It’s a good thing racism is over in America (thanks Chief Justice Roberts!) because otherwise we’d have truly awful nonsense like this happening.
Cameron James Stout, 24, of Stover was arrested on Tuesday and remains in custody after an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Jefferson City, Missouri’s capital, prosecutors said.
An informant told a Morgan County sheriff’s deputy that Stout had asked him on Thursday for a high-powered rifle and assistance in a plan to shoot the president in the next few weeks, an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint said.
Over the next few days, the informant, a former member of the Aryan Nation, met with Stout and agreed to put him in touch with a high-ranking member of the organization who could help him obtain a rifle and plan the attack, the affidavit said.
Stout drew diagrams of the Washington, D.C., area and talked about possible positions from which he could fire at the White House or a church the president attends, the affidavit said.
The Missouri man also told the informant he had loaned out a .270-caliber rifle with a scope, but had gotten it back and planned to use it in the crime, the affidavit said.
On Tuesday, Stout told the informant and an undercover officer who was posing as an Aryan Nation superior that he planned to shoot Obama the next time the president appeared in Kansas City, the affidavit said.
Why, it’s enough to drive the US Secret Service to drink.
debbie
But, but…there are no bitter Whites!
Germy Shoemangler
I am very glad they got this guy.
I wonder why he was a “former” member.
Maybe he thought if he succeeded, they’d be so impressed they”d take him back?
Will this be covered on Fox News, or ignored?
Earl
…the secret service needs a reason to drink..?
Hoodie
Not that surprising to find that in that part of Missouri, it’s pretty much like Alabama. Kind of interesting that a local sheriff would (1) have an informant who is a former member of Aryan Nation (meth?) and (2) pull off an undercover op to nab the guy. Morgan Co. is pretty much nowhere except for the part that borders Lake of the Ozarks.
Cervantes
@Hoodie:
Yes, and that informant had better get out of Dodge pronto.
Bobby B.
More slave-state hijinks.
AxelFoley
Give this muthafucka the electric chair.
Betty Cracker
Obviously this story is a lie since it mentions a church PBO attends, and we all know he attends a mosque, not a church. /wingnut
Hal
He’s never heard of Google maps?
dmsilev
Well, there’s your problem right there. Everyone knows the President attends a mosque.
MattF
Yeah, well, it’s not racism because… because… just because because.
JPL
@dmsilev: lol
Bobby Thomson
@Germy Shoemangler: the informant was a former member, not the perp.
Germy Shoemangler
@Bobby Thomson: Ahh, I see.
My reading comprehension has gone downhill. I tend to skim, which leads to misunderstandings like this.
Helmut Monotreme
I don’t understand the “thinking” that’s going on here. Are they aware they live in a democracy, and Obama is not an emperor? Are they aware if Obama is killed that Biden will be president and pick up right where Obama left off? Did they notice that when Lincoln was shot that the South didn’t magically win the civil war or that when Kennedy was shot, that the civil rights movement didn’t go away?
patrick II
If you think this sounds serious, you should know that a striking teacher gave Scott Walker a dirty look once.
C.V. Danes
Given all the nuttery and gun waiving going on now days, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t taken a shot yet. Truly surprised.
NorthLeft12
Personally, I think the wing nuts will use this story to further justify that America has moved past racism, as the plot to kill Obama is/was just like all the plots to kill any of the Republican Presidents.
You remember? The plots by the New Black Panthers, PETA, tree huggers, and other fellow travelers on the far left.
But really, this story just further emphasizes for me that for a growing segment of the US population, the solution to many problems [particularly political] are found at the end of a weapon.
OzarkHillbilly
@Helmut Monotreme: Didn’t you know that the solutions to all problems come from the barrel of a gun? Don’t you watch the movies anymore?
Big ole hound
Missouri is finally being recognized as violently racist. I lived there in the late 60s (St Louis county) and it was worse than the deep south. Out in the countryside racism was even more out in the open. It appears to be out in the open again right alongside that “old time religion”.
Bobby Thomson
The baldknobbers never left.
Gene108
@C.V. Danes:
People have taken shots. They just miss.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/white-house-shooting/
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/09/white-house-security-knife-man-20149212334522527.html
Cervantes
@Helmut Monotreme:
The Aryan Nation and company?
Surely it’s not about “thinking.” It’s about hate.
Bobby Thomson
@Helmut Monotreme: actually, when Lincoln was shot the South did win. Johnson gave up everything.
EconWatcher
I know your angle on this story is white supremacists who want to kill the president, but as a former criminal defense lawyer, I have a different reaction: Just how many members of Aryan Nations do we have on the payroll as informants?
The use of informants is an ugly, nasty practice, and not a few times federal agents have lost their heads and become criminals themselves in the process. I’m not saying it’s never justified, but damn it goes wrong a lot. The people who make viable informants are usually by definition total scumbags; who else do you think could plausibly hang with the Aryan Nations? And then, who really controls the agenda–the LE guys or the scumbag informant?
I defended a meth manufacturing case in which the DEA informant was the only one who knew how to cook meth and helpfully supplied all the funding and equipment. Somewhat like Jesse in Breaking Bad, my moron client acted as some kind of pathetic lab assistant, promised all kinds of riches.
The DEA was trying to get my guy to lead them to a motorcycle gang involved in distribution, but he was just the town loser and couldn’t do it. When the operation was finally wound up, he was left holding the bag for the entire amount cooked by the informant under conspiracy laws. I tried an entrapment defense, but particularly in fed court, you can only win those if you’ve got a beautiful middle class defendant; juries just won’t spring for it. (I did get the judge to reduce the guidelines sentence on the argument that it was really the government and not he who determined the amount produced.)
My guy got sent up for 8 years. The informant was a far, far nastier piece of work, but got like 3 years for the huge operation he had run before he was flipped.
We need more of a conversation about informants. If there were more sunlight, most people wouldn’t like what they saw.
Keith G
@Helmut Monotreme:
Thinking? Understand?
Folks filled with this much hate have left the rational world a long time ago. The damage done to them is deep and and significant. Trying to diagram logic or coherence in their thought process is a lost cause.
OzarkHillbilly
@Big ole hound: Welcome to my world, tho the violence is overstated a little. I have had “Black Lives Matter” in the back window of my truck for some months now and nobody has fvcked with it or me in all that time. In truth, nobody says anything at all. I have gotten a few looks tho, but even those have been mostly positive. Still, I am not about to leave it all day at a river access while I go floating.
Zandar
@EconWatcher:
Oh, that’s incredibly disturbing as well, and I agree with you. Here’s the thing: I thought all these right wing hate groups didn’t exist, because that’s what FOX says.
But they’re federal informants.
Betty Cracker
@EconWatcher: Interesting. I heard a “Democracy Now” segment on this yesterday regarding how the feds sometimes entrap addled crackpots into terrorism plots, even supplying the money and fake weapons and egging the addled bastards on and then busting people who are clearly mentally ill and sending them to prison for decades. Goodman on DN interviewed a reporter from The Intercept on a case outlined here.
I agree with you that some really ugly shit goes down, and in the case you described, it’s clearly fucked up that the less culpable and dangerous person ended up doing harder time. But in the possibly trumped up terrorism charges in the article linked above, I understand the dilemma from the point of view of the feds too.
OzarkHillbilly
@Zandar: Heh.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@EconWatcher:
It is tricky, though, because groups like Aryan Nations are terrorist groups who finance their activities through crime rather than simple criminals. But there is often the problem of whether the informant is simply an informant or if they’re acting as an agent provocateur. Sometimes they take it upon themselves to be an agent provocateur and sometimes it’s an overzealous cop/FBI agent who encourages them to do it.
I think it’s worth having informants within terrorist groups to keep an eye on their activities, but I can see that there is a line that can be tempting for law enforcement to cross.
Helmut Monotreme
@Bobby Thomson:Andrew Johnson was more lenient than Lincoln, but even so the confederates didn’t get their slaves back, their dead were still dead and their cities were still burned to the ground. The south still lost everything it fought for. The union was preserved and slavery was abolished. Those were Lincoln’s goals and they remained achieved. The fact that Southern rich people still got to oppress the hell out of African Americans was A-OK with lots of people in the north.
Cervantes
@EconWatcher:
I think you’re right. What are the alternatives?
Also, and it’s a concern at a different level, and I guess it’s a manageable one, but stray beams of “sunlight” have been known to kill informants, undercover operatives, and (other) innocents.
ruemara
@Germy Shoemangler: skimming through is half the problem with both sides.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Betty Cracker:
IIRC, part of the issue is plea bargaining. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a spate of the wives/girlfriends of drug dealers getting hard time for their (sometimes unwitting) activities supporting the drug dealing operation because they were at too low of a level to have enough information to bargain for a reduced sentence. Meanwhile, their drug kingpin boyfriends/husbands were only getting a couple of years because they had a lot of information to trade. It’s pretty effed up.
It sounds like it may have been a similar issue with EconWatcher’s client — he was drawn into the operation by someone else and left holding the bag because he didn’t know enough about the operation to bargain that information for a reduced sentence.
EconWatcher
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Exactly right. But there is the additional issue of the informants actually creating the crime. The entrapment defense does not adequately address that. Ask any federal defense lawyer how that defense almost always goes. Yeah, John Delorean won on that defense, but he had the feds on tape actually threatening his family if he didn’t go through with the deal.
EconWatcher
@Betty Cracker:
I would add that job performance evaluations for federal agents often depends on their “stats,” and desire to improve their stats can lead to the kind of behavior you mentioned.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Betty Cracker:
WereBear sometimes talks about a book she read that said terrorist groups often recruit suicide bombers by seeking out people who are already depressed and suicidal. It sounds as though the FBI is doing the same thing, only they give them fake bombs and send them to jail.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@EconWatcher:
Right, that’s why I called them “agents provocateurs” in my previous comment. There’s that thin line between an informant going along with someone else’s plan to commit a crime and the informant doing the planning him/herself to push the others into it.
I always think of the supposed Sears Tower bombers, who wouldn’t have been able to get past their argument over who was going to run the head shop that they hadn’t bought yet that was going to finance all of their terrorist activities if they hadn’t been pushed by their informant to get it together. And even then all they managed to do was film a couple of videos of Sears Tower before they went off to smoke more weed.
Hoodie
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Can’t really tell from the story whether this involved the fed. Could it be that these were locals, i.e., you have a sheriff in a backwoods county (Morgan county is nowhere) running undercover operations with white supremacists? Is the meth problem in Morgan Co. that bad? Is the white supremacist problem that bad? The kid looks dazed and confused and that .270 rig is something usually reserved for deer hunting. Yeah, you could use it for an assassination, but this sounds kind of far fetched.
My sister lives nearby in Jeff City. When I’ve traveled around there and similar places in the south, I have a sense that some rural whites are almost feral, like the Gutres in “The Gospel According to St. Mark.”
Couldn't Stand the Weather
The more I read about modern law enforcement, the more I want to avert my eyes.
Glad they stopped that idiot, but I am still thrown by like this. Like that Chicago site called Homan Square. Dick Wolf and the Law & Order writers make those shows tough to watch sometimes; this real shit is as bad or worse.
Villago Delenda Est
@AxelFoley: He’s not worth the electricity that would be used.
There are other methods that use less energy.
Chris
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
It seems like real life is Hollywood in reverse here. Instead of going easy on the underpaid overworked Punch Clock Villain underlings in exchange for them flipping so we can get the Big Bad, we go easy on the Big Bad so we can get all his underlings. Apparently, our society is so screwed up that the Golden Parachute principle applies even when dealing with the mob.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Ayuh. AGs can promote their statistics (# of convictions), police can use the numbers to simultaneously brag about the criminals “off the streets” and whinge to city/county/state that they need bigger budgets to collar all those criminals, and the corrections industry can take all of that to the bank. And each of those will take their proceeds and donate to the pols who help make it all happen, so pols stay “tough on crime” to keep their
ownersconstituents happy.Chris
@boatboy_srq:
You would think that with a tiny bit of work, getting your face in the paper as The Man Who Put Away Our Generation’s [Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky] would bring you just as much good PR as rates of convictions, if not more. After all, people love a Good vs. Evil story a lot more than the “fuzzy math” of numbers.
WaterGirl
@boatboy_srq: Completely OT, but you mentioned in another thread that you had seen the coffee shop sign about misbehaving children being given an espresso and a puppy.
I wonder if that’s a common sign or if we were at the same coffee shop? I saw it in Boulder, Colorado in 2009 when I was volunteering for the Obama campaign and it made me smile every day so I took a photo of it on my last day.
Cervantes
@WaterGirl:
It’s a common sign. I’ve seen it in tens of locations, if not more.
boatboy_srq
@WaterGirl: I think it’s gone, not exactly viral, but certainly distributed. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I’ve done my latte-sipping all up and down the West Coast and a bunch of the East Coast as well. It could be I saw the pic, could be I saw it in an actual shop. Never been to Colorado, so it definitely wasn’t the sign you saw.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: High conviction numbers translate (amongst the lawnorder wingers) as “tough on crime”. High stats sell really well – especially when they go hand-in-hand with Fauxnews coverage of things like the local Blah People acting out or bigger events like the Rodney King riots. They’re interpreted as S/He’s Keeping Us Safe From Those People. That the only thing high conviction rates really seems to do is increase the prison population is feature-not-bug. Most of the big names that would merit special mention, though, tend to fall dangerously close to the People Like Us (most of the Wall Street bigwigs look dangerously close to what they think they see in the mirror, for example), so going after a 21st century big crime name doesn’t do much unless his name is Morales or Rodriguez – and then it’s more proof that Securing the Borders is necessary.
de stijl
So is every RWNJ a grifter? Can no wingnut actually buy their own shit?
Cervantes
@Cervantes:
Not really.
Meant to say “maybe ten locations, maybe more.”