A well-known white supremacist was indicted Thursday on charges of making threats against a varied group including a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, a group of black people involved in a housing discrimination lawsuit and a Citibank employee.
William A. White, the founder of the American National Socialist Party, is accused of making late-night phone calls in which he identified himself as a leader of a white supremacist group and sending letters and e-mails full of threats and racial epithets.
An attorney for Mr. White, 31, of Roanoke, said prosecutors have taken Mr. White’s statements out of context and that the indictment is an attempt to silence unpopular speech protected by the First Amendment.
“This is a guy who has some pretty extreme views; I don’t agree with them and I think most people may not agree with them,” said Attorney Chris M. Shepherd of Chicago. “But I think we have to be pretty careful about silencing unpopular opinions.”
But a federal prosecutor said free speech does not extend to threats against innocent people.
“This case will not serve as a referendum on freedom of speech,” said Julia C. Dudley, acting U.S. attorney for western Virginia. “This case is about innocent people being threatened, intimidated and extorted by a man that in most cases, they don’t know and have never met.”
He was charged with five counts of communicating threats in interstate commerce, one count of communicating an extortionate threat in interstate commerce and one count of witness intimidation. He faces decades in prison if convicted.
According to an indictment, Mr. White was angry with syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. for a piece he had written about the killing of a white couple by a black gang in Nashville, Tenn. Authorities say he made a threatening call to Mr. Pitts’ wife and posted personal information about Mr. Pitts on his Web site, overthrow.com, which included rants against blacks and Jews.
He also wrote letters to a group in Virginia Beach that made a discrimination complaint against their landlord to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mr. White was not involved in the case otherwise.
“You may get one over on your landlord this time, and you may not,” Mr. White wrote in a letter to the tenants, according to the indictment. “But know that the white community has noticed you, and we know that you are and will never be anything other than a dirty parasite - and that our patience with you and the government that coddles you run thin.”
One accusation does not relate to Mr. White’s ideology. In that case, Mr. White made threats against a Citibank employee during a financial dispute.
It is the second time Mr. White has landed in trouble with federal authorities. He is currently in jail in Illinois, charged with soliciting the murder of a federal juror.
He is accused in that case of posting personal information on his Web site about a juror in the case of Matthew Hale, another white supremacist who is serving a 40-year prison sentence for soliciting an undercover FBI informant to kill a federal judge. The judge had ruled against Hale in a copyright infringement case.
Mr. White has garnered media attention for posting on his Web site personal information about and advocating for violence against five of the six black students charged in 2006 with beating a white classmate in Jena, La., a case that drew national attention. According to media reports, he also expressed support for the two killers in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.
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