Back in October, the FBI arrested a Florida Donald Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc for mailing pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters, Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, CNN, comedian Bill Maher, and six other prominent Trump critics.
Fortunately, none of bombs detonated, but had they done so, Sayoc could have perpetrated one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in the nation's history against individuals the president has dubbed "scum," "dishonest," "not good people," "sleazy," "fake news," and "among the worst human beings."
What Sayoc could have fomented, however, would not even have come close to the attack on Democratic members of Congress and well-known media personalities a neo-Nazi lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard was discovered on Wednesday to be plotting.
According to a Maryland federal court filing, Christopher Paul Hasson compiled a spreadsheet of targeted lawmakers Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Maxine Waters, and Sheila Jackson Lee; Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kaine, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, and Ari Melber; CNN anchors Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, and Van Jones; former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke; African American activist and author Angela Davis; former Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta; and the Democratic Socialists of America.
When law enforcement converged on his Silver Spring, Maryland home, they found and seized 15 guns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
Court documents confirm Hasson identified as a white nationalist and had been researching the manifesto of far-right Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 attack, for "focused violence" to create a "white homeland."
In addition, he had been searching online for information regarding "civil war if trump impeached" [sic], "what if trump illegally impeached" [sic], and "where do most senators live in dc" [sic].
Moreover, court documents quote a 2017 email that states:
"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."
His online history shows him referring to a "liberalist/globalist ideology" destroying white Americans and conspiracies by "((((People))))," an internet styling the farright uses to refer to Jewish individuals.
He also apparently inquired online about whether congressional lawmakers and supreme court justices are under Secret Service protection.
Hasson's home contained bottles of human growth hormone, and he apparently scoured Anders Breivik's manifesto for references to steroids, which Breivik ingested while planning his massacre.
We owe Hasson's capture to former Senate counter-terrorism adviser, Seamus Hughes, now employed with the George Washington University Program on Extremism.
Could Cesar Sayoc and now Christopher Hasson's planned domestic terrorist massacres be our own modern-day Kristallnacht?
As Andrew Gawthorpe writes in The Guardian:
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