Militia Member Pleads Guilty in Military Identity Theft
A Minnesota National Guard soldier, implicated by the FBI in a plot to blow up a National Security Agency facility in Utah, has pleaded guilty to federal identity theft charges in a Minneapolis courtroom.
Keith Michael Novak, 25, of Maplewood, Minn., has been in jail since his arrest by the FBI last December on charges of stealing the classified personnel roster of members of his former military unit.
The case suggests the FBI is actively looking at antigovernment and militia activists or sympathizers using their military connections to commit crimes – an issue of national concern that has been repeatedly raised by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The case against Novak is the latest example.
Charging documents (PDF) say Novak, who served in Iraq with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before joining the Minnesota Army National Guard, stole the identity information, including Social Security numbers, in a scheme to fund and provide fake identities for his militia unit.
He sold the information last November and December for $4,000 to two men who turned out to be undercover FBI agents he had met earlier at a military training session in Utah.
Novak served in the U.S. Army on active duty from 2009 to September 2012, assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., where he had access to sensitive, classified personnel roster information.
At a detention hearing, an FBI agent testified that Novak, while he was in the National Guard, also belonged to the 44th Spatha Libertas or “Sword of Freedom” militia in Minnesota and had discussed bombing an NSA facility in Utah, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in January. Novak was not charged in that alleged plot.
He has, however, also been linked to Buford Braden “Bucky” Rogers, a 24-year-old member of the Black Snake Militia, another antigovernment group based in Minnesota, the newspaper reported. Rogers was arrested last May on charges related to plans to bomb the police department in Montevideo, Minn.
Federal prosecutors are expected to recommend Novak serve three to four years in prison for his offense, while his defense attorney is expected to recommend a sentence of six months to a year. No sentencing date has been set.
Rogers, meanwhile, remains in custody, awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty on Jan. 10 to being a felon in possession of a firearm and possessing unregistered destructive devices (i.e. homemade bombs or improvised explosive devices).
The relationship between Rogers and Novak isn’t fully spelled out in court documents.
While no specifics are given in court documents, the cases of Novak and Rogers suggest the FBI is looking at other suspects, perhaps including someone who helped assemble bombs. Several documents filed in the case against Rogers are sealed from public inspection, suggesting either an ongoing investigation or cooperation by the defendant.
The Minneapolis newspaper has challenged the sealing of some of the documents and won some redacted releases of court filings.
FBI agents who arrested Rogers found assembled homemade bombs and firearms at the home of the suspect’s father, who was not arrested.
At the time of Rogers’ arrest, the FBI said it believed “a terror attack was disrupted by law enforcement personnel and that the lives of several local residents were potentially saved.”
Federal authorities say “they are confident that they foiled a planned attack on the Montevideo Police Department and possibly saved lives” when they arrested Buford Rogers.
