A Coast Guard officer in custody on gun and drug charges should stay there until trial, because he “intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” according to a memo filed in the case Tuesday.
Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson was arrested Friday, but the detention memo asserts the charges are the “proverbial tip of the iceberg” and that he is also a domestic terrorist who backed a “white homeland.”
According to court records filed Tuesday in a U.S. District Court in Maryland, Hasson must be detained before his trial because he “intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.”
“The defendant is a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life,” the memo said.
The memo claims Hasson drew inspiration from right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, the mastermind behind two terrorist attacks in Norway that took the lives of 77 people. Hasson read Breivik’s manifesto, which detailed how Breivik planned the attacks and promoted keeping lists of targets.
Just last month, Hasson drafted his own list of targets in an Excel spreadsheet that included lawmakers and media figures including “pelosi,” a likely reference to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; “sen kaine,” a likely reference to Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; “poca warren,” a likely reference to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; among others. Other people on the list appear to reference MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, MSNBC’s Ari Melber, and CNN’s Don Lemon, among others.
Days before compiling the list, he searched on the Internet several queries regarding where members of Congress live, where to “see congress people,” and “what if trump illegally impeached.”
Hasson, who identified as a “white nationalist,” also supported a “white homeland” and wrote a letter to a neo-Nazi leader in September 2017 weeks after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. He ultimately sent the letter to himself.
“I never saw a reason for mass protest or wearing uniforms marching around provoking people with swastikas etc.,” Hasson said. “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 total, 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition were seized by authorities after they conducted a search of his apartment basement this month in Silver Spring, Md. They also uncovered more than 30 vials of human growth hormones, and determined he purchased more than 4,200 pills of the narcotic Tramadol in the past several years. The detention memo claimed he used synthetic urine so his drug use would go undetected.
Hasson, who works at the Coast Guard headquarters in D.C., is slated to appear in court on Thursday for a detention hearing at 1 p.m. in Maryland.
