Kessler, was determined to redeem himself by organizing a Unite the Right II in 2018.

You probably remember that the 2017 rally ended in the declaration of a state of emergency, causing the rallygoers to be cleared from the park before it even really started.

A few hours later, one of those attendees drove his car through a crowd, killing Heather Heyer.

Kessler and the other organizers of the rally were sued by survivors of that attack, and by the time Kessler was trying to organize the sequel,

didn't have many friends anymore.

He got a permit from the National Park Service to hold the 2018 event in Lafayette Park, just outside the White House.

But he's not really a logistics guy.

And unlike the year before, where the rally had been planned by a broad coalition of white nationalist groups and hundreds of eager attendees joined a Discord server to help coordinate transportation and lodging and supplies.

This time, Kessler was trying to organize the rally in a Facebook group chat with just 19 supporters and at least one of those people was an infiltrator who leaked the entire chat to Unicorn Riot.

When that leaked chat log was published on June 28th, 2018, just six weeks before the rally was scheduled to happen, Fred Arena was identified as the participant in the chat using the name McCormick Foley.

And while Kessler was desperate to prove he could thread the needle of holding a rally attended by the kind of people who agreed with him politically, but one that would not devolve into the kind of violence that that politics inevitably leads to, Fred Arena was the guy in the chat proving that that's just not possible.

From the very beginning, he was upset that Kessler was considering inviting speakers like Hotep Jesus and Joe Vival, speakers who are not white.

Arena wrote that he understood why such a decision might be made by his fellow white nationalists, acknowledging Kessler's assurance that even these non-white speakers would be speaking for a pro-white cause, but Arena said that it was, quote, a little bit different for me being a neo-Nazi to accept.

He even threatened to back out of the rally altogether because all this talk of recruiting non-white speakers for the sake of optics felt like Jewish influence to him.

And on the subject of whether or not their planning chats could possibly be infiltrated or monitored by anti-fascists or law enforcement, Arena repeatedly and energetically offered to fight either kind of opponent to the death, even offering to pay their travel costs to come to him for this beatdown.

His membership in Vanguard America and his eagerness to engage in physical violence got him invited to a private chat organized by David Rother to discuss how they could handle physical security at the rally.

Arena told Rother he'd be able to bring some of his own guys, describing them as paramilitary and neo-Nazi.

But the two quickly fell into bickering about Arena's inability to stop posting things that would get them all in trouble.

For what it's worth, Dave Rother didn't really need anyone's help getting into trouble.

He's currently in jail awaiting trial on charges of driving while intoxicated, leaving the scene of an accident, and assaulting a police officer.

And he was probably a little antsy about Arena's talk of paramilitary activity, given that he was on probation at the time for one of the several felonies he already had under his belt.

All that to say, when federal agents showed up at the Navy Yard to speak with Fred Arena on August 1st, 2018, less than two weeks before that rally was set to take place, they'd already read all of that.

They had already read Arena's posts about being a member of Vanguard America, about self-identifying as a neo-Nazi, about his connections to groups like the Hammerskins.

They had already looked at the photos that he'd been posting of himself with his many guns, one of which was captioned, coming soon to a synagogue near you.

And they'd already seen the posts he was making about hanging white women who sleep with black men and his selfies where he's brandishing a knife and threatening Muslims.

But on August 1st, 2018, Fred Arena hadn't really broken the law yet.

He was saying some really troubling stuff.

He was giving off heavy signals signals that he was very interested in breaking the law, but he hadn't.

With this rally coming up, some FBI agents just wanted to talk to him.

Nobody wanted a repeat of the rally the year before, and if this was the guy who had appointed himself to head of security for an event that would be taking place across the street from the White House, they just wanted to talk.

And here's the thing.

So this episode is about lying on an SF-86 form, and he is going to end up doing that.

But that same statute also makes it a crime to lie to an FBI agent.

So, when they showed up in August of 2018 and said, hey, Fred, are you a member of Vanguard America?

And he said, no.

He was already committing one of the five counts of lying that he would be eventually convicted of.

But I guess since nothing came of it at the time, he figured it was fine.

He could keep lying.

That 2018 rally was an embarrassing failure for everyone involved, but nobody died at Unite the Right 2, so we can skip over the silly little antics of a couple of washed-up white nationalists trying to figure out how to ride the metro.

A few months later, in January of 2019, Fred Arena had to fill out an application for a security clearance.

He'd been working at the Navy Yard for two years already, but he hadn't needed a clearance before, and now he did.

And when he filled out that form, he checked the no box for that question we were talking about earlier: Are you a member of a group that has used or advocated the use of force or violence to prevent others from exercising their constitutional rights, et cetera?

He said no,

and he should have said yes.

And a few months later, when FBI agents came back to talk to him again in May of 2019, they asked him the same question and he gave the same answer.

No, he'd never been a member of Vanguard America.

But they knew that wasn't true and he knew that wasn't true and they reminded him very explicitly in that interview that it would be illegal for him to not tell the truth.

So a few months later, he was indicted on five counts of giving false statements.

One for lying to the agents the first time they came to talk to him, two for lying on the clearance application, and two for telling the same lies again when they came back to ask him about his answers on the form in person.

He was sentenced to six months with two years of supervised release.

As always, we can really only guess exactly why they sent an agent back out to talk to Fred Arena the second time, but I'm going to guess.

That's my prerogative.

And I think it's possible he could have avoided that second visit and the subsequent indictment and federal prison time if he had just chilled out a little.

It seems like Fred Arena believed that Jason Kessler was responsible for him being on the FBI's radar at all.

The names are redacted, but when the government moved to keep Arena in custody after his arrest, they produced chat logs showing that in early 2019, Fred Arena was furious with someone.

Someone who lived in Charlottesville.

Someone who wanted to invite non-white speakers to that rally in August of 2018.

Someone who was working on a book about organizing the Unite the Right rally.

Someone who could really only be Jason Kessler, redactions or not.

And in January of 2019, Arena wrote in that Facebook chat, quote, that's what got the Fed so scared, because thought we were going to kill him.

Arena claimed that he had gone as far as to drive down here to Charlottesville and ask around at local stores, trying to figure out how to catch his target out in public, trying to figure out where he bought his groceries, where he went every day.

And he boasted that after sending his subject photos that showed he was in the area, the man, quote, went completely bananas and spent two days hiding under his bed.

And in at least some of these online conversations where he's bragging about his Nazi extracurriculars, he was talking to an undercover FBI agent.

The motion for detention also mentions a woman whose initials are KS, who voluntarily spoke with the FBI about threats she'd received from Arena.

He used a burner phone to text her that he was going to cut her fucking throat.

She told agents she thought he was threatening her because he believes she'd been cooperating with the FBI.

Similar threats were sent to a man whose initials are DR.

Both sets of initials are potential matches for two members of that planning chat that he'd have been having disagreements with in the lead up to that first conversation with the FBI.

So maybe Fred Arena could have gotten away with fudging some paperwork if the FBI hadn't been forced to look into whether a couple of Nazis were going to kill each other over an online beef.

Hard to say.

The other two cases I have in mind when I think about lying on your background check do actually have to do with military service, but unlike Decker Ramsey and Fred Arena, whose charges were explicitly related to their hate group membership, these two guys actually got caught lying about something kind of unrelated.

These cases are from my folder of guys where, to my eye at least, It looks like they ended up charged with whatever a prosecutor could come up with because they just needed to charge him with something

because he looked like he was going to be a problem and if they waited for that problem to develop, someone could already be dead.

Killian Ryan was discharged from the Army on August 26th, 2022, the same day he was arrested on federal charges for lying on his SF-86.

He'd been on active duty for a little over two years and was stationed at Fort Liberty, back when it was still called Fort Bragg.

He'd gotten a DUI on base a month earlier, but that's not what federal agents were there to talk to him about.

They wanted to talk to him about his father.

When Ryan filled out the SF-86 form in May of 2020, he wrote that he had not been in contact with his biological father for the last 10 years.

The form did require him to list who his father was, but he chose to use the optional comment block to explicitly state that he'd had no contact at all with his father, they hadn't spoken in at least a decade, and that his father wasn't even listed on his birth certificate.

A lot of this was completely optional information.

He did not need to write this.

He chose to.

And his father, Richard Dillard, does have a criminal history, but there's no reason to believe Ryan would have been denied his security clearance because his father was a former drug user and had once stolen a car.

Having a few skeletons in your closet doesn't mean you can't get a security clearance.

You just have to be honest and maybe they'll want to conduct a follow-up interview about something like that, sort of talk through the specifics of the situation, but plenty of people whose dads have stolen a car are in the military.

This really shouldn't have mattered at all.

It's not the kind of thing you get criminally charged over.

But it's where they found the proof that the problem arises, because the proof that he had lied about being in contact with his father was on his father's Instagram.

The Instagram account where his father had posted a photo of them together at Ryan's high school graduation also revealed that his father was involved in racially motivated extremism.

That Instagram account isn't visible anymore, but from other accounts I've been able to review, his dad really loves posting racist stuff.

Some Mussolini memes, some pro-Rhodesian content, a lot of sort of runic Viking type stuff, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the stuff that I would expect to see from a Gen X tattoo artist with an interest in in esoteric Nazism.

You know, there's nothing super special, at least not that's publicly visible to me today.

The criminal complaint says further investigation into the father's social media revealed that Ryan himself had several Instagram accounts that he was not only using to communicate with his father, which again he lied about, but was also espousing some pretty alarming ideological views of his own.

On one of those accounts, which he created using the Gmail address

ACE1488,

not a great idea,

Ryan posted, quote, I serve for combat experience, so I'm more proficient in killing N-words.

When the case was first filed, National Security Lawyer Mark Zayd told Adam Ronsley for Rolling Stone that, this was a very unusual case.

It's very rare to see a case where the only criminal charge on the indictment is giving a false statement on an SF-86.

Zayd told Ronsley, I get cases all the time where people are accused of lying on the form.

They lose their security clearance or get fired, but they don't get prosecuted.

One of two things happened.

Either the government is taking a much stronger position on racist white nationalist extremists if they find them within the U.S.

government, Or something else happened where this individual really aggravated somebody personally.

I think that's an interesting quote, right?

This attorney is acknowledging that, you know, maybe he was just a personal problem for someone.

And I'm not an attorney or an expert on security clearances, but I think he's on to something there.

You know, I don't know that this truly signaled a policy shift from the DOD,

but something triggered an investigation here.

Lloyd Austin had taken office as Secretary of Defense just the year prior to this, and he'd vowed to make rooting out extremists in the military a higher priority, particularly particularly after so many service members were arrested for participating in the January 6 riot.

Just a few months before Killian Ryan's arrest, the Pentagon had issued new guidance about tackling this problem.

Officials said under the new guidance, the military won't actively screen service members' social media accounts, but if there is an investigation into an extremist incident, social media posts may become part of that investigation.

So it's possible that what happened here is that there was some kind of underlying incident that led to Ryan's social media coming under scrutiny, which led officials to seeing his posts about wanting to kill black people, which led them to need a reason to take some kind of action.

Because we have this problem here.

Again, was he a member of an organization?

Hard to say.

Were any of those concerning posts actively illegal?

I assume not, since that's not what he was charged with.

There is a single tantalizing, mysterious little line in the indictment.

While the criminal complaint focuses exclusively on his communications with his father, which he lied about, when the actual indictment came down, it includes a single mention of a second lie, that he failed to disclose significant contact over social media with a foreign national.

There's nothing more about it.

I wish they'd put on the record who or what that was, but ultimately what this case looks like to me is that somehow Killian Ryan's extremist ideologies came to the Army's attention and they used an unusual tool to achieve the desired result, which was a felony conviction and his discharge from the service.

Killian Ryan entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to three months in prison and three years of supervised release.

The government never offered any more information about this mysterious foreign national.

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And I feel better about only having four cases at hand to offer as examples.

Now that we've read that quote from Mark Zaid,

if an attorney who handles security clearance-related matters says that it's highly unusual to see a case where this is the sole criminal charge, I'm less worried now that I've overlooked some huge cache of similar cases.

You know, I absolutely concede that there are others out there, but probably not very many.

And this fourth case is, to my eye, at least, a clear case of the government looking at a guy and saying, we will invent a reason to detain this man if we have to, and stumbling onto an old SF-86 with a lie on it out of pure luck.

In the summer of 2019, Ross Farca was arrested by local police in Contra Costa County, California after making some pretty alarming threats online.

Under the username Adolf Hitler, he posted a series of statements in a chat room on Steam, a gaming website, about carrying out mass shootings at synagogues, specifically referencing the Poway Synagogue shooting that had just happened a few months earlier.

He was charged in California with making criminal threats and unlawful possession of an assault weapon.

The police kept the guns they found and a court order was issued that prohibited him from getting any more guns, but he was released on bond shortly after his arrest.

His release sparked outrage in the community, particularly among Jewish residents, but he hadn't actually committed any acts of violence and without access to a firearm, the judge felt he posed no imminent danger to the community.

While he was out on bond, he used an encrypted messaging service to communicate with another mass shooting enthusiast and the pair were making plans to meet up to discuss it.

Later that summer, he also filed paperwork with the county court in California to try to fight the gun violence restraining order that was preventing him from possessing a firearm.

He wanted those guns back and he wanted to keep talking to other aspiring mass shooters.

There was a lot of outrage about this whole situation for good reason, but he remained out on bond while he awaited trial on those charges in California.

So some federal prosecutor reached into his toolbox and pulled out 18 U.S.C.

1001A,

knowingly making false statements to a government agency.

Because when Farca was originally arrested in June of 2019, his bedroom was searched.

They found the AR-15 style rifle that he was charged with possessing.

They found 13 rifle magazines.

They found a lot of Hitler paraphernalia.

And they found paperwork related to Farca's 2017 discharge from the U.S.

Army.

The local cops in California collected the evidence recovered from the bedroom, but they were mostly focused on the guns, obviously.

But for a federal prosecutor, that paperwork presented a new opportunity.

In June of 2017, two years before that arrest, Ross Farca walked into a US Army recruiter's office in Mountain View, California and filled out a standard form 86.

He'd been obsessed with joining the Army for years.

He had repeatedly asked his psychiatrist and his case case manager at the Regional Center of East Bay, a nonprofit contracted by the state of California to coordinate services and support for adults with disabilities, about how to get off his medication and get a letter of medical clearance so he could enlist.

His psychiatrist told him on three occasions in 2014 and 2015 that she couldn't write him a letter of medical clearance because in her professional opinion, he was not mentally stable enough to serve in the military.

After that third denial from his psychiatrist in 2015, he wrote in a Facebook message, I will take violent action against the Zog once I have military training and preferably some military combat experience to ensure I am steady under fire.

My problem is I can't initiate that process immediately for some specific personal reasons.

Zog is an acronym for Zionist Occupied Government.

It's a popular concept among white supremacists.

They believe the United States government is being controlled by Jewish influence, and his specific personal reasons for being unable to enlist in the military to get the training he needed to become a better murderer were, of course, the caseworker and psychiatrist who refused to sign a letter saying he was medically fit to serve.

In 2015, his case manager contacted the police after Farka's father reported to her that he was refusing to take his medication.

She told the police she didn't think there was any immediate danger, but he, quote, fit the profile of a school shooter and wanted the police to at least conduct a welfare check at the family's home.

So when he walked into that recruiter's office in 2017, he knew he couldn't tell the truth.

So he lied.

But unlike Decker Ramsey and Fred Arena, who lied about being members of organized hate groups, Ross Barko didn't need to lie about that.

It doesn't look like he had any ties to a particular organization.

But he did lie lie about his medical history, indicating that he had not sought treatment for any mental or emotional condition in the prior seven years.

Now, having been to therapy doesn't by default disqualify you from service, but there would be some kind of follow-up about the nature of the issue and whether or not it was resolved and your current mental health.

And that kind of follow-up would definitely have led to a conversation with Farca's psychiatrist, and that would have disqualified him for sure.

So he said no.

And within days of arriving at Fort Benning for basic training, Farca attacked another soldier.

He was held in a psychiatric facility for two weeks before being discharged for erroneous enlistment, meaning they knew he lied about his medical fitness.

But he wasn't charged with anything at the time.

They just sent him home.

So fast forward to two years later, it's 2019, he's out on bond, he's trying to get his guns back, he's frightening the community, and in that box of evidence collected from his bedroom, there's that discharge paperwork.

The state of California can't hold him on the criminal threats charges, but there's a lot of incentive here, a lot of pressure from the community to get him back into custody.

So in November of 2019, he was indicted on a federal charge for lying on that SF-86.

And this time, a federal judge judge says, there's no way we're letting this man out of custody.

So he was held in federal custody from November of 2019 until May of 2020.

He entered a guilty plea on the federal charge in April of 2020 and was sentenced to time served, which ended up being about six months, which is normal for this kind of charge.

He was still awaiting his criminal trial in California, but he was back out on bond for a few months in the summer of 2020 before he was rearrested in October.

In those few months that he was out of custody, he refused to participate in the court-mandated computer monitoring program and cut off his ankle monitor.

When his home was searched in October, officers discovered that he had obtained a secret cell phone in order to circumvent the monitoring software, and he had been sending texts about things like carrying out a mass shooting.

He was discussing child pornography, although it doesn't say he actually had any, it just said he was discussing it, and he was also having conversations about forming a militia.

He also threatened to murder the police officer who was conducting this search of his home.

And this obviously resulted in that judge in California revoking his bond again, putting him back in state custody.

He was convicted on those state charges in 2021 and sentenced to 57 months.

With time already served, he was released in 2023, but the state of California was done with him, but that doesn't mean he was home free.

He was immediately rearrested by federal authorities for violating his release conditions back in 2020 by refusing to cooperate with the computer monitoring program.

And when he threatened to kill that police officer, that was a new criminal charge.

So he had violated those release conditions in 2020, and so the federal government was just waiting for California to be done with him.

So then it could be their turn again to put him back in.

federal prison for those violations.

He was sentenced to another six months and he was released earlier this this year and remains on probation with the state of California.

So with all of that said, now we have to ask ourselves, who gets charged with lying on their SF-86?

And why?

Who doesn't get charged?

And why don't they?

And I think the answer is that this charge, like most criminal charges, if we're being honest, is a tool.

It is a tool that gets used when it is the most useful tool available.

You could pound in a nail with the butt of a tape measure if you had to, but it's not the best tool for the job.

So charging Jordan Duncan or Brandon Russell with lying on their security clearance application may have been possible, but better tools were available.

It was a lot more efficient to just go with the gun stuff for Duncan and the plan to blow stuff up for Russell.

But when a soldier is posting online about his ideological desire to murder black people,

what tool did they have to arrest Killian Ryan?

His posts were alarming, but not really against the law.

If a guy who wasn't fantasizing about mass murder had lied about hanging out with his dad, the DOJ probably wouldn't get involved.

But they had a problem, and there was a tool in the toolbox to solve it.

And that's what I find so interesting about the Kai Nix case.

It doesn't really look like they needed this this tool.

He was charged with a couple of gun-related crimes, too.

We'll have to wait for the case to move along a little bit to see exactly what they have here, but it seems like the firearm charges probably would have been enough to accomplish their goal of getting Nix out of the army and into federal custody.

Adding the charge for lying on his background check is unique.

Like that attorney said in the Killian Ryan case, it's unusual and potentially signals that the government is taking a stronger position on keeping white nationalists out of the armed forces.

Obviously, one case doesn't make a pattern, so I've got my eyes glued to new federal filings.

I wonder if we'll see a real effort to address this problem.

Because if it's not already clear from the sampler platter of violent white supremacists in the military, I was teasing earlier in the episode,

America has a serious problem with weird little guys stealing guns from the armory to try to start a race war.

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