THE LONE WOLF IN THE HENHOUSE: A Department of Justice counterterrorism expert has deep ties to white supremacist groups.

• Author: Christophi, Helen
• Position: Brian P. Haughton

Neo-Nazis still talk about Brian P. Haughton. He played drums in Arresting Officers, one of the biggest neo-Nazi punk bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They churned out dozens of violent skinhead anthems before Haughton became a Philadelphia police officer in 1995.

Now Haughton works in domestic counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has access to sensitive intelligence used by more than 1,000 federal agencies and police departments in all fifty states to stop attacks by white supremacists--the deadliest domestic terrorist movement in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.

As of early November, at least, Haughton worked in the Justice Department's Regional Information Sharing Systems program, dubbed RISS. Law enforcement agencies share intelligence regionally and nationally through its platform, one of several that have proliferated since 9/11. It is also used by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Haughton, now in his early fifties, works as a law enforcement coordinator in RISS's Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network in Newtown, Pennsylvania, one of six regional centers spanning the United States. Haughton has this job even though his links to the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi gang suspected of funding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing--the single largest domestic terror attack in U.S. history--are easily traceable on Google.

The Aryan Republican Army had six known members. Three were friends of Haughton's from the skinhead music scene in Philadelphia--Scott Stedeford, Kevin McCarthy, and Michael Brescia. In 1996, when he was a twenty-four-year-old college student, Brescia was investigated by the FBI on the suspicion that he was John Doe 2--the Oklahoma City bombing suspect who was never caught. (The FBI later claimed John Doe 2 didn't exist.)

Haughton also has this job even though the Justice Department, in conducting a security clearance investigation, could have found lyrics for twenty-four Arresting Officers songs on a single webpage on songlyrics.com.

One Arresting Officers song is called "Lone Wolf." The term often refers to a terrorist who acts alone, without the help of a government or political organization. "Lone wolf, on the prowl, protect your family, survival now," it goes. The song is about waging a race war against the government.

But lone wolf attacks aren't usually a solitary affair. The white supremacist movement, for example, often uses them to hide the involvement of its leaders and of the movement itself, a strategy it adopted when it declared war on the state almost forty years ago, as Kathleen Belew writes in her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

"Lone wolf, on the streets, protect your culture and your creed," sang the Arresting Officers. The band's name alluded to the racist belief that arresting officers have the best job on the force: They're the ones who get to kick the crap out of Black people.

According to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, white supremacists have killed more people than any other type of domestic terrorist since 2000. The Biden Administration's new domestic counterterrorism strategy, released in June, found that white supremacists and anti-government militia extremists are the most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians and to target government officials and the police.

But the threat of white supremacist terrorism often comes from the inside. The FBI warned its agents in 2006 that white supremacists were getting jobs as police officers in order to access intelligence and weapons training. The bureau also said these officers threatened the safety of lawmakers, "whom they could see as potential targets for violence."

At least eighty defendants charged in connection with the January 6 insurrection--which has been designated as an act of domestic terrorism--have law enforcement or...