The Last Time the Justice Department Prosecuted a Seditious Conspiracy Case
Rioters try to scale the walls of the Capitol building, Jan. 6, 2021 (Blink O fanaye/https://flic.kr/p/2kpYYza/CC BY-NC 2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)
Lenawee County, Michigan, had an apocalyptic Christian nationalist militia problem about a decade ago. The group called itself the Hutaree, a name that members said meant “Christian Warriors,” though the FBI said it didn’t mean anything at all.
The Hutaree saw themselves as soldiers to a higher power. The ex-wife of the group’s founder, David Stone, characterized her former husband’s beliefs as religiosity that spiraled out of control. She told reporters during their trial that “[i]t started out as a Christian thing …. You go to church. You pray. . I think David started to take it a little too far” and “went from handguns to big guns.”
When Hector Xavier Monsegur reviewed the hacker movie Blackhat for the news site the Daily Dot (published under the byline of Kevin Collier, national security reporter), there were rumblings. Monsegur, better known as Sabu, had been the de facto leader of LulzSec and AntiSec; later he became better-known for selling out his crew members and becoming not merely a cooperative federal witness, but a proactive collaborator who willingly directed, then sold out his crew members. Former crewmate Jeremy Hammond, for instance, has done his best from behind the bars where he’ll be for the next ten years to explain that Monsegur and the FBI created, ordered, and facilitated crimes including those for which Hammond is serving time.