As President Trump stokes fears with his fake claims of terrorists infiltrating the country by illegally crossing the southern border, those who bother to read actual crime statistics realize that the largest terrorist danger in the United States originates with right-wing extremist groups.
Luckily, one planned domestic terror attack was thwarted when the FBI’s Baltimore office arrested a Coast Guard lieutenant on what it initially thought were simple gun and drug offenses. As it turned out, Lt. Christopher Hasson was discovered to be in the midst of a right-wing domestic terror plot.
According to a report by Seamus Hughes, a former Intelligence Policy Officer for the U.S. government and now working for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, the FBI discovered that the active duty Coast Guard officer Hasson had an arsenal of weapons, a thousand rounds of ammunition, was in contact with white supremacist groups, and had a hit list of prominent progressive politicians and media figures.
He called for “focused violence” to “establish a white homeland” and dreamed of ways to “kill almost every last person on earth,” according to court documents.
The discovery led the federal prosecutors to describe Hasson as “a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life” in its motion for detention pending trial of the rogue Coast Guard Lieutenant.
Hint about the importance of the case was in the opening paragraph. “The defendant is a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life” pic.twitter.com/QUZk2j92u2
— Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) February 20, 2019
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The federal indictment in the US District Court in Maryland includes details of Hasson’s contacts with a known American neo-Nazi leader and his internet search history rife with visits to pro-Russian and neo-fascist websites.
More ominously, Hasson was a fan of — and seemed prepared to emulate — Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extreme-right domestic terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011 in his act of “Crusader nationalism” designed to fight what he saw as the “Islamization” of Europe.
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He was an fan of Anders Breivik pic.twitter.com/6GcClevGu5
— Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) February 20, 2019
Hasson’s indictment also includes a copy of a spreadsheet alleged to be his target hit list that included multiple hosts from liberal news outlets such as MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, and Ari Melber and CNN‘s Chris Cuomo, Van Jones, and Don Lemon.
Hasson’s targets also contained a laundry list of progressive Democratic politicians including Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Corey Booker (D-NJ), and Kamala Harris (D-CA) — a list that includes the majority of declared candidates to run against Trump as the Democratic nominee for president.
The wanna-be terrorist didn’t fail to include his perceived enemies in the House of Representatives on his target list. Everyone from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Sheila Jackson (D-TX), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made the list, as did former Representative and Senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) and former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
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With the arsenal pictured in the tweet below — and a hit list similar to the one compiled by Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man arrested for mailing pipe bombs to CNN and Congress — the hateful terrorist impulses unleashed by President Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance and divisiveness could have resulted in the assassination of one or more of his most vocal opponents or another mass shooting.
Thanks to the @FBIBaltimore office for working the case and the arrest. Arraignment is schedule for tomorrow in Greenbelt. Always troll the MJ court filings folks. Always.
— Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) February 20, 2019
Luckily, Lt. Hasson’s sinister plans were discovered before he could carry them out, thanks to the same FBI that has been denigrated as a den of deep state operatives by the reckless president whose demagoguery has created the atmosphere enabling the explosion of hate crimes in this country since his installation.
The arrest of another right-wing terrorist simply proves how intellectually bankrupt President Trump’s claims that a border wall will help prevent terrorism in America, when it is his own followers who pose the greatest threat to our society at the moment.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
