(Ken Silva, Headline USA) “The FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit (DTOU) creates and controls fake white supremacist extremist groups and has done so for decades.”
That shocking allegation comes from a controversial source: an affidavit filed by convicted felon and neo-Nazi activist Bill White. The Nazi inmate has filed hundreds of court documents from prison over the last decade, describing a vast FBI operation to infiltrate right-wing groups and provoke them to violence.
Despite his background, Headline USA is publishing White’s allegations because they have been accompanied by numerous FBI memos, affidavits, news articles and other records to support at least some of his claims.
Moreover, White’s litigation has had a modicum of success in federal court. He has overturned several of his convictions, and has three pending lawsuits against U.S. government agencies, including one that survived a preliminary review in July.
Perhaps just as importantly, records show that White has been tortured while incarcerated, and that the Bureau of Prisons has retaliated against him over his court filings.
In the coming days, Headline USA will publish White’s records, which this publication has dubbed the “Fed Files.”
The Fed Files will reveal, among other things, that an FBI informant created one of America’s oldest and largest Nazi organizations, and that this same group participated in the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. Other records will delve into dark undercover FBI operations involving North Korea and Satanic cults.
But first, a closer look at White’s story.
Who is Bill White?
Purportedly the son of a CIA officer, White grew up a radical left-wing anarchist before turning to Nazism in his early adulthood.
In April 1999, he had his first major brush with notoriety for publicly supporting the Columbine school shooters.
The media attention over what he later called his Columbine “prank” seemed to embolden the young Nazi. Already an activist by that time, White began increasingly pushing the envelope of his First Amendment rights with outrageous statements and threats towards public officials.
White allegedly crossed the line of his free-speech rights in 2008, when he threatened to publish the information of a federal juror involved in the case of Matthew Hale—a white supremacist who allegedly solicited an undercover FBI informant to kill federal judge Joan Lefkow.
Here, the story becomes especially bizarre.
After being charged and sentenced to 30-months imprisonment for publishing the Hale juror’s information, White successfully filed a motion for acquittal on First Amendment grounds. A district judge partially granted his motion and dismissed one of the major charges against White in April 2011, and he was released from prison that same month.
However, prosecutors appealed the district judge’s decision. And not only did the appeals court side with the DOJ and order White back to prison, the justices granted the DOJ’s appeal for an even harsher sentence for him in early 2012.
At this point, White decided to flee to Mexico instead of report back to prison.
According to the DOJ, White was trying to escape justice.
But White claims he fled to Mexico because he was tipped off that “rogue” FBI informants in the Nazi movement were plotting to kill him—purportedly because of his knowledge of the Judge Lefkow case and other FBI dirty secrets. He also claims to have been tortured in prison from 2008 to 2010, which would be another incentive for him to flee the country.
Either way, White was arrested in Mexico only months later and sent back to U.S. prison. Soon thereafter, the DOJ slapped additional charges on him for allegedly sending Facebook threats to public officials while he was on the lam.
White denied sending Facebook threats, claiming that FBI informants hacked his account and impersonated him.
To White’s point, the public officials he was accused of threatening were involved in the 2012 prosecution of the neo-Nazi group American Front—a dubious case quickly revealed to have been manufactured by FBI informants and agents, and in which only one of the 13 defendants received any jail time (a mere six months).
Given that White had no direct connection to any of the players in that case, it seems plausible that someone else had co-opted his Facebook account while he was running from the FBI in Mexico.
Nevertheless, White was eventually convicted in the Facebook case, too, and is now set to be incarcerated until 2037.
The Fed Files
White’s incarceration hasn’t stopped him from filing a dizzying number of lawsuits against various government agencies over the last decade.
Some of White’s litigation has been partially successful, and at least three of his lawsuits are still open—which has given him the opportunity to submit affidavits and exhibits to support his allegations. It’s these records, the Feds Files, that describe the FBI’s alleged right-wing provocation operation.
The most comprehensive account of the FBI’s alleged operation comes in a 97-page affidavit—sworn under the penalty of perjury—that White filed in 2020 to support his application for compassionate release, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
Some of White’s claims are unproven, such as his allegation that the February 2005 murders of Judge Lefkow’s husband and mother were retaliatory measures from the white supremacist movement.
However, White supported other claims with hard evidence. For instance, he attached FBI memos as exhibits to corroborate his claim that one of America’s oldest and largest neo-Nazi organizations, the National Socialist Movement, was co-founded by an FBI informant.
White also submitted a slew of records suggesting that the NSM was infiltrated by informants for most of its nearly 50-year history—raising the question of the extent to which the NSM was an FBI production. This question will be explored in part two of Headline USA’s Fed Files series.
Along with filing records about duplicitous alleged FBI operations, White has also documented his torture in the hellish American prison system.
According to a 2019 medical examination by psychologist Richard Samuels, White was once held in isolation in a brightly lit cell for about three months, and slept for only about an hour a day during that time—an incident that contributed to him developing PTSD.
“In 2014, while Mr. White was incarcerated at the John C. Polk Correctional Facility/Seminole County, FL, he was subjected to a regimen of sleep deprivation,” Dr. Samuels wrote in his report.
“As described earlier, he was placed in segregation; alone in a small seven-foot by seven-foot room with constant bright illumination (24/7) over a period that of 105 days, or about three months, during which time he averaged approximately 1.2 hours of sleep per night,” Dr. Samuels wrote.
“During this period, he underwent a period of not eating or drinking and ultimately collapsed in his cell.”
Dr. Samuels also noted that White has been diagnosed with “narcissistic personality disorder” for displaying “histrionic, antisocial, and obsessive-compulsive traits”—but the psychologist said White has not displayed signs of major psychiatric illness.
The BOP has responded to some of White’s torture allegations, arguing that holding an inmate in a lit cell doesn’t constitute torture. The BOP also asserted that White’s period of not eating and drinking was due to a hunger strike he underwent.
Other White allegations have been flatly denied by the BOP, including that he was held in a cell that was flooded with human feces in 2008.
A lawsuit White filed over his alleged torture was dismissed in 2021 for procedural reasons. He filed a similar lawsuit in June, arguing that the BOP exacerbated his PTSD symptoms by placing him in isolation due to COVID-19 protocols. That lawsuit is still open.
BOP Retaliation
While many of White’s claims are unproven—and indeed, some seem fantastical and implausible—it’s apparent that the U.S. government wants to keep him quiet. Shortly after he filed his 97-page affidavit in October 2020, the BOP restricted his mail privileges.
In an Oct. 20, 2020, letter, prison warden Daniel Sproul, who’s in charge of USP Marion, accused White of releasing sensitive information in his legal filings.
“You are attempting to circumvent control and monitoring of your communications by making the information you attempted to communicate in your rejected letters available by documenting them in your legal filings and instructing the recipients of your letters to retrieve them by reviewing your legal filings,” Sproul said.
“This behavior of accusing Billy Roper and other individuals of being confidential informants can reasonably be believed to pose a threat to the safety of an outside person,” Sproul said, referencing Roper—a long-time white nationalist personality and the founder of the Arkansas-based neo-Nazi group, the Shieldwall Network. Roper didn’t respond to requests for comment about White’s disclosures.
White sued the BOP in August 2021. Along with alleging that the BOP retaliated against him for his earlier legal filings, White also claimed that the U.S. government is punishing him for refusing to cooperate in an ongoing investigation of the Judge Lefkow murders.
Much of White’s complaint remains redacted, and evidence he’s filed is under seal. A lawyer with extensive experience litigating against the BOP told Headline USA that he’s never seen a redacted complaint against the BOP before.
Because a large portion of White’s claims are redacted, Headline USA is unable to verify whether what he says about the Lefkow murders has any veracity.
In any case, a district court tossed White’s Lefkow claims in a July decision, while allowing the allegations about the mail restrictions survive preliminary review.
After White’s mail-retaliation claim survived preliminary review in July, he was allowed to issue a summons to the BOP.
The BOP has until Oct. 2 to answer the summons. Both the BOP and FBI have declined to comment for this story.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
