Washington: US Coast Guard officer Christopher Paul Hasson, 49, who espoused white supremacist views and drafted a target list of Democratic politicians and prominent media figures was arrested on firearms and drug charges last Friday.
Police also recovered a powerful arsenal from his home in a suburb here, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
“The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” US District Attorney Robert Hur said in a motion seeking that Hasson be detained until trial.
“The defendant is a domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct,” Hur pointed out.
The US Attorney’s office said 15 guns and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition were recovered from Hasson’s cramped basement apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, along with illegal drugs, including steroids and human growth hormone.
Prosecutors said Hasson identified himself as a ‘White Nationalist’ for over 30 years and advocated for ‘focused violence’ in order to establish a ‘white homeland’.
Among the documents seized, according to prosecutors, was a draft letter to an unidentified American neo-Nazi leader in which Hasson described himself as a ‘long time White Nationalist’ and a ‘man of action’.
A spreadsheet of potential targets compiled by Hasson included Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats in the House and Senate.
Media personalities on the list included CNN’s Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Joe Scarborough.
Prosecutors said Hasson’s internet searches included such queries as ‘most liberal senators’, ‘where do most senators live in DC’ and ‘are supreme court justices protected’. He also routinely perused ‘pro-Russian, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi literature’.
According to prosecutors, Hasson began obtaining his cache of firearms in 2017 and had also expressed a desire to obtain biological weapons.
Hasson, a lieutenant in the US Coast Guard, has been working at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington since 2016 as an acquisitions officer, according to prosecutors.
AFP
