In late January, Johnny Roman Garza traveled to a Jewish journalist’s home in Arizona, crept up to a bedroom window and then glued a poster to the glass. “Your Actions Have Consequences,” it said. “You have been visited by your local Nazis.” On Tuesday, Garza, 21, of Queen Creek, Ariz., pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Seattle to multiple charges related to threatening numerous journalists as part of a plot by a group of neo-Nazis, the Associated Press first reported. He faces up to five years in prison at his December sentencing. Garza and three co-defendants were members of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group started in 2015 and born from a now-defunct white-supremacist online forum. The group called police to various journalists’ homes and offices and dropped off threatening fliers, prosecutors said, and also made threats to employees of the Anti-Defamation League.
The neo-Nazi faction has repeatedly targeted journalists, prosecutors said. Around the same time Garza and his co-conspirators were arrested, John Cameron Denton, an alleged Atomwaffen leader, was charged with conspiring to call police to the home and office of a ProPublica reporter. In July, John William Kirby Kelley admitted to “swatting” journalists, by calling in false threats to send SWAT teams. According to the plea agreement, Garza first got involved with his alleged co-conspirators — Kaleb J. Cole, Cameron Brandon Shea and Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe — in November, when Shea invited the group to a chat room to discuss a plot to threaten journalists. Shea called it “Operation Erste Saule,” a German term meaning “first pillar,” which Shea used to refer to the news media, according to court documents. In a message to the group chat, Shea said they would target “journalists houses and media buildings to send a clear message that we too have leverage over them. … The goal of course, is to erode the media/state air of legitimacy by showing people that they have names and addresses, and hopefully embolden others to act as well.”
via washingtonpost: A neo-Nazi threatened Jewish and Black journalists. He faces five years in prison.