How Patriot Front’s white nationalist leader avoided prosecution

February 10, 2024.1/5 or 6

Nearly two years ago, police in North Idaho had the leader of America’s largest white nationalist group and 30 of his followers unmasked, zip-tied and in custody.

They'd been caught June 11, 2022, based on a tip that said a “little army” of masked men had been seen filing into the back of a U-Haul truck. Coeur d’Alene police pulled open the back door, found a squadron of men equipped with white masks, metal flag poles, homemade sheet-metal riot shields and a smoke grenade.

And on the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, police found a note laying out a detailed plan to establish a “confrontational dynamic” at that day’s gay pride festival.

Rousseau is the head of Patriot Front, a secretive racist organization of young men that has beenrunning a guerrilla marketing campaign for white nationalism since the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Patriot Front frequently targets minority communities with racist propaganda vandalism, said Jeff Tischauser, research analyst for theSouthern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate organization. They spray-paint over gay pride murals. They deface George Floyd memorials. And they show up to events like Coeur d’Alene’s Pride in the Park with masks, shields and smoke bombs in an attempt to intimidate participants into staying home, he said. (SPLC has already debunked this entire article)

But this time, every one of them was arrested, booked into jail and charged by local prosecutors with conspiracy to riot by disturbing the peace. Anti-extremism experts have been watching the case closely ever since, hoping Patriot Front would face consequences.

“The prosecution in Coeur d'Alene finally had an opportunity to hold them accountable for their harassment and their intimidation of the diverse community,” Tischauser said.

Instead, Rousseau’s case never got to trial.

While most of Rousseau’s underlings have either been found guilty of conspiracy to riot or pleaded to a lesser infraction, Judge John Cafferty dismissed the case against the white nationalist leader in November.

“This is an important case. It should not be dismissed lightly,” Cafferty said, according to court transcripts. “I tried to do what I could to not get to this point.”

But after a year and a half of delays, lost evidence and failures of prosecutors to follow court orders, he said he didn’t have a choice. The prosecutors, on the other hand, blamed judges and defense attorneys for the case devolving “into a forum for fishing expeditions justified by nothing more than bumper sticker claims.”

In all, it highlights just how difficult it is for an overwhelmed and understaffed team of prosecutors to take on a case involving so many extremists at once.

It’s one reason why Kris Goldsmith, head of an anti-fascist research organization, said the Patriot Front case should not have been handled by local prosecutors to begin with.

“Expecting a city prosecutor to take on a national white supremacist organization is disappointing,” Goldsmith said. “The FBI is just sitting on their hands.”

In fact, court documents suggest,the FBI made prosecuting Patriot Front a lot harder. (You don’t say, hmmm)

https://cdapress.com/news/2024/feb/10/how-prosecutors-lost-the-case-against-patriot-fronts-white-nationalist-leader/

>>21193288

2/5 or 6

OVERLOADED, UNDERSTAFFED

The Coeur d’Alene community has already had plenty of practice defying hate groups. Over two decades ago, community members stood up to white supremacist Richard Butler and the other neo-Nazis on his Aryan Nations compound in nearby Hayden Lake. And Patriot Front had targeted the city repeatedly with graffiti and racist propaganda flyers.

“We need to catch these people,” Steve Widmyer, then mayor of Coeur d’Alene, wrote in 2021 after a local college was targeted that August. “Disgusting.”

In 2022, police caught 31 of them at once. Yet, the size of the catch, ironically, may have helped the biggest fish get away.

Even the limited size of local courtrooms quickly became a problem.

“We could have asked to join all 31 cases, but the reality is that Kootenai County does not have a facility to handle something like that,” Wes Somerton, the head of Coeur d’Alene’s criminal prosecutors, later told the court.

Instead, the prosecutor's office initially charged all the cases separately, though they later tried to combine them.

While prosecutors did not return interview requests from InvestigateWest, court records show how the sheer size of the caseload quickly clogged up the local judicial system. The city prosecutors handling the cases had to pinball between the courts of nine judges. Scheduling alone was a nightmare: One week, there were two different Patriot Front trials scheduled before two different judges in two different courtrooms, involving the same witnesses.

As a small city, there are only four attorneys in the city prosecutor's office, tasked with handling all misdemeanors and infractions within city limits. And then, in the middle of the Patriot Front prosecutions, one of the four went on paternity leave, meaning prosecutors were left pulling double-docket duty. A prescheduled summer vacation meant every case on the docket had to be handled by two prosecutors.

In July 2023, neither remaining city prosecutor showed up for a scheduled hearing in one Patriot Front case. Judge Destry Randles was unsympathetic.

“The court is not in the business of tracking down attorneys when they are not where they are supposed to be,” Randles said, according to court transcripts.

Similarly, afterDeputy City Attorney Ryan Hunter was chastised for failing to get the defense some court-required information, he pointed to the short-staffed prosecutor’s office for why it slipped his mind. In court documents, he wrote that he’d fallen “victim to the ever-present cracks into which things fall for every person, attorney and judge alike at some point.”

A number of Patriot Front members, meanwhile, wererepresented by aggressive private attorneys, paid at a rate of $150 an hour by the Kootenai County taxpayers, instead of a harried public defenders office.

The public defenders office had concluded they’d only be able to represent one of the 31 defendants without there being a conflict of interest. So for the others who couldn’t afford an attorney, the county recruited other local private lawyers to pinch-hit.

After trying to represent himself for six months,Rousseau applied for a public defender in December 2022. Instead, he was handed private attorney Kinzo Mihara. Mihara was a Marine veteranwho’d been given a Carnegie Medal for dragging a man from a burning helicopter cockpit, and not afraid to brag about it in court.

https://cdapress.com/news/2024/feb/10/how-prosecutors-lost-the-case-against-patriot-fronts-white-nationalist-leader/

>>21193310

3/5 or 6

He worked evenings and weekends to get caught up on the Patriot Front case, according to an affidavit.He unleashed repeated salvos of bombast against the prosecutors, declaring in one court document that the prosecution team "spits upon the grave, and defiles the memory, of the Patriots who gave their last drop of blood and dying breaths in support of our great Constitution.”

In court filings, Hunter accused Mihara of “hyperbolic hostility and vitriol,” of being “self-congratulatory” and “braggadocious,” and of abandoning “professionalism in favor of performative advocacy.”

But, ultimately, Mihara’s tactics worked.He managed to turn a key collection of evidence — what may have seemed like a massive coup for law enforcement — into the prosecution’s downfall.

LOST CELLPHONE

After officers had arrested Patriot Front members,they’d hauled away a potential treasure trove of evidence: 37 Patriot Front devices, according to police records, including cellphones wrapped in signal-blocking foil, SD cards, GoPro cameras and a USB stick. In all, there wereroughly 3,500 gigabytes worth of everything from Hitler pictures to swastika logos to — in one case — child pornography.(definitely FBI)

It was like opening Pandora’s box, one judge later said. The Patriot Front cases ground to a halt as defense attorneys demanded time to sift through all the new information.

The data didn’t help the prosecutors. ==Some judges had ruled the police didn’t have probable cause for the July 11 arrest of Patriot Front and barred them from using it.=

But the defense thought it could help them. If one of those cellphones had information that could help prove a defendant’s innocence, then the defense was legally entitled to see it.

Mihara argued there just might be. In court documents, he wrote that the cellphone of a Patriot Front videographer potentially contained a video of Patriot Front leadership instructing members to refrain from violence and to be respectful while protesting Pride in the Park.

Just one problem: The police had already handed all 37 devices over to the FBI, before a sealed federal warrant had been signed. Mihara called the move "ludicrous."

In an email to InvestigateWest, the Coeur d’Alene Police Department said they would have likely sent them to the FBI anyway, as they “have an electronic forensics lab that could process the phones in a timely manner whereas our agency resources would have taken months to complete.”

But that analysis took more than seven months to complete, according to court records=. And when they were finally done, the FBI wouldn’t give back the actual phones (The FBI declined to comment for this story==).

Mihara was incensed. The idea that a prosecutor could simply hide evidence by sending it to a federal agency, he wrote in a court filing, "embodies the very tyranny our forefathers saw in their British masters.”

https://cdapress.com/news/2024/feb/10/how-prosecutors-lost-the-case-against-patriot-fronts-white-nationalist-leader/