An anonymous email sent to me two years ago offered an ominous warning: that a “heavily armed” woman claiming to be my neighbor had threatened me at a right-wing militia meeting.
Turns out, there was more to that story than I knew then; a lot more.
First, the guy who sent the email was the commander of a far-right Utah militia group; and then, this militia commander guy was also a self-styled double agent, who had infiltrated the militia group intent, among other things, on exposing the connections of the U.S. militia movement to local police departments, sheriff’s offices and law enforcement agencies at the state and federal levels.
I learned all of this about the anonymous guy who had emailed me two years ago just yesterday, when a reporter for a nonprofit whistleblower news website reached out to me about an article published by ProPublica, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joshua Kaplan, titled “The Militia and the Mole.”
The reporter for the whistleblower site wanted to know if I was the “local reporter” described in Kaplan’s story as being the focus of a woman on a Zoom seminar put on by a leader of an AP3 militia group who had “brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.”
ICYMI
- Anonymous email: ‘Armed,” ‘dangerous’ MAGA neighbor threatens AFP editor (March 31, 2023)
- Anxiety can have any number of triggers: A threat from a neighbor can be among the worst (April 11, 2023)
“The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark,” Kaplan wrote, referencing Jim Wood, the vice mayor of Waynesboro, who, six weeks before the online threat was directed at me, and then anonymously reported to me, had used a homophobic slur in a podcast to refer to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
I am the reporter who broke that story, and another reporting on homophobic comments that Wood had made on another podcast about the hammer attack on the husband of House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi – reporting that led to calls from fellow City Council members and a wide swath of city residents for Wood to resign his seat.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro vice mayor hits Buttigieg with gay slur after asking for federal money
- Waynesboro Republicans cast doubt, then joke about attack on Pelosi
- City Council members, city residents, urge Waynesboro Vice Mayor Jim Wood to resign
Back to Kaplan’s reporting:
“She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn,” Kaplan wrote.
“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” the woman went on to say, according to Kaplan’s telling. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.”
After the call, the “mole” – who now goes by the name John Williams – reached out to the woman, who not only lives in Waynesboro, but is, indeed, a neighbor of mine, to try to talk her down.
When she resisted, per Kaplan’s reporting in “The Militia and the Mole,” Williams, who had wrestled with what to do in these kinds of situations before, when he had learned that the militia had developed detailed “red lists” of journalists, realized that “he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown.”
“He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning,” Kaplan wrote.
To me.
He sent the anonymous warning to me.
I faced a choice, too
I then made another connection: the screen name also matched the name of a person who had commented four times on discussion threads attached to AFP stories reporting on Wood, including a response to another letter writer who cast Wood’s slur of Buttigieg as being “hate speech” by commenting that “hate must be a relative term because the only hate being spewed is being directed at Jim in this media outlet.”
“She thinks you sent fake bombs to her house and placed dead animal carcasses in her yard,” the anonymous emailer had informed me. “She said she is looking to ‘settle a score with (you)’. She said she is going to do ‘midnight walkabouts’ to gather intel on you. She is setting up a camera system on her property in an attempt to get video of you doing the things she thinks you are doing.”
“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know. She seemed to me to be suffering from mental health issues. Based on my past interactions with her I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous.”
I called the police to report the threat, but as I had suspected, the threat wasn’t taken seriously; it would be a few days before the local PD even sent anybody to the neighbor’s house to question her about the threat, and from the courtesy call that I got after that interaction, it didn’t amount to much.
The way the anonymous emailer had framed it, it seemed to me that the threat was fresh.
I debated reporting on AFP on the threat, assuming that it was possible that I’d be inviting the “heavily armed” neighbor to move quickly to “settle the score,” but also thinking, if I out her before she does anything, at least the cops – and the world – would know who did it, so to speak.
To that point: for the next several months, every time I walked outside my house, in full view of this “heavily armed” neighbor two doors down, it was in the back of my mind that my head might get blown off.
The only thing I knew to do was write a story, hit publish, and hope for the best.
The fallout, on the other side of the continent
The next morning, per Kaplan’s reporting in “The Militia and the Mole,” the man we now know by the name John Williams, deciding, after seeing my story in AFP, that his cover had been blown, “pulled the go bag from his closet and fled.”
“He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home,” Kaplan wrote.
The “go bag” contained, we learned from Kaplan, “three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.”
“In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion. It was addressed to me,” Kaplan wrote.
Williams, per Kaplan, “spent a few weeks in the desert” after packing up and fleeing, and putting the flash drive containing his life’s work in the mail.
“He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization,” Kaplan wrote. “At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured.
“No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life,” Kaplan wrote.
He’s out; what about me?
Kaplan and other journalists, including the one who first reached out to me about Kaplan’s story after it was published online on Saturday, have been poring through the information from the documents given to them by Williams for the past two years.
There’s a lot to what they’ve been able to report, and I’m told that there’s much, much more that is still being vetted and verified.
The part of interest to me, for probably obvious reasons, involves the surveillance of journalists, which includes the creation of “red lists” of reporters on the radar of the militia groups that include names, addresses, photos of their homes and vehicles, personal information about their family members, where they live, work, what they drive.
It’s one thing when it’s somebody anonymous who has to look up your address on GIS and drive to your neighborhood and risk sticking out like a sore thumb when they’re trying to amateur-surveil you.
This woman who openly threatened me in an online forum lives two doors up the street from me.
I should emphasize here: still lives two doors up the street from me, with the oversized Trump sign with Christmas lights in her front yard.
It’s been two years; I’d put the minute-by-minute fear of having my head blown off when I’m mowing the lawn or in the backyard shooting hoops behind me, though the publication of the story in ProPublica is bringing the threat back into the present again.
All because I reported on vile comments made by the vice mayor, this Jim Wood guy, who, predictably, has people on his side who think the problem isn’t the hate speech, but the person reporting on the hate speech.
I’m not packing a go bag, if you get what I’m getting at when I say that.
Video: The Militia, The Mole, and Me
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Chris Graham
