Two neo-Nazi group members intended to engage in terrorist activity before FBI agents arrested them ahead of a pro-gun rally in Virginia, a federal judge concluded Monday.
US District Judge Theodore Chuang’s decision to apply a “terrorism enhancement” in sentencing the men favors prosecutors’ recommendation that both of them get 25 years in prison.
Chuang heard starkly different portraits of the two defendants as he prepares to sentence them at separate hearings on Thursday at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Prosecutors said Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Jordan Mathews and US Army veteran Brian Mark Lemley Jr. planned to carry out a massacre inspired by their white supremacist ideology. Defense lawyers say an undercover FBI agent tried in vain to bait the two “damaged military veterans” into developing a plan for violence at a January 2020 gun rights rally at Virginia’s state Capitol in Richmond, Virginia.
FBI agents arrested Lemley and Mathews and a third member of a white supremacist group called The Base. The group has been a leading proponent of “accelerationism,” a fringe philosophy that advocates using mass violence to hasten society’s collapse.
Read more at Times of Israel.
{Matzav.com}
I have zero sympathy for neo Nazis .Let alone neo Nazis who engage in terrorism.
Even so these guys do seem to have been somewhat framed. Even assuming the FBI agents didn’t actively try to convince them to engage in terror, when undercover government agents spend HUNDREDS of hours speaking to someone who then allegedly goes and attempts to engage in the crime they were looking to pin on him, I smell a rat.
I’m sure they are horrible people. There is still something wrong with FBI agents spending hundreds of hours with small time neo nazis