An active duty U.S. Army soldier has been charged with lying to the military about his ties to a group dedicated to overthrowing the government and about illegally selling firearms, according to federal prosecutors in North Carolina.
The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, N.C., was arrested on Aug. 15. A day earlier, a grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of having lied on his security clearance application in 2022, when he stated he had not been involved in a group “dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States Government.”
A redacted copy of the indictment did not name the group to which Mr. Nix was accused of having ties, and neither did a news release issued on Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He is also accused of stealing and illegally selling firearms at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of 2024.
Mr. Nix, who prosecutors said also went by the name Kai Brazelton, is charged with one count each of making a false statement to the government and of dealing in firearms without a license, along with two counts of selling a stolen firearm. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to 30 years in prison.
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment further on the case.
At Mr. Nix’s first court appearance on Monday, a judge ordered that he remain in custody until a hearing set for Thursday. He was also assigned a federal public defender, Robert J. Parrott, Jr, who said in an email to The New York Times that “we should avoid rushing to judgment.”
“Mr. Nix looks forward to making his presentation in court,” he added.
Although the authorities did not specify which group they claim Mr. Nix was affiliated with, his arrest came days before The New Yorker published an extensive article on Sunday about organizations outside of law enforcement that investigate far-right groups. The article mentioned Mr. Nix and his potential ties to Patriot Front, a far-right group that has engaged in white nationalist activism.
The article mentioned that the Southern Poverty Law Center and the antifascist collective Appalachia Research Club were able to use information that had been leaked by the online publication Unicorn Front to connect Mr. Nix to a Patriot Front member’s alias, Patrick NC, and to a Telegram account that released personal information about perceived political enemies. One of those doxxed by the account was a reporter with the left-leaning news organization, Raw Story, who was looking into a neo-Nazi group.
The reporter of the New Yorker article said that he had reached Mr. Nix over the phone, and that he had denied involvement in Patriot Front or the Telegram account.
In July, members of the Patriot Front marched down a main strip in Nashville waving flags with swastikas and disrupted a City Council meeting. Members of the group have been convicted in the past for plotting riots at a pride event in Idaho. An Anti-Defamation League report found that Patriot Front was responsible for a majority of racist, antisemitic or otherwise hateful propaganda in 2022.
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