Patriot Front trial starts today
Kootenai County Sheriff's Office personnel in riot gear guard Coeur d'Alene police officers who arrested the individuals seen kneeling June 11, 2022 with their hands cuffed behind their backs in Coeur d'Alene. Those arrested are associated with the Patriot Front, a white nationalist, fascist organization.
PRESS file
COEUR d’ALENE — Five members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front are expected to stand trial this week for allegedly planning to violently disrupt a Pride celebration in Coeur d’Alene City Park.
The five men — Devin W. Center, James J. Johnson, Forrest C. Rankin, Derek J. Smith and Robert B. Whitted — have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors estimate the trial, which begins today, will last through Thursday or Friday. The state plans to call more than 20 witnesses.
The charges stem from last June, when a tipster reported seeing a “little army” with metal shields and other gear piling into the back of a U-Haul truck.
Area law enforcement stopped the truck just blocks from City Park, where a Pride celebration was ongoing, and arrested the 31 men crammed inside the vehicle. The men carried what police described as “tactical” medical kits, as well as radios, cameras, homemade shields and “abnormally long” metal flag poles.
The group also had a document outlining a plan to form a column outside City Park and proceed inward, “until barriers to approach are met.” At that point, the column would disengage and head down Sherman Avenue.
Patriot Front broke off from neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America after the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. The group’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate in the U.S. and specifically argues that only people of European descent are American.
“Even those born in America may yet be foreign,” the manifesto reads in part. “Nationhood cannot be bestowed upon those who are not of the founding stock of our people and those who do not share the common spirit that permeates our greater civilization and the European diaspora.”
Rioting is generally a misdemeanor in Idaho. Conspiracy to riot is punishable by up to one year in jail, as well as by a $5,000 fine and up to two years of probation.