The FBI “terrorism” arrest of a Washington, D.C., Metro police officer making headlines all over the world on Wednesday actually involved a man who sent $245 worth of gift cards to an FBI informant he thought was his friend.
Nicholas Young, a 36-year-old Virginia man, had previously tried to dissuade the informant from joining ISIS, even as the informant spent years cultivating him and waiting for him to do something illegal.
Young was accused of attempting to provide material support to the militant group the Islamic State. News reports highlighted his job prominently and announced that he had been accused of “helping ISIS” — making it sound like he was about to blow up the subway.
But Young is not alleged to have planned any act of violence. Instead, he is accused of sending $245 worth of gift cards to a government informant who had pretended to be living in Islamic State territory. The informant had been posing as a friend of Young’s for several years. He was only one of several informants who had been in touch with Young since 2010 and had seemingly tried to coax him into committing an illegal act.
In a Department of Justice press release announcing Young’s arrest on Wednesday, it was noted that since 2014, ” Young met on about 20 separate occasions with an FBI confidential human source.” This source was an informant posing as a U.S. military reservist of Middle Eastern background. The informant told Young he had become disillusioned with the Army and wanted to travel abroad and live in the territories of the Islamic State. According to the terms of the criminal complaint, the informant told Young it was “becoming an obligation for us” to travel and join ISIS.
In November 2014, Young was led to believe that the informant in the case had successfully made it abroad and was now living under ISIS rule. In an email sent to his account, an undercover FBI operative posing as the informant wrote Young a note saying, “Essa, Salaam Alaykum. I made it to [the Islamic State]! Mashallah words cannot explain …” Over the next several months, Young periodically exchanged emails with this account, which was being operated by the FBI.
On June 1, 2015, Young was interviewed by law enforcement in relation to a separate domestic violence investigation. During this interview, he told investigators several bizarre details about his personal life, including the fact that he had dressed up as “Jihadi John” the previous year at a Christmas party and was a collector of Nazi memorabilia. He also told investigators that he thought ISIS was a terrorist organization and showed them a German eagle tattoo he had gotten on his neck.
FBI agents interviewed him again several times in December of that year, asking him about his previous contact with the man who had been their informant. Young told them that he had not been in touch with him for some time and had no up-to-date contact information for him, adding that he had lost touch with the man after he’d taken a “vacation trip” to Turkey.
In April 2016, an FBI undercover agent contacted Young again from the informant’s email account and told him to download a mobile messaging application. A few months later, in July, the FBI contacted Young through that application while still posing as the informant and told him that circumstances in Islamic State territory were “better than the news reports portrays.” The undercover agent, who Young thought was his friend, subsequently asked Young if he could send him some gift card codes that could be used to purchase messaging accounts for international communications.
Young told the agent that “[God willing] more codes will come your way,” adding with apparent concern that there were “many sting operations and set ups in this area.” A week later, an account, allegedly belonging to Young sent 22-digit gift card codes to the account operated by the undercover agent. The FBI then redeemed these gift cards for a total of $245.
The charges in this case stem entirely from this gift card transaction.
Ironically, in the communications referenced, Young evinced great concern about being targeted by informants and repeatedly warned the informant that he should be wary.
It appears from past communications that Young had also previously told FBI agents that he fought with rebels seeking to overthrow Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Throughout the investigation, law enforcement agents apparently never saw fit to stop Young from carrying weapons or continuing his work, even noting that he had undertaken off-site weapons training for his job in March.
If convicted of the charges in this case, Young faces up to 20 years in prison.
Top photo: A law enforcement officer walks on the street outside the home of Nicholas Young.
Why not imprison all of the US Senators and Bush for creating ISIS, and for war crimes by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. It is odd that our government officials consider themselves heroes when they kill without a cause, but when a someone in the Middle East starts shooting back after his children have been burned alive with bombs, he is a terrorist.
Textbook definition of exceptionalism.
Where was the 4th Amendment’s requirement of “probable cause” of a past crime to snoop on this guy in the first place?
This is precisely why the 4th Amendment needs to be enforced by the Judicial Branch – not everything is the government’s business and when they snoop on citizens, without legitimate probable cause, real harm comes to those citizens.
I think it isnt just a matter of being allowed ‘to snoop’ on someone. Part of warrant law as we have it states that warrants need to be renewed every monthish, and for it to be renewed one supposedly has to prove continued wrongdoing (with evidence). Not that they are hard to come by or are treated as if they matter (and the patriot act makes them virtually immovable if they want them to be without any malfeasance necessary). We have totally trashed the concept of a warrant in this country. And I havent even touched on search and seizure, or sneak and peek (do I need to? The latter seems a totally unconstitutional nobrainer, especially given how people are being set up and/or abused to take advantage of civil forfeiture law).
Dog gone it. I may be the subject for arrest from sending money codes to that beautiful Nigerian princess who needs rescuing. She only needed 10,000 or so. Am I being entrapped?
Thanks for reporting this. I live in the DC metro area, and what the media here is reporting is nothing but sensationalism, parroting the FBI. Really despicable.
I have long maintained that one way of countering domestic terrorism, both in the US and in other countries, would be to allow those who wished to go to the Middle East to support ISIS to go there. Before leaving they would be required to exchange their passports for a temporary version that enabled them to travel to their destination, renounce their citizenship. and sign an affidavit indicating their understanding that should they ever set foot in their former home country again, they would be subject to immediate arrest for terrorism.
I would also extend the practice to those who send money to other terrorist states, or state supporters of terrorism such as North Korea and Israel.
Once someone becomes a target, and sometimes that happens when they have a normal human reaction, or rub someone in a bogus or wrong way, etc., they will then take control of a targets life- They parallelly construct pretexts to enable and deploy whatever authorities /techniques / cooperations they need. Whereas the target becomes highly suggestible. So, you can’t really know why they take down a target, really. Trials are kangaroo courts.
Finally a cop is charged with … something!
This is shameful behavior, and it amounts to entrapment. US citizens deserve better.
Why the exceptionalism though? Nobody deserves that. Nobody, anywhere.
What a colossal waste of time and resources. FBI needs to stop these silly entrapments and go after the cops who are killing U.S. civilians–that would be appropriate use of all of their toys for “turning” people. Heck, why not send informants to infiltrate every large police dept. in the country? That would save a lot more lives than any of these “masterminds” they’ve entrapped over the years.
According to the average commentator / journalist here:
Police officer accidentally kills a black man during a traffic stop = all cops are terrorists.
Police officer actually sends money to terrorists = omg government overreach?
Apparently it should only be a crime if a large amount of money is sent? You people realize how silly you sound?
I had such promise for this site but with each passing day I wonder why I keep coming back. This isn’t adversarial journalism as I define it… just a collection of really illogical opinions.
“. . .just a collection of really illogical opinions.”
Oh, the irony!
Where did a police officer “actually send money to terrorists”?
Are you dim?
Do us a favor: Keep the promise you made to yourself. It is quite apparent from your many posts that this site is intellectually unsuitable to a person of your mentality.
Did you read the press release linked to in the article? It contains quite a list of all the bad things he has said and done. He sounds like a terrorist in the making who might have blown the metro if allowed to continue. But all they arrested him for was trying to send $245 in coupons to a friend of his who he was duped into thinking had joined ISIS. You have to wonder why that is the best they could do. Is all the rest of it is just exaggerations, simply distractions from the fact that ISIS actually received no aid whatsoever? I think you got duped, too. Think about it.
Who gets to lawyer up for sending nearly 1/2 million to Iran, a State Dept. state sponsor of terror — Uncle Sam? by the way, does that put you on a list?
damnit, was 400 million, that’s large neough to not be considered as providing material support.
If $0.01 <= donation <= $999,999.00, then you are providing material support to terrorists.
Well, in the case of Iran it was *their money* to start with, frozen but never actually taken formally away from them, not under Reagan, not under Bushes. And the U.S. had signed an agreement that unfroze it, right out in the open.
“. . .it was *their money* to start with. . .”
Yup. Frozen since 1979.
And if interest had been paid, at an average 3% per annum, compounded annually, that $400 million would be 1,194,090,671.14 by now.
I wonder if that money was “working” for someone other than the owner over those nearly-four decades.
“..an FBI confidential human source.”
You mean they have non-human sources!? Are aliens among us, posing as peace-niks while they gather the intelligence needed to bring us down!!!? I knew the FBI was crooked, but working for evil alien space invaders is too much! It does, however, explain why the US government lacks human empathy.
Ostensibly I suppose an animal can be a witness too but I suspect that is to differentiate it from a wiretap, a document, osint and other sources of datagathering which are supposedly less biased. Though of course that phrase is also used to cover up technical interception like the stories written here and elsewhere about Stingrays have shown, ostensibly to protect their methods or prevent them from being scrutinized.
Agent Smith.
Every official from every national security agency (federal, state, local) takes a supreme loyalty oath to operate within the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution – which includes the Bill of Rights.
It is illegal and disloyal for any agency’s mission to violate the U.S. Constitution (a wartime charter). This sounds like CoinTelPro which was outlawed by Congress in the 1970’s. CoinTelPro is not merely entrapment but oath-sworn constitutional officers intentionally FRAME their targets – in other words government officials actually fabricate evidence or commit crimes themselves.
Since 9/11, we would probably be safer by cutting those agency budgets by at least 50% – they actually function better with LESS money, which minimizes mission-creep. Also never forget the Bush Administration created ISIS by disbanding the Iraqi government in the Spring of 2013.
From this description it sounds like he sent monetary support to someone he had reason to believe was an ISIS member abroad using the money for ISIS purposes. (It is a fair argument that he might have thought his friend was just in need of cash and was talking up a story, but surely not certain). The real question is whether the punishment fits the crime. The lack of an obvious lower limit on “support” is the key issue here – can federal agents put you in prison for 20 years for writing your disagreement to an ISIS member because he could use the back of the envelope to write a terrorist recipe on?
But let’s get to the math. ISIS had $2 billion in assets, takes in allegedly $1 billion yearly in heroin smuggling now … let’s suppose it has a $1 billion cash flow, on an order of magnitude. And that it has killed 18,000+ people in two years, call it 10,000 a year, on an order of magnitude. Then you take 1 billion over 10,000 and get that every $100,000 sent to ISIS pays for the taking of a human life. (This should be of relevance when people talk about how sympathetic we ought to be to that Italian family that had almost gotten together the ransom when the U.S. accidentally blew up their loved ones in an Al Qaida camp, though arguably that group is less homicidal) Now spending $245 to help them means paying for, oh, about 1/400 of a killing. And 20 years is, obviously, more than 1/400 of a life. So the sentence is cruel, though not by as many orders of magnitude as I might have expected.
An interesting parallel is the Mexican drug war, which continues to kill around 20,000 a year. A recent estimate puts the cartels taking $20 to $30 billion annually back to Mexico. So there every $1 to $1.5 million spent seems to be paying for a murder. Which means that paying $2500 to a cartel for drugs would cause roughly comparable loss of life. And again, that is likely to generate serious jail time if you’re caught with the product, and again, it is not proportional, but not as far off as I might have thought.
Now if only we would design a policy that did not punish the people who compete with ISIS or domestic cartels with violence-free domestic drug production and allowed properly regulated distribution and use…
Interesting argument. I dont agree with all of it but interesting no less. Going to reply more later.
A quick question: if it were given for a doctor visit or groceries or a babysitter or school tuition or whatever, is that still considered supporting terrorism? Or just helping a fellow human? Does it do any of us any good to label things this much? Especially for a few hundred bucks. It isn’t like he was sending sarin or yellowcake or even a fitted suit to cover up a suicide vest. I actually think in some of these cases (real) help of that nature is more preventative than causitive. Just IMHO.
Depends on whether it was a flight school. :)
Seriously, you have a real point there. To send money to ISIS, even for groceries, is clearly part of funding the organization; it doesn’t matter what they say it’s earmarked for in their budget, any more than it matters when the state tells you your lottery losings “go to education”; it’s all general funds.
However, what if it were someone known to associate with ISIS, saying they had a different use for it? In this case, the recipient was an agent so they said it was for ISIS messaging, but plausibly a real recruit to ISIS might take her kid to Syria and then beg the non-Islamic father of her child, who knows she went to fight for ISIS, for money to buy medicine. But … is she telling the truth? Now what? I don’t know what the law is and I don’t currently have a philosophical scheme either.
Thanks for your reply :)
I thought it was to you but either it wasn’t or I had deleted it before pressing “submit”, but it isn’t here and it correlates directly to what you said so I will bring it up either here or again:
When I saw this story I couldn’t help but think of those two girls who were press darlings for a few days (last year I think?) for chatting up “recruiters” and/or lonely dudes who wanted “supportive wives” for travel money/etc. Everyone was all “heroes!” but (a) were they really? And (b) what if instead they got catfished (well, whatever the equivalent would be in such a twisted scenario) by FBI or some other agency looking for people who want to join up?
I disagree with BOTH parties in that scenario — but this and stuff like this is one reason I think “intent” is such an evolving concept these days. People experiment a lot more these days with all sorts of ideas and possibilities — in part because most of the barricades to entry have now been entirely stripped away. And then that in turn, I think, winds up making people take it less seriously when applied to them to begin with — no deep thought involved or necessary.
A funny thought, too: how many of us REALLY look into things we give a bit of money to now? How difficult would it be for “terrorists” — or actual terrorists — to fund something with a semireal (or even totally real) kickstarter? And how do/would we allocate responsibility?
Wow! That $245.00 could have won the war had it gotten into ISIS hands. Thank you, FBI, for all your hard work intercepting it.
What did that cost the American taxpayer, by the way?
This is a new low for the FBI and the US criminal justice system. It can only be surpassed if the US starts prosecuting Facebook users for “liking” the posts of undercover agents who express support for terrorist acts.
Confession: I have “liked” posts which have called for the destruction of Israel.
There’s little or no terrorism being enacted against the USA so it has to be cultivated. Imagine the kind of people who actually do this for a living and the threat that their jobs pose to us all. They must be nasty messed up people or perhaps mind controlled. Poor bastards are being locked away for life. Our lives are disposable to these people.
He communicated with a member of a group responsible for sex slavery, genocide and global terror. He cannot plead ignorance of these facts. He sought to help them out. He got burned. He has nobody to blame but himself. Time for him to lawyer up
So you’re suggesting that he communicated with the United States government?
So you’re saying he communicated with the United States government?
ummmmm —seems to me he only thought he was helping out a “friend.” Another shameful set-up by TPTB.
Using that logic one might reasonably argue that every tax-paying US citizen is guilty of the same crimes. US ideology has certainly killed far more than ISIS, and that’s not even including the non-fatal harms and suffering.
But like the totally behead people so they’re superduper evil and we’re the good guys! U-S-A-U-S-A-U-S-A!
So, when I call my Congresscritter to deplore their actions and ask them to resign, I should be jailed for 20 years?
After all, every Congresscritter is a member of a group that is responsible for sex slavery, genocide, and global terror. I even provide mayerial support in paying taxes to them (under threat of imprisonment.)
Global terror – bombing Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc ad nauseum.
Genocide – support for Israel, Indonesia, the ongoing genocide of Native Americans, Diego Garcia, etc ad nauseum.
Sex slavery – support of Saudi Arabia, Jerry Epstein, Dyncorp, US prisons…
“So, when I call my Congresscritter to deplore their actions and ask them to resign, I should be jailed for 20 years?”
We laugh at people for doing that, not send them to jail.
And here fly your true colors.