A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist who was arrested in Maryland last week was plotting to kill a long list of prominent journalists and Democratic politicians, as well as professors, judges and what he called “leftists in general,” federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday.
Lt Christopher Paul Hasson, 49, was arrested Friday on gun and drug charges, but prosecutors said in the filing that the charges were just the “proverbial tip of the iceberg.”
The filing argued that Hasson should be held until he is tried, describing him as a “domestic terrorist” who intended “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.”
Prosecutors quoted a letter that he drafted to friends in 2017 and that authorities found on his computer. In it, Hasson, who works as an acquisitions officer at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, wrote: “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 will find something.”
In the last month, prosecutors said, the lieutenant used his work computer to draw up a list of prominent figures he called “traitors” and wanted to kill, including many well-known anchors and hosts on the CNN and MSNBC news networks and a number of Democratic elected officials. The list included, among others, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and Maxine Waters, D-Calif, Sen Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, whom he referred to as “Sen blumen jew,” and many of the senators running for president in 2020.
He had recently performed internet searches seeking information about whether senators and Supreme Court justices receive Secret Service protection, the court filing said.
In the letter quoted by prosecutors, Hasson wrote about wanting to start a race war, and pondered the best way to do it. “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch,” he wrote.
He mused about taking advantage of some already tense issue, like the standoff in 2016 between Oregon protesters and the Bureau of Land Management. “Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads. Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world,” he said in the letter.
Hasson served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1993, then approximately two years on active duty in the Army National Guard. He has held his current Coast Guard job since 2016, according to court documents.
A Coast Guard spokesman, Lt Cdr Scott McBride, confirmed on Wednesday that one of its service members stationed at headquarters in Washington had been arrested on weapons and drug charges, but declined to comment further on the case. “Because this is an open investigation, the Coast Guard has no further details at this time,” McBride said.
Federal investigators said in the court filing that Hasson had begun stockpiling weapons in 2017. When federal agents searched his cramped basement apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, they said, they found a cache of 15 assault rifles, shotguns and handguns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition that the lieutenant had amassed.
The Program on Extremism at George Washington University called attention to the court filing in Twitter posts on Wednesday. In the filing, authorities cited writings found on the lieutenant’s computer that point to extreme racist and apocalyptic views.
Shortly after the violence incited by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, authorities say, Hasson drafted a letter to a well-known neo-Nazi expressing support for the idea of building a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest.
“I never saw a reason for mass protest or wearing uniforms marching around provoking people with swastikas etc.,” he wrote. “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.”
In a passage of the letter quoted in the court filing, Hasson wrote, “I am a long time White Nationalist, having been a skinhead 30 plus years ago before my time in the military.”
Authorities said Hasson had studied the 1,500-page manifesto that mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote in the hope of inspiring other killers.
Following Breivik’s advice about how to start a race war that would topple liberal governments, Hasson planned to assassinate prominent figures. He performed internet searches for MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, among others, and for the phrase “civil war if Trump impeached,” authorities said.
Hasson’s efforts appeared to intensify in January. Authorities say he searched for a section of Breivik’s manifesto that advises other mass murderers to begin a six-week cycle of steroids once all their preparations for violent acts are complete. Federal agents said they had found a locked box in his apartment containing more than 30 vials of human growth hormone.
In the 2017 letter he drafted to friends, the lieutenant discussed ways that, acting alone, he might cause the most social chaos. “Food/fuel may be the key, if I can disrupt two or three weeks,” he wrote. When people started to loot, steal or protest, he wrote, he would “dress as cop and shoot them. Burn down Apt complex, bar the doors first. Thermite on gas station tank.”
He also wrote of plans to stockpile food and gear in hidden locations and to “learn basic chemistry” so that he could survive the civil disorder he hoped to cause.
The court filings did not make clear how the authorities had learned about Hasson’s plans. The court documents noted, though, that in the last two years “the defendant conducted online searches and made thousands of visits for pro-Russian, neo-fascist, and neo-Nazi literature.”
