Chattanooga prosecutors won’t use the word “terrorist” when they resume a federal case today against a 65-year-old Tennessee man charged with planning to attack a Muslim community in New York.
Robert Doggart recruited people from right-wing social media sites, openly discussed using assault rifles on Muslims, and wanted to use explosives to burn down a mosque at Islamberg near Hancock, N.Y., prosecutors told jurors in Chattanooga’s U.S. District Court last week.
Doggart, a former engineer at the Tennessee Valley Authority and a 2014 congressional candidate, never launched his planned attack because authorities stepped in and arrested him on April 10, 2015, prosecutors say. He faces one count of solicitation to commit arson of a building, one count of solicitation to commit a civil rights violation, and two counts of threat in interstate commerce, records show.
But he wasn’t charged with terrorism, say attorneys for Islamberg, because the federal government doesn’t have a powerful, catch-all statute to punish alleged domestic terrorists like Doggart or Dylann Roof, the white supremacist convicted of killing nine black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015.
“Any time you see Muslims charged with terrorism, [prosecutors] often have this link to ‘they were looking up ISIS- sympathizing websites’ because then they can get them on an international terrorism charge,” attorney Tahirah Amatul-Wadud said Friday. “Essentially, your charge is connected to something overseas.”