Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. On April first, twenty ten, retired Navy
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Commander Walter Francis Fitzpatrick the Third walked into the
Speaker 1: Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee. That was no surprise
Speaker 1: to anyone in Madisonville. Fitzpatrick had become a frequent visitor
Speaker 1: to this courthouse in a small town in the foothills
Speaker 1: of the Great Smoky Mountains. A year earlier, in March
Speaker 1: of two thousand and nine, he asked a Monroe County
Speaker 1: grand jury to indict President Barack Obama on charges of treason.
Speaker 1: The grand jury declined to do so. In the year
Speaker 1: that followed, he had been a regular fixture in the
Speaker 1: County Court Clerk's office, demanding information about the county's jury
Speaker 1: selection process. After the grand jury's refusal to accept his
Speaker 1: presentation of evidence against Barack Obama, he could only conclude
Speaker 1: that the process itself was deeply corrupt and sinister forces
Speaker 1: were conspiring against him to suppress the truth that Barack
Speaker 1: Hussein Obama was not the rightful president of the United States,
Speaker 1: that he was born in Kenya, that he had rigged
Speaker 1: the two thousand and eight election, and he was guilty
Speaker 1: of high treason. Walter Fitzpatrick was more than prepared to
Speaker 1: put Barack Obama on trial, but now he believed the
Speaker 1: whole damn system was guilty and he wasn't going to
Speaker 1: let them get away with it. He just needed some backup.
Speaker 1: I'm Molly Konger, and this is where the LA guys
Speaker 1: as in writing this. It's a few days after the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four presidential election. Every election has winners and losers,
Speaker 1: and not everybody is happy with the results. It's probably
Speaker 1: no surprise to you that I count myself among those
Speaker 1: of us who aren't thrilled with the results this time around.
Speaker 1: But sometimes disappointment, dread, and dissatisfaction aren't enough. For some people,
Speaker 1: an undesirable election outcome is simply unacceptable. Literally, they can't
Speaker 1: accept it, it can't be true, and it can't be
Speaker 1: allowed to stand. As with my Halloween episode, I'm a
Speaker 1: little behind the curve here in terms of seasonal content.
Speaker 1: At this rate, I'll be doing a Christmas special on
Speaker 1: Groundhog's Day. But elections and weird little guys go together
Speaker 1: like peanut butter and jelly. Well, no, no, that's not true.
Speaker 1: You do find them together often, but they don't usually
Speaker 1: mix well, so maybe it's more like oil and water.
Speaker 1: Neither of those analogies are really giving me what I want.
Speaker 1: In my personal experience, right wing extremists and election results
Speaker 1: go together like blue gatorade and raw onions. When I
Speaker 1: covered the January sixth riot at the Capitol in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, those were the two things I saw people
Speaker 1: pulling out of their backpacks the most. I think some
Speaker 1: right wing influencer convinced a lot of people who'd never
Speaker 1: been to a riot before that you should carry a raw,
Speaker 1: white onion cut in half in a ziploc baggie because
Speaker 1: rubbing it on your face is a homeopathic remedy for
Speaker 1: tear gas. Just a heads up that is not true.
Speaker 1: Do not do that. Do not rub a raw onion
Speaker 1: on your eyeballs at any time, and definitely don't do
Speaker 1: it after exposure to a chemical irritant. And if you
Speaker 1: you can only pack one thing to drink in a
Speaker 1: situation like that, make it water or else you'll be
Speaker 1: washing pepper spray and onion juice out of your eyes
Speaker 1: with gatorade, which doctors do not recommend. That's just some
Speaker 1: free advice for you, but I thought it would make
Speaker 1: perfect sense to do some kind of election themed weird
Speaker 1: little guy, And to be honest, I'm bored of January
Speaker 1: sixth stories. I'm sure I'll get to some of them
Speaker 1: on this show eventually. And there were some guys there
Speaker 1: who were very strange guys even before they were trying
Speaker 1: to stop the steal. And if the guy they were
Speaker 1: fighting for that day follows through on his promise to
Speaker 1: pardon them all, some of them will make their way
Speaker 1: back into the news one way or another, whether that's
Speaker 1: running for office or building a bomb. But right now today,
Speaker 1: I'm sick of thinking about the twenty twenty election results,
Speaker 1: because I'm sick thinking about the twenty twenty four election results.
Speaker 1: And the twenty twenty election was not the first time
Speaker 1: right wing extremists couldn't accept the results. So come with
Speaker 1: me to the distant past. Two thousand and eight. I
Speaker 1: voted for president for the first time that year, making
Speaker 1: me one of nearly seventy million Americans who cast a
Speaker 1: ballot for Barack Obama. He won handily, beating John McCain
Speaker 1: by more than seven percent in the popular vote and
Speaker 1: pulling in three hundred and sixty five electoral votes to
Speaker 1: McCain's one hundred and seventy three. Barack Obama was promising hope,
Speaker 1: change and healthcare. John McCain was burdened by George W.
Speaker 1: Bush's rock bottom approval ratings and his support for Bush's
Speaker 1: now increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. It seemed like a
Speaker 1: new day had dawned. We were all going to get healthcare,
Speaker 1: and we had finally elected our first black president. Of course,
Speaker 1: not everyone was on board. We'd had more than two
Speaker 1: centuries of white men named James, John, William, and George. Literally,
Speaker 1: of the forty two presidents before Obama, eighteen of them
Speaker 1: were named James, John William, or George. About forty percent
Speaker 1: of the total presidential time until two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: was under a guy with one of those four names.
Speaker 1: We elected two different guys named Franklin. We hadn't really
Speaker 1: been getting a lot of variety conspiracy theories about Barack
Speaker 1: Obama's race, religion, and place of birth are creatures of racism,
Speaker 1: pure and simple. There's no talking your way around that fact.
Speaker 1: He has a foreign sounding name and he is not white.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of anxiety that someone who didn't
Speaker 1: look like the American presidents we'd had before couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: have the same American values. During the primary, Mark Penn,
Speaker 1: a senior campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, wrote a memo
Speaker 1: suggesting that they should highlight the fact that Obama spent
Speaker 1: some of his childhood in Indonesia while emphasizing Clinton's Midwest roots, writing.
Speaker 2: His roots in basic American values and culture are at
Speaker 2: best limited. I cannot imagine electing a president during a
Speaker 2: time of war who was not, at his center fundamentally
Speaker 2: American in his thinking and in his values.
Speaker 1: The Clinton campaign didn't end up going with this strategy,
Speaker 1: but the memo got out, and this idea that Barack
Speaker 1: Obama was an American bled into a conspiracy theory that
Speaker 1: he was not American at all and had in fact
Speaker 1: been born in Kenya. During the two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: election season, surveys showed that as many as a third
Speaker 1: of Republican voters believe there may be some truth to
Speaker 1: the idea that Barack Obama was born outside of the
Speaker 1: United States. An analysis published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity,
Speaker 1: and Politics in twenty nineteen acknowledge that yes, the best
Speaker 1: predictor of believing in any conspiracy theory is a pre
Speaker 1: existing belief in any other conspiracy theory. People who are
Speaker 1: prone to believing unsubstantiated claims often believe many of them.
Speaker 1: But while there are certainly people of all political orientations
Speaker 1: who are willing to entertain the theory, the study found
Speaker 1: that belief in this particular conspiracy theory was uniquely correlated
Speaker 1: to the believer's own race, party affiliation, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: their level of racial resentment toward African Americans. So to
Speaker 1: be clear, there are multiple studies published in journals across
Speaker 1: a range of disciplines over the course of nearly twenty
Speaker 1: years that have found measurable correlations. Here, the people who
Speaker 1: trafficked in Birtherism were white Republicans with a measurable level
Speaker 1: of racial animus. This was never about getting to the truth.
Speaker 1: It was an intense fear of a black president. In
Speaker 1: June of two thousand and eight, just days after Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton conceded the primary and Obama was the presumptive nominee,
Speaker 1: his campaign released a copy of his birth certificate showing
Speaker 1: he had in fact been born in Hawaii. But you
Speaker 1: can't kill a conspiracy with facts. That's never worked and
Speaker 1: confronted with what should have been the final answer to
Speaker 1: the question, Berthers just doubled down. The birth certificate was
Speaker 1: simply fake. This only fueled the fire, and in August
Speaker 1: of two thousand and eight, the first of countless lawsuits
Speaker 1: was filed. And oddly enough, we've already talked about this
Speaker 1: particular lawsuit on this show in the first episode about
Speaker 1: the Pennsylvania clansman Berry Black. Philip Burg's lawsuit alleged that
Speaker 1: Obama had been born in Kenya, and this relied on
Speaker 1: a sworn affidavit written by Ron McCray about a phone
Speaker 1: call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother
Speaker 1: through a translator. Ron McCrae was the homophobic street preacher
Speaker 1: who spent years harassing the owners of the Casanova Lounge,
Speaker 1: a gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania that was located
Speaker 1: across the street from a farm owned by some klansmen.
Speaker 1: Burg's lawsuit was dismissed and the judge called it frivolous
Speaker 1: and not worthy of discussion, which is true, but that
Speaker 1: became the playbook. Berths around the country filed frivolous and
Speaker 1: baffling lawsuits. They filed them in federal court houses, county
Speaker 1: circuit courts, state supreme courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals,
Speaker 1: state boards of election, state administrative courts. They filed complaints
Speaker 1: and requests for injunctions and petitions anywhere they could find
Speaker 1: a bureaucrat sitting in a desk. For just the years
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight through twenty twelve, I found over
Speaker 1: two hundred complaints in various forms, filed with every kind
Speaker 1: of court you can imagine, and some kinds of courts
Speaker 1: I've never heard of, and they lost every single one.
Speaker 1: They seemed convinced that they could find the right collection
Speaker 1: of words, the right legal incantation, that, if presented to
Speaker 1: the right judge and the right jury, would wake America
Speaker 1: from this national nightmare of an Obama presidency. But the
Speaker 1: lawsuits weren't working. Judge after judge judge sent them packing.
Speaker 1: In most cases they didn't even get a hearing. They
Speaker 1: were submitting complaints that had absolutely no legal basis to proceed,
Speaker 1: no basis in reality even and in the cases that
Speaker 1: did get a foot in the door, they were submitting
Speaker 1: forged documents and relying on already debunked claims. Lawyers were
Speaker 1: sanctioned fines were levied, and suit after suit was dismissed.
Speaker 1: But undeterred, the Birthers found a new way forward. If
Speaker 1: they couldn't get justice through civil suits, they would simply
Speaker 1: have to have the President of the United States arrested.
Speaker 1: In June of two thousand and nine, one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy two extremely devoted conspiracy theorists convened. They called themselves
Speaker 1: the super American grand Jury. Now that's not a real thing.
Speaker 1: Grand juries are real, of course. We don't need to
Speaker 1: get bogged down in the specifics because they vary from
Speaker 1: state to state. But generally speaking, a grand jury is
Speaker 1: a group of citizens convened by a court and tasked
Speaker 1: with issuing indictments. So a prosecutor will briefly summarize a case.
Speaker 1: They'll put on a little bit of evidence, maybe some witnesses,
Speaker 1: and the grand jurors will decide if there's probable cause
Speaker 1: to believe a crime has been committed by the individual
Speaker 1: the prosecutor is seeking to indict. They aren't deciding if
Speaker 1: anyone is innocent or guilty. They're not trying the case.
Speaker 1: It's a much lower standard here. They're just deciding, is
Speaker 1: this something that should proceed as a case at all.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard the saying you can get a grand
Speaker 1: jury to indict a ham sandwich. It's a pretty low
Speaker 1: bar to clear at this stage. But we're not here
Speaker 1: to talk about real grand juries because that barely factors
Speaker 1: into the story at all. I just want to be
Speaker 1: clear that grand juris are real, they do exist, and
Speaker 1: this was not one. A grand jury is made up
Speaker 1: of grand jurors who have received an official summons from
Speaker 1: a real court, and they are presented real potential cases
Speaker 1: by a real prosecutor, and they make real determinations about
Speaker 1: which cases get indictments. There are six states that allow
Speaker 1: citizen initiated grand juries in Oklahoma, Nevada, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and North Dakota. There is a process through which you
Speaker 1: can collect enough signatures on a petition to force a
Speaker 1: judge to convene a grand jury to investigate an alleged crime.
Speaker 1: That's not what this was either. They didn't have a
Speaker 1: petition they submitted to a court. They didn't do it
Speaker 1: in any of those states. I'm just saying. Avenues do exist,
Speaker 1: and in some states, like California, you can submit a
Speaker 1: written complaint to request a grand jury investigation into a
Speaker 1: criminal allegation, but they're under no obligation to follow up.
Speaker 1: And in Tennessee, the fact that is about to become
Speaker 1: very relevant. State law allows any citizen to apply to
Speaker 1: testify before a county grand jury about an alleged offense
Speaker 1: that is prosecutable in that county. But the idea of
Speaker 1: a citizen's grand jury, like the super American grand jury,
Speaker 1: is not something these particular extremists invented in their modern iteration.
Speaker 1: Most of these citizens grand jury groups were trying to
Speaker 1: arrest Barack Obama for various invented crimes, but they also
Speaker 1: popped up in the early two thousands among nine to
Speaker 1: eleven truthers who wanted to arrest George Bush during the
Speaker 1: Malhair National Wildlife Refuge occupation. A few years back, militia
Speaker 1: members who supported the Bundy family convened fake grand juries
Speaker 1: to indict local officials and even some reporters whose coverage
Speaker 1: they found lacking conspiracy theory. Frequent flier Larry Clayman has
Speaker 1: not only indicted Joe Biden with a fate grand jury,
Speaker 1: he even convicted him. But according to Daniel Levatas the
Speaker 1: author of The Terrorist next Door, a two thousand and
Speaker 1: four book on the American militia movement. These citizen grand
Speaker 1: juries actually date back to the nineteen seventies with Christian
Speaker 1: identity extremists. Christian identity has come up before. We talked
Speaker 1: about it briefly in the episode about Christopher Hassen, the
Speaker 1: Coastguard lieutenant who was stockpiling guns and planning to assassinate
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court, but was too addicted to opiates to
Speaker 1: make much progress. He'd spent some time researching Christian identity
Speaker 1: online before writing to a longtime white nationalist leader named
Speaker 1: Harold Covington about his plans to make changes to society
Speaker 1: with quote a little focused violence and Christian identity kind
Speaker 1: of sounds like it might mean someone whose identity is Christian, Right,
Speaker 1: It's just someone who considers themselves to be a Christian.
Speaker 1: But that's not what it means at all. It refers
Speaker 1: to a specific set of extremist beliefs that white Europeans
Speaker 1: are God's true chosen people. It is a deeply anti
Speaker 1: Semitic belief system, and one whose followers are often very
Speaker 1: willing to engage in violence. The earliest example levatas sites
Speaker 1: of a written threat to bring a citizen's grand jury
Speaker 1: indictment is a tax protester in Michigan in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two who threatened to indict local authorities trying to enforce
Speaker 1: a core order. And in nineteen seventy five, Richard Butler,
Speaker 1: another weird little guy's recurring character, led a group of
Speaker 1: fifty followers to try to arrest a policeman in Kurdalene,
Speaker 1: Idaho before the officer could testify against a member of
Speaker 1: the group who'd been charged with assault with a day weapon.
Speaker 1: Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan Nations yet at that point,
Speaker 1: but he was already a prominent figure within Christian identity.
Speaker 1: So the super American Grand Jury had deep roots in
Speaker 1: dark places, and it was not so super and not
Speaker 1: a grand jury at all. It was just a collection
Speaker 1: of conspiracists who wrote their own indictment against the president,
Speaker 1: and then they went to a federal courthouse in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. And filed it. Judge Royce Lambert promptly dismissed them.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe dismiss is a tricky word to use here,
Speaker 1: because a real indictment can be dismissed by a judge,
Speaker 1: and that's not what happened here, because this was not
Speaker 1: a real indictment. What Judge Lamberth actually did was issue
Speaker 1: in order denying them permission to have even filed it
Speaker 1: at all, writing, any self styled indictment or presentment issued
Speaker 1: by such a group has no force under the Constitution
Speaker 1: or laws of the United States. Judge Lamberth took senior
Speaker 1: status in twenty thirteen, meaning he's kind of retired but
Speaker 1: still working. So he is actually still a federal judge
Speaker 1: in DC today and has presided over quite a few
Speaker 1: of the January six cases, most notably the trial of
Speaker 1: the QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley in twenty twenty three, fourteen
Speaker 1: years after he kicked those Birthers out of his court
Speaker 1: for trying to arrest the president. He was dismayed to
Speaker 1: see Republican politicians trafficking in rhetoric that downplayed the events
Speaker 1: of January sixth, writing in a court filing in one
Speaker 1: of those cases, the court.
Speaker 2: Is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they
Speaker 2: did anything wrong, But in my thirty seven years on
Speaker 2: the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless
Speaker 2: justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream. I have been
Speaker 2: dismayed to see distortions in outright falsehood seep into the
Speaker 2: public consciousness. I've been shocked to watch some public figures
Speaker 2: try to rewrite history cleming rioters behaved in an orderly
Speaker 2: fashion like ordinary tourists, or mortyrrizing convicted January sixth defendants
Speaker 2: as political prisoners or even incredibly hostages. That is all preposterous.
Speaker 2: The court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could pressage
Speaker 2: further danger to our country.
Speaker 1: So the Super American grand Jury's first indictment didn't work,
Speaker 1: but that didn't stop them. That's sort of a theme here.
Speaker 1: Nothing really seems to deter them. One of those Super
Speaker 1: American grandeurors was a Georgia man named Carl Swenson. Swenson
Speaker 1: is a very special kind of conspiracy theorist called a
Speaker 1: sovereign citizen. It's a strange and complicated set of beliefs
Speaker 1: that I can't really do justice in the time we
Speaker 1: have for this story, but it's a kind of legal
Speaker 1: magical thinking. There's a lot of crossover between sovereign citizens
Speaker 1: and other kinds of conspiratorial belief and a not insignificant
Speaker 1: amount of sovereign citizen belief within the militia movement, and
Speaker 1: sovereign citizens generally believe that there are certain secret procedural
Speaker 1: loopholes that they can use to avoid being subject to
Speaker 1: the law, anything from traffic stops to income taxes. To
Speaker 1: be honest, it's almost always traffic stops and income taxes.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard jokes about a guy in a courtroom
Speaker 1: proclaiming that the judge has no authority over him because
Speaker 1: there's gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom and
Speaker 1: that means that Admirals law is in effect. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you've heard of someone being pulled over and refusing to
Speaker 1: produce a driver's license, arguing with the cop that they
Speaker 1: don't need a driver's license because they're not driving. They're
Speaker 1: traveling and it's different. I've only seen one in court
Speaker 1: in real life, and it was a young woman appealing
Speaker 1: a conviction for driving without a license. She just kept
Speaker 1: yelling at the judge, I do not contract with the
Speaker 1: Department of Motor Vehicles. It did not work. She was
Speaker 1: unsuccessful in that appeal. A month after Judge Lamberth told
Speaker 1: the Super American Grand jury that they couldn't just make
Speaker 1: their own grand jury. Carl Swinson and a few of
Speaker 1: the others submitted a new case to the court. If
Speaker 1: they couldn't be their own grand jury, then the court
Speaker 1: should convene one for them. Judge Lamberth once again declined,
Speaker 1: explaining that a general grievance about the government doesn't give
Speaker 1: them standing to file this complaint. There was some kind
Speaker 1: of procedural mishap in the court clerk's office, though, and
Speaker 1: the docket was left open by accident. This normally wouldn't
Speaker 1: matter at all. No lawyer would keep filing motions at
Speaker 1: a closed case. But they did not have lawyers, and
Speaker 1: one of Swinson's co petitioners, Penny Kelso, filed a bizarre
Speaker 1: seven page document four years later, demanding that the judge
Speaker 1: take action. It has a lot of prayers in it
Speaker 1: and links to blogs and random excerpts from the Constitution,
Speaker 1: and the last page is just illegible handwritten notes, and
Speaker 1: I can kind of make out something about Benghazi. And
Speaker 1: she signed this whole thing penny Kelso DVM, which is
Speaker 1: technical true. Penny Kelso does have a doctorate of veterinary medicine,
Speaker 1: but the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has suspended
Speaker 1: her license half a dozen times for things like watching
Speaker 1: a C section on someone's dog, duct taping bandages to
Speaker 1: animals in a way that caused harm, improperly confining animals
Speaker 1: in a kennel, and falsifying records related to mandatory continuing
Speaker 1: education hours. Penny doesn't actually come up again in this story.
Speaker 1: She's not really relevant here. I just wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure you know that at least one person involved in
Speaker 1: this whole situation has killed a puppy. So they couldn't
Speaker 1: sue the president, They couldn't issue their own federal indictment,
Speaker 1: they couldn't make a judge convene a federal grand jury.
Speaker 1: But they had incontrovertible proof that Baraco Obama could not
Speaker 1: be the president, and it was their duty as Americans
Speaker 1: to have him arrested. If this false president's collaborators in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Wouldn't heed their demands, maybe a grand Jerry
Speaker 1: foreman in a small town in rural Tennessee would. Sweetwater,
Speaker 1: Tennessee is a small town straddling the line between McMinn
Speaker 1: and Monroe Counties. A bit of geography that explains why
Speaker 1: Sweetwater resident Walter Fitzpatrick would eventually go to jail for
Speaker 1: trying to perform citizens arrests on courthouse employees in both counties.
Speaker 1: In March of two thousand and nine, he drafted his
Speaker 1: own indictment against Barack Obama. He went down to the
Speaker 1: county courthouse and notarized the following letter.
Speaker 2: I have observed and extensively recorded treacherous attacks by military
Speaker 2: political aristocrats against the United States Constitution for twenty years now,
Speaker 2: and yet another betrayal, you have broken in and entered
Speaker 2: the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, dissembling,
Speaker 2: and deceit, posing as an imposter President and Commander in Chief,
Speaker 2: who have stripped civilian command and control over the military establishment.
Speaker 2: Known military criminal actors command racketeers are now free in
Speaker 2: the exercise of military government, intent upon destruction of America's
Speaker 2: constitutional government, free from constitutional restraint, and following your criminal example,
Speaker 2: military commanders deployed US Army active duty combat troops into
Speaker 2: the small civilian community of Samson, Alabama, last week in
Speaker 2: a demonstration of their newly received despotic domestic police power.
Speaker 2: We come now to this reckoning. I accuse you and
Speaker 2: your military political criminal assistance of treason. I name you
Speaker 2: and your military criminal associates as traitors. Your criminal ascension
Speaker 2: manifests this clear and present danger. You fundamentally changed our
Speaker 2: form of government. Constitution no longer works confident holding your
Speaker 2: silent agreement and admission. I identify you as a foreign born,
Speaker 2: domestic enemy. My sworn duty, mister Obama, is to stand
Speaker 2: against what you stand for. You're not my president, you're
Speaker 2: not my commander in chief. Obedient to the constitution and
Speaker 2: submission of this criminal accusation, I remain stepfast and born fighting.
Speaker 2: Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, the third, there's.
Speaker 1: A lot going on there. You probably have some questions
Speaker 1: about Walter's claims. Will take him one at a time.
Speaker 1: The twenty years of experience fighting the treacherous attacks on
Speaker 1: the constitution by the military political aristocrats, well that's about
Speaker 1: how long he's been writing a blog. He started his blog,
Speaker 1: Jag Hunters, after he was pushed out of the Navy.
Speaker 1: Fitzpatrick was allowed to serve out his nineteen and a
Speaker 1: half years, rounding up to twenty so he could receive
Speaker 1: his pension, but his last four years in the Navy
Speaker 1: were humiliating. He was convicted in a court martial in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety for improperly accounting for the morale, welfare and
Speaker 1: recreation funds for the sailors aboard the USS Mars of
Speaker 1: which he was the executive officer at the time. He
Speaker 1: was found not guilty on charges of stealing twenty eight
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, misappropriating another ten four hundred dollars, and improper
Speaker 1: use of a government vehicle, and his only sentence was
Speaker 1: a reprimand all things considered, it could have been worse.
Speaker 1: He was basically convicted of bad record keeping and given
Speaker 1: a talking to. He didn't have to go to the
Speaker 1: brig He didn't get kicked out or demoted, or lose
Speaker 1: his pension or any of his access to veterans benefits.
Speaker 1: He served out his twenty years and retired and collected
Speaker 1: a pension, But he spent four years sitting at a desk.
Speaker 1: He was passed over for promotions. He was humiliated and angry,
Speaker 1: and he stayed angry at the government for a very
Speaker 1: long time. Sometimes I get a little lost in the weeds.
Speaker 1: When I started writing this week's episode, it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be about a guy we haven't gotten to yet
Speaker 1: and aren't really going to get to today. But when
Speaker 1: you start pulling the narrative threads and looking for the
Speaker 1: beginning of the story, there's always more beginnings than you think.
Speaker 1: It's probably more than enough backstory on Walter Fitzpatrick to
Speaker 1: say that his distrust of the government comes from his
Speaker 1: decades long, deeply held belief that he was a victim
Speaker 1: of a grave injustice at this nineteen ninety court martial.
Speaker 1: But as I spend more and more time really getting
Speaker 1: to know each of these weird little guys, patterns start
Speaker 1: to emerge, and I think Walter Fitzpatrick fits into the
Speaker 1: Frank Sweeney archetype. I did two episodes a while back
Speaker 1: about a lifelong con man named Frank Sweeney. He got
Speaker 1: into all sorts of hijinks and cross paths with all
Speaker 1: kinds of people, going to federal prison half a dozen
Speaker 1: times for various frauds and threats. But the one thing
Speaker 1: that connected everything in Frank's life was an overwhelming sense
Speaker 1: of personal grievance. He had been wronged, he had been wronged,
Speaker 1: and the only way to make it right was to
Speaker 1: make that lust for vengeance the sole focus of his life,
Speaker 1: no matter where that path took him until he felt satisfied.
Speaker 1: For Frank, that meant spending several years writing threatening postcards
Speaker 1: to a stranger who made a passing comment about where
Speaker 1: he would parked at the post office, and I see
Speaker 1: echoes of that same mindset here. In nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: Fitzpatrick had successfully recruited his Congressman Norm Dix as an
Speaker 1: advocate on his behalf, and Congressman Dix wrote several letters
Speaker 1: to the Navy advocating for a new trial for Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 1: He did his best as an elective representative to help
Speaker 1: a constituent seek redress through the proper channels, and he
Speaker 1: was ultimately unsuccessful. Fitzpatrick continued communicating with Norm Dix and
Speaker 1: later Congressman Adam Smith throughout the nineties and early two thousands,
Speaker 1: badgering their staff regularly and demanding his decade old case
Speaker 1: be revisited. There wasn't really much anyone could do, but
Speaker 1: both representatives met with him and heard his complaints and
Speaker 1: did what they could. In two thousand and two, Fitzpatrick
Speaker 1: was banned from Congressman Smith's Tacoma offices. It's unclear what
Speaker 1: led to the ban, but a letter filed with the
Speaker 1: court said that they would continue to serve him as
Speaker 1: a constituent, but he was only allowed to communicate with
Speaker 1: the congressman or his staff by letter, and in two
Speaker 1: thousand and three, two female staffers in Norm Dix's office
Speaker 1: got restraining orders against Fitzpatrick. In her petition to the court,
Speaker 1: one of those staffers wrote, over the past year, I
Speaker 1: have become increasingly aware that mister Fitzpatrick's rage was building.
Speaker 1: He had difficulty looking me in the eye, and he
Speaker 1: was so angry he often paced in our lobby. He
Speaker 1: has no respect for the work we've done for him
Speaker 1: over the years. The last straw was an incident in
Speaker 1: October of two thousand and three when Fitzpatrick refused to
Speaker 1: leave the office and physically prevented the employee from leaving
Speaker 1: by blocking the door, forcing her to call the police.
Speaker 1: Police reports show multiple violations of these restraining orders and
Speaker 1: several complaints, though no prosecutions for trespass, harassment, and domestic violence.
Speaker 1: He was angry, he had been wronged, and their inability
Speaker 1: to help him was unforgivable. Fitzpatrick was coming into regular
Speaker 1: contact with the police in Kitsap County, Washington until he
Speaker 1: moved to Tennessee in two thousand and seven. But back
Speaker 1: to Fitzpatrick's trees and allegations, you probably noticed that he
Speaker 1: only barely mentioned the president's citizenship. I mean, it's in there,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong. He does call Obama a foreign
Speaker 1: born enemy, but that's pretty secondary here. This indictment for
Speaker 1: treason isn't really about that. This is a brand new tactic.
Speaker 1: He's accusing the president of having violate that the Posse
Speaker 1: Comatatis Act, and that did actually kind of happen, not
Speaker 1: in the way he's claiming. Obviously, Broack Obama did not
Speaker 1: violate the Passe Commatatus Act, but it's not a wholly
Speaker 1: fabricated allegation. The Passe Commatatus Act dates back to the
Speaker 1: end of reconstruction after the Civil War, and it prohibits
Speaker 1: the use of the US military in civilian policing. It
Speaker 1: doesn't apply to the National Guard under the direction of
Speaker 1: a state governor, and there are exceptions. Federal troops can
Speaker 1: be deployed domestically in certain situations, like if the President
Speaker 1: invokes the Insurrection Act or if there is some kind
Speaker 1: of emergency involving nuclear materials or significant amounts of explosive
Speaker 1: ordinance that can't be safely dealt with otherwise. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: the United States military cannot engage in domestic civilian policing.
Speaker 1: It's not something that comes up very often for normal
Speaker 1: people under normal circumstances. You're probably never having conversations about
Speaker 1: the Posse Commatatius Act. But it's a big boogeyman in
Speaker 1: anti government movements, and the allegation Fitzpatrick is making in
Speaker 1: this letter alludes to an actual incident. On March tenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, Michael McClendon carried out what is
Speaker 1: still the deadliest mass shooting in the history of Alabama,
Speaker 1: killing ten people, injuring six others, and ultimately taking his
Speaker 1: own life. It wasn't political or ideological, it wasn't racially motivated.
Speaker 1: It's just a terrible, sad story about gun violence in America.
Speaker 1: He was an angry young man with a gun, and
Speaker 1: he made his problems everybody else's. McLendon first drove to
Speaker 1: his mother's house in Kinston, Alabama, where he shot and
Speaker 1: killed her and then burnt her house down, And then
Speaker 1: he drove to his uncle's house and nearby Samson, Alabama,
Speaker 1: and shot his uncle, two cousins, and several of their neighbors.
Speaker 1: Then he went to his grandmother's house and shot and
Speaker 1: killed her, and as he fled the third crime scene,
Speaker 1: he was firing at random from his car window, shooting bystanders,
Speaker 1: killed a gas station attendant, passing motorists and injured several pedestrians.
Speaker 1: When sheriff's deputies tried to run him off the road,
Speaker 1: he shot one of them too. With more than a
Speaker 1: dozen people shot across three towns spanning two counties, law
Speaker 1: enforcement was stretched pretty thin. There were multiple crime scenes,
Speaker 1: ten dead bodies, half a dozen seriously injured survivors, including
Speaker 1: an infant, and the shooter was on the move, and
Speaker 1: so someone at the Geneva County Sheriff's office made a
Speaker 1: phone call to nearby Fort Rucker to ask for help.
Speaker 1: The army officer who responded to the request later said
Speaker 1: that he believed at the time that what he was
Speaker 1: doing was lawful, citing his own experience assisting in disaster
Speaker 1: response after Hurricane Katrina. His intention was only to be
Speaker 1: what he called a good neighbor, and for a period
Speaker 1: of about five hours that afternoon, several soldiers from Fort
Speaker 1: Rucker assisted local law enforcement at traffic checkpoints near the
Speaker 1: crime scenes and stood guard at the makeshift morgue that
Speaker 1: they'd set up to store the bodies. And this was
Speaker 1: in fact a violation of the Posse Comma Tatis Act.
Speaker 1: Soldiers from the United States Army should not have been
Speaker 1: participating in traffic checkpoints. That is against the law, and
Speaker 1: the officer who made that call was disciplined. But it
Speaker 1: was a local mistake. This wasn't something that was run
Speaker 1: up the chain of command all the way to the President.
Speaker 1: This didn't go through the Pentagon. They didn't convene the
Speaker 1: Joint chiefs of Staff. It was just someone from the
Speaker 1: sheriff's office made a phone call to a guy he
Speaker 1: knew at the army base, and they did something they
Speaker 1: didn't realize was wrong. I won't claim to be familiar
Speaker 1: with the details of military chain of command or military
Speaker 1: law or anything, but I'm not sure the commander in
Speaker 1: chief can be charged with treason because one guy in
Speaker 1: Alabama accidentally broke the law. But this actual violation of
Speaker 1: the Posse Coomatatis Act was enough to send a certain
Speaker 1: kind of guy into hysterics. I mean, look, I'm not
Speaker 1: making excuses for it. Any kind of precedent for that
Speaker 1: sort of thing should be avoided. The potential for abuse
Speaker 1: is extreme and terrifying. But anti government activists could finally
Speaker 1: point to a real thing that happened as proof that
Speaker 1: Barack Obama was about to institute martial law. Federal troops
Speaker 1: really were setting up checkpoints. It happened. It's not a drill.
Speaker 1: For someone like Walter Fitzpatrick. This was all the evidence
Speaker 1: he needed to have the President hanged for treason. And
Speaker 1: that gets us back to where we started this long journey,
Speaker 1: back to the beginning of the story. Walter Fitzpatrick accused
Speaker 1: the president of treason in March two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: He took his complaint down to the courthouse and he
Speaker 1: got it notarized. He applied to present it to a
Speaker 1: Monroe County grand jury, and they chose not to indict
Speaker 1: the president, probably mostly because even if there was probable
Speaker 1: cause here, which there wasn't, the Monroe County, Tennessee Circuit
Speaker 1: Court does not have jurisdiction in a case involving the
Speaker 1: President of the United States committing treason, unfortunately, But that's
Speaker 1: not how Fitzpatrick saw it. In his mind, this could
Speaker 1: only mean that there is corruption afoot. Again and again,
Speaker 1: Walter Fitzpatrick made the trip to the county courthouse. He
Speaker 1: harassed the court clerk. He tried forcing his way into
Speaker 1: the grand jury proceedings to make his presentation again, and
Speaker 1: they did hear him out once more, they allowed him
Speaker 1: to present the grand jury. In December of two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine. That grand jury again declined to indict President
Speaker 1: Barack Obama for treason, and at this point they were
Speaker 1: done humoring him. Hearing this evidence again wasn't going to
Speaker 1: change anything. He was on several occasions refused entrance into
Speaker 1: the courtroom while the grand jury was hearing real cases,
Speaker 1: and just like those years, he spent getting angrier and
Speaker 1: angrier at his congressman's office staff. These people were as
Speaker 1: helpful as they were required to be. They were doing
Speaker 1: their jobs, but there wasn't really anything they could do
Speaker 1: that would satisfy him because his requests weren't reasonable. They
Speaker 1: couldn't give him what he wanted. But in his mind,
Speaker 1: this inability to assist him could only mean that they
Speaker 1: were actively fighting against him, and so they too became
Speaker 1: subjects of his investigations. They were all guilty now of
Speaker 1: obstruction of justice, and they too must be arrested. In
Speaker 1: March of twenty ten, a year after he first charged
Speaker 1: the President with treason, Walter Fitzpatrick sent a letter to
Speaker 1: the police chief in Madisonville, Tennessee. If no one else
Speaker 1: was interested in justice, he was just going to have
Speaker 1: to do it himself.
Speaker 2: Chief Breeden, please accept this notice of the necessity, authority,
Speaker 2: and intent to conduct a series of imminent citizens arrests
Speaker 2: throughout Monroe County, Tennessee. The first arrest plan must be
Speaker 2: constructed and crafted in cooperation with the Madisonville Police Department.
Speaker 2: Wisdom dictates the first arrest plan be one that is
Speaker 2: acceptable to your police chief colleagues throughout Monroe County. An
Speaker 2: arrest plan that can be used again and again time
Speaker 2: is not a friend. Planning must begin immediately. Contact information
Speaker 2: is provided separately. Fair Wins following sees Walter Francis Fitzpatrick third.
Speaker 1: Notice that he's not asking for permission, and he's not
Speaker 1: making a threat. He's letting him know. He feels like
Speaker 1: he and the police chief have the same level of
Speaker 1: authority here. They're both absolutely empowered to make these kinds
Speaker 1: of arrests, and he just thinks it would be best
Speaker 1: if they collaborated on this plan. He's not threatening to
Speaker 1: break the law, because he doesn't think he is. He's
Speaker 1: inviting the police chief to participate in what he believes
Speaker 1: is a perfectly rational and legal course of action. It's
Speaker 1: not clear if the police chief wrote him back. I'm
Speaker 1: sure they had some conversations about this plan. That didn't
Speaker 1: know how Fitzpatrick had hoped, but there was no talking
Speaker 1: him out of it. He was going to arrest the
Speaker 1: people who were standing in his way, with or without
Speaker 1: their help, and on April first, twenty ten, he tried it.
Speaker 3: Laid the room, arguing their officials laid the room. You
Speaker 3: were under arrest, under arrest, mister, your under citizens or
Speaker 3: whatever around, I'm placing you under iads now, I'm actually
Speaker 3: they wrote for U escorted him, mister Petway.
Speaker 1: Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached Grand Jerry Foreman
Speaker 1: Gary Petway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying
Speaker 1: to indict. And Petway doesn't look excited to see Fitzpatrick,
Speaker 1: but he looks more exasperated than anything else. He doesn't
Speaker 1: look afraid of the old man lurching towards him, saying
Speaker 1: over and over again, I'm placing you under arrest. Petway
Speaker 1: is just sort of backing away from him and repeating
Speaker 1: please leave, please leave the room, and pointing towards the door.
Speaker 1: And the video we have of this incident is not
Speaker 1: police bodycam footage, but you'd be forgiven for assuming that's
Speaker 1: where it came from. It was recorded on someone's cell phone,
Speaker 1: a Motorola droid to be precise. If you remember those
Speaker 1: by Carl Swenson, the sovereign citizen who had been agitating
Speaker 1: for people all over the country to take this kind
Speaker 1: of action in their local courts ever since Judge Lamberth
Speaker 1: denied his petition in federal court the year before.
Speaker 4: He did this for us. What do you intend to
Speaker 4: do for him and for this country. If we don't
Speaker 4: come to his assistance, if we don't get to the courthouse,
Speaker 4: if we don't call him, if we don't walk and
Speaker 4: march on that courthouse and that sheriff's department, we don't
Speaker 4: deserve the freedoms we have. I know what I must do.
Speaker 4: I plan on marching on that courthouse.
Speaker 1: Carl Swinson was one of several supporters who showed up
Speaker 1: at the courthouse with Fitzpatrick that day. Swinson recorded the
Speaker 1: incident and posted it online, exhorting his followers to show
Speaker 1: up at the next hearing. The website he was running
Speaker 1: at the time, rise Upfoamerica dot Com is gone now.
Speaker 1: That url does still go to a real website, but
Speaker 1: it belongs to some kind of construction consortium now, and
Speaker 1: the homepage is a six year old blog post about
Speaker 1: the pros and cons of different kinds of carpet tiles.
Speaker 1: One of the other supporters who witnessed Fitzpatrick's arrest that
Speaker 1: day was a man named Darren Huff. Like Swinson, Huff
Speaker 1: had made the drive to Madisonville from his home in Georgia.
Speaker 1: He was a member of the Oath Keepers and was
Speaker 1: also the chaplain of a separate militia group that was
Speaker 1: just called the Georgia Militia. When Fitzpatrick was granted bond
Speaker 1: a few days after his arrest, Darren Huff made the
Speaker 1: drive back up to Tennessee to meet with him. They
Speaker 1: weren't going to suffer this indignity in silence. They made
Speaker 1: a plan, and two weeks later, when Fitzpatrick was due
Speaker 1: back in court. Darren Huff was outside the courthouse with
Speaker 1: a crowd of supporters, prepared to take over the whole
Speaker 1: damn town by force if they had to. And Darren
Speaker 1: Huff was the weird little guy I had in mind
Speaker 1: when I sat down to start this week's episode. I
Speaker 1: was thinking about guys who did something weird because they
Speaker 1: were mad about an election, and I had a vague
Speaker 1: recollection of some research I did on the oath Keepers
Speaker 1: back in twenty nineteen, when Oathkeeper's founder Stuart Rhodes was
Speaker 1: front row center, right behind the podium at a Trump
Speaker 1: campaign rally, and I did a little more digging around
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty when the Oathkeepers were starting to make
Speaker 1: noise about what would eventually become the January sixth insurrection.
Speaker 1: I'd collected a few odds and ends about oathkeepers who
Speaker 1: got arrested for a variety of crimes over the years,
Speaker 1: trying to convince people that this could be a serious problem.
Speaker 1: And there are plenty of strange little stories in there,
Speaker 1: like an oathkeeper in Ohio who was being investigated for
Speaker 1: mortgage fraud back in twenty ten, and the investigators completely
Speaker 1: accidentally discovered that he was making napalm in his garage,
Speaker 1: Or how Oathkeepers leaders Stuart Rhodes advised members to take
Speaker 1: it upon themselves to prevent voter fraud in the twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen election, in a plan that definitely was not meant
Speaker 1: to function as voter intimidation. And there's the story of
Speaker 1: that car load of Oathkeepers who were arrested in Florida
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. They were charged with violating the curfew
Speaker 1: order put in place during the state of emergency after
Speaker 1: Hurricane Michael. The militia members were driving around dressed as
Speaker 1: police officers, cruising around town in the dark with a
Speaker 1: car full of rifles, dressed as cops patrolling for looters.
Speaker 1: And obviously there's the entire saga of the Oathkeeper's role
Speaker 1: in January sixth, But like I said, right now, I'm
Speaker 1: tired of that story. But then I remembered Darren Huff
Speaker 1: and his plans to citizens arrest a whole county courthouse
Speaker 1: because he didn't think Barack Obama was the real president.
Speaker 1: It was sort of a micro January sixth, an hour
Speaker 1: south of Knoxville, but eleven years too soon. At this
Speaker 1: point in the run of this show, I think I
Speaker 1: have to stop apologizing for writing so much preamble that
Speaker 1: the actual story I'm getting to is in part two.
Speaker 1: I should just admit to myself that I'm doing that
Speaker 1: on purpose. Sure, I could launch right into a story
Speaker 1: about Darren showing up at the courthouse with a gun.
Speaker 1: That would still be an interesting weird little guy. But
Speaker 1: Darren and his gun outside of a courthouse three hours
Speaker 1: away from his home across state lines, trying to arrest
Speaker 1: a grand jury foreman in a small town that he
Speaker 1: has no connection to, just doesn't make any sense, does it.
Speaker 1: Trying to explain that a retired Navy vet was convinced
Speaker 1: his county court could arrest the president sounds like a
Speaker 1: silly little joke without the context that this was a
Speaker 1: nationwide movement motivated by a racist conspiracy theory. These aren't
Speaker 1: just stories about one weird little guy at a time.
Speaker 1: It's a whole network. None of this happens in a vacuum,
Speaker 1: which is why the same stories keep playing out with
Speaker 1: different characters, and the same characters keep showing up in
Speaker 1: each other's stories. An oathkeeper tried to arrest the president
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, the Oathkeepers tried to overturn the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty election. The woman whose blog chronicled Walter Fitzpatrick's efforts
Speaker 1: fueling the conspiracy and driving more supporters to show up
Speaker 1: in Madisonville tried to obtain government records in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two related to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's families, immigration and naturalization,
Speaker 1: and the same woman was a central figure in the
Speaker 1: brief frenzy of birther conspiracies about Kamala Harris in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. When Jared Taylor, America's leading purveyor of pseudo
Speaker 1: academic eugenicist polemics, had to go to court in twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen over a permit for his annual race science conference,
Speaker 1: he sought help from Birther lawyer Van Irian, the same
Speaker 1: lawyer who worked on Carl Swinson's lawsuits to keep Barack
Speaker 1: Obama off the ballot in twenty twelve. Cutting straight to
Speaker 1: the chase and getting to Darren's story wouldn't just be
Speaker 1: missing the forest for the trees. It would be ignoring
Speaker 1: a whole thriving white supremacist ecosystem. Because when you turn
Speaker 1: over a big rock there's more than one weird bug
Speaker 1: under there, and to be honest, I really just wanted
Speaker 1: to have plenty of room to explore Darren Huff's fascinating
Speaker 1: legal strategy because not to spoil it, but he does
Speaker 1: end up in federal prison for a little bit. It's
Speaker 1: such a rare treat to have so much incredible source material,
Speaker 1: and I really don't want to have to cut the
Speaker 1: audio of a man who got pulled over on his
Speaker 1: way to commit a federal crime and used that opportunity
Speaker 1: to try to recruit a state trooper into his militia.
Speaker 1: So until next week, don't be rude to your court clerk,
Speaker 1: and please, for the love of God, do not put
Speaker 1: gatorade in your eyes. Weird Little Guys is a production
Speaker 1: of Kool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
Speaker 1: recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Speaker 1: Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
Speaker 1: wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Speaker 1: Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
Speaker 1: Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
Speaker 1: but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1: I don't answer any of my emails. You can exchange
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Speaker 1: Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going
Speaker 1: to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.