A man has been arrested and accused of working with members of a white supremacist group to create a “hit list” of assassination targets, including a U.S. senator and a federal judge, the authorities said.
Noah Lamb, 24, was arrested on Tuesday and indicted in the Eastern District of California on eight counts, including soliciting the murder of three federal officials. Prosecutors said Mr. Lamb had suggested people to include on a hit list and found personal information about them that was distributed to members of a group on Telegram, the messaging app.
The people on the list were not named in court documents, but they include a sitting U.S. senator, a federal judge and a former U.S. attorney, as well as state and municipal officials and leaders of private companies and nongovernmental organizations.
A lawyer for Mr. Lamb declined to comment on Wednesday.
Mr. Lamb was accused of being a member of the Terrorgram Collective, which operates on Telegram, and of playing a “central role” in the group’s effort to make a list of assassination targets.
Federal prosecutors described the Terrogram Collective as a transnational terrorist group that promotes white supremacy and calls for using violence and attacks on government infrastructure to ignite a race war. The group has been tied to a number of attacks, and planned attacks, across the world, prosecutors said.
The group “recruited impressionable teenagers to do their dirty work, promising them eternal glory — ‘Sainthood’— in return for committing an act of mass violence,” prosecutors said in court documents.
In September, two men were arrested and accused of running the Terrorgram Collective. The indictment in that case, also filed in the Eastern District of California, said the group inspired at least two hate-driven crimes, in Slovakia and Turkey, and a planned hate crime in New Jersey.
After the indictment in that case was filed, other attacks were traced to the Terrorgram Collective, prosecutors said. Those attacks include a mass shooting in Brazil and the murder of two people in Wisconsin as part of a larger plot to assassinate a U.S. official. A plan to bomb an energy substation in Tennessee and a plan to assassinate an Australian politician were also tied to the group.
Prosecutors said Mr. Lamb campaigned for the Terrorgram Collective to create a list of assassination targets. He suggested dozens of people to be on the list and found information about them, including addresses, phone numbers and photographs. This information was then made into a stylized list and distributed to people in the Telegram group with messages encouraging them to take action.
Many people on the list were targeted because of their race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity, court documents said.
After the two men accused of being leaders of the Terrorgram Collective were arrested, the government extracted messages from one of their cellphones and found messages about the assassination list in a private group chat with Mr. Lamb, court documents said.
Mr. Lamb was charged with three counts of soliciting the murder of a federal official, three counts of doxxing a federal official, one count of conspiracy and one count of interstate threatening communications for offenses that court documents said took place from November 2021 through September 2024.
If convicted on all counts, Mr. Lamb would face up to 85 years in prison.
Mr. Lamb does not own a home and described himself as “nomading” in recent years, according to court documents.
After he was arrested on Tuesday, prosecutors said, law enforcement agents found white supremacist literature, gun parts and paperwork from an attempt that Mr. Lamb made last year to enter Canada illegally by using a false identity.
Amanda Holpuch covers breaking news and other topics.
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