Neo-Nazis wanted to assassinate Virginia house speaker and bust mass murderer Dylann Roof out of prison: prosecutors

On Friday, according to The Virginian-Pilot, prosecutors detailed new allegations in their case against a pair of neo-Nazis, Patrik Mathews and Brian Mark Lemley — alleging that they debated a plan to assassinate the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates before breaking Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Church shooter Dylann Roof out of death row.

"They have been jailed since their January 2020 arrest at a Delaware apartment where the FBI had installed a closed-circuit television camera and microphone," reported Michael Kunzleman. "The surveillance equipment captured them talking about planning an attack during a gun rights rally in Richmond, destroying rail lines and power lines, and how Mathews 'briefly considered' trying to assassinate a Virginia lawmaker, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Thursday. After Mathews found a home address for the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, he and Lemley 'pondered' an attack on the speaker's route to work because they concluded that there probably wasn't a good sniper location near the lawmaker's home, prosecutors said."

The speaker, Eileen Filler-Corn, is Jewish.

"The FBI also heard Lemley and Mathews talk about trying to free Roof, who was sentenced to death for killing nine members of a Black church congregation in South Carolina in 2015," said the report. "They discussed how many people it would take to break into the maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Roof is an inmate, how many guards would be there and how a shootout would happen, prosecutors said. 'Can you imagine Dylann Roof broked out of jail?' Mathews said, according to prosecutors. 'The Base would be known as the guys who broke out Dylann Roof.'"

Mathews and Lemley, veterans of the Canadian and U.S. Armed Forces, respectively, are members of a white supremacist terror cell calling itself "The Base", which believes in accelerating the destruction of society through mass violence. Another Base member who had a farmhouse full of swords in Michigan was recently arrested, and federal agents busted more members at a training ground in Georgia.

According to previous reports, prior to his arrest Mathews' ineptitude had become such a liability to his fellow terrorists that they had been plotting to kill him.

Law enforcement efforts to bring down The Base come amid other white supremacist threats, including a group known as "BSN" full of former Marines who tried to attack the U.S. power grid.