A federal jury in Seattle on Wednesday convicted the leader of a Neo-Nazi group that threatened Jewish activists and journalists in three states.
After a two-day trial, Kaleb Cole, 25, was found guilty of five felonies, including mailing threatening communications, interfering with a federally protected activity and conspiracy, the Associated Press reported.
Cole, who was a leader of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, will be sentenced in January and could face as much as 10 years in prison.
He was charged last year along with four other group members after they were accused of the online and mail harassment of journalists and of the staff of of the Washington state chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. The threats included sending swastika posters to the victims that said, You have been visited by your local Nazis,” “Your Actions have Consequences,” and “We are Watching.”
The posters also featured threatening images of a hooded individual throwing a Molotov cocktail at a house along with the words “Death to Pigs,” a reference to the phrase written in blood on the wall of a house where followers of Charles Manson committed a mass murder in 1969.
In late August, Atomwaffen Division leader Cameron Shea, 25, was sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the threat campaign.
Two other co-defendants pleaded guilty and have already been sentenced.
Cole had been known to police since at least 2018 when during a border check by US customs as he was returning from Europe photos were found on his cellphone featuring him with a white supremacist flag and doing a Nazi salute.
In 2019, Seattle police used an “extreme risk protection order” to confiscate nine guns from his home. At the time police said that he had “gone from espousing hate to now taking active steps or preparation for an impending ‘race war.’”
Law enforcement accused Cole of running paramilitary “hate camps” in Nevada and Washington.
During closing arguments, assistant US attorney Thomas Woods said to the jury that Cole was “not simply sending a message of hate, he was sending a statement of terror.”
Cole’s attorney had argued that his client never engaged in physical violence and that the posters “never intended to communicate an actual threat to commit violence.”