The Daily Beast reports on information from an FBI search warrant that indicates agents were investigating messages among three Arkansans that included talk of attacking or bombing Black people, drug users and the Democratic National Committee.
The talk is chilling, but it seems to have come to nothing. Said the article:
The investigation began in late August 2019, when a tipster contacted the FBI about disturbingly violent conversations they had observed in a private Facebook Messenger chat group named “Right Wing Death Squad.” According to the FBI, three men were behind the troubling chats: James Wisdom of Arkansas; mechanic Jason D’Juan Garfield—also of Arkansas—who went by the noms de guerre “Moon Man” and “Jugger Bugger;” and [Travis] Owens, a Marine Corps E-1 from Arkansas stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.
“Rhetoric in the private chat messages was consistent with racially motivated extremism ideology, to include aspirational violence against religious and racial minorities,” states the affidavit, which was signed by Special Agent Ryan Crump of the FBI Little Rock Joint Terrorism Task Force.
The only one of the three who has been charged to date is Garfield, who in May 2021 was sentenced [in Fort Smith federal court] to 78 months in prison for illegal [machine] gun possession. Charges against Wisdom and Owens have not been filed, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast, and neither has a lawyer listed in court records. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen, the prosecutor handling the case, declined to comment.
In pleading for a lighter sentence, Garfield’s lawyer conceded his client’s racially disturbing messaging with others but described a troubled childhood as a reason.
The Daily Beast reports that Owens was kicked out of the Marines in April 2020 after news of the investigation surfaced.
