By Jenny Jarvie and Brittny Mejia
Los Angeles Times
ATLANTA — Four militant white nationalists from California were arrested by federal authorities Tuesday on charges that they traveled to Virginia with the intent to incite a riot and commit violence at last year’s deadly far-right rallies in Charlottesville.
Thomas Cullen, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, announced that charges had been filed against Benjamin Drake Daley of Redondo Beach, Michael Paul Miselis of Lawndale, Cole Evan White of San Francisco and Thomas Walter Gillen, whose hometown was not immediately known.
The four defendants are members of the so-called Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group based in Southern California that promotes “clean living” and meets regularly in public parks to train in physical fitness, boxing and other street fighting techniques, according to the affidavit.
Last August, the four California men traveled to Charlottesville, the affidavit says, to join hundreds of other white nationalists to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Photos and video show the four men attacked counterprotesters, the affidavit alleges, “which in some cases resulted in serious injuries.”
The four men assaulted an African-American man, two females and a minister wearing a clerical collar at Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally and had previously engaged in acts of violence at political rallies in Huntington Beach, Berkeley and San Bernardino, prosecutors said.
“They were essentially serial rioters,” Cullen said. This wasn’t the lawful exercise of First Amendment rights. These guys came to Charlottesville to commit violent acts.”
If convicted, each defendant faces up to 10 years in prison, said prosecutors.
On Aug. 11, the group marched through the University of Virginia campus, carrying torches and chanting “Blood and Soil!” and “White Lives Matter.” The next day, more clashes erupted when hundreds of white supremacists assembled for a “Unite the Right” rally in downtown Charlottesville. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed when a man rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters. Nineteen other protesters were injured.
The charges against the four California men are not related to Heyer’s death. The suspected driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Maumee, Ohio, was charged in June with federal hate crimes, including one count of a hate crime act that resulted in Heyer’s death and 28 counts of hate crime causing bodily injury. Fields, who has pleaded not guilty, is also charged under Virginia law with murder and other crimes.
While Democrats and Republicans denounced the violence and the white supremacist views at the Charlottesville rally, President Donald Trump provoked nationwide outrage when he suggested that both sides — the white nationalists and the counterprotesters — were to blame for the violence.
“You had a group on one side that was bad,” Trump said. “And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now.”
After the incident, anti-racism advocates accused local law enforcement of not acting swiftly enough to stem the violence or to arrest a group of white men who were videotaped beating a black counterprotester, DeAndre Harris.
Several white nationalists have since been found guilty of violently beating Harris. In August, Jacob Scott Goodwin, of Arkansas, was sentenced to eight years in prison and Alex Michael Ramos, of Georgia, was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of malicious wounding for their roles in the beating of Harris in a parking garage.
A third white nationalist, Daniel Patrick Gordon, of Ohio, was found guilty in May of malicious wounding for his role in the attack, but he has yet to be sentenced.
In August, a judge sentenced Richard Wilson Preston, 52, a white demonstrator, to four years in prison for discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
