The Justice Department announced Wednesday the sentencing of a neo-Nazi who went by the name “commander butcher” and hatched plots to conduct acts of racist and antisemitic violence and terror in New York City.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 22-year-old Georgian national, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty in November to soliciting hate crimes, according to a DOJ press release. I wrote about Chkhikvishvili back when he was charged in 2024, under then-President Joe Biden’s administration. At the time, the Justice Department alleged that Chkhikvishvili was the leader of a white supremacist group known as the “Maniacs Murder Cult” and had revealed his terroristic plot to an undercover informant.
Chkhikvishvili encouraged members of his organization, including an informant he was trying to recruit, to commit violent hate crimes, according to the Biden DOJ. Among the allegations against the white supremacist leader, the informant said Chkhikvishvili claimed arson and poison were the “best options for murder,” that he devised a plan to dress someone as Santa Claus to poison racial minorities and children at Jewish schools, and that he told the informant to consider “mass murder” of what he called “low race targets” elsewhere in the U.S.
If Wednesday’s press release is any indication, Trump’s Department of Justice is basically patting itself on the back for the sentencing, as if the Trump administration had not pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists or assumed a role as a major vector for white supremacist propaganda itself.
“Individuals who plan and encourage this violence will not find refuge in the dark corners of the Internet,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general overseeing the DOJ’s beleaguered Civil Rights Division. Dhillon has perverted the division’s mission to target many of the rights, like voting rights, it was designed to protect.
“Together, with our law enforcement partners, we will relentlessly pursue these criminals, and hold them accountable,” Dhillon said.
But it’s hard to be confident in that. The Trump administration’s counterterrorism strategy is being led by right-wing influencer Sebastian Gorka, who has been accused of ties to Nazism, which he’s repeatedly denied. As my colleague David Rohde wrote for MS NOW, Gorka recently announced a counterterrorism strategy that targets antifascists and so-called left-wing extremism as some of the biggest threats to national security. ProPublica assessed that the strategy laid out “Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump.”
None of that inspires confidence in the Trump administration’s readiness — or interest — in thwarting potential terrorist attacks like the ones Chkhikvishvili was planning, and that the Biden administration actually stopped.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.