WASHINGTON [CNN] — The suspect in Wednesday's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

Von Brunn served six years in prison on federal attempted kidnapping, assault and firearms charges after what he called a citizen's “legal, nonviolent citizens arrest” of members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

White Supremacist Shoots-up Holocaust Museum

WASHINGTON [CNN] — The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

Von Brunn served six years in prison on federal attempted kidnapping, assault and firearms charges after what he called a citizen’s “legal, nonviolent citizens arrest” of members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

On his Web site, “Holy Western Empire,” von Brunn said he was “convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge.”

“He is in our files going back way into the 1980s,” said Heidi Beirich, a researcher for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

“He has extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He’s written extremely incendiary publications, raging about Jews, blacks and the like.”

The suspect and a security guard were wounded in Wednesday afternoon’s shooting at the museum, U.S.

District of Columbia police and the FBI said the shooting appeared to have been the work of a single gunman and there was no prior indication of the attack.

Von Brunn’s Web site states he served as a Navy officer during World War II. But by the late 1970s, Beirich told CNN, he had become a “hardcore neo-Nazi” and an associate of William Pierce — the white supremacist leader whose 1978 book, “The Turner Diaries,” is credited with inspiring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The suspect’s site proclaims itself “a new, hard-hitting exposé of the Jew conspiracy to destroy the white gene-pool.”

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