EX-RESERVIST WANTED TO BRING HARM TO MOUNTIES: DOCUMENTS
Mathews wished he had booby-trapped home, motion says
A Canadian ex-soldier and alleged white supremacist told cohorts in the U.S. that he wished he had booby-trapped his Manitoba home before RCMP searched it last year so the officers “got f---ing exploded,” say dramatic new court documents filed by American prosecutors.
Patrik Mathews and fellow alleged members of the hate group The Base also talk graphically about shooting civilians and police at an event in Richmond, Va., this week, the Canadian suggesting they could “be literally hunting people,” says the bail motion.
Unspecified intelligence about possible violence at a Richmond gun rally Monday prompted Virginia’s governor to declare a state of emergency around the demonstration.
Mathews, 27, and two co-defendants were arrested last week just days before the event started, with another three members of The Base picked up a day later in Georgia. Despite the presence of thousands of protesters, many toting firearms, the rally unfolded peacefully.
The new court document submitted by a U.S. Attorney’s office in Maryland also details one of several videos allegedly made by Mathews. Wearing a gas mask, the former Manitoba-based reservist promotes derailing trains, murdering people and poisoning water supplies as part of a “revolution” to save the white race.
Mathews and alleged accomplices Brian Mark
Lemley, 33, and
William Bilbrough, 19, appear in court Wednesday for a bail hearing. Prosecutors indicate in the motion they want the trio kept behind bars until their trial.
“The defendants in this domestic terrorism investigation must be detained,” said the memorandum. “No condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure the appearance of any defendant or the safety of any other person.”
Mathews was exposed as an alleged member of The Base —— a new but seemingly burgeoning group that espouses trying to trigger a race war —— last August after a Winnipeg Free Press reporter infiltrated the organization.
He had been a combat engineer with a Winnipeg-based reserve unit but was released by the Armed Forces after the allegations surfaced.
RCMP later searched his home in Beausejour, Man., and briefly detained him. Soon after, he disappeared. His whereabouts were a mystery until his arrest last week.
The freshly filed motion provides more detail about the extensive U.S. police investigation, which included a “sneak-and-peak” warrant that allowed officers to enter the apartment where Mathews and Lemley stayed until their arrest.
They also installed a hidden camera and microphone in the apartment, which allegedly captured Mathews’ discussion of the RCMP raid of his home last Aug. 19.
“I could really wish they f---ing all started searching my place, accidentally trip a pin, and boom and the whole house goes boom,” the document quotes him as saying. “Boy, wouldn’t that be terrible, a bunch of f---ing RCMP search experts got f--ing exploded.”
He then muses that “you reach the most violent extreme solution first and you talk yourself out of doing that and then little by little you lose all inhibitions.”
The physical search of the apartment and electronic devices in it turned up several videos in which he espoused violence and used anti-semitic and racist language, the prosecutors allege.
The filing includes a transcript and screengrab from one video in which he wears the gas mask in an attempt to disguise his voice. He says violent revolution is needed for the white race to survive.
“Derail some f----ing trains, kill some people and poison some water supplies,” he says, according to the document. “You better be f---ing ready to do those things.”
But perhaps the most ominous evidence contained in the memorandum details statements the men allegedly made about an event in Richmond, Va., Monday, an apparent reference to the gun rally.
Mathews is quoted as saying into the concealed recording device that while events are unfolding in Virginia, they could shut down highways and derail trains to create instability.
“You can kick off the economic collapse of the U.S. within a week,” he says, according to the motion.
Experts call The Base an “accelerationist” white supremacist group, meaning that its purported goal is to bring about social collapse and a race war.
The document also sheds more light on the police investigation of Mathews and his cohorts. It traces the Canadian’s journey across the Manitoba-minnesota border late last August, with Lemley and Bilbrough eventually picking him up in Michigan. He then travels first to Georgia, spending time there with other Base members, then Maryland and Delaware.
The filing includes security-camera screen grabs of Lemley and Mathews in a truck passing through a tunnel near Norfolk, Va., and of the pair exiting a store where they had bought ammunition for an assault rifle they made.
It also reports that the secret camera at one point caught Mathews manipulating the homemade rifle “while making imaginary gunshot noises.”