A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant who is an alleged white nationalist with a hit list and a plan “to murder innocent citizens on a scale rarely seen in this country” has been arrested by the FBI in the Washington, DC area.
Christopher Hasson planned to “establish a white homeland” by force, according to court records filed in federal court in Maryland and first flagged Wednesday by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
The former U.S. marine, who currently serves as an acquisitions officer at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., was arrested Friday on illegal guns and drug charges. He is scheduled to appear before a judge for a detention hearing on Thursday.
In a filing requesting that Hasson be detained pending trial, prosecutors described him as a “domestic terrorist” who was stockpiling weapons as part of a plot to, in his words, “kill almost every last person on earth.”
As evidence, they provide a photograph of the 15 firearms FBI agents discovered at his Silver Spring home, and a copy of a spreadsheet of his hit list targets, which include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and MSNBC anchor Ari Melber.
A review of Hasson’s web history allegedly found frequent searches for the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who murdered 77 people at a summer camp in 2011. Hasson’s email drafts and correspondence also allegedly made frequent mentions of his dreams of carrying out a “bombing/sniper campaign” and engaging in a race war. In one letter to an unnamed American neo-Nazi leader, Hasson allegedly referred to himself as a “long time White Nationalist” who was a skinhead before joining the military.
“From January 2017 to January 2019, the defendant conducted online searches and make thousands of visits for pro-Russian, neo-fascist, and neo-Nazi literature,” prosecutors note in one court filing.
Hasson was charged with possessing firearms as an “unlawful user or addict of controlled substances.” Agents who raided his home found quantities of the opioid Tramadol as well as a weapons cache, according to court documents.
The same unusual charge of possessing guns while abusing drugs was also brought against Jeffrey Clark, the Washington, D.C. neo-Nazi arrested last November.
Read the full motion for Hasson’s detention pending trial below.
