Neo-Nazis still talk about Brian P. Haughton. He played drums in Arresting Officers, one of the biggest neo-Nazi punk bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They churned out dozens of violent skinhead anthems before Haughton became a Philadelphia police officer in 1995.
Now Haughton works in domestic counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has access to sensitive intelligence used by more than 1,000 federal agencies and police departments in all fifty states to stop attacks by white supremacists—the deadliest domestic terrorist movement in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
“A person like him, I’m sure he still has these beliefs. You don’t join the cops being racist and then get un-racist being a cop.” — Frank Meeink
As of early November, at least, Haughton worked in the Justice Department’s Regional Information Sharing Systems program, dubbed RISS. Law enforcement agencies share intelligence regionally and nationally through its platform, one of several that have proliferated since 9/11. It is also used by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Haughton, now in his early fifties, works as a law enforcement coordinator in RISS’s Middle Atlantic–Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network in Newtown, Pennsylvania, one of six regional centers spanning the United States. Haughton has this job even though his links to the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi gang suspected of funding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—the single largest domestic terror attack in U.S. history—are easily traceable on Google.
The Aryan Republican Army had six known members. Three were friends of Haughton’s from the skinhead music scene in Philadelphia—Scott Stedeford, Kevin McCarthy, and Michael Brescia. In 1996, when he was a twenty-four-year-old college student, Brescia was investigated by the FBI on the suspicion that he was John Doe 2—the Oklahoma City bombing suspect who was never caught. (The FBI later claimed John Doe 2 didn’t exist.)
Haughton also has this job even though the Justice Department, in conducting a security clearance investigation, could have found lyrics for twenty-four Arresting Officers songs on a single webpage on songlyrics.com.
One Arresting Officers song is called “Lone Wolf.” The term often refers to a terrorist who acts alone, without the help of a government or political organization. “Lone wolf, on the prowl, protect your family, survival now,” it goes. The song is about waging a race war against the government.
But lone wolf attacks aren’t usually a solitary affair. The white supremacist movement, for example, often uses them to hide the involvement of its leaders and of the movement itself, a strategy it adopted when it declared war on the state almost forty years ago, as Kathleen Belew writes in her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.
Former skinhead Frank Meeink on the day before his first laser treatment to remove his neo-Nazi tattoos in 1996. His knuckle tattoos spell “SKINHEAD.”
“Lone wolf, on the streets, protect your culture and your creed,” sang the Arresting Officers. The band’s name alluded to the racist belief that arresting officers have the best job on the force: They’re the ones who get to kick the crap out of Black people.
According to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, white supremacists have killed more people than any other type of domestic terrorist since 2000. The Biden Administration’s new domestic counterterrorism strategy, released in June, found that white supremacists and anti-government militia extremists are the most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians and to target government officials and the police.
But the threat of white supremacist terrorism often comes from the inside. The FBI warned its agents in 2006 that white supremacists were getting jobs as police officers in order to access intelligence and weapons training. The bureau also said these officers threatened the safety of lawmakers, “whom they could see as potential targets for violence.”
At least eighty defendants charged in connection with the January 6 insurrection—which has been designated as an act of domestic terrorism—have law enforcement or military connections, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.
The predominantly white and white supremacist mob intended to kill lawmakers inside the Capitol that day. “Strategic political assassination,” according to a lyric by the Arresting Officers, “can make America a better nation.” It’s in their song “Get the Reds Out.”
Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi leader from Philadelphia, says he met Haughton once—at a skinhead meeting in the late 1980s. “A person like him should never have been able to become a cop. That’s just a fact,” Meeink tells The Progressive.
“This is a persistent problem in policing, where police underestimate white people as threats.” — Vida Johnson
Meeink was only thirteen when he was indoctrinated into the neo-Nazi skinhead movement. By 1992, at age seventeen, he was one of its most prolific recruiters and the most dangerous skinhead in the United States. Now he’s a police reform activist and the author of Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, a memoir about leaving the movement. He has run hate crimes training for police departments, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security.
“If they knew about his past when they hired him, then they’re corrupt. If they didn’t, then they’re incompetent, because he was a large name out in that area—in the nation,” says Meeink, referring to Haughton’s hiring at Regional Information Sharing Systems.
“If they’ve been hiring more wrong cops, then it’s time to say we need to limit your fucking access to us,” he adds, “because you’ve been hiring wrong and training wrong.”
Vida Johnson
Law enforcement remains predominantly white and conservative. Many departments, according to Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson, are willing to give white job candidates the benefit of the doubt, even when a candidate has a racist affiliation.
“This is a persistent problem in policing, where police underestimate white people as threats,” Johnson tells The Progressive.
Police in Little Rock, Arkansas, for example, hired a white police officer in 2007 despite knowing that he had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting. He was hired anyway, on the basis that he was a teenager when he went to that meeting. “And of course, he ends up killing a young Black kid,” Johnson says.
“One of the things I’m slightly obsessed with right now is just how bad police officers are at rationally assessing threats, and this is a really good example,” she says, referring to Haughton.
“You’ve got a person who has an easy-to-find background, and you hire that person over probably other qualified candidates, and yet at the same time not understanding the threat that he poses to people outside your demographic.”
Johnson says this is part of a larger dynamic where law enforcement officials “focus on Black Lives Matter and this idea of an organization called antifa, while letting 800 people storm the Capitol.”
Three voicemails left by The Progressive at a Philadelphia cellphone number belonging to a Brian P. Haughton seeking comment for this story were not returned. Nor was an email sent to an address confirmed as Haughton’s by the main operator at Middle Atlantic–Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network. A phone message left with the operator for Haughton was also not returned. The operator did confirm, on November 3, that Haughton is employed there. Middle Atlantic’s executive director, Douglas Burig, and Regional Information Sharing Systems’ chief information officer, Matt McDonald, declined comment. The Philadelphia Police Department declined to comment except to provide the dates of Haughton’s employment, which were from 1995 to 2017.
“Police are hired to protect all of us,” says Johnson. “When law enforcement is repeatedly demonstrating how it only protects its own rather than serving the public, it’s time to think about dismantling law enforcement in this country, at least the way it exists now.”
Michael German is a Brennan Center fellow and former FBI special agent who investigated neo-Nazi groups undercover in the 1990s. He says he doubts an employer like RISS would miss a neo-Nazi affiliation if it conducted a pre-employment background check.
“A white supremacist couldn’t prosper in law enforcement agencies if the prosecutors didn’t go along with it, if the judges didn’t go along with it, if the government didn’t go along with it.” — Michael German
“Police officers know who among them is racist,” German tells The Progressive. Moreover, the FBI allowed white supremacist infiltration to persist. In 2015, when the FBI reported “active links” between police officers and white supremacists suspected of domestic terrorism, the bureau took steps to protect its domestic counterterrorism investigations from officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist connections on platforms like RISS but otherwise denied there was a problem.
“In the months before January 6, the FBI was ignoring that white supremacists continued to recruit officers,” says German. “People inside had seen it as such a threat and FBI managers refused to see it because it didn’t fit their policy preferences. That’s where anyone in the system having ideological bias or blind spots is so problematic.”
Paul Morigi
Michael German
As German sees it, “A white supremacist couldn’t prosper in law enforcement agencies if the prosecutors didn’t go along with it, if the judges didn’t go along with it, if the government didn’t go along with it.”
In the mid-1990s, three of Haughton’s skinhead friends were involved in robbing twenty-two banks in the Midwest as members of the Aryan Republican Army (also called the Midwest Bank Bandits). The notorious neo-Nazi criminal gang was suspected of funding the Oklahoma City bombing with proceeds totaling a quarter of a million dollars.
In a January 1995 recruitment video, Aryan Republican Army leader Peter Langan asks the other members if they are ready for a “courthouse massacre.” “One answers in the affirmative,” states a 1996 FBI intelligence report, “and displays a semi-automatic handgun and says there will be many congressman [sic] and judges there.” The Oklahoma City bombing, which included a courthouse, took place on April 19, 1995.
Haughton knew the three culprits through Break the Sword, a neo-Nazi skinhead band he played in around the time he joined the Philadelphia Police Department, on January 2, 1995. He eventually quit that band (it was rechristened Day of the Sword following his departure). But he is known to have continued to hang out with Day of the Sword members during the gang’s two-year crime spree from 1994 to 1996.
Federal investigators found no link between the Aryan Republican Army and the Oklahoma City bombing. But critics say evidence of a possible connection was suppressed to protect the government’s case against its prime suspect, Timothy McVeigh.
In the months preceding the attack, Haughton’s Aryan Republican Army friends had been living at the white supremacist Elohim City compound in Oklahoma with an associate of McVeigh’s named Andreas Strassmeir. According to an informant for the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the bombing was planned by Strassmeir and others at Elohim City.
Shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh called Strassmeir in Elohim City on April 5, “a day that he was believed to have been attempting to recruit a second conspirator to assist in” the attack, according to a 1996 FBI intelligence report. (McVeigh later claimed he had called for permission to hide in Elohim City after the attack.)
According to the federal informant, Oklahoma City was meant to trigger a “racial holy war” against the federal government.
The Aryan Republican Army also sought a race war. It gave robbery money to white supremacist groups for this cause and stockpiled weapons with the rest of the stolen cash. After winning the racial holy war, the gang intended to install a white supremacist dictatorship.
Jews would be exterminated and people of color deported once the Aryan Republican Army was in charge, according to the group’s recruitment video. “We know where you work,” the video warns. “We know where you live. You’re not that hard to find.”
After January 6, the Biden Administration made domestic terrorism a top investigation priority, citing a dramatic increase in white supremacist violence and promising more than $100 million in new funding to prevent future attacks.
The administration’s domestic counterterrorism strategy directs the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to “improve screening and vetting processes” to ensure domestic terrorists aren’t hired into the military or law enforcement. “Training and resources” will be developed for state and local law enforcement agencies “to enhance their own employee screening programs and prevent individuals who pose domestic terrorism threats from being placed in positions of trust.”
In September, policymakers from the DOJ, Homeland Security, and the FBI testified at a House Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee hearing about their vague progress implementing these new screening measures. Chaired by Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, the subcommittee has been investigating white supremacist violence and domestic terrorism since 2019, bringing in experts like Meeink, Johnson, and German to testify. It has held six hearings so far.
“The bloody trail of violent white supremacy is now splattered across America,” Raskin declared at a subcommittee hearing last year. [See page 55 for an interview with Raskin.]
But none of the subcommittee’s sixteen members—ten Democrats and six Republicans—returned The Progressive’s multiple requests for comment for this story. Raskin’s communications director, Jacob Wilson, set up an interview for November 5 but then canceled.
The Justice Department also did not return requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
Meeink testified before the subcommittee in September 2020 and since then has publicly identified neo-Nazis who became police officers. To his dismay, he says there was “not one phone call from the FBI or any police department asking about this problem.” German, when asked what this silence could mean, points to institutional bias against people of color.
“It highlights the scope of the problem throughout our society, not just in law enforcement.” says German. “As we’ve seen, even trying to get an official investigation of the assault on the Capitol, that some members of Congress are resisting that, and don’t want to acknowledge the scope of the problem. They don’t even want to acknowledge it’s a problem. That’s certainly part of why it’s up to the general public to make sure we’re promoting this problem as a priority that needs to be fixed.”
Elohim City is a Christian Identity compound. Christian Identity is white supremacy’s terrorism recruitment tool. It deploys a virulently antisemitic and racist interpretation of the Bible to radicalize followers. For example, Christian Identity preaches that “Aryans” are the real descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, and Jews are the product of a sleazy tryst between Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Young Christian Identity recruits learn that the Apocalypse is near, and that the end times will be a racial holy war between “good” Aryan soldiers and the “evil,” Jewish-controlled government. Recruits—many in their teens, like Meeink—are trained in paramilitary combat to carry out God’s purported plan to exterminate Jews and thereby save the world.
In the early 1990s, Meeink trained in a makeshift camp at the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, home of former Aryan Nations leader Mark Thomas, a manipulative Christian Identity preacher then in his mid-forties. Thomas convinced Meeink and the other boys that they were training for a mission from God. In reality, Meeink told the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee last year, “This experience was meant to militarize us and push us to gain more professional training in law enforcement.”
At the time, movement leaders like Thomas were encouraging young skinheads to blend into society (no more tattoos, shaved heads, or mosh pits) and get law enforcement or military jobs. This was to prepare for white supremacy’s key goals: race war and the establishment of a white homeland in the United States.
Thomas recruited the young members of the band Day of the Sword into the Aryan Republican Army; one was just seventeen years old. Thomas himself was a member of the Aryan Republican Army and received a cut of the money stolen from banks “to further his white supremacist cause,” according to a 1996 FBI intelligence report. Proceeds may have also gone to the then headquarters of Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho.
These directives to join the police and the military, Meeink told the subcommittee, were seen as “a means to cause harm to people of color.” The ultimate goal was to foment a race war.
Meeink joined the racist skinhead movement in the late 1980s. Haughton was older and belonged to another crew already aging out of the scene. “Our crews meshed but not me and him personally,” Meeink recalls.
Plus, Haughton wasn’t really hanging around with skinheads or playing with Arresting Officers any more. Word was that Haughton had begun training at the police academy. To Meeink, it seemed like part of a trend.
“I remember we were standing around and someone brought up the Arresting Officers, and some people were like, ‘Ah they’re punks, they’re out of the scene now,’ and one guy was like, ‘No, they’re becoming cops, and they’re in the police academy and they can’t hang around shady motherfuckers like us,’ ” says Meeink. He clarified to The Progressive that only Haughton was training to be an officer.
Just because Haughton was a hardcore skinhead back then doesn’t mean he is a white supremacist neo-Nazi today. Nor does it mean those beliefs influenced his police career. Haughton does not appear to have been disciplined or had any complaints filed against him for racial misconduct while he was with the Philadelphia Police Department. Haughton taught in the police academy, worked in the SWAT unit, and trained in terrorism response before retiring from the force in December 2017.
“He might have changed,” Meeink says of Haughton. But he doubts it, adding, “A person like him, I’m sure he still has these beliefs. You don’t join the cops being racist and then get un-racist being a cop.”
Meeink thinks that Haughton, in his DOJ role, is likely to only “look at terrorism as antifa or BLM—he’s not going to look at the Tea Party. He’s not going to look at them because he doesn’t think they’re terrorists. He thinks they’re fucking freedom fighters.”
“That’s where white privilege allows this to grow, where we have people like that who are supposed to be watching for terrorist groups, the biggest terrorist groups we have,” Meeink says. “He’s not going to look because it’s his own ‘peeps,’ it’s his own kind, it’s shit that he promoted and sang about and wrote songs about.”