Verified Update: The Letter Bombs

February 22, 2023·55 min·3 clips

Reporter Mark Greenblatt describes feeling nervous as neo-Nazi leader Matt Heimbach, on a live Zoom call, refuses to condemn violence against named elected officials and says 'their kids have names and addresses.'

Natasha Del Toro opens with new reporting. The update goes back to season three's investigation into racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists and their international fight for white power. This time, the focus moves toward Ukraine. The Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM, is described as helping Russia while fighters join the battlefield alongside the Russian military. After more than 11 months of fighting, the reporting links RIM to a terror campaign aimed at Ukraine supporters. From there, the trail runs through Tennessee. A reporter finds Matt Heimbach, a 31-year-old extremist from Chattanooga who once hosted RIM in America. The show handles the interview carefully. Before playing his explanations, it warns listeners that his racist ideas may be upsetting. That is not a throwaway warning. Heimbach matters to the story because he is presented as a connector between RIM and other Americans. He describes a shared conspiracy worldview, and the reporting does not launder the antisemitic premise behind it. It keeps the focus on evidence, contacts, and how the network formed. His background is part of that record: he started a white power club in college and later became a prominent neo-Nazi figure. The European links come next. He says he already knew European nationalists before meeting RIM members at a gathering in the Czech Republic. The update is grim, careful, and direct about how ideology, war, and American contacts can move through the same channels.

As heard by us

A restrained investigative update that follows RIM's ties from Ukraine to an American neo-Nazi.

Reveal revisits the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group the U.S. government still designates as a terror group. It follows the group's ties to the war in Ukraine and then traces the connection to Matt Heimbach, the American neo-Nazi who helped link RIM to other…

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Why you'd press play

You get the clearest trail from Ukraine's war to Russian Imperial Movement ties with American neo-Nazi organizing and wartime extremism.

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