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A Neo-Nazi leader who led a multi-state plot to intimidate journalists and others who worked to point out antisemitic activity has been sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

Meanwhile, a federal jury convicted Kaleb Cole and a frontrunner of the Atomwaffen Division based in Washington state on one count of interfering with freedom of faith, three counts of mailing threatening communications, and one count of conspiracy.

Prosecutors presented evidence of flyers designed by Cole that warned recipients, "you are visited by your local Nazis" and contained a picture of a hooded figure throwing a petroleum bomb, which was delivered to homes in January 2020. The recipients were primarily Jews and other people of color, prosecutors said.

In one case, a co-conspirator glued one in every of Cole's posters to the editor's house of an Arizona Jewish publication. Three co-conspirators were previously convicted and sentenced within the plot. While he was organizing the distribution of the messages, Cole was also stockpiling weapons, promoting violence, and leading "hate camps," federal attorneys said.

After those people seized those weapons in December 2019, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes said, "We firmly believe we prevented a massacre." Three months later, Cole was arrested for mailing the threats. "Mr. Cole displayed through his actions that his beliefs were quite just rhetoric," Donald Voiret of the FBI's Seattle field office said in an exceeding statement.

During the trial, victims attested how the posters had affected them. Some reported installing security cameras outside their homes or opening their mailboxes with a stick. Others changed addresses entirely. And one journalist said she left the profession out of fear.

The flyers were reported during a minimum of 4 states, with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation involving Phoenix, Houston, Tampa, and Seattle. Members of the Atomwaffen Division, also named because of the economy Order, have been charged with a minimum of 5 murders since 2015.

Perhaps it's most notorious includes the murder of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish student who was stabbed to death in Orange County in 2018. In line with a ProPublica investigation, his alleged killer, Samuel Woodward, had joined Atomwaffen two years earlier, attended group meetings, and received weapons instruction at a three-day training camp led by the group. Woodward's trial is scheduled to start in March.