The FBI foiled a possible domestic terrorist attack against a Jewish temple, arresting an anti-Semitic and Nazi-sympathizing white supremacist who allegedly plotted to firebomb Colorado’s second-oldest synagogue, according to court documents released on Monday.
Richard Holzer, 27, was arrested following a monthlong sting operation. A Boulder, Colorado, resident and self-described skinhead, Holzer made openly racist comments and violent threats online and detailed his intentions to shut down the Temple Emanuel in a plot that escalated from poisoning to using Molotov cocktails and even pipe bombs and dynamite to demolish the building, authorities said.
“Let’s get that place off the map,” Holzer told undercover agents in October. “This is the big center here for them here in town. Thing is, why not hit the heart, right?”
Holzer’s actions were classified by the FBI as hate crimes and domestic terrorism, and he is charged with attempting to use explosives and fire to prevent the free exercise of religion.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last week the FBI “sees domestic terrorism as a persistent evolving threat” and called white supremacist violence a “persistent, pervasive threat” earlier this year.
The FBI says that Holzer wanted to close the synagogue down and condemn it, shifting from a plan using arsenic to poison its water to suggesting welding the temple’s doors shut and bringing up the use of Molotov cocktails with the agents.
“I want something that tells them they are not welcome in this town — better get the f— out, otherwise, people will die,” he told agents.
Holzer, his friend “Skeeter,” and the undercover agents traveled to the synagogue, where Holzer decided that Molotov cocktails wouldn’t work because “simply busting out the windows is not gonna be enough.” The discussion then moved to more powerful explosives such as pipe bombs and dynamite, and over the next week and a half Holzer and his friend prepared for the attack, with Holzer telling the agents he was “honored to be a part of history and, more importantly, the future of our folk. Heil.”
Holzer had a knife, a mask, and a copy of Mein Kampf when he met with undercover agents at a motel on Nov. 1 to carry out the terrorist attack to go along with two pipe bombs and 14 sticks of dynamite he thought the undercover agents were supplying. Holzer was arrested for his intention to firebomb the synagogue and told the FBI that the plan was his “mountain” and that Jews and the synagogue were a “cancer.”
The FBI said an undercover agent posing as a white supremacist first reached out to Holzer through Facebook in late September, after which Holzer said that he’d previously paid a Mexican cook to “hex and poison a local synagogue” using arsenic, although the FBI said it didn’t have evidence that this had actually occurred.
Holzer sent the undercover agent a message saying he was “getting ready for RAHOWA [racial holy war]” and videos of himself urinating in front of a Jewish center, of Nazi propaganda and weaponry, and of himself scoping out the temple.
He brought along his friend to meet with alleged friends of the undercover agent, also federal agents, in mid-October. The FBI said that Holzer gave white supremacist paraphernalia as gifts to the undercover agents, and he “repeatedly expressed his hatred of Jewish people.”
His belief in racial holy war stemmed from Matt Hale, the self-proclaimed “Pontifex Maximus” of the racist Church of the Creator, who began a 40-year sentence at a Florence, Colorado, supermax in 2005 for his plot to kill a federal judge, Holzer told the undercover agents.
A small sampling of Holzer’s recent Facebook posts over the summer, likely what sparked the FBI investigation, show him threatening violence against Jewish people and others,
“I wish the Holocaust really did happen … they need to die,” he said in a post.
“I hate them with a passion. I told this nasty Jew to fuck off or I’ll kill him,” he said in another.
Holzer also posted photos of himself wearing white supremacist garb with guns in both hands with the caption reading he was “getting ready to cap people.”
Mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, this summer have pressure on the Department of Justice to come up with a comprehensive strategy for preventing attacks. Patrick Crusius, 21, allegedly posted a racist and anti-Hispanic four-page manifesto drawing inspiration from the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings prior to the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, where he took the lives of 22 people the day before the Dayton shooting.
