U.S. Coast Guard officer accused of plotting attack on Democratic politicians faces sentencing

[January 31, 2020]  (Reuters) - A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant accused by prosecutors of plotting to attack Democratic politicians and TV personalities was due to be sentenced on Friday after pleading guilty to illegally possessing guns and opioid painkillers.

Christopher Paul Hasson, 50, has been in federal custody since his arrest in February last year, when investigators found more than a dozen guns, hundreds of bullets and scores of Tramadol pills in his home in Silver Springs, Maryland.

Prosecutors have labeled him a terrorist and a white supremacist, saying he made a list of people to shoot that included U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. They have asked Judge George Hazel of the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, to sentence Hasson to 25 years in prison.

His lawyers said Hasson was not planning any attacks but rather was in the grip of a years-long opioid addiction that created "significant mood disturbances," according to a letter they wrote this month to the judge.

"Like many Americans, Mr. Hasson went through a difficult time in mid-life, when he became addicted to prescription opioids," his lawyers wrote, saying he was taking three or four times the daily approved dose of Tramadol, a prescription-only medicine he ordered illegally online. "His criminal conduct arose out of this addiction."

They asked that Hasson be sentenced only to the time he has already served in prison and three years of supervised release.

In their sentencing memo for the judge, prosecutors quoted racist emails and draft documents they said Hasson had written on his computer in which he repeatedly advocated a violent race war.

"Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch," one typo-filled draft document said, which prosecutors described as a signed manifesto Hasson wrote in June 2017. "Have to take serious look at appropriate individual targets, to bring greatest impact. Professors, DR's, Politian's, Judges, leftists in general."

Hasson spent about $12,000 over three years amassing illegally obtained firearms and unregistered gun paraphernalia, prosecutors said.

He pleaded guilty to three crimes in a plea agreement reached with prosecutors in October: possessing unregistered gun silencers, possessing firearms as an unlawful user of controlled substances, and illegal possession of a controlled substance.

Until stopped by his arrest, prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo, Hasson "intended to exact retribution on minorities and those he considered traitors."

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)

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