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Dec. 18, 2025 - Weird Little Guys
55:07
The Florida Bar v Invictus

Augustus Invictus has finally been suspended by the Florida Bar for his felony conviction for participating in a nazi torch march in 2017. But when will he actually serve his jail sentence?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
Stories like Erica Hunt.
A young mother vanished without a trace after a family gathering on 4th of July weekend, 2016.
No goodbyes, no clues, just gone.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Glaubo here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years.
That's probably not long enough.
I didn't kill him.
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the last full-length, non-rerun episode of 2025.
This won't be the last thing on your feed this year, but it is the last regular episode until we pick back up in January.
It's been a hodgepodge sort of month this month, but I think we're going to hit the ground running in 2026 with some stories you'll really get a kick out of.
Today's episode is another one that isn't quite in the classic weird little guys format, but it is about a guy a lot of you have been asking me about.
Look, it's the end of the year.
It's dark at four in the afternoon.
It's too cold to convince my dogs to go for a walk with me.
Back when I had an office job, I could get away with pretending to look busy at my desk for the last week or so before any major holiday.
The problem with the job I have now is that you guys would definitely notice if I spent the week goofing off online and then quickly switching to a big spreadsheet on my monitor if somebody walked by.
It's okay, though.
I like you guys a lot more than I liked anybody who ever looked over my shoulder at an office, so I'll do my best for you.
I had planned on doing a sort of reverse weird little guy thing for the holidays.
You know, I was going to write an episode about a guy who was definitely a little odd, but like in a good way.
But you know by now that I've never, not once in my life, sat down and written the thing I had in mind before I started.
So that's not what this is.
I didn't even start working on that.
I'm not bound to this seasonal cycle.
I can tell you a nice story about a different kind of guy some other time.
We can have moments of joy any time of year.
Instead, today I'm going to keep my promise from last week and tell you a little bit more about the other man who lost his job the same day Tyler Dykes did back in October.
Last week, we were talking about Tyler Dykes.
He's running for Congress in South Carolina, hoping to win the seat Nancy Mace is leaving.
But before that, he was one of the nearly 1,600 people who received a presidential pardon for their actions on January 6th, 2021.
And before that, well, it was mostly Nazi stuff.
And in last week's episode, I opened with a funny little synchronicity.
Tyler Dykes' campaign launched shortly after he tweeted on October 22nd that he'd just been fired from another job.
That was something that keeps happening to him because people won't stop calling him a Nazi, due in part to all the times he's been photographed in public giving Nazi salutes.
And that same day, October 22nd, the Florida Supreme Court filed an order giving Augustus Sol Invictus 30 days to offload all of his clients before his license to practice law was suspended.
But by the time I finished picking apart the Congressional Candidates' Conspiracy Theory podcast appearances, I had run out of time and we never got to the second guy.
And I paired those two seemingly unconnected stories because they started in the same place.
They're both still living with the consequences of a trip they took to Charlottesville in August of 2017.
It might seem like a strange preoccupation to you, listener, how often a story that's winding its way in and out of side stories will wind up here.
I'm sure you've noticed, comes up a lot.
Even if it's only in passing, almost every one of these stories has some thread that connects it to Charlottesville.
Something that connects it to the Unite the Right rally here in August of 2017.
If you hadn't noticed it before, I'm sure you will now.
It's always there.
Gerald Drake, the Confederate reenactor who went to prison for threatening his former friends, got the idea to pretend the bomb threats were from Antifa because he saw pictures of protesters in black block on the news after Unite the Right.
Those fake grassroots March Against Sharia rallies were organized by many of the same men who were planning the Unite the Right rally later that same summer.
The featured speakers at the American Freedom Party conference earlier this year were both men who had led their respective organizations on the ground here in Charlottesville in 2017.
At a 2018 Breitbart News Town Hall, the man asking Ann Coulter about white genocide was the leader of a group that organized Unite the Right.
Over and over and over again, in all of these seemingly unrelated places and times, these stories are all connected.
And it's not a coincidence.
Part of that, to be fair, is that I live here.
My own interest in figuring out how someone ends up marching in the streets at a Nazi rally started here.
It was these guys in particular that sparked my interest in understanding the concept of the weird little guy as I write about them today.
I have spent years reconstructing those events and trying to understand the men who marched here.
That then led to a need to understand the groups they came with, which led to a need to understand where those groups came from and what preceded them.
And it's been one long rabbit hole that I haven't dug myself back out of for more than eight years.
So that's definitely part of why it comes up so often.
It is what I know best.
But truthfully, everything is connected.
And that rally in 2017 is a central node.
It comes up all the time because everyone was there.
It was the largest and most violent public gathering of white supremacists in the United States in decades.
It was a pivotal moment in our collective understanding of political violence.
And it didn't come out of nowhere.
Every story I write about the present has a very clear relationship to that day because the guy was probably there.
But even in stories about the distant past, it's there.
Like the ghost of Nazi rallies yet to come.
Just recently, I spent two months writing about the men whose lives intersected with the death of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
Those stories mostly took place in the 1960s.
But that weekend in August, 50 years later, kept elbowing its way into the story.
That kind of white power march owed quite a bit to Rockwell, just in terms of the ideological lineage of that kind of event.
But it's more than that.
Some of his old friends were actually there.
Decades after Rockwell's death, the man who still keeps the Nazis' ashes in a white urn on a swastika shrine drove halfway across the country to be here.
And he told reporters that Rockwell would have been pleased to see it.
So while it is a funny coincidence that Tyler Dykes and Augustus Invictus both became unemployable on October 22nd, 2025, it's not a coincidence that they both attended the rally in 2017.
And back in 2017, Tyler Dykes was just part of the crowd.
He was some teenage nobody.
Augustus Invictus, on the other hand, was here as a headline speaker.
He had been part of the core group of organizers and was at the time a member of a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights, which was a short-lived subset of proud boys who were particularly committed to engaging in violence.
And the night before the main event was to take place, they were both in the crowd lining up for the Tiki Torch march at the University of Virginia.
There were hundreds of them there that night, torches in hand, chanting as they marched through the university grounds and then encircled a small group of counter-protesters at the base of the Thomas Jefferson statue.
But I've told you that part of the story before.
This is an update.
Of the hundreds of torch marchers, only 12 were ever charged under the Virginia law that makes intimidating someone with a burning object a felony.
Tyler Dykes and Augustus Invictus were two of those unlucky 12.
Of those 12, five pleaded guilty without taking it to trial.
Tyler Dykes, of course.
along with Colton Fears and his brother William Fears, and a pair of gigantic redheads from Texas named Billy Williams and Will Smith.
Another four took plea agreements that reduced their charge to misdemeanor disorderly conduct.
Ryan Roy, Jamie Troutman, Dallas Medina, and Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau.
One of the 12 got lucky.
Jacob Dix took his chances at trial, and the out-of-town special prosecutor handling his case fumbled it so badly that jurors who watched video footage of the crime couldn't reach a verdict and it ended in a mistrial.
Augustus Invictus and a former Marine named Vasilios Pistolis were both convicted at trial.
And I think I will come back to some of these cases down the road, but today we're just talking about Invictus.
As far as trials go, this one was as close to a slam dunk as I've ever seen.
The charge requires that the defendant burned an object, that they did it in a public place, that their intent was to intimidate someone, and that the way they went about it would make a reasonable person afraid of death or bodily injury.
In this case, the defendant himself provided the best piece of evidence, a 30-minute video that he live streamed from his phone during the march.
Now we are live here at University of Virginia at the Torchlit Rally.
High energy, as you can tell, high tea, very high tea today.
We all got our torches on.
Somebody forgot the pitchforks at home, so all we got is torches.
So we're going to flip the camera around.
You got Antifa up there on the hill.
Let's keep our speech turnout.
The video starts in the field where the crowd assembled, and it follows the march through the university grounds.
The narrator is in good spirits for much of it.
He's laughing as the men around him are working themselves into a frenzy.
And for most of the march, there are these isolated verbal encounters with individual people they pass on their route, but the campus is pretty empty.
But as the march reaches the top of the stairs at the rotunda and begins to walk back down the steps into the plaza on the other side, the marchers know they aren't alone anymore.
It's like a Disney ride where you get to the really purpose of a thing where That's Augustus Invictus.
Just as the counter protesters in the plaza come into view, he says, it's like a Disney ride.
He's comparing this to the moment on a roller coaster where you're at the top of the hill looking down and you feel that rush of excitement, knowing you're about to get to the best part of the ride.
And the other voice, the one telling those counter protesters to look out, telling them they're outnumbered.
That's Daniel Borden.
He was never charged for this night, but he would eventually serve a few years in prison for the violent assault he committed the next morning.
And as the video continues, the marchers fill the little plaza.
You can see the crowd consciously and intentionally form a ring around the statue, around the people who are now trapped at its base.
It wasn't an accident.
It wasn't organic.
It was the plan.
You can hear Richard Spencer's bodyguard directing the marchers standing right next to Invictus.
We need some more people to fill in this way to block these guys off.
Fill it in.
Block them off.
Trap them.
And after the rally, Augustus Invictus made no secret of how he felt about it.
He loved it.
No regrets.
So, you know, the torchlight rally, it was gorgeous.
It was beautiful.
The entire thing was an aesthetic, and I regret nothing about it.
It was perfectly done.
It was flawlessly executed.
And I would do it again.
So, like I said, kind of a slam dunk.
Starts by joking about how he has to make do with a torch because he doesn't have a pitchfork.
Marching with a crowd chanting explicitly racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic slogans all along the route.
Seeing the counter-protesters already standing in that public place and making the conscious choice to surround them.
Continuing to hold that line as other members of the crowd engage in violence against the people you've trapped.
Ratifying the actions and the intent after the fact by saying you have no regrets and you do it again.
Testimony from one of those trapped counter protesters who says he feared for his life that night.
It's pretty clear-cut.
And the jury thought so, too.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
Despite the terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
May 24th, 1990.
A pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.
I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.
I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.
In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.
She received death threats before the bombing.
She received more threats after the bombing.
The men and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.
They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.
The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.
I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage on those legislatures.
Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting Black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, Save Our Girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Augustus Invictus was convicted by a jury on that felony charge in Virginia in October of 2024.
Coincidentally, it was the same week that Tyler Dykes reported to federal prison to begin serving his sentence for his January 6th conviction.
But Augustus Invictus did not report to jail.
He didn't have to.
He had been out on bond since his arrest in the summer of 2023, and he was allowed to return home again after his conviction.
In January of 2025, the judge sentenced him to five years, but suspended the majority of that time, ordering him to serve just nine months and two weeks in the local jail.
But again, he didn't go to jail.
He went home.
It's not that unusual to allow a defendant to delay their report date.
It gives them a little bit of time to get their affairs in order.
You don't get remanded directly into custody in most cases.
If you're out on bond already at the time of sentencing, there's not much harm in letting you go home that day.
And his attorney made it very clear from the moment the verdict was in that they planned to appeal.
So it was no surprise when they asked for an appeal bond, which the judge granted, allowing him to continue to kick out that report date while he was appealing his conviction.
So all year, I checked in from time to time.
I just added it to my mental list of dozens of other ongoing little matters that I check in on when I'm sitting at my computer.
The sentencing order was finally entered in March, followed by the defense filings for their appeal to the State Court of Appeals.
And he remained out on bond, and he kept practicing law.
Despite rules governing the practice of law in Florida that specify in no uncertain terms that suspension from the bar is automatic and immediate following a felony conviction, it didn't happen.
The months dragged on.
The appellate courts moved pretty slowly, but there was no indication that the Florida Bar intended to enforce their own rules.
He continued practicing law for over a year after his conviction at trial.
Again, the rules regulating the Florida Bar are remarkably straightforward on this subject, which isn't always a given for a rulebook written by lawyers.
If a lawyer in Florida is convicted of a felony, they are suspended from the bar immediately and automatically.
Even if they're appealing the conviction, Rule 3-7.2 subsection J says the suspension will remain in effect during any appeal of the determination or judgment of guilt of a felony offense in the criminal proceeding.
But I guess someone at the bar was feeling generous because he was still practicing law.
Just weeks after his own felony conviction, he was in federal court at the sentencing hearing of one of his clients, a January 6th defendant named Anna Lichnowsky.
Based on available records, it's not clear how much of her 45-day sentence she ever served.
The president's pardons came not long after this.
Augustus Invictus worked on Lichnowsky's case as co-counsel with his own lawyer.
That's a confusing arrangement, let me explain.
She was indicted on January 6th charges in the summer of 2023, not long after Augustus Invictus' own arrest here in Virginia.
He then hired a Maryland attorney named Terrell Roberts to work on his criminal case.
And a few weeks later, they were both hired by Ms. Lichnowski in her case.
Now, Invictus isn't a member of the bar in DC federal court, and he hadn't shown any particular interest in J6 cases before this.
But it wasn't Terrell Roberts' first January 6th case.
And given Invictus' apparently pretty dire financial situation, it kind of looks like he may have been paying his own lawyer by providing legal assistance on one of his other cases, but that's just me spitballing.
Can't prove that.
In the two years between his arrest in June of 2023 and his suspension from the bar in October of 2025, he had a small but steady caseload.
Aside from the January 6th cases, he worked with his own lawyer.
He had a handful of clients with domestic violence charges, a few divorce cases, a DUI case, pretty typical stuff.
Perhaps there were others, but I don't have access to any fancy legal databases.
I just love wasting my own time enough that I checked in with half the county court clerks in the state of Florida.
According to statements he offered the court here, some of those clients were referred to him through his volunteer work with his church.
Obviously, I couldn't tell you which cases he worked pro bono, but it does seem to be true that at least some of these clients he's represented in the last two years were unconnected to white nationalist political causes.
And that's noteworthy.
I mean, today isn't the day we get all the way into it.
You have my word I'll cover the whole story eventually.
But his career as an attorney has been a real roller coaster.
After graduating from law school in 2011, he passed the bar in several states in 2012 and was eventually admitted to practice in Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, and Florida.
He was just shy of 30, a proud father of four, married, and settling in as a defense attorney at his father's law firm outside of Orlando.
By 2013, he was divorced.
That spring, he dropped all of his clients and quit his job at his dad's law office.
He sent a letter to some of his former law school classmates announcing that he was a powerful, successful genius, but he'd grown bored of society and was going to leave it behind.
And that's not an exaggeration.
So many people got this letter, and the letter was so fucking weird that it was published in full and roundly mocked in an article by Elie Mistal on the blog Above the Law.
The letter is addressed to the gray world of man.
He's boastful.
He's accomplished everything a man could dream of.
He's better than you, and he wants you to know that.
It reads in part, Witness ye the glory of my life at 29 years of age.
I have four children, each of whom should be the envy of every parent in the world.
I have attained a baccalaureate degree in philosophy with honors.
I have attained a doctorate in law, cum laude.
I have acquired licenses in the profession of law in the states of New York, Illinois, and Florida.
I am scheduled to acquire two more such licenses in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
I am editor-in-chief of a poetry journal.
I run an independent publishing company.
I have opened my own law office in downtown Orlando.
I am an MBA candidate, and I have accomplished a few other things that will remain off the record for now.
I am of genius intellect and cultured, well-educated and creative, well-mannered and refined.
I am God's gift to humankind where the English language is concerned.
I also happen to have a basic knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.
I am musical and artistic.
I am athletic and possessed of militant self-discipline.
I am many other things.
I have a Cadillac and a poodle, multiple computers and a personal library.
I live in an apartment downtown, right across the street from the courthouse.
I've been to Paris and Vancouver, to Cairo and Dubrovnik, to Mexico City and Syracusa.
I dress better than all of you, pronounce my words perfectly, and have a winning, professional handshake.
I am everything you ever wanted to be.
I mean, can you argue with that?
A Cadillac and a poodle?
And an apartment?
But he's sick of it.
He's so sick of this world, and the world makes him sick.
He has nothing but contempt for it.
He renounces his law license, his diplomas, his Catholicism, his citizenship, and all of his material possessions.
He wants none of it.
He's walking away.
And he ends the letter with this.
Hear ye my final words in peacetime.
I have prophesied for years that I was born for a great war, that if I did not witness the coming of the second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.
Mark well, that day is fast coming upon you.
On the new moon of May, I shall disappear into the wilderness.
I will return bearing revolution, or I will not return at all.
War be unto the ends of the earth.
Augustus Sol Invictus, Orlando, Florida, USA, 20th of April, 2013.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
In the terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
May 24th, 1990.
A pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.
I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.
I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.
In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?
She received death threats before the bombing.
She received more threats after the bombing.
The men and women who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.
They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.
The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.
I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.
Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting Black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, save our girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Some of the people who got this letter emailed it to a funny blog about news in the legal profession.
But some of them called the FBI.
According to his self-published memoir about this time in his life, he then drove out to the mountains in North Carolina, wrote a goodbye letter to his family, which he left in his car, hoping whoever found the abandoned vehicle would drop it into a mailbox for him.
He then spent several months hitchhiking across the country before returning home and resuming the life he'd just so dramatically renounced.
He went back to being a lawyer from 2014 until 2017, and then he publicly announced that he was retiring from law to focus on politics.
And by politics, he meant both his run for U.S. Senate, as well as a punishing schedule of headlining white supremacist rallies all over the country.
A year later, though, in 2018, he announced that he was unretiring from law to focus on taking clients he referred to as political dissidents.
He wanted to be a movement lawyer.
And he tried.
He took on a couple of cases and he lost them all.
But he made a good public show of being the hard right's go-to guy for legal advice.
He ghost wrote lawsuits for Nazis who were angry at the city of Charlottesville.
He sent a cease and desist letter to a journalist on behalf of members of Adam Woffen.
And he founded a nonprofit that solicited donations for members of the Rise Above movement who faced federal charges for beating counterpresters at several rallies in 2017.
And like I said, I don't think you want a single case.
By 2020, he was dealing with his own problems.
His father was arrested for sex trafficking.
He was arrested for domestic violence, although the jury could not convict him at trial because the victim failed to appear.
I think of him primarily as a movement lawyer.
But that was really such a brief period of his life.
Financial affidavits he filed in various cases of his own during this time period show he was reporting just $1,000 a month in income from his law office.
And after 2020, a surprising number of the cases I can find him working on are just divorce and domestic violence cases against guys he knows.
He's not trying to fight for white civil rights at the Supreme Court.
He's just trying to make his own child support payments.
When he was arrested on the charge out of Virginia in June of 2023, he filed a motion on behalf of one of his divorce clients from jail, requesting a modification of the case schedule.
The first few paragraphs of the motion are pretty standard.
You know, we need more time to conduct these depositions.
We need more time for discovery.
Both parties are comfortable extending the deadline.
And then almost as an afterthought, he adds, quote, respondent's counsel was arrested and detained on false charges in relation to a Virginia political rally and is currently in Orange County awaiting extradition to Virginia.
Respondent's counsel anticipates being released by the end of July.
That motion was granted and he was indeed out on bond by the end of July 2023, but not before he missed a hearing in a domestic violence case against one of his other clients.
That particular client must not have been too upset that his lawyer didn't show up to court, because that man, after being convicted of strangulation and witness tampering, hired Augustus Invictus again, this time to represent him in a movement case.
Jason Brown was one of four members of the anti-Semitic group, the Goyam Defense League, who were arrested for hanging swastika banners from a highway overpass near Orlando.
One of those four defendants, Amanda Raines, cut her losses and pled guilty.
But the other three are still hoping to depose Governor Ron DeSantis as part of their case.
They feel the state of Florida is being unconstitutionally unfair to Nazis.
Aside from those Goyam Defense League cases, though, he wasn't really trying to bolster his reputation as a movement lawyer by taking on high-profile white rights cases anymore.
Being a movement lawyer got him a lot of attention, but you can't pay your rent if you only take movement cases.
And based on a brief suspension of his driver's license, he was getting behind on child support.
Shortly after his arrest, he was working on one other white civil rights case.
He had a client who felt he'd been fired from his job as a baggage handler for American Airlines simply for being white.
But Invictus messed up the paperwork and missed a deadline to correct it when he filed the appeal, so it was dismissed.
A technicality, I guess.
But I think even if he'd filed the paperwork correctly, the 11th Circuit would not have ruled in their favor.
I mean, first of all, the client hadn't sought the proper administrative remedy through his union and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
But even if you set all of that aside, even if everything had been done correctly, procedurally, I think the whole situation had less to do with anti-white racism and more to do with the fact that you can't refer to your black co-worker using the N-word in the workgroup chat.
So that case was dismissed, and the swastika banner cases were moving pretty slowly.
And Augustus Invictus seemed mostly focused on his own problems.
There was an ongoing battle in the court with his second ex-wife, a custody battle in New Jersey with a different woman, his own lawsuit against various Florida law enforcement agencies alleging a vast conspiracy against him,
his own lawsuit against that woman in New Jersey, his lawsuit against a different woman that he had a sexual relationship with during his marriage, his attempts to get his computer back from a police evidence locker because he was using it in the living room at his dad's house when that house got raided the day his father was arrested for sex trafficking.
I mean, he had a lot going on.
Even one of those divorce cases he was working on was a little bit personal.
He took great offense when opposing counsel accused him of having a romantic relationship with his client.
But if you read the filings closely, he doesn't actually deny it.
But he also doesn't mention that in addition to being her divorce lawyer, he features prominently in her upcoming wedding as the groom.
So he's busy.
He's focusing on his own problems.
Which is why I was so surprised to see his name on a brand new lawsuit filed in June of 2025.
That lawsuit was the subject of an episode of this show back in June.
The complaint is.
I mean, you can listen to the episode, but the short version is, it is consistent with the kinds of legal work I've seen from him in the past, right?
He doesn't win cases.
But Enrique Tario, Ethan Nordine, Zachary Real, Dominic Pozzola, and Joe Biggs want the United States government to pay the Proud Boys $100 million as an apology for being so mean to them about the whole sedition thing.
It's a stupid lawsuit, but we live in stupid times.
So there is a non-zero chance that the government will simply nod and agree to a settlement that puts millions of dollars into the hands of the leadership of an extremist organization.
I don't know what the betting odds are on that specifically, but I imagine the kind of cut of that settlement their lawyer would get made it a pretty attractive gamble.
Unfortunately for Augustus Invictus, he'll never see a dime of any potential payout to the Proud Boys.
At least, not anything official.
Nothing on the books as far as attorneys' fees.
He was initially removed from the case back in June when the judge noticed that he wasn't allowed to practice in the federal court after his conviction.
But he was inexplicably able to get himself readmitted to the bar in the Middle District of Florida a month later.
But that victory was short-lived.
He was finally formally suspended from practicing in the state of Florida in October, and he was forced to withdraw representation from all of his active cases, including this one.
The Florida Bar finally made their move in October after the Virginia Court of Appeals dismissed his appeal in his criminal case.
I didn't bother asking the state court of appeals for a copy because I have a pretty good idea what arguments they intended to use on appeal based on the hours and hours of rambling about it I sat through before the trial.
I'm curious though, how the appellate judge would have responded to the powerful argument that a lit torch is not a burning object.
I wonder if they planned to put on their PowerPoint presentation about transitive verbs again.
I found it tremendously unconvincing in pretrial hearings.
But unfortunately for everyone, the appeal wasn't even heard.
The Virginia Court of Appeals did not end up weighing in on whether or not a wall of flames is free speech under the First Amendment, or whether something that is on fire can be legally said to be burning.
Hearings on this matter before the trial culminated in the prosecution putting the local fire marshal on the stand to offer his expert opinion on whether something that was previously on fire could be called burnt.
The fire marshal said yes, for the record.
But we never did get a semiotician, a linguist, a physicist, or a poet to weigh in under oath on the nature of fire.
Ultimately, the appeal was filed improperly.
Something of a theme in looking at a decade of Augustus Invictus' practice of law.
He and his attorney failed to get their paperwork into the court on time, which is an automatic dismissal.
A subsequent petition for rehearing was promptly denied.
And there's no indication on the record that he filed a petition for rehearing on bunk or a petition to the state Supreme Court.
And at this point, any deadline for those filings would have passed.
So if you're just looking at the State Court of Appeals case management system online, this case is over.
So I'm not sure what he might have been referring to when he told a judge in Florida last month that he still expects to prevail in his appeal sometime in the spring of 2026.
What appeal?
I can't imagine that telling an outright lie to the court is something you would do if your goal is to avoid permanent disbarment, so maybe he's still got a trick up his sleeve in the appeal.
The Court of Appeals doesn't have the best online docket, so I guess it's possible that there's something there that I just don't see.
The automatic dismissal for missing a deadline is a bit harsh.
So maybe that's the point of contention.
Maybe there is some process for appealing that decision in particular.
It is terribly unclear to me, and I did ask several practicing attorneys in Virginia, and they couldn't tell me either.
So I'll just keep waiting.
Augustus Invictus is due back in court in Albemarle County, Virginia in February of 2026 for a hearing that, if there's any sanity to this process, should result in the judge setting a date for him to begin serving his sentence.
Even if he does find a way to get a second bite at the apple in the State Court of Appeals, there's no reason the county court should continue to extend that appeal bond, considering the appeal has been dead since October.
He's lucky enough to have gotten the hearing scheduled so many months out.
The court granted his request to schedule it after January 9th.
He was so insistent about that, not just in January or in February, it had to be after January 9th.
And he didn't say why.
I'm not sure why he wouldn't just tell the judge he couldn't afford to miss his own wedding.
When he does finally begin his nine and a half month sentence, he can expect to serve about six months of it typically, assuming he doesn't have any conduct violations.
For now, at least, he's still out on bond, and he can't practice law.
With the wedding just weeks away, it's probably too late to warn his wife to be that Les Crozet makes great enameled cast iron, but their stainless steel pots are really nothing special.
You're just paying for the brand.
You should have registered for the all-clad, if you ask me.
Then again, if you'd asked me, I probably would have advised against most of what's going on here.
With jail on the horizon and his career in shambles, perhaps he too will pivot to politics now that he has nothing else to do.
It wouldn't actually be his first time.
But I'll save the story of his Senate campaign for another day.
His suspension from the bar was an update I couldn't let pass us by without telling you about.
It affects that Proud Boy lawsuit that there was a whole episode about.
But this is just a tiny peek into the life of a very weird little guy.
And if I don't end up writing at least a couple of episodes about him, I'll have wasted all those hours I spent tracking down a physical copy of the novel he self-published under a pseudonym.
Back when he still thought he was a very powerful wizard.
Next year.
I promise.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gakin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at RivliguysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
Stories like Erica Hunt.
A young mother vanished without a trace after a family gathering on 4th of July weekend, 2016.
No goodbyes, no clues, just gone.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Glaudwell here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in Northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years.
That's probably not long enough.
I didn't kill him.
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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