ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Federal prosecutors in Virginia are seeking a five-year prison sentence for a former neo-Nazi group leader who pleaded guilty to conspiring with other far-right extremists to threaten dozens of targets, including a predominantly African American church, a sitting U.S. Cabinet member and journalists.
John Cameron Denton, of Montgomery, Texas, and others involved in the plot made at least 134 threats to injure people and institutions, often for racist reasons, Justice Department prosecutors wrote in a court filing last Wednesday. They said Denton participated in “the most far-reaching swatting conspiracy in our nation to date,” referring to hoax calls made to fool emergency dispatchers into sending police to the addresses of unsuspecting victims.
Prosecutors say Denton was a leader of a group called Atomwaffen Division. More than a dozen people linked to Atomwaffen Division or an offshoot called Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with federal crimes since the group’s formation in 2016. Many have pleaded guilty and been sentenced already.
Atomwaffen has been linked to several killings, including the May 2017 shooting deaths of two men at an apartment in Tampa, Florida, and the January 2018 killing of a University of Pennsylvania student in California.
The charges against Denton and other Atomaffen members and associates centered on hoax “swatting” calls that they made to targets in 2018 and 2019, including the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, where one of Denton’s associates attended college.
In court, a judge has noted that the U.S. Secret Service waved local police away from mobilizing to Nielsen’s home in Alexandria in January 2019 after a member of the conspiracy called, claiming hostages were being taken there.
Denton also placed swatting calls to the New York City offices of news outlet ProPublica and to a ProPublica reporter in Richmond, California. Prosecutors say Denton had a vendetta against the ProPublica journalist for reporting on his activities in Atomwaffen, including for a PBS Frontline documentary.
Prosecutors’ filing says the reporter’s young son has nightmares about neo-Nazis kidnapping his family and murdering his father, and the experience has prompted the Mexican American boy to ask, “Why do Nazis hate brown people like me?”
Atomwaffen Division has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a terroristic neo-Nazi organization that formed out of Iron March, an influential fascist forum that went offline in fall 2017.
