A leader of a white supremacist group faces up to five years in prison after admitting he made threats against a Brooklyn-based journalist.
Nicholas Welker, 32, pleaded guilty in a New York court on Monday to threatening the unnamed reporter who was looking into the right-wing group Feuerkrieg Division.
Welker, who has gone by aliases such as King ov Wrath and ilovehate5150, posted a picture online of the journalist with a gun being aimed at their head.
The photo was captioned “JOURNALIST, F*** OFF! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED” and it also contained messages such as “race traitor”.
Welker’s goal had been to block the reporter and their unnamed media outlet from running a potential exposé, prosecutors said. Feuerkrieg Division champions white supremacy, prosecutors told the court, by “challenging laws, social order, and the government via terrorism and other violent acts”.
“Welker and his hate group threatened a journalist to prevent reporting on the white supremacist group that Welker led and [the] guilty plea represents a victory for freedom of the press,” said attorney Breon Peace.
“This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to ensuring that those who espouse hateful, extremist ideologies, like Welker, cannot silence First Amendment-protected activity through threats of violence and will be met with the full force of the law.”
Welker, from San Jose, California, will be sentenced in January.
The prosecution came after a joint operation by the FBI’s New York joint terrorism task force, which consists of investigators and analysts from the FBI, the NYPD, and more than 50 other federal, state, and local agencies.
The group was reportedly started in 2018 by a 13-year-old boy in Estonia— (Eugene Antifa)
Feuerkrieg, also known as FKD, has a presence beyond the US and has been proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organisation.
Deputy senior national coordinator for counter terrorism policing Tim Jacques said in 2020 that the group is part of a worrying trend of radical right wing organisations forming.
He said: “Our world class Counter Terrorism Network has become adept at identifying and disrupting these groups, but like the recently proscribed Sonnenkrieg Division, and National Action before that, we should expect FKD to splinter and rebrand under a different name.
“We will continue to use every power at our disposal to arrest and charge those who support this group and those like it, but we can only hope to beat this insidious ideology by stopping young and vulnerable people from following the path towards extremism in the first place.”
