FBI: White supremacists target grid
Oshkosh man among those named in warrant
An Oshkosh man, an Ohio teen and a Purdue University student from Texas talked of white supremacy and how they might disrupt the nation’s power grid if President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, according to federal court records.
A recently unsealed search warrant revealed that the FBI’s counterterrorism unit was tracking the three subjects who said they’d met online and got together in person in Ohio where they were surveilled by agents over several days in February.
The case shows how random people can meet and share extreme views online, and quickly move toward real-life actions to obtain guns and weapons that they talk of using to revolt against the government.
The Department of Homeland Security this year reported that white supremacist extremists “will remain the most persistent and lethal threat” to the U.S., and the FBI has also identified them as the top domestic terror threat.
None of the subjects named in the affidavit supporting the search warrant has been charged with the investigated offenses — conspiracy, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, distribution of information relating to explosives, destruction of an energy facility and providing material support to terrorists. The 17-year-old from Ohio under investigation in the case would be eligible to
be charged as an adult in federal court.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Milwaukee said the search warrant was made public in error this month. It has since been resealed.
Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbus, Ohio, which is overseeing the case, said she couldn’t provide more information because the investigation is ongoing, but that “we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter.”
The suspects could not be reached, but the Wisconsin man’s grandfather said his grandson has been “cleared of anything” and has moved on.
A lawyer for the recent Purdue University graduate — whose parents hold top legal and judicial posts in the Houston area — said no one could talk about the case now.
The three apparently appeared on the FBI’s radar last year after a fourth man was stopped coming into Detroit from Canada in October 2019. He said he was going to visit his friend, Christopher
B. Cook, 17, in Ohio. The Canadian had a rifle, a shotgun and a handgun.
On his phone, agents found “multiple images of Nazi, white power and anti LGBTQ propaganda.”
Plan to ‘go off the grid’
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents feared the Canadian and Cook and possibly a third person in Tennessee whom the Canadian also planned to visit, were possibly planning a “white supremacist extremist” attack. Further investigation of the Canadian’s devices revealed more communications with Cook and talk of using student loans to buy a bus to convert to a camper to “go off the grid” to train for disrupting government.
Agents visited Cook and his mother. Cook said he’d met the Canadian via an online game. He admitted they had discussed some white supremacy topics and said he had deleted all his texts and chat messages with the other man after he called about being questioned at the border.
His mother told agents she made her son take down three Nazi flags she found hanging in his bedroom, photos of which agents had found among the
teen’s online posts.
Mission called ‘Lights Out’
An informant who said he was part of the same online community, but then decided not to embrace Nazism, told agents that Cook had talked of forming an 18-member group, The Front, to attack the nation’s power grid by shooting electrical substations around the southeastern U.S., a mission he called, “Lights Out.”
Cook thought the group should be operational by 2024 — or much sooner if President Trump lost reelection in 2020.
The informant led agents to an encrypted cloud-based storage and messaging system where Cook had shared information about military operations, and about how to make weapons and bombs.
He said Cook discussed being investigated by the FBI but believed he was getting away with it. The informant shared copies of a group text from November 2019 from Cook discussing the “Lights Out” plan to damage electric power transmission substations with rifle fire.
Others on the message list included Jackson Sawall, 21, of Oshkosh and Jonathan Frost, of Katy, Texas, then a student at Purdue University where he studied IT. In February, the informant told agents that Sawall had begun recruiting more members into The Front on another message board and that Sawall and Cook said they planned to die for their cause.
The same month, an undercover FBI agent joined the chat room and expressed interest in joining The Front. Sawall warned that the recruitment was a long, hard process but told the agent, “if you truly want a Fascist society,” Sawall would make the effort.
Cook’s mother told the FBI her son was planning to move to Wisconsin with Sawall, and on Feb. 20, Sawall arrived in Ohio in a pickup.
Over the next three days, agents surveilled the pair and Frost, who appeared to drive from Indiana in an older Mercedes registered to his father.
The trio made stops at several stores and restaurants, and a hotel, and loaded a bag of what agents believed were parts for making untraceable assault rifles into the pickup from the Mercedes.
They were stopped on the freeway outside Columbus and told police they were planning a camping trip. Police saw parts without serial numbers for building an AR-15 style rifle, two magazines and ammunition, as well as a Nazi flag, but no camping equipment.
Frost returned to Indiana. Sawall returned to Wisconsin, where he was pulled over by state police for an improperly mounted license plate. He told police he didn’t have any weapons but was interested in assault-style rifles because you could build them yourself. Inside the truck was a Nazi flag.
After the friends’ visit to Ohio, the informant told agents, Cook said his mother had kicked him out of the house and he was moving to Tennessee. Agents tracked Cook’s Feb. 28 bus trip to Clarkesville, Tenn., where he was met by a 14-year-old runaway from Georgia. The two went into a display storage shed at a Home Depot.
Cook was arrested on charges of trespassing, and police confiscated a main part of an AR-15 rifle and several electronics. The 14-year-old was referred to child services.