24-year-old North Carolina man Benjamin Ryan Teeter — a member of the far-right extremist group called the Boogaloo Bois — has been sentenced to four years in prison after previously pleading guilty to supporting a foreign terrorist organization. Teeter’s offense was trying to sell weapons to Hamas — the person to whom Teeter and a fellow conspirator attempted to sell weapons was eventually revealed to be an FBI informant.
That other individual, fellow Boogaloo Bois member Michael Robert Solomon, a 32-year-old from Minnesota, was already sentenced to three years in prison after also pleading guilty to supporting a foreign terror group. Teeter and Solomon “showed up with guns at protests in Minneapolis two years ago that followed the police murder of George Floyd” after which point they evidently caught the attention of the FBI, per Minnesota’s MPR News. Teeter has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, who handed down Teeter and Solomon’s sentences, indicated he’d be open to shaving a year off Teeter’s sentence in the event he follows through with that pledged cooperation.
Another individual associated with the Boogaloo Bois extremist group — which hopes to help foster civil war in the United States — was sentenced this January to two years of prison after pleading guilty to trying to sell machine gun parts to an individual who yet again turned out to be an informant. The defendant, Michael Paul Dahlager, “conducted surveillance of law enforcement ahead of a pro-Trump rally at the Minnesota Capitol after the 2020 election and had expressed a willingness to kill police,” per MPR News.
That obviously sounds reminiscent of what occurred last year when thousands of Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol to try and stop the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Hundreds of the rioters who’ve been criminally charged so far have been specifically charged with assaulting or impeding police in some form, and it’s not only police who the rioters were apparently okay with assaulting — infamously, one portion of the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” at one juncture.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as an aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows at the time of the Capitol riot, told the House committee investigating the Capitol riot that Trump “suggested to Meadows he approved” of the “Hang Mike Pence” chants, according to CNN’s summary. Hutchinson has now spoken with the riot committee three times. And in actuality, it’s not just source-based reporting on which someone would have to rely for such a conclusion — asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about those angry chants targeting the then-vice president, Trump remarked, in part: “Because it’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right? — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that?” Trump and others wanted Pence to somehow stop the certification in Congress of the electoral vote totals indicating Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
