Augustus Invictus: Movement Lawyer

This is a continuation of the story of the career of Augustus Sol Invictus, self-styled 'Attorney for the Damned.' Read part one here.

Augustus Sol Invictus has had a career riddled with false starts, failed campaigns, retirements, and renunciations. After being admitted to the bar in September 2012, he practiced law for just six months before issuing a statement renouncing everything in his life, his law license included. His radical pronouncements about abandoning civilization to bring about the Great War alarmed his colleagues, but amounted to little - he was back in the courtroom a few months later. It was not until his second return to the profession in late 2018, after a two year retirement, that he sought to work specifically as a movement lawyer, taking on civil and criminal cases for clients he would describe as 'political dissidents.' He gave interviews, raised money, and built a reputation in the movement, but a careful examination of the record fails to produce any clear instance in which one of his dissident clients was left better off for retaining him. The self-styled 'attorney for the damned' offered his clients no salvation, with none of the high profile cases he built his reputation on ending in a favorable verdict.

In a 2019 interview on Red Ice TV, a white supremacist Youtube channel, Augustus Invictus told the program's host, Henrik Palmgren, that it was his involvement in the American Front cases that "got [him] into all this." Marcus Faella, the leader of the white supremacist paramilitary group American Front, remains to this day Invictus' most notable movement case. "I was in the trenches with these guys for years," Invictus told Palmgren, "Some of them are my best friends at this point." After Faella's conviction in 2014 for conducting paramilitary training, Invictus came on as counsel for his appeal. But for all the years of this case appearing next to his name as shorthand for his movement bona fides, it appears that Invictus did very little to help Faella. The court affirmed Faella's conviction and set the case for resentencing. On the morning Faella was scheduled to receive his new sentence, Invictus filed a motion to reschedule. After months on the road for his 2016 US Senate campaign, he couldn't make it to court.

Hoping to appeal the case to a higher court, Faella's wife Patricia wrote a letter to the judge expressing her concern that although they'd retained Invictus to represent her husband, Invictus had "hired a special appeals lawyer to write the brief." According to her letter, the appeals lawyer refused to continue working for Invictus after the Faellas were late making payments toward the agreed upon $20,000 fee, though she specified that Invictus was working on the case "essentially for free." Invictus, in his motion to reschedule the hearing, wrote that Patricia was mentally ill "to the point of clinical insanity." At the end of his appeal in May of 2016, Marcus Faella was not only still guilty and out thousands of dollars paid to a mysteriously absent appeals attorney, the judge actually increased his sentence, adding another year of home confinement to the original sentence. Three months later, Invictus lost the Libertarian primary for Florida's US Senate seat by nearly 50 points. By the end of 2016, Invictus had lost the biggest case of his career, lost an election, and been accused of violence and abuse by multiple women.

Invictus retired from the practice of law in early 2017 "so that [he] could do the politics thing full time," as he told Palmgren in that 2019 interview, but he didn't mean another run for office. Invictus spent 2017 traveling the country, speaking at right wing rallies and protests from Boston, MA to Huntington Beach, CA. Perhaps most famously, he was a headline speaker for the August 12, 2017 Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville, VA. A year later, still retired from law and with no clear source of income, court filings show he was behind on child support payments to his first wife. That same month, August 2018, his second wife gave birth to the couple's second child together. He continued to write for his website The Revolutionary Conservative and self published several books, including The Witches' Sabbath, a cycle of poems reimagining the Manson Family murders as series of occult initiation rituals. It had been a year since the Unite the Right rally, a year during which he apparently did not work. In text messages filed in a divorce case several years later, his second wife wrote, "I want the pain I remember from going to work one week after giving birth to go away and it haunts me."

In October of 2018, Invictus announced that he was returning to the practice of law. He incorporated a new law firm, The Law Firm of Augustus Invictus, with the address listed as the Ocala, Florida home of Everte Farnell, a marketing copywriter with a history of tax scams who is currently represented by Invictus in an ongoing domestic violence case. The announcement coincided with the news that four members of the Rise Above Movement (RAM) had been indicted in the Western District of Virginia under the Federal Anti-Riot Act. Several weeks later, four more members of the group were indicted under the same statute in a federal court in California. Three of the California defendants were arrested, but the fourth, Aaron Eason, was listed as a fugitive. It was in this moment that Augustus Invictus began his career as a movement lawyer in earnest.

In a video posted to his social media on November 6, 2018, Invictus says he was contacted by a friend of Aaron Eason's. Since the launch of his newest law firm, Invictus had put the word out: "If anyone gets arrested in connection with these rallies we were doing last year, I need you to give me a call." Invictus flew to California to negotiate Eason's surrender to federal authorities. When Eason appeared in court with his court-appointed attorney, Invictus, who is not licensed to practice in California, was in the room. While he was in California, he helped found the American Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) to raise money specifically for Aaron Eason's defense, with the hope that it would raise enough money for all eight RAM defendants.

Invictus himself does not appear on the incorporation paperwork for the ALDF, which lists Brian Michael Enright as the registered agent. The ALDF's secretary and spokesperson was Christopher Johncox, a libertarian blogger who also managed Invictus' Revolutionary Conservative site and produced a podcast hosted by David Duke. Later filings show the corporation was run by movement figures like James Kelso, a man whose white nationalist resume goes back decades and includes a stint as David Duke's live-in personal assistant. The organization, of course, required the involvement of a few movement lawyers. In 2020, paperwork lists the CEO as California attorney William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the explicitly white nationalist American Freedom Party who has run for office on the platform of amending the Constitution to revoke the citizenship of any American who is not a "non-Hispanic white of the European race." The following year, he was replaced as CEO by Charles Edward Lincoln III, a disbarred attorney who helped Jason Kessler organize a failed "Unite the Right 2" rally in Washington DC.

It is not clear how much money the ALDF raised for the legal defense of Aaron Eason or any of the other RAM members. Though the website claimed 501(c)4 status, the IRS shows no record of that status being granted and no Form 990s were ever filed. When the indictments against Eason, Rundo, and Boman were dismissed in April 2019, former Traditionalist Worker Party leader Matthew Parrott credited the victory to Invictus and the ALDF. Invictus had successfully spun a narrative that these donations were a vital component of the legal defense in those cases, glossing over the fact that all of the defendants were represented by court-appointed counsel.

The decision to dismiss the indictments against the California RAM defendants was reversed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 and the case is proceeding against Rob Rundo, Tyler Laube, and Robert Boman. Aaron Eason was dismissed from the case following his death in December 2022. Boman and Rundo are expected to go to trial in March 2024. Tyler Laube entered into a plea agreement on September 26, 2023. All three men continue to be represented by court-appointed attorneys.

In the summer of 2019, all four RAM members charged in Virginia entered guilty pleas. Soon after pleading guilty, however, Benjamin Daley, Thomas Gillen, and Michael Miselis sought to appeal those convictions. Cole White, whose plea provided a more lenient sentence in exchange for his substantial assistance in the case, did not join the appeal. As in the California cases, these defendants all received court-appointed counsel, which extended to their appeals process. Thomas Gillen, however, chose go his own way. In August 2019, he retained Augustus Invictus to represent him, replacing his public defender, and moved to sever his appeal from his co-defendants'.

And while all three men's appeals were unsuccessful, the docket in the Gillen case reveals an attorney unprepared for the federal appeals process and distracted by other endeavors. His initial appearance on the case was filed on August 23, 2019, just two days after he announced a 2020 Presidential campaign. After receiving two extensions on the deadline to file his appeal brief, Invictus instead filed a request to introduce new evidence to supplement the lower court record, evidence he hoped would support a grounds for appeal that Gillen's plea agreement specifically waived.

The same week that motion was denied, Invictus set off on a five week cross-country road trip, with a path mapped out through gas station purchases he filed as campaign expenses with the Federal Election Commission. He drove up the east coast from Florida to Maine, then crossed the country to California and drove halfway back again, ending in Sweetwater, TX. The week he was supposed to be taking advantage of an extension granted by the court to file his brief, he made a stop in Denver to visit James Mason, a lifelong neo-Nazi writer and organizer whose book Siege regained popularity on the violent fringes of the extreme right when it became required reading for members of the Nazi terror organization Atomwaffen Division.

After receiving another extension, he filed an improperly formatted brief a day late. Gas station receipts indicate he finished writing the brief in southern California, with a $21 purchase at a restaurant in RAM founder Robert Rundo's hometown of Huntington Beach the day prior. A corrected, but still insufficient, version was filed a few days later as Invictus drove from Las Vegas to Lubbock, TX, with a stop in Tempe, AZ that would have added hours to the drive. Perhaps coincidentally, Atomwaffen member Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh was at that time being held without bond at the Lubbock County Detention Center after he and fellow Atomwaffen member Kaleb Cole were pulled over for speeding while dressed in full tactical gear with drugs and weapons in the car. A records request for the visitor logs is unlikely to be successful, but it is not out of the question that he may have been offering legal advice to a member of Atomwaffen. A few months earlier, journalist Nate Thayer received a cease and desist letter from Invictus. Thayer had contacted Cody Moreash of Tempe, AZ for comment before publishing a story in which Thayer alleged Moreash was the new leader of Atomwaffen.

By the time Invictus received notice from the court that the appeal would be dismissed if he failed to cure the insufficiencies in his filing, he was otherwise occupied. Though he was later acquitted on the charge, court documents in a domestic violence case allege that on December 12, 2019, Invictus choked his wife and threatened her with a gun in their home in South Carolina. On December 20, she attempted to report the assault at a police station in Jacksonville, Florida. On December 23, arrest warrants were issued in South Carolina. On December 26, he did manage to file a corrected brief, despite being a wanted fugitive. He was arrested outside of a shopping mall in Melbourne, Florida on December 30, 2019. When the Fourth Circuit affirmed Gillen's conviction, it was with his public defender at his side.  

During his brief return to the legal profession before his own arrest, Invictus claimed in multiple interviews to be representing Matt Hale, the founder of the white supremacist "religion" the World Church of the Creator (now called the Creativity Movement), who is currently serving a forty year sentence for attempting to solicit the murder of a federal judge who ruled against him in a trademark infringement lawsuit. In a January 2019 interview, Invictus said he was planning to make a visit to ADX Florence, the maximum security federal prison in Colorado, to meet with Hale and a second client he did not name. At the time, ADX Florence was also home to Ted Kaczynski, of whom he appears to have been a longtime fan, although it is not clear who he may have been claiming to represent as Invictus never filed an appearance on behalf of Hale or any other inmate at that facility.

As part of the grand legal strategy he envisioned, Invictus planned not only to provide criminal defense, but proactive civil litigation to advance the movement.  In furtherance of that goal, Invictus ghost-wrote the complaint in a lawsuit filed in August 2019 by Warren Balogh and Greg Conte, members of the National Justice Party, against the City of Charlottesville. The suit was substantially similar to an unsuccessful suit filed by Jason Kessler, with both cases alleging the government had violated the civil rights of the Unite the Right attendees by not proactively ensuring the event could take place. Conte and Balogh did not have representation in the case, which was dismissed earlier this year, but the original complaint ends with a signed statement that Invictus helped them draft it. Warren Balogh is represented on appeal by Glen Allen, a former National Alliance member who currently represents Patriot Front in several lawsuits.

A civil suit he did file an appearance on that year was a defamation case filed by Nicholas Dean, a New Orleans charter school principal who lost his job after being photographed at the "Battle of New Orleans," a confederate rally in 2017. The suit against the photographer was dismissed less than a year after it was filed, but not before Invictus withdrew from the case just hours before his own arrest in the domestic abuse case, citing a "personal dispute" that had left the attorney-client relationship "irretrievably broken." Invictus would later unsuccessfully attempt to subpoena all of his former client's text messages as part of his own divorce proceedings. The "personal dispute" that preceded his withdrawal from the case was his belief that Dean had helped Invictus' second wife file the initial police report near his home outside of Jacksonville.

His arrest at the end of 2019 put an abrupt end to his plans to organize a robust network for fundraising, researching, and litigating on behalf of white supremacists who found themselves up against the judicial system. The pandemic delayed his trial, which didn't take place until April 2022. He was released on bond in March 2020 and moved in with his father, John Gillespie. Within weeks of his release, however, that house was raided by a multi-agency task force executing a warrant for his father's arrest on charges of sex trafficking. Invictus filed notice that he intended to represent his father, but was forced with withdraw after the prosecutor's office moved to disqualify him - not only had be been present at the time of the raid, the wire tap had intercepted a number of calls to which he was a party, making him a witness in the case. John Gillespie remains incarcerated with no trial date, having been found incompetent to proceed by a court appointed doctor.

Since his arrest earlier this summer on a felony charge arising from his participation in the 2017 torch march on the eve of the Unite the Right rally, Invictus has entered into an unusual arrangement. Shortly after retaining Maryland-based defense attorney Terrell N. Roberts to represent him in his criminal case, he filed an appearance as co-counsel alongside Roberts, representing Capitol riot defendant Anna Lichnowski. He's also provided representation to Jason Brown, an active member of the anti-semitic hate group the Goyim Defense League. Brown pleaded guilty to domestic violence by strangulation and witness tampering last month. He also currently represents Amanda Rains, Ronald Lee Murray, and Anthony Altick after their arrests under Florida's new criminal mischief law for hanging swastika banners off a highway overpass in Orlando. And he has recently filed to appeal a case in which he represents a former United Airlines employee who claims he was the victim of employment practices that discriminate against white men. In an echo of earlier cases, the most recent entries on that appeals docket are a request for an extension and the court's response that his filing was improper.

Augustus Invictus is currently scheduled to proceed to trial in March 2024. Until then, he continues to appear in court both as a defendant and attorney.

Note: Augustus Sol Invictus has not been convicted of a crime. Allegations of domestic abuse and violent behavior have been made by multiple women, as documented in police reports over the course of the past decade. He was acquitted in 2022 on charges of kidnapping, domestic violence, and the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime after the complaining witness failed to appear at trial. Stalking charges related to a bond violation in that case were also dropped. His settlement offer in a defamation case against another former partner has not been accepted.
The facts as presented here are drawn from public record and do not imply anything beyond what exists in court documents, public statements, and contemporaneous reporting.