Hate and Hale

The trial of white supremacist Matthew Hale, which begins this week in Chicago, has gotten surprisingly little publicity.

Hale first gained national attention when the Illinois State Bar refused Hale a law license because of his racist beliefs and violent rhetoric. In 1999, a follower of Hale and member of Hale's World Church of the Creator shot five non-white individuals in a multi-state shooting spree. As a result, the FBI infiltrated Hale's organization. At the same time, Hale was involved a civil trademark lawsuit involving a dispute of the name of his organization. After an unfavorable ruling in the civil suit, Hale allegedly solicited an undercover FBI agent to murder the District Judge who ruled against him.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Hale's conversation with the agent was taped:

The tapes, expected to be played for the jury at trial, were made by the FBI informant a few weeks after Lefkow's order in the trademark case.

Prosecutors say Hale, in an email to the informant 10 days after that hearing, quoted "The White Man's Bible," written by his group's founder, as saying that if the government interfered with them, "they then are obviously the criminals and we can treat them like the criminal dogs they are and take the law into our own hands."

He later asked the FBI informant for the addresses of Lefkow and three attorneys involved in the case, and then met with the informant, who secretly taped the conversation, prosecutors say.

On the tapes, the informant asks: "Are we gonna exterminate the rat?"

"Well, whatever you want to do, basically," Hale says.

As the article suggests, the issue is whether Hale solicited a murder or acquesieced to participation in a crime actually suggested by the FBI agent. There's also an obstruction of justice charged based on the allegation that Hale urged his father to lie to the grand jury investigating the solicitation allegation.

I don't know why this case hasn't gotten more attention. As far as I can tell, Hale hasn't become a hero to the black helicopter crowd, ala Weaver, Koresh and McVeigh. The issues certainly are more interesting those in most of the front-page crime fodder these days.