Original subtitles

- They wanted society to collapse.

They have real weapons.

- This was a perfect storm.

- The Base advocated to violently target

Jewish Americans, African Americans.

- This individual may have

illegally crossed into the U.S.

- He was prior military.

He wanted to engage in violence.

This was something that we needed to look at immediately.

- We've flipped the switch.

He's talking about the killing of African Americans.

- We're talking about people from all over the country

with weapons engaging in training for violence.

You put an undercover involved in this,

that's the safety of an agent.

To go up to 24/7 in the woods on multiple subjects,

and they all have guns--

Now we've got to go in there?

- They start honing in

on this Second Amendment rally in Virginia.

We can shoot into the crowd and see what's going to happen.

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- You're all right.

- It's good, very good.

- Tom, what were you doing when this case started?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

- So I was an executive at headquarters.

I ran the domestic terrorism program for the FBI.

And so I was looking at all cases across the country

and around the world.

- For over 20 years, Tom Sobocinski

worked international and domestic terrorism.

- The FBI is always looking for individuals who

are about to commit violence.

It's very complicated.

I mean, anybody who goes online sees a massive amount

of speech about things they hate,

things they want to do to other people.

And so for the FBI, it is how do we search through all

of that to find out those that actually

want to do that violent act.

We found out that there was an individual who

wanted to get groups together.

He wanted to do these various levels of attack.

- Summer of 2019 is kind of when

we started tracking Norman Spear,

which is a Twitter account.

- Rachid Harrison joined the FBI

after working as a Special Agent with the DEA.

He works international and domestic terrorism.

- Norman Spear advocated for The Base.

Norman Spear advocated to violently target

Jewish Americans, African Americans.

This wasn't just like hate speech.

This was talking about creating cells across the country,

organizing in real life, not just behind the keyboard.

- The ideology is a real-- it's a secondary thing for us.

It's like, why is somebody racist?

It's hard to figure that out.

And does it matter for me as an FBI agent?

One people! One nation!

End immigration!

- Do I need to know why he's doing this,

or do I need to know what he's planning to do

and what the crime is?

And for us, it's what he's planning to do

and what that crime is that I need to stop him on.

He is saying, I want to blow up something,

I want to go after the infrastructure,

I want to violently take down the U.S. government.

For us, that raised the bar.

- We are gearing up for a military campaign.

We need recruits, military recruits,

not voting, not community building,

none of that bullshit.

War--that's what our aim is.

- So we then started to try to figure out

who the real people were behind these online sites.

We, as the Bureau, started looking around

to figure out who he was, where he was.

Is he real? Is that his name?

Is he even in the U.S.?

Where are the servers?

We eventually found out Norman Spear was Rinaldo Nazzaro.

- And you were getting some of this information

from individuals that were actually inside The Base.

- Absolutely.

I will say that a large percentage of these individuals

that we ultimately look at and arrest,

people that they live with, work with,

and are aspirationally linked to,

they call us up and say, hey, listen.

This is who I am.

I have these issues.

But this person, this person is somebody

you need to worry about. - Yeah.

- The FBI takes that seriously.

- So we've got this guy, Norman Spear, Rinaldo Nazzaro.

What are you seeing?

- So in The Base, we saw people physically

making plans to get together.

We saw them talking about weapons.

We saw them procuring weapons, having weapons,

discussing explosives, training.

None of that's illegal.

Combined with that they want to learn and do and teach all that

to do violent attacks, that combination made us say,

OK, this is one that we're now seeing move

from this potentially aspirational, online space

into these folks physically exist,

they appear to be getting together,

and they appear to be focused on actually

doing a violent attack.

- Early August 2019, we have a really great undercover

that gets into the group.

When the undercover got vetted into the group,

Norman Spear was the recruiter.

Everybody that joined the organization

came through Norman Spear.

He vetted everybody.

The undercover, he had to get vetted

on an encrypted chat group.

- What are some of the questions they ask?

I'm curious, what's the vetting process like?

Like, what do you ask somebody to join a hate group?

- They like to know what their descent is.

Are they of European descent?

- Their religion, their view on the White ethnostate.

- They were very good about their OPSEC.

When they would communicate with each other,

they always used encrypted apps.

They didn't talk on the phone.

- Yeah, but they're not that good.

I am comfortable saying that I'm glad they're not that good,

makes our job easier.

- Before I work domestic terrorism,

I worked matters relating to ISIS.

And one thing they were very good at was propaganda.

Right? - Yes.

- The Base made a point

to make sure their propaganda was--you know, was good, right?

And this is an example of something they

put out September of 2019.

- Let's be clear. That's in the United States.

That's not overseas.

- It's--it's shocking, right, to watch?

- Yes.

- We have an undercover agent who is going

to go into a meeting with folks who we know have weapons,

do want to destabilize the government.

And for the agent who's going to go do it,

that's going to be a difficult day for him.

- In domestic terrorism, the FBI is focused

on the prevention of violence.

The individuals in this group were committed

to using violence on a massive scale.

- So when he went down to Rome, Georgia, to be vetted,

the cell down in Georgia actually brought

all kinds of tech gear, RF transmitters just

to kind of make sure he wasn't wired up,

which he was, obviously.

They had these RF scanners that were legitimate.

They actually did go off.

- And they chalked it up to the fact that they were over some--

- High wires? - Power lines.

And they kind of just gave up on that.

And they said he was good to go.

And that's how we started in the group.

- What kind of plans were they--were you hearing

that they were going to make?

Like, what were some of their operational plans

to disrupt society, the government?

- Attack certain individuals, power plants

that would destabilize the community

so that, then, this new America would be reborn.

- They would focus on people that you and I

would never think about as potential victims.

The Georgia cell included the undercover

on some of the activities

that the Georgia cell were partaking in.

- There was a couple who were engaged in political activity

that they disagreed with.

And so they really started to focus in on killing them

to stop that activity.

- And then, when they started naming people,

like they want to kill or hurt person X,

we have to notify that person that they've now--

there's a threat against them.

How do we notify them?

What do--do we offer them protection?

Do we offer to move them?

You know, are they going to go to the media?

I mean, all of these factors come into play.

And it was dozens of times a day.

- There's predicated subjects down in Atlanta.

There's a hate camp.

- These are real people.

What made them different was they're talking about training.

- They wanted people who had prior paramilitary training,

law enforce people who knew how to use guns,

knew how to use explosives.

- The undercover is very tactically proficient.

He knew his firearms, knew tactics,

knew defensive tactics.

And he even said, like, these guys weren't perfect,

but it was very concerning how good they were

at some of this stuff.

The undercover, he meets individuals

that attend this camp.

After the training session,

we learn that we have a Maryland cell.

The leader is a former cavalry scout in the U.S. Army.

He's 33 years old.

He's obsessed with his Chevy Colorado

ZR2 edition that's black.

He also went by the name Mark.

That's all we knew about him.

I end up working with a state partner

to try to figure out if we could identify

Mark with what we had.

Based on the fact that he was obsessed

with this Chevy Colorado ZR2 edition,

which comes to find out is a diesel truck,

which they don't make a lot of those,

we were able to put together a partial VIN.

And we compared it to every 33-year-old in Maryland that

drove a black Chevy Colorado that lived

around the Maryland-Delaware border.

Came back with three results.

We showed the results to the undercover.

And undercover said, that's your guy,

Brian Mark Lemley,

33 years old, lived in Elkton, Maryland.

He was our subject.

We were able to track his devices.

And we were able to see his travel.

Just after that, Ryan Thorpe,

a "Winnipeg Free Press" reporter...

Found a flyer that said,

"Save your race. Join The Base."

That was kind of their slogan.

He replied to the email address.

Eventually, he was vetted online.

Norman Spear went through an interview process with him.

- Once he passes that online vetting process,

he was put into a meeting with Patrik Mathews.

- He was a military reservist in Canada.

Ryan Thorpe is the one who identifies him.

He puts that in the newspaper.

The next day, the RCMP conducted

a search warrant of his home.

- It's reported that they seized his firearms.

There was a piece of paper that was crumpled up in the trash.

Mathews had documented almost every mass shooting event

over the last decade, things like how many were killed,

what their ethnicities were, what their ages were.

He was not arrested.

- It's reported that he was booted

from the Canadian military.

A couple of days later, he was reported missing.

His truck was found on the Manitoba-Minnesota border.

- We had information from the Canadian government

that Mathews may have illegally crossed into the U.S.

This is absolutely a priority for us.

He was prior military.

He had the ideology that we were concerned about.

He wanted to engage in violence.

- This was something that we needed to look at immediately.

- Mathews had potentially come into the U.S.

Especially with the information we had

about his past history, his military background...

this quickly became a priority for us, to try to find him.

- His truck was found at the border.

He's probably in the U.S.

Who helped him, right?

So our most concerning subject in Baltimore

and in the Maryland AOR was Brian Mark Lemley.

He was the cell leader.

We knew that he was trying to recruit more members.

For work, he was a truck driver.

His pattern of life was going down to Virginia every day,

leaving early in the morning,

and he would be back in the evening.

Late August, right after the time Mathews disappears,

Lemley drives to the Michigan-Indiana border,

600 miles,

spends about two hours in a hotel parking lot,

turns right back around and drives about 700 miles

to Chincoteague Island, Virginia.

That's a long trip.

It certainly raised suspicion that he went that distance

and came back that same day and didn't go home.

His mother had a place down there on Chincoteague Island.

So maybe he was just going down there for--

- To spend a lot of quality time with his mom?

- Yeah. We didn't know at the time, right?

Over the course of the next week,

he's making trips down to Chincoteague Island.

At this point, we just had suspicions that maybe

Mathews was there with him.

- But we also had suspicion that Mathews

was multiple other spots at this time as well.

And so we were, at the same time,

tracking down leads in several states that we thought was him.

All the stuff we're talking about,

the tracking him, figuring out where it is,

those are FBI employees that are sitting there digging

through that material, going on 24 hours a day

throughout the country, because we do think

there's somebody here who is going to do something bad.

- One of the issues we had was the fact

that we were tracking Lemley, right,

we're tracking his phone.

We don't have a phone for Mathews.

The device he had in Canada was gone.

- Right. - It was off.

It wasn't being used.

He probably tossed it.

We knew certain places and specific location and times

that Lemley was in Chincoteague Island.

We compared tower data from those times

to the specific time and place that Lemley

passed through the Chincoteague Bay Bridge tunnel.

- That's a lot of analytical hours right there.

- Well, then we had to get a search warrant to do that.

- Yeah. - We got the warrant.

And very clearly, we got another device that came back.

We find out that it was activated on August 31,

the same day that Lemley had gone

to the Michigan-Indiana border and came back.

We find out it was activated at a Walmart in Ohio.

We go back to Lemley's historical returns.

We find out that they stopped at a Walmart in Ohio

at that same date and time that that phone was activated.

That raised our suspicions even more.

OK, maybe that is Mathews.

Maybe Lemley went to go pick him up.

- Wow. That's fantastic.

- A few days later-- this is early September.

There's another Hate Camp down in Georgia.

And Lemley travels to Chincoteague Island,

spends not too long, just maybe an hour there,

and starts heading south.

We were able to pick up, on footage,

of him driving through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel.

And in that footage, you can see Lemley

clear as day in the driver's seat

and somebody in the passenger seat.

From that photo, we believe we have Mathews in that car.

They're on their way to Georgia.

They go down to the Hate Camp.

We didn't know what these guys are thinking,

what their future plans are.

When do we need to draw the line, if that comes?

- So guys, when they're at Hate Camp

and they're around the campfire,

what are some of the motivating rhetoric, if you will,

that they were saying to their attendees?

- They, you know, believed that certain people were converted.

And then there's this special few group

of people who have gotten this true insight

to how the world is going to work.

And so they felt that they were special,

that they were one of the true ones

that saw how the world really is and how it should be.

And so it gave them a sense of purpose,

a sense of mission for what they were trying to do.

The personalized end game for them is all of these folks

weren't happy with the lives they were living,

and they all wanted something different.

I think the one thing they wanted different

was something that we kind of call acceleration.

They wanted society to collapse.

- They believe that society was bound to collapse.

- Anything they can do to accelerate that collapse

for their cause was good, right?

And they constantly talk about the creation

of the white ethnostate, right?

I mean, that's a thing.

As we're collecting evidence throughout this case,

they start getting more specific on the types

of plots they want to commit.

And they center in on this Second Amendment rally

that is going to occur in January of 2020.

They viewed this rally as their opportunity

to create conflict, and again, in their words,

like, accelerate civil disorder.

And they said things like, we could cause conflict

with the police and the crowd.

We could shoot into the crowd and see what's going to happen.