August Kreis III

August B. Kreis III was a white supremacist activist and self-appointed director of a Aryan Nations faction based in Lexington, South Carolina who served as a central node in the network that FBI informant Joshua Caleb Sutter was deployed to monitor and report on following Sutter's 2003 arrest and recruitment.

Background and Aryan Nations Leadership

Kreis had a long history in the white supremacist movement before his South Carolina period. He served as "minister of information" for the main Aryan Nations under Richard Butler before Butler's death in 2004, and subsequently assumed leadership of a splinter faction that continued under the Aryan Nations name from Lexington County, South Carolina. In this role he operated out of the same geographic and social environment as Sutter.

The Al-Qaeda Statements and FBI Investigation

In 2005, Kreis publicly stated to CNN that the Aryan Nations sought to form an alliance with al-Qaeda and claimed members of his movement "desired to join Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States government."¹ He had previously pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

According to contemporaneous reporting citing FBI sources and former Aryan Nations figures, Sutter, already working as a paid FBI informant from his Lexington home, talked Kreis into making these public statements. Aryan Nations figures including Kreis himself and a figure named Redfeairn stated that Sutter had "attempted repeatedly to gain access to top leaders in various branches of the Aryan Nations and the Church of the Sons of Yaweh."² The al-Qaeda public pledge brought FBI and media attention to Kreis and began the investigation that eventually led to his prosecution.

In the same period, Sutter was appointed the "Minister for Islamic Liaison" of the Aryan Nations under Kreis, a position that nominally formalized the role he was performing as an FBI informant tracking Aryan Nations attempts to reach out to Islamist networks.²

VA Fraud Prosecution and Sentence

The FBI investigation into Kreis's public statements did not produce a material support for terrorism prosecution. Instead, investigators discovered financial irregularities: Kreis had collected nearly $193,000 in military pension benefits to which he was not fully entitled, reporting no income from side sources to the Veterans Administration in 2005 while actually receiving approximately $33,669 from undisclosed sources.¹

In May 2011, a federal grand jury in U.S. District Court in Columbia, S.C., returned a three-count indictment against Kreis for filing fraudulent statements to obtain veterans benefits and embezzling money belonging to the United States. Kreis pleaded guilty in August 2011. In December 2011, he was sentenced to six months served, six months house arrest, two years probation, and ordered to repay approximately $193,000.³

Kreis resigned leadership of his Aryan Nations faction following his conviction.

Sutter's Earliest Federal Prosecution

Kreis represents the earliest documented instance of Sutter's FBI informant work producing a prosecutorial outcome. The Kreis case preceded Sutter's 2014 Martinet Press publishing operations and his 2017 entry into Atomwaffen Division, situating Kreis as an early node in a continuous informant deployment that ran from 2003 through at least 2021. The FBI Columbia Field Office, which handled Sutter's primary informant relationship through Special Agent Bill Moser, was the same field office with jurisdiction over the Lexington County operations involving Kreis.