A New Jersey man accused of coordinating a neo-Nazi group’s plot to vandalize synagogues and telling FBI agents that he fantasized about killing black people at a mall has been freed from jail several months after his arrest.
Richard Tobin, 19, was released on $100,000 bond Wednesday, according to Matthew Reilly, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of New Jersey. A federal magistrate ordered Tobin to remain under house arrest, prohibited him from accessing the internet and barred him from having any contact with current or former members of the neo-Nazi group, called The Base, and another group called Atomwaffen Division, court records show.
The records don’t explain why U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Williams in Camden, N.J., agreed to set bond for Tobin, who was arrested by the FBI in November. The magistrate sealed court records related to Tobin’s bond request.
A criminal complaint said Tobin was a member of a “white racially motivated violent extremist group” that has “proclaimed war” against members of minority groups in the U.S. The complaint doesn’t name the group, but its description matches The Base.
Yousef Barasneh, a Wisconsin man, was arrested and charged separately in January with spray-painting swastikas, The Base’s symbol and anti-Semitic words on a synagogue in Racine, Wis., in September.
The arrests of Barasneh and Tobin were part of a broader FBI investigation of The Base and Atomwaffen Division.
Both white supremacist groups have embraced “accelerationism,” a fringe philosophy that promotes mass violence to fuel society’s collapse.