Federal prosecutors who brought terror charges last year against a Virginia man — for buying gift cards for an FBI informant — argued in court last week that Nazi memorabilia found in the man’s apartment was relevant to the case because ISIS and the Nazis share “a similarity in ideology.” According to a transcript of the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg said that the defendant, Nicholas Young, was interested in ISIS and Nazism simultaneously. As an example of historical Muslim-Nazi cooperation, Kromberg noted that Young, on Facebook, had “liked” Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, a Palestinian nationalist who supported Adolf Hitler. Last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused an uproar by claiming that al-Husayni inspired the Nazi Holocaust, an allegation that was widely denounced as untrue by historians.

Photo: Family of Nicholas Young

Young’s lawyer pointed out to the judge that the FBI agents who executed a search warrant on Young’s apartment initially thought they lacked the authority to seize the Nazi mementos — not seeing them as obviously relevant to a terrorism case — but that Kromberg had told them to seize the items anyway. Kromberg, for his part, has previously faced accusations in sworn affidavits by defense attorneys of anti-Muslim bias Young, a white 36-year-old former Washington, D.C., Metro police officer, was arrested in August and charged with material support for terrorism after a sting operation in which he agreed to send $245 worth of gift cards to an FBI informant who had been posing as a friend. The informant told Young that he had joined ISIS and needed the money to pay for mobile messaging accounts ISIS could use to recruit Westerners. A number of weapons were seized from Young’s home after his arrest, which he appeared to have owned legally as part of his work as a police officer. According to the FBI’s own criminal complaint, Young had previously tried to dissuade the informant in his case from joining ISIS. But at least since his 2011 trip to Libya, the bureau had been watching Young’s erratic behavior and alarming social media chatter and waiting for him to do something illegal. Young’s lawyer, Nicholas Smith, argued that if FBI agents had considered Young an actual threat, they never would have let him continue working as a police officer and carrying firearms for more than five years. And despite the terror charge he now faces, Young is not alleged to have been planning to actually conduct any acts of violence. A search warrant executed at his home after his arrest turned up a number of items of historical Nazi paraphernalia, a Confederate flag, and an old photo of Young dressed in a Nazi uniform. His family and lawyers say that Young had been part of a historical re-enactment group for many years and had historical items and uniforms from a number of different armies and conflicts. In the March 10 hearing before federal District Court Judge Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, Kromberg introduced seized items including the Confederate flag, Ku Klux Klan literature, and historical books about the Nazis that were found in Young’s home, along with two pictures of Young — dressed as a Nazi in one, and in “Muslim garb” in the other — taken within five days of each other 11 years ago, in 2006. “So there’s not only a similarity in ideology about certain parts of the ideology, but chronologically, this was happening at the very same time,” Kromberg insisted. Ashley Young, the defendant’s sister, said her brother had been in possession of a large amount of documents and paraphernalia from many different periods of history. “He had done Vietnam War re-enactments in addition to World War II and had been a member of a re-enactment group for many years,” Ashley Young said. “He has boxes full of books and items from different wars in history but they only focused on the Nazi stuff.” Kromberg called attention to a social media account allegedly operated by Young that made positive comments about ISIS under the pseudonym of a German SS storm trooper named Klaus Dusselkamp. And he even cited an anonymous social media commenter who had referred to Young as “Muslim-Nazi scum.” “Now, whether or not that’s true, I don’t know the answer to that,” Kromberg said. “But the point is that the Nazi stuff in this case is very much related to the, to the ISIS stuff.”