(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a dark case involving a Satanic, neo-Nazi FBI informant who pushed others into doxing left-wing journalists in an alleged intimidation campaign.
SCOTUS’s Monday decision means that Kaleb Cole—a leader of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen—must serve the remainder of his seven-year sentence, which he received in January 2022 for mailing threatening posters or gluing the posters to the homes of journalists. The posters included the addresses and other personal information of the journalists, and the U.S. government took that as a threat.
Cole’s case grabbed national headlines in August 2021, when he filed a motion that revealed that a member of an online Atomwaffen chat group was longtime FBI informant Joshua Caleb Sutter, who also ran a Satanic publishing company. Cole revealed that Sutter received more than $144,000 over roughly 16 years as an informant—meaning that the FBI was essentially bankrolling a publisher of Satanic literature.
“The CI [confidential informant] is a convicted felon and currently owns and operates a publishing company that distributes white supremacist writings,” Cole said in his Aug. 13, 2021 filing.
Cole’s revelations were a part of his unsuccessful to have evidence suppressed that was gathered with the help of Sutter, and the Atomwaffen leader was found guilty several months later.
He appealed his conviction to SCOTUS in October. But rather than arguing entrapment, Cole said his activities should have been protected by the First Amendment.
“Specifically, the charges relate to sending posters via mail to journalists and lobbyists and affixing them to their doorsteps and offices. The problem though was that from Cole’s perspective, it was not a campaign of threats but an exercise in activism, specifically demonstrative and retaliatory speech,” Cole argued in his October petition.
Cole further noted that the FBI, which had thoroughly infiltrated Atomwaffen and was tracking all the group’s activities, told the journalists targeted that they were never in real danger.
And according to Cole, the government asserted at his trial that the posters were threats of violence, but was unable to quantify what exactly that threat entailed.
“They maintained from the criminal complaint onward that Cole had caused ‘emotional distress’ in his alleged victims and had derived subjective intent to threaten from the aforementioned information,” argued Cole, who represented himself.
Cole warned that earlier court rulings have opened a “pandora’s box” by allowing convictions for constitutionally protected speech.
SCOTUS is apparently content to leave that pandora’s box open for the time being. The court did not require the Justice Department to respond to Cole’s petition before dismissing it, not did it give any reasons for declining to hear the case.
Cole’s case bares similarities to that of neo-Nazi inmate Bill White, who was imprisoned in 2008 for publishing 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.
White is the source of an ongoing Headline USA series called the Fed Files, which is about the FBI’s infiltration of the American Nazi movement. As it happens, White is the man who first accused Sutter of being FBI informant around 2017—four years before Sutter’s identity as an FBI informant was confirmed in Cole’s case.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
