The leader of a White nationalist group that aggressively sows racial discord around the country has been named as the 12th man indicted for sowing such discord in Albemarle County seven years ago.
Thomas Ryan Rousseau, a 25-year-old resident of Grapevine, Texas, and the founder of the group known as Patriot Front, was indicted on Aug. 7 for participating in the 2017 torch-lit march across University of Virginia Grounds that preceded the deadly Unite the Right rally-turned-riot in Charlottesville. Ryan has been charged with using fire to racially intimidate, a felony in Virginia dating back to the Jim Crow era. That’s according to records that were unsealed March 5.
“This is the burden that American patriots must bear,” Rousseau’s group wrote on Telegram after Texas authorities arrested him on Feb. 23. “The arrest comes after a nearly 7-year witch hunt by politically motivated prosecutors.”
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This isn’t the first criticism of the prosecution. One of the 12 other accused men recently convinced a judge to recuse the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office after allegations that the lead attorney prosecuting the 2017 cases had been too close to anti-racist counterprotesters in advance of the planned White nationalist rally.
Unite the Right was called off minutes before its official noon start time on Aug. 12, 2017, amid rioting between White nationalists and their detractors on the streets of downtown Charlottesville. That afternoon, James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi from Ohio, drove his Dodge Challenger into a celebratory group of counterprotesters, killing one woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring at least two dozen others. He was convicted of murder and hate crimes and sentenced to life in prison.
Unlike some of the earlier men charged in Albemarle under Virginia’s so-called cross-burning statute, Rousseau has a high profile. Both he and Patriot Front have separate pages amid the “extremist files” of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That group calls Patriot Front a rebranding of Vanguard America, an organization that appears to have lent one of its shields to Fields the day he killed Heyer.
Patriot Front yearns for an America of yore using theatrical rhetoric, racist propaganda, fascist motifs and bouts of vandalism. The group has defaced murals depicting minority figures, including 35 memorials specifically to George Floyd, the Black man whose death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 set off protests around the world, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“The American identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent,” according to the Patriot Front manifesto. “America is truly unique in this pan-European identity which forms the roots of our nationhood.”
The mob Rousseau is accused of joining marched across UVa Grounds on the evening of Aug. 11, 2017, chanting “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” There were near-immediate calls to prosecute the individuals who surrounded counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and grew increasingly violent. But Albemarle County’s then-lead prosecutor Robert Tracci asserted that there was no law in Virginia outlawing the torch-bearers’ behavior.
Today, a different prosecutor, Jim Hingeley, holds office and has authorized the prosecutions of those who encircled counterprotesters, charging them under a cross-burning statute established in Virginia to rid the commonwealth of the Ku Klux Klan.
Court records indicate that Rousseau received bail when he appeared before Judge Cheryl Higgins in Albemarle County Circuit Court on March 5. The judge gave him bail but ordered him to go back to Texas, surrender his passport and refrain from illegal drugs and alcohol.
Rousseau has hired Peter Frazier, the same lawyer who successfully pushed the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office off the case of a fellow defendant. On Jan. 8, after a contentious hearing, Judge H. Thomas Padrick Jr. effectively forced the recusal of Hingeley’s office in the case of Jacob Joseph Dix of Clarksville, Ohio.
Frazier and another lawyer have also gotten two local judges pushed off their cases. On Nov. 8, Higgins recused herself in the Dix case. On Sept. 27, Judge Claude Worrell recused himself from the case of Augustus Invictus. Both judges eventually agreed to step away from both of those cases.
Invictus is a Florida-based lawyer whose ultimately unsuccessful third-party run for a U.S. Senate seat made headlines in 2015 when he revealed that he once drank goat blood in a sacrifice ritual. Via a motion from his lawyer, he recently attempted to do what Frazier did in the Dix case, attempting to recuse the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. However, a recent ruling rejected that attempt.
“Although defense counsel strongly raises several issues, I have found nothing that definitively shows a lack of impartiality or prejudice toward the defendant,” Judge Richard Moore wrote in a 15-page ruling released March 18.
Invictus’ lawyer decided to incorporate Frazier’s arguments into his own motion, and many assertions in the combined document were, Moore wrote, “overstatements, exaggeration, innuendo, inaccuracies and hyperbole.”
At issue was whether prosecutor Lawton Tufts had been too close to anti-racist activists prior to Unite the Right.
“But I do not find that Tufts’ involvement rises to the level of a constitutional violation and that he is not and can not be impartial,” Moore wrote.
So Hingeley’s office can continue prosecuting Invictus. But then in a footnote, Moore seems to open a door for recusal, pointing out that a lack of firm legal basis for recusal doesn’t prevent recusal.
“There are many situations where a prosecutor is not constitutionally required to take certain action,” Moore wrote, “but they do so anyway.”