In 2019, the FBI arrested a coast guard lieutenant who'd been buying pain pills online, but it wasn't just Tramadol they found in his apartment: he'd spent years stockpiling weapons and studying mass shooter manifestos. The investigation revealed an obsession with sniper rifles, a kill list, and his secret skinhead past. Sources: https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/christopher-hasson-sentenced-more-13-years-federal-prison-federal-charges-illegal https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/22/sentence-upheld-for-former-coast-guard-officer-tied-to-terror-plot/ https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/02/21/coast-guard-lt-christopher-hasson-wrote-notorious-neo-nazi-harold-covington https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/05/14/nazis-showing-in-nc-race-embarrasses-gop/84295cd5-37c3-449c-b8b6-cea599978b14/ https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/base https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/07/25/harold-covington-founder-white-separatist-group-dies-64 https://archives.lib.ku.edu/repositories/3/resources/5422 https://www.wbay.com/2024/08/12/uncle-fester-aka-stephen-preisler-returns-court-new-drug-charge/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14581072/united-states-v-hasson/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And you get minus 30% off on Norwegian potatoes in weight-free, Norwegian carrots in weight-free, and 1 kilo Norwegian root mix with you.
More slushies at Høstkosen.
And the cash register that counts at Remondthusen.
Always low prices.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated.
Crooks Everywhere unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.
She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting?
Yeah.
And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself.
I hear the cops.
Do you think we should go?
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States.
One was the protégé of Charles Manson.
26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky.
The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI.
Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore.
The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast RIP Current.
Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free, and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime+, only on Apple Podcasts.
MTV's official Challenge podcast is back for another season.
That's right.
The Challenge is about to embark on its monumental 40th season, y'all, and we are coming along for the ride.
Woo-hoo!
That would be me, Devyn Simone.
And then there's me, Dayvon Rogers.
And we're here to take you behind the scenes of The Challenge 40, Battle of the Eras.
Join us as we break down each episode, interview challengers, and take you behind the scenes of this iconic season.
Listen to MTV's official challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In February of 2019, a federal prosecutor in Maryland made an unusual presentation to a magistrate judge in support of pretrial detention.
Christopher Paul Hassan had just been arrested on charges of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user or addict of a controlled substance.
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.
But he hadn't been, and he wasn't, and he owned those guns legally.
Hassan 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.
He was also addicted to tramadol, an opioid pain medication that he didn't have a prescription for.
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.
But there was something else going on here.
His apartment was packed to the brim with guns, ammunition, and tactical gear.
And on his computer, they found mass shooter manifestos, terrorism manuals, and a list of names.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I thought we could use something a little lighter this week after last week's episode.
I know 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.
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.
It wasn't easy to find a story like that in my mental Rolodex, but I thought you guys deserved a break.
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.
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.
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.
Just a week earlier, I'd been in another courtroom in that massive building for a detention hearing in another case.
Three members of the neo-Nazi paramilitary group, The Base, had just been arrested.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not too proud to admit that I was a little on edge at that detention hearing.
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.
And apparently I did take notes.
Pretty good ones.
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.
So, it's a small courtroom.
It was just a hearing with a magistrate judge on detention.
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.
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.
But it was crowded, so I had to sit next to some federal agent or another.
And he was having the damnedest time trying to figure out how to turn off his iPhone.
He just kept locking and unlocking it, locking it and unlocking it, and he couldn't figure out why it wouldn't turn off.
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.
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.
I was trying to explain it and he just kept locking it, unlocking it, turning the volume up and down and locking and unlocking it.
And he couldn't turn it off.
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 a helpful girl.
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 Hassan.
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.
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 Bilbrow had been successful.
And it'd 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.
You know, I just can't resist a municipal government meeting.
And the piss-ant Nazi crybaby who'd spent years threatening me finally got arrested in a pre-dawn raid by the FBI, but it was for something totally unrelated.
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 I was going to afford to replace my tires.
I was having a weird week.
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.
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?
And all the better when the would-be hangman is shackled at the ankles.
But like I said, this is a story about Christopher Hassan, not me.
And Christopher Hassan may never have been caught at all if he'd just kept his extracurricular interests at home.
Evidence produced in this case includes hundreds of pages of logs of his computer activity.
Mostly computer activity he was engaged in at work.
Generally speaking, I'm opposed to the idea of your employer monitoring your internet history.
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?
But Hassan worked for the government.
He was using a government computer on a government internet connection to look at extremist content online.
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.
And again, in another context, I support time theft, especially from the government.
You know, rock on.
But he wasn't scrolling social media.
The investigation began in November of 2018.
Something he did on his work computer set off an internal flag.
They never say exactly what it was that ended up getting him flagged.
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.
They didn't actually start monitoring him until something happened in November 2018.
And looking at this report, I can't explain why nothing set off an alarm in the IT office before that, but that's what it says, so I guess we just have to take it as written.
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.
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.
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.
He was checking out the Anarchist Cookbook, you know, a classic.
He sent himself a PDF called US Army Improvised Munitions Handbook.
And these next three, well, I think you 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, One called Home Workshop Explosives by Uncle Fester.
And a document just called The Terrorist's Handbook, which is mostly instructions on how to make IEDs.
I guess he was smart enough to understand that he shouldn't download these at work, so he emailed them to himself so he could read them there.
Semtex is a plastic explosive originally developed by the Czech military that has become quite popular with terrorists.
And Uncle Fester is a 75-year-old man named Steven Preissler who was arrested last year in Wisconsin for making meth, in case you were wondering.
I spent hours combing through these reports, trying to make some sense of them, 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.
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.
In June of 2017, he spent an entire workday accessing what the report calls, quote, extensive pro-Russian and neo-fascist content, end quote.
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.
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.
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.
This is another one of those questions we're just not gonna 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 maybe it was a website that is Russian state-owned media.
Or maybe somebody at work just saw him dicking around at his desk and reported him.
We'll never know.
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.
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.
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.
While at the MGTOW subreddit, Subject routinely accessed gender-based extremist content that promoted discrimination of women or hatred towards women on a daily basis.
Due to the persistence of the behavior, Subject's routine daily activity in browsing the MGTOW subreddit is not included in this chronology of activity.
So we don't know why they started looking, but they did.
Starting in November of 2018, the Coast Guard started monitoring his workplace computer activity in real time.
They were logging his keystrokes.
They set up a hidden camera near his desk to record him during the day.
And then they started reporting their findings to the FBI.
And by January, the FBI was worried too.
They cut warrants for his email accounts, a warrant for his historical cell location data, and placed a GPS tracker on his car.
They installed a poll camera outside his home.
They searched his desk at work.
And on February 15th, 2019, they arrested him in the parking garage outside of Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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.
That is, as the judge noted, a pretty unremarkable charge.
That's not really the kind of crime that warrants real-time surveillance, secret cameras, parking lot ambush arrests, and pretrial detention.
But with that real-time access to his computer activity at work, the investigators saw what they interpreted as a shift.
He'd spent years accumulating knowledge and supplies, reading manifestos, buying guns, and now it seemed like he was preparing for something.
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 and why.
He needs probable cause, obviously, you know that.
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?
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?
No.
According to a defense motion to suppress the evidence seized pursuant to those searches, which was unsuccessful, quote, Agent Harrison asserted he had probable cause to believe the warrants would produce evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C.
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.
That is not what he was charged with.
The government's motion for detention calls the charges that they actually filed, that drug stuff, quote, the tip of the iceberg.
And they opened their memo with a pretty bold statement, writing, the defendant is a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect government conduct.
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.
And this is where it becomes clear that this case was never about pain pills.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting idea the other day.
Start with biological attacks followed by attack on food supply.
Have to research this.
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.
I don't think I can cause complete destruction on my own.
However, if I could enlist the unwitting help of another power or country, would be best.
Who and how to provoke?
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.
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.
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.
And once major unrest is underway, he plans to dress as a cop and execute looters.
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.
The email is signed, very respectfully, Lieutenant Christopher P. Hassan, National Security Cutter Acquisition.
Three months later, in September of 2017, he drafted another letter.
This one has a clear recipient, although there is no concrete proof he ever mailed it.
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.
Covington is a man who deserves his own episode.
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.
Accounts vary a little bit here.
One 1980 New York Times article says he, quote, I didn't realize we were still saying that in 1980.
honorable discharge after getting into a tavern brawl with blacks.
End quote.
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.
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.
He also has the distinction of being the only man I've ever heard of who was deported from Rhodesia for being too racist.
Our guy Frank Sweeney from a few weeks ago was deported from Rhodesia for stabbing a guy, but there was no indication they had any problem with the Nazi stuff.
I don't want to spoil too much now.
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.
So, it's September 2017.
Hassan is buying a bunch of Covington's novels.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Hassan spent most of the next workday browsing Reddit, as he did every day, and doing a little research on Christian identity.
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.
Racial purity is valued above all else, and racial mixing is a violation of God's law.
Christian identity believers yearn for a white ethnostate, and some of them are willing to kill for it.
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 Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Hasson.
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.
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.
And this isn't actually the first time I've seen it used as the closing of a letter.
For the record, if we must, the 14 words are, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
And then there's sort of a second 14 words and you can use them both.
You know, if you're super into it, the latter half is because the beauty of the white Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.
So that's really beautiful stuff.
David Lane was quite the wordsmith.
But back to Chris Hasson.
After spending a few days on his research into Harold Covington, he did another Bing search.
He searched for formal introduction letter example.
And he read an article about how to write a letter.
And then he drafted a letter to Harold Covington himself.
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.
I am a long-time white nationalist, having been a skinhead 30 plus years ago before my time in the military.
A long-time white nationalist and a former skinhead?
That's quite a revelation.
We'll get to that.
The letter continues.
My plans are upon retirement to move to the Northwest, most likely Idaho.
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.
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.
So that explains his multiple searches for, is Harold Covington an FBI informant?
Someone had told him that.
But he decided to write to Covington anyway, it seems.
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.
Harold Covington died in 2018, so he's not around anymore to ask if he ever got a letter in the mail.
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.
We'll never know.
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.
And he sees no value in public protest, writing, 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.
However, you can make change with a little focused violence.
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, 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.
He would sort of check in on the idea every couple of months, compared to his daily obsession with incel ideology, buying guns, studying mass murder Anders Breivik's manifesto, and eventually building his target list.
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.
He said he hesitated to reach out to Covington because someone told him that Harold Covington was a snitch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But they blacked out those details and I wanted them and I couldn't let it go.
So I figured it out anyway.
On February 11th, 1995, there was an incident.
There's a little bit of a Rashomon situation going on here with sort of competing and conflicting accounts.
There's, you know, self-serving half-truths, spotty reporting, faded memories.
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.
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.
He spent over a decade behind bars, serving at least part of his time just down the road from where I'm writing this.
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.
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.
And the way that his hand is situated, sort of pressing her into his chest to steady her, you can read his knuckle tattoos.
Her little pigtails and cute plaid romper seem so at odds with the letters H-A-T-E spread out over her torso on his fingers.
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.
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?
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.
It's a neighborhood in Hampton.
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.
They refused.
And then they argued.
Stephen Casey Jones reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
He pointed the pistol at the girl's father, putting it right in his face, and pulled the trigger.
But it didn't fire.
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.
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.
And the police report says that Christopher Hassan was standing right there next to Jones when all of this went down.
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.
Stephen Casey Jones was there, of course.
He was arrested.
But there's no mention in the newspaper at all of Christopher Hassan.
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.
And I tell you, when I found a 30-year-old newspaper article naming the third man who was there that night in 1995, it 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.
Because when I read that name, I didn't need to look him up.
I already know exactly who Ryan Masiarka is.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered.
There are crooks everywhere you look now.
The situation is desperate.
My name is Manuel Delia.
I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.
Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
And she paid the ultimate price.
Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect in the FBI's investigation.
But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night.
And that's all most people know about him.
What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub.
What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003.
And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected.
From iHeart and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Cole Acasio, and this is Flashpoint.
All eight episodes are available to binge now.
Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And join Tenderfoot Plus for an ad-free binge experience.
I've been thinking about you.
I want you back in my life.
It's too late for that.
I have a proposal for you.
Come up here and document my project.
All you need to do is record everything like you always do.
One session.
24 hours.
BPM 110.
120.
She's terrified.
Should we wake her up?
Absolutely not.
What was that?
You didn't figure it out?
I think I need to hear you say it.
That was live audio of a woman's nightmare.
This machine is approved and everything?
You're allowed to be doing this?
We passed the review board a year ago.
We're not hurting people.
There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.
They're just dreams.
Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.
Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
They stroll in like regular shoppers.
Did it ever occur to you that all these crazy shoplifting stories are actually connected?
The $8 million retail theft ring.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To connect the dots and expose this secret world.
It's 100% human trafficking.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting?
Yeah.
But she's just a worker bee.
I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself.
I just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff.
No, I have no comment.
A mother of three orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion.
We're walking around the perimeter of the house now.
I hear the cops.
Dude, I think we should go.
Let's roll.
We're running from the cops.
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating.
MTV's official challenge podcast is back for another season.
That's right.
The challenge is about to embark on its monumental 40th season, y'all, and we are coming along for the ride.
Woohoo!
That would be me, Devyn Simone.
And then there's me, Dayvon Rogers.
And we're here to take you behind the scenes of...
Drumroll, please.
Ba-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
The Challenge 40 Battle of the Eras.
Yes.
Each week, cast members will be joining us to spill all of the tea on the relentless challenges, heartbreaking eliminations, and of course, all the juicy drama.
And let's not forget about the hookups.
Anyway, regardless of what era you're rooting for at home, everyone is welcome here on MTV's Official Challenge Podcast.
So join us every week as we break down episodes of the Challenge 40 Battle of the Eras.
Listen to MTV's Official Challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2019, the FBI paid Ryan Masiarka a visit. .
They wanted to get his version of events about this incident in 1995.
He confirmed to them that, yes, Hassan had been a skinhead back then, but he didn't know him really very well.
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.
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.
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.
And it's very different from the story that was in the newspaper back when it happened.
You see, Ryan Maziarka has a history.
And that history starts a few months before that night in February of 1995.
The summer before that, 1994, he and a couple of his teenage skinhead pals had defaced a black church.
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.
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.
And in February of 1995, Ryan Maziarka had just been convicted.
And he was facing the possibility of some real jail time under a new hate crime statute here in Virginia.
They weren't looking for booze that night.
They were looking for Ricky.
The teenage girl they were there to question was Ricky's girlfriend.
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.
Newspaper articles from the time state outright that Maziarka was looking for Ricky because he wanted to fight him.
Maziarka 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.
He didn't get any additional jail time for it.
And in 1997, he shows up in the local paper again.
So he's fresh out of jail and he needed to register his car.
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.
So it's 1997 and he's getting a new license plate.
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.
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.
And for Ryan Maziarka, the personal message he wanted to drive around town with was Zyklon B.
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.
Zyklon B is, of course, the cyanide gas used in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust, an event Masiarka says he does not believe happened.
After a decision by the State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull the plate for offensive content, Masiarka said, 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.
Apparently, I lost all civil rights in this community.
He was ultimately unable to return the plates to the DMV.
Somebody stole them off the back of his car while he was at work.
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.
She, too, confirmed that Christopher Hassan and Stephen Jones were skinheads.
But in her interview in 2019, she mentions the presence of a woman.
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.
So when you're typing on your computer, you're almost certainly using a variable width font.
So the letter I, for example, takes up less width on the page than the letter M. So different letters have different widths.
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 by a redaction.
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.
So that just leaves Maziarka.
Though maybe the woman in the van was Ryan's girlfriend.
Whoever she was, though, she seemed to be calling the shots.
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.
The witness recalled hearing him say, yes, ma'am, as he climbed back in.
It's hard to pin down exactly if Maziarka 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.
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.
Shortly after William Luther Pierce died in 2002, corporate pilings reflect a series of changes to the neo-Nazi organization's leadership structure.
I got into a little bit of that period of power struggle in the episode about Kevin Alfred Strom.
In paperwork filed with the Virginia Corporation Commission in 2003, Ryan Maziarka is listed as National Alliance's treasurer, and he remained on the board until he was pushed out in a lawsuit in 2014.
His wife, Angela Forbes, had been handling orders for the skinhead streetwear you could buy from an ad in Resistance Magazine since 2000.
And by 2002, the ad copy directed the buyer to make out the money orders to her personally, not to National Alliance.
I guess what I'm getting at here is I don't think he was telling the truth when the FBI stopped by in 2019.
He admitted to hanging out with Hassan a bit back in the mid-90s, but he said it was only ever about their shared love of skinhead music.
He says Hassan was always going on about Hitler, but he personally didn't really get into that fascist stuff.
I know it probably seems weird to spend this much time trying to dissect this incident from 1995.
That's not what Christopher Hassan is charged with.
It was 30 years ago.
A lot of you probably weren't even born then.
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.
A month after Hassan was arrested, an agent spoke with the assailant himself, Stephen Casey Jones.
And immediately after that interview, Jones contacted a member of Hassan's family to say he'd been visited by an agent.
And we know this because that unnamed family member in turn called Hassan immediately to tell him about the phone call they had gotten from Stephen Casey Jones.
And jail phone calls are recorded.
When Hassan heard that the FBI had spoken to Jones about him, his reply was, oh shit.
Hassan was very concerned that Jones would think that he'd been talking.
But he doesn't say about what.
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.
I wouldn't do that, but I'm just saying I got this thing in my head where they'd offer me.
But he doesn't finish the thought.
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.
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?
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.
That can't be what Hassan was worried they'd make him talk about.
So this raises a lot more questions than it answers.
And it turns out it's pretty hard to track down the exact identity of 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.
In these days, Stephen Jones is living in Missouri and is a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence.
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.
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.
But the last time they did file paperwork, that corporate entity, Bad Influence Inc., listed a Stephen Casey Jones as its president.
Photos of Jones taken more recently than the decades-old picture of him in his Virginia prison jumpsuit show an older Steven Jones, bearded now and heavyset.
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.
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.
The Department of Justice has listed the Sons of Silence as a criminal organization for at least 20 years.
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 company's ever considered suing over it.
But you also see a different logo sometimes.
SSBOLT, with S-Y-L-S-O-S written down the lightning bolts.
That stands for Support Your Local Sons of Silence.
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.
And next to the image, in this sort of Germanic-looking, antique-style font, the shirt reads, Meine Ehre heißt Troya.
My honor is loyalty.
That was the slogan of the SS. The S.A.D. The S.A.D. The S.A.D. The S.A.D. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered.
There are crooks everywhere you look now.
The situation is desperate.
My name is Manuel Delia.
I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.
Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
And she paid the ultimate price.
Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect in the FBI's investigation.
But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night.
And that's all most people know about him.
What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub.
What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003.
And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected.
From iHeart and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Cole Acasio, and this is Flashpoint.
All eight episodes are available to binge now.
Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And join Tenderfoot Plus for an ad-free binge experience.
I've been thinking about you.
I want you back in my life.
It's too late for that.
I have a proposal for you.
Come up here and document my project.
All you need to do is record everything like you always do.
One session.
24 hours.
BPM 110.
120.
She's terrified.
Should we wake her up?
Absolutely not.
What was that?
You didn't figure it out?
I think I need to hear you say it.
That was live audio of a woman's nightmare.
This machine is approved and everything?
You're allowed to be doing this?
We passed the review board a year ago.
We're not hurting people.
There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.
They're just dreams.
Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.
Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
They stroll in like regular shoppers.
Did it ever occur to you that all these crazy shoplifting stories are actually connected?
An $8 million retail theft ring.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To connect the dots and expose this secret world.
It's 100% human trafficking.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting?
Yeah.
But she's just a worker bee.
I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself.
I just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff.
No, I have no comment.
A mother of three orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion.
We're walking around the perimeter of the house now.
I hear the cops.
Dude, I think we should go.
Let's roll.
We're running from the cops.
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating.
MTV's official challenge podcast is back for another season.
That's right.
The challenge is about to embark on its monumental 40th season, y'all, and we are coming along for the ride.
Woo-hoo!
That would be me, Devin Simone.
And then there's me, Devon Rogers.
And we're here to take you behind the scenes of...
Drumroll, please.
Ba-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
The Challenge 40 Battle of the Eras.
Yes.
Each week, cast members will be joining us to spill all of the tea on the relentless challenges, heartbreaking eliminations, and of course, all the juicy drama.
And let's not forget about the hookups.
Anyway, regardless of what era you're rooting for at home, everyone is welcome here on MTV's Official Challenge Podcast.
So join us every week as we break down episodes of the Challenge 40 Battle of the Eras.
Listen to MTV's Official Challenge podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
you 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.
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.
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?
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.
But there's a difference, I think, between arriving at the truth and decreeing it.
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.
So at this stage in the case, both the defense and the prosecution write these long memos explaining to the judge why the defendant deserves a particular sentence.
He's legally guilty now.
The court accepted his plea.
So that's the truth.
He's guilty.
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?
A responsible gun owner who just had a little trouble with pills?
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?
Is there room for something in between?
The Defense paints Hassan as the former, obviously.
The memo begins with a bit of biography.
Hassan served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1994, when he was honorably discharged after several overseas deployments during the first Gulf War.
He struggled to adapt to civilian life and enlisted in the Army National Guard in Virginia barely six months after leaving the Marines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
His children shared anecdotes about fond childhood memories of their father's love and care for them.
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.
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.
There's no mention in this memo, but the man his daughter married in secret is not white.
Was this on his mind when he typed, best n-word killing gun into a search engine?
What was he thinking about when he googled, I think my wife is a n-word lover?
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.
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.
She didn't join him in D.C.
right away.
They reconciled after about a year, but they spent that first year he was in D.C.
apart.
The memo says he was lonely.
He was having a hard time adjusting to city life, and he hated commuting.
He hated sitting at a desk all day.
So he became increasingly dependent on a drug he'd been abusing since 2012.
His wife had a prescription for tramadol for a chronic pain condition, but now he was turning to illegal online pharmacies to buy hundreds of pills at a time.
The defense hired a medical doctor who diagnosed Hassan with opioid use disorder and offered an extrovert opinion that such a condition can cause serious mood disturbances.
Which is true, right?
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 riflescopes.
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.
But overall, the defense sentencing memo rests heavily on this very narrow angle of the truth.
Friends and relatives and neighbors and coworkers sent letters of support saying, that's just not the Chris Hasson I know.
One co-worker wrote, unless the definition of white nationalist has changed, Christopher Hassan is not one, noting that he had worked successfully with Black and Hispanic colleagues for years.
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. - 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'd play chess together, work out, and share food.
And the man adds helpfully that, as a black person, he'd never felt that Chris was prejudiced in any way.
There were multiple letters from priests and lay ministers who'd been meeting with Hassan in jail.
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.
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.
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.
The government did something very different in mind.
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.
In early 2017, Hassan began obsessively studying Anders Breivik's manifesto.
It's a sprawling 1,500 pages, part diary, part manual.
There's big chunks of plagiarized content from other sources.
It's not great.
I mean, it's not great for a lot of reasons.
Anders Breivik did murder 77 people and most of them were children.
But the manifesto was also just kind of bad.
But Hassan would spend hours at a time some days reading and re-reading passages of the manifesto, and then he'd get online and research topics related to those passages.
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.
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.
And that $12,000 does not include the money he spent on guns themselves.
This was accessories.
And Aston was already a proficient marksman, but now he's developing an interest in long-range shooting.
We bought a sniper rifle.
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.
He searched for information on subsonic rounds, ammunition that doesn't break the sound barrier.
Sometimes snipers use it because it makes it more difficult to determine where the shots are coming from.
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.
And he bought all the materials he would need to make silencers at home.
And then he did.
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.
And he's reading the Unabomber's manifesto.
And he's reading the book written by Eric Rudolph.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know, maybe he was thinking about his family, but that's not what's on his computer.
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.
And in January of 2019, it was starting to look like he might be working up to it.
He'd been reading Anders Breivik's manifesto like it was the Bible for years now.
Analysis of his computer activity showed that he returned to it often and would supplement his reading with additional research on the topics it contained.
And on January 3rd, 2019, he opened the manifesto on his computer.
And he searched the text for the term category A to read a passage where Breivik lays out the three categories of what he calls traders, 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. There are at least 90 pages spread across this 1500-page document in which Breivik expounds on his theories about Category A, B, and C, traitors to the white race, or whatever.
But to be honest, I'm not a pilled-out white supremacist, so it's just not interesting to me.
But Hassan seemed persuaded by Breivik's rambling, and he started making a spreadsheet.
And consistent with Breivik's advice to target politicians, journalists, Marxists, and non-profit leaders, he filled in names on his Excel spreadsheet.
He lists some journalists and political commentators.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Ari Melber, CNN's Don Lemon and Van Jones.
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?
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.
For politicians, he selected a wide variety of senators and congressional representatives.
He wrote down Pelosi and Schumer, though he spelled it wrong.
And some targets just got crude nicknames, like Senator Bloomin' Jew, which seems to refer to Senator Richard Blumenthal.
He was also considering targets like Ilhan 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.
He would later find personal information for two female members of the organization's National Political Committee.
And that same week, he queried the Breivik Manifesto again, this time for the word steroids.
Hassan's computer records show he made quite a few online purchases for steroids, human growth hormone, and testosterone.
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 tramadol.
In Breivik'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.
The idea is to ensure that you are maximally aggressive when it's time to strike.
But he never did, did he?
Hassan didn't strike.
He was arrested, charged, and convicted of a crime that really just kind of feels like a technicality.
It's legal to have a silencer in most states.
He just didn't do the paperwork.
He owned those guns legally.
He just lied on a form about his drug use.
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.
And if this case had gone to trial, they almost certainly would not have been allowed to admit most of this material.
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.
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.
He didn't derail a train or join ISIS or, you know, terrorist stuff.
But there's something called a terrorism sentencing enhancement.
So this is not a criminal charge.
This is just something you sort of put on top of the sentencing, you know, sprinkles on top of your federal sins.
And typically you see this used in cases that actually include a charge of terrorism-related crime.
That makes sense.
But in this case, the prosecutor argued that terrorism isn't really as well-defined in the code as you might think.
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.
All that is required is that the crime of conviction or relevant conduct involved or was intended to promote a federal crime of terrorism.
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.
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.
It doesn't feel good.
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 D.C.?
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 silencer.
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.
This is a vibes-based enhancement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adding that the defendant is not alone in those views.
That white supremacist ideology is deeply embedded in the soul of this country.
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.
Maybe one day we as a nation will do the hard work of digging up the roots of that tree.
This sentence is in no way intended to be an attempt at that work.
It simply addresses the conduct of one man.
End quote.
What makes me so uneasy in this case is that, do I think that Christopher Hassan belongs in jail to the extent that anyone belongs in jail?
Like, as 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?
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.
And if I'm being really honest with myself, that's not how it's supposed to work.
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, They didn't actually charge, convict, or sentence him for his thoughts, ideas, and beliefs, right?
But they kinda did.
And how are you supposed to feel about that?
I don't know.
You have to sit with that.
Because the alternative was waiting.
Right?
Keep that pole 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.
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.
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?
I don't know.
I don't know.
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.
Does anyone use Bing?
But my favorite Christopher Hassan case fact has got to be this one.
It's a callback to the first episode of this show, actually.
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.
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.
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, to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
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.
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.
And that's all I have for you about Christopher Hassan, but our journey through his life and internet history did introduce some exciting new characters in the Weird Little Guys extended universe.
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.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone 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.
Høsten er bedre med meny, og denne helgen får du blant annet årets ferske forekålskjettalam til 99 kroner per kilo, 400 gram fersk karbonadedeig til og denne helgen får du blant annet årets ferske forekålskjettalam til 99 kroner per kilo, 400 gram fersk karbonadedeig til 64,90, norske epler til 29,90 per kilo, og 8x1,5 liter Coca-Cola Meny.
Do you eat better?
Do you live better?
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She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting?
Yeah.
And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself.
I hear the cops.
Do you think we should go?
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States.
One was the protégé of Charles Manson.
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Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore.
The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast RIP Current.
Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free, and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime+, only on Apple Podcasts.
MTV's official Challenge podcast is back for another season.
That's right.
The Challenge is about to embark on its monumental 40th season, y'all, and we are coming along for the ride.
Woo-hoo!
That would be me, Devyn Simone.
And then there's me, Dayvon Rogers.
And we're here to take you behind the scenes of The Challenge 40, Battle of the Eras.
Join us as we break down each episode, interview challengers, and take you behind the scenes of this iconic season.
