Speaker 1: Coozo Media.
Speaker 2: On October fourteenth, twenty seventeen, the Battle of Cedar Greek
Speaker 2: was happening all over again. Originally fought on October nineteenth,
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty four, the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could
Speaker 2: no longer maneuver through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington,
Speaker 2: and the Union victory was the last minute boost for
Speaker 2: Lincoln's reelection campaign one hundred and fifty three years later,
Speaker 2: as reenactors in Middletown, Virginia milled around in their historically
Speaker 2: accurate wool uniforms and replica weaponry waiting for the battle
Speaker 2: to begin, one of them found an alarming anachronism in
Speaker 2: the sutler's tent, a pipe bomb. I'm Mollykonger, and this
Speaker 2: is weird, little guys. The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has
Speaker 2: held their annual re enactment of the battle since nineteen ninety,
Speaker 2: but twenty seventeen was a politically fraught time in America.
Speaker 2: On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, the United the Right rally
Speaker 2: in Charlesville, Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who
Speaker 2: kept a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on his nightstand,
Speaker 2: ran his car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching
Speaker 2: on a closed street. He injured dozens and killed Heather Hire.
Speaker 2: Images of the crowd that day, with rally attendees carrying
Speaker 2: Confederate flags and swastikas side by side, flooded the national consciousness.
Speaker 2: Most Americans heard the word antifa for the first time.
Speaker 2: That week, the national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had
Speaker 2: been simmering all year, boiled over. The city council in Baltimore, Maryland,
Speaker 2: voted to remove their Confederate statues just two days later.
Speaker 2: The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, asked his
Speaker 2: city council to approve the rows removal of the statues
Speaker 2: at their courthouse. The Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Speaker 2: in LA was removed overnight. From Florida to California, Confederate
Speaker 2: monuments were removed, toppled, and vandalized. No one wanted to
Speaker 2: be the next Charlottesville. Six days after the rally, officials
Speaker 2: in Manassas, a small city outside of DC about two
Speaker 2: hours north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the
Speaker 2: annual Civil War Reenactment Weekend scheduled for the end of August.
Speaker 2: The Washington Posts reported that the reenactors themselves were worried
Speaker 2: the quote racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether
Speaker 2: to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence. So
Speaker 2: the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue
Speaker 2: celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally,
Speaker 2: but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa America's new
Speaker 2: black clad boogeyman would target these events. And these growing
Speaker 2: fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on
Speaker 2: September twenty third, when the Cedar Greek Battlefield Foundation received
Speaker 2: an ominous letter in the mail. Instead of a return haddress,
Speaker 2: the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds,
Speaker 2: a black circle containing a black flag overlaying a red flag.
Speaker 2: It was from Antifa. The letter inside read, you.
Speaker 3: Need to cancel your coming up celebration of the Civil
Speaker 3: War on October thirteen, fourteen fifteen, twenty seventeen. If you
Speaker 3: choose to continue with this farce of history that clearly
Speaker 3: celebrates the war to keep African Americans in chains, then
Speaker 3: we have no choice but to come in protest. We
Speaker 3: will come and disrupt and cause problems for all those
Speaker 3: who attend the atrocity of history. Several hundred of our
Speaker 3: supporters will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harassed patrons
Speaker 3: and reenactors. We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic.
Speaker 3: Many of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces
Speaker 3: to throw on people. We will also throw cups of
Speaker 3: human urine. We might resort to actually firing guns into
Speaker 3: the camps and at the re enactors. We will put
Speaker 3: poison in the water. We will use noise to disrupt
Speaker 3: the battles in sleep. These events must stop. Our local
Speaker 3: organizer tells us he is ready to go. You have
Speaker 3: been warned. Now. If it is not called off, we
Speaker 3: will destroy you. You have less than one month to
Speaker 3: issue a cancelation notice to it asap.
Speaker 2: Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield
Speaker 2: Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter,
Speaker 2: but that the event would go on with increased security,
Speaker 2: and the details of the threat were not released, but
Speaker 2: speculation immediately turned to the culture war, and after the
Speaker 2: bomb was discovered, The National Review wrote The simplest and
Speaker 2: most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent
Speaker 2: extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues. The Federalists
Speaker 2: lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the
Speaker 2: culture war. The threatening letters continue for over a year,
Speaker 2: becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the
Speaker 2: board at Cedar Creek and their family members. Cedar Creek
Speaker 2: had to cancel the reenactment in twenty eighteen after one
Speaker 2: director of the foundation resigned in fear for his family
Speaker 2: safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb
Speaker 2: under his mother's car. The new director started getting threats
Speaker 2: of sexual violence against her young daughters. The mayor of
Speaker 2: Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg
Speaker 2: Remembrance Day parade. Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?
Speaker 2: But it wasn't Antifa. It wasn't Antifa at all.
Speaker 3: It was Gerald.
Speaker 2: Gerald Leonard Drake born in nineteen fifty eight in Michigan,
Speaker 2: loves the Civil War. In nineteen ninety six, his hometown paper,
Speaker 2: The port here In Times, Harold wrote an article about
Speaker 2: his dedication to reenactment. He'd gotten a second job to
Speaker 2: save up the ten thousand dollars it would cost him
Speaker 2: to try and sport Judith his five hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: five pound replica Civil War canon from Michigan to Columbus,
Speaker 2: Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival. Judith the Canon was
Speaker 2: named after his wife, Judy, who would file for divorce
Speaker 2: the following year. When he married his third wife, Donna
Speaker 2: in twenty ten, they took wedding photos in Civil War
Speaker 2: era address at the historic Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg.
Speaker 2: They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.
Speaker 2: But the world was changing. The world of eighteen sixty
Speaker 2: falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate
Speaker 2: the brass buttons on your coat are. In twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum
Speaker 2: about a living history event he'd recently participated in a
Speaker 2: tour group. Was appalled that the re enactors, role playing
Speaker 2: as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter
Speaker 2: describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was
Speaker 2: riddled with racial slurs. Though he felt that the event
Speaker 2: itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan afterwards,
Speaker 2: and the liberals in the group had a bitch session
Speaker 2: about appropriate language.
Speaker 3: I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians
Speaker 3: and reenactors, aren't we supposed to do as good of
Speaker 3: a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can.
Speaker 3: We used to get praise and accolades for doing a
Speaker 3: great first person impression. Let me know if anyone else
Speaker 3: is having this kind of trouble for being the best
Speaker 3: you can be.
Speaker 2: Surprisingly, even in twenty eleven, fellow users on the Civil
Speaker 2: War message board disagreed with Gerald their reenactment groups is
Speaker 2: committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use
Speaker 2: the N word. One user, whose profile bears the badge
Speaker 2: for Member of the Year wrote that he is quote
Speaker 2: careful to avoid certain language in terms, always realizing that
Speaker 2: my performance is in the present century to modern day
Speaker 2: folks who live in the present would not understand the customs, practices,
Speaker 2: and language of the nineteenth century with any real clarity.
Speaker 2: Another user, a former moderator of the forum, replied to
Speaker 2: a comment from Drake that he was looking for a
Speaker 2: less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine there is
Speaker 2: any group out there that would condone that kind of language,
Speaker 2: and all this achieves is bad publicity for reenactors, adding
Speaker 2: that those tourists surely all went home that day and
Speaker 2: told their friends about the racists they saw at the event.
Speaker 2: A year later, Drake posted again in the same Civil
Speaker 2: War forum, complaining that people are getting too hung up
Speaker 2: on safety, writing remember when reenacting used to be fun
Speaker 2: and mourning the old days when battle reenactments were more
Speaker 2: like real battle Again. Fellow reenactors pushed back, with one
Speaker 2: veteran reenactor writing that he did indeed remember those days.
Speaker 2: He'd once had a costume ruined and gotten pretty serious
Speaker 2: burns when another reenactor shot him with a replica shotgun.
Speaker 2: Even in his chosen community of Civil War reenactors, Gerald
Speaker 2: was living in a version of the past that was
Speaker 2: becoming increasingly lonely. In October of twenty fourteen, things really
Speaker 2: started to fall apart. His third marriage was on the rocks,
Speaker 2: and after what sounds like a pretty petty dispute, Gerald
Speaker 2: was kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit. As
Speaker 2: a volunteer at the Cedar Creek Battlefield. He'd heard a
Speaker 2: rumor that someone was planning to sneak into the reenactment
Speaker 2: without paying the registration fee. Gerald and his friend and
Speaker 2: fellow reenactor Daryl, found this to be an outrageous offense
Speaker 2: and decided to print up flyers letting everyone know that
Speaker 2: Duffy Miller wasn't going to pay his entry fee and
Speaker 2: anyone who sees him should stop him. Duffy Miller, as
Speaker 2: it turns out, was their unit commander, and he was
Speaker 2: not pleased to see the posters. He kicks Gerald and
Speaker 2: Daryl out of the unit. Jerald continued volunteering at Cedar Creek,
Speaker 2: but it seems this incident was the end of his
Speaker 2: love for reenacting.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I can't find exactly how much it cost to register
Speaker 2: for the event in twenty fourteen, but the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four registration fee is thirty five dollars, and I know
Speaker 2: from the forum post that's actually been increased in the
Speaker 2: last couple of years to cover the new security measures
Speaker 2: that they have to have, so you have to assume
Speaker 2: it was much less ten years ago. So the inciting
Speaker 2: incident for this entire debacle was a couple of old
Speaker 2: guys fighting about twenty bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment.
Speaker 2: I guess, so what's a guy to do now? First
Speaker 2: they stop letting him say the N word, You're not
Speaker 2: even allowed to shoot each other anymore, and now he's
Speaker 2: kicked out of his unit Entirely a hobby he'd loved
Speaker 2: since the early nineties was being ruined. They weren't saying
Speaker 2: like wokeness back then, But I think if this happened today,
Speaker 2: Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke
Speaker 2: He'd been left by three wives and now his own
Speaker 2: civil war unit didn't want him around. But he continued
Speaker 2: volunteering at Cedar Creek. He retired, He built and painted
Speaker 2: little models, got into model rockets, He traveled the world,
Speaker 2: and he posted a lot, and apparently he held on
Speaker 2: to his anger about that incident at the twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: Cedar Creek reenactment. I spent a lot of time combing
Speaker 2: through hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years
Speaker 2: of his posts on forums, But I can't quite sort
Speaker 2: out what the catalyst was in twenty seventeen. Why did
Speaker 2: he wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek.
Speaker 2: Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas reenactment getting canceled.
Speaker 2: Out of fear of political violence at the wake up
Speaker 2: Unite the Right and just got an idea because within
Speaker 2: weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters. After
Speaker 2: his first letter to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation in September,
Speaker 2: he followed up by placing an actual bomb at the
Speaker 2: event in October. The reenactment community is pretty small, and
Speaker 2: the pipe bomb was big news, but a rumor was
Speaker 2: going around on Facebook that a teenager had been arrested
Speaker 2: for the original letter, and then that was sort of conflated.
Speaker 2: As you know, people are posting and reposting and talking
Speaker 2: about the post that they saw. It was conflated to
Speaker 2: the idea that someone had been arrested for the bomb,
Speaker 2: and the rumor was very quickly disproven. No one was
Speaker 2: arrested replacing the bomb in the vendor's tent, but the
Speaker 2: letter writer was frustrated. If they thought the culprit had
Speaker 2: been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore. John Buchheister, a
Speaker 2: vendor at the event who told a reporter that he
Speaker 2: was present when the bomb was found, was one of
Speaker 2: the posters in that Facebook rumor mill and there's nothing
Speaker 2: malicious here. He just reposted something that someone else had
Speaker 2: said that the would be bomber had been apprehended. I
Speaker 2: think there was a lot of relief in believing that,
Speaker 2: so a lot of people were posting it. But I
Speaker 2: guess our letter writer saw John Buchheister's post, because on
Speaker 2: November thirteenth, twenty seventeen, he opened a letter addressed to
Speaker 2: his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Like the first letter, the
Speaker 2: envelope was printed with the ANTIFA symbol in place of
Speaker 2: a return address. Inside a typed letter read.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a
Speaker 3: teenager was arrested for the threat to see her creek.
Speaker 3: It was so much easier to bring in a bomb.
Speaker 3: Do something like this again for us. We are coming
Speaker 3: to the Gettysburg parade and speech. Thank you again for
Speaker 3: all your help in the last terror event.
Speaker 2: That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a
Speaker 2: letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade. The letter
Speaker 2: threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade,
Speaker 2: a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murderer Unite
Speaker 2: the Right, and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and
Speaker 2: on rooftops. The letter writer ended the note by giving
Speaker 2: a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek quote
Speaker 2: for proof that we did the Cedar Creek terror attack.
Speaker 2: But just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they
Speaker 2: were threatened, the Gettysburg Rememberance Day parade was not canceled
Speaker 2: that year, but the route was significantly shortened to allow
Speaker 2: for a heavy police presence. As Chris Anders, a Republican
Speaker 2: political activist, wrote on Facebook, apparently Antifa and other hate
Speaker 2: groups are headed to try and cause problems this Saturday
Speaker 2: at the annual Remembrance Day parade, but he wrote that
Speaker 2: he would be marching with his brothers in Gray rather
Speaker 2: than giving in to terrorists. There are nearly one hundred
Speaker 2: comments on this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Dantifa must
Speaker 2: be stopped or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that
Speaker 2: you should use a wool scarf to protect yourself from teargas.
Speaker 2: I have to assume that would only make things worse.
Speaker 2: I feel like wool is very absorbent. But one loan commenter,
Speaker 2: a reenactor from New England who rides with the First
Speaker 2: Main Cavalry, got a different theory. He wrote, I bet
Speaker 2: you five dollars that the perpetrator is a reenactor or
Speaker 2: former reenactor. No offense to anyone, but no one knows
Speaker 2: about rem Day beyond reenactors and locals. For it to
Speaker 2: be a target, someone would have to be aware of it,
Speaker 2: and there are plenty of other high profile, low security
Speaker 2: events with bigger crowd numbers to choose. From his comment,
Speaker 2: drew ire from the victimized confederates obsessed with the idea
Speaker 2: of a massive conspiracy from the radical left. He was,
Speaker 2: of course correct. And now here's where things start to
Speaker 2: get really weird. Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep
Speaker 2: weird roots. I mean, I guess that's the show, right,
Speaker 2: This guy's weird. But here's where it takes its super
Speaker 2: weird turn. Gerald is retired at this point, and when
Speaker 2: he's not traveling, he's volunteering. He's still volunteering at Cedar
Speaker 2: Creek even though he doesn't reenact anymore, but he's also
Speaker 2: volunteering at sky Meadows State Park. It's not entirely clear
Speaker 2: why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at
Speaker 2: the state park alongside a high school student, but that's
Speaker 2: what it says in the affidavit. So I guess that
Speaker 2: one fell through the cracks at sky Meadows because while
Speaker 2: he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the
Speaker 2: sex offender registry in twenty twenty one, in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: the background check required for volunteers at state parks would
Speaker 2: have shown that he was a registered sex offender for
Speaker 2: a two thousand and four conviction in Ohio for sexual
Speaker 2: imposition and child endangerment. And again, I'll be so clear
Speaker 2: with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake
Speaker 2: was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere,
Speaker 2: not at the state park, not anywhere in the time
Speaker 2: period of these events. There's no allegation that he's touching
Speaker 2: any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct. But
Speaker 2: I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex offender
Speaker 2: to sort of point and laugh at that. As a circumstance,
Speaker 2: these things intersect. So in twenty eighteen, he's volunteering at
Speaker 2: the park with this teenage boy, and one afternoon in
Speaker 2: February they're volunteering together. They're shooting the shit fill in
Speaker 2: the time and Gerald, who is sixty at this point,
Speaker 2: is telling this teenage boy about his hobby of Civil
Speaker 2: war reenactment, which is very tragically in decline. The topic
Speaker 2: of the twenty seventeen reenactment at Cedar Creek comes up.
Speaker 2: I have to assume Gerald brought it up, because why
Speaker 2: would the seventeen year old boy have brought that up?
Speaker 2: But Gerald is telling the kid about some funny articles
Speaker 2: about that twenty seventeen event. He later emailed the teenager
Speaker 2: what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings about the bombing.
Speaker 2: These these articles, the bomb went off. The articles he
Speaker 2: emails this teenager contained details of the bomb actually killing people,
Speaker 2: with more deaths caused by subsequent sniper fire. But we
Speaker 2: know the bomb didn't really go off. No one got shot,
Speaker 2: no one got hurt, nothing really happened. The articles he
Speaker 2: showed his young friend were completely fake. The federal agents
Speaker 2: investigating the case wrote that attempts to locate sources for
Speaker 2: these fake newspaper clippings turned up nothing. I mean, not
Speaker 2: even anything online showing these fake articles. Just nothing.
Speaker 3: There's nothing.
Speaker 2: He must have made them himself, and that's where his
Speaker 2: sex offender status ties back in. In two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: he was indicted in Auglaize County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition,
Speaker 2: and shortly after he's indicted, someone starts sending weird letters
Speaker 2: to the Auglaize County prosecutor. The letters were made to
Speaker 2: appear as though they were sent by a member of
Speaker 2: the police department in Drake's hometown of Port here On, Michigan,
Speaker 2: and they appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was
Speaker 2: a child abuser. The letter writer sent a forged polygraph
Speaker 2: report on Michigan State Police letterhead and a forged notarized
Speaker 2: statement from Drake's estranged wife, and when his home was
Speaker 2: eventually searched, police found a doctored page from the local newspaper.
Speaker 2: He had taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it
Speaker 2: with a false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan,
Speaker 2: pleading guilty to child abuse and endangerment. No such news
Speaker 2: story ever existed, and I can find no evidence that
Speaker 2: Susan was ever charged with such a crime. Maybe a
Speaker 2: more thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here,
Speaker 2: but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend
Speaker 2: to be completely closed. Those documents are sealed unless someone
Speaker 2: was sitting in those hearings, and there's local news reports
Speaker 2: about the testimony. You're just you're not to find it,
Speaker 2: and short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's
Speaker 2: no way for me to know exactly what led to
Speaker 2: Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment
Speaker 2: or why he tried to frame his strange wife for it.
Speaker 2: But I can tell you that after his conviction there's
Speaker 2: a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake
Speaker 2: from contacting his second ex wife and her minor daughter
Speaker 2: from a prior marriage. So I think we can get
Speaker 2: the gist of the situation without me asking a young
Speaker 2: woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for
Speaker 2: making a bomb, was court ordered to stay away from
Speaker 2: her when she was ten. Take from that way you
Speaker 2: will the relevant kernel of that story, though, is those
Speaker 2: fake newspaper articles. In two thousand and three, he's manually
Speaker 2: cutting and pasting by hand and xeroxing his creations to
Speaker 2: disguise the alterations. He's arts and craftsing his way into
Speaker 2: an alternate reality where his ex wife is the one
Speaker 2: in endangering children, not him, And in twenty eighteen he's
Speaker 2: doing it again. He's making fake newspaper clippings about what
Speaker 2: he wishes were real. He's showing this teenage boy a
Speaker 2: reality where the bomb did go off and the people
Speaker 2: who snubbed him died. And while he was in jail
Speaker 2: for that sex offense a short eight months in Ohio
Speaker 2: County jail, he made another art project of sorts. In
Speaker 2: September two thousand four, the Auglais County Sheriff's office reached
Speaker 2: out to the FBI Field office in Cleveland. Gerald had
Speaker 2: been trying to make friends in jail by showing off
Speaker 2: his knowledge of explosives. He produced eight pages of hand
Speaker 2: drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb, a
Speaker 2: CO two cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a propane
Speaker 2: tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the kind
Speaker 2: of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or at
Speaker 2: the Army surplus store and how to turn them back
Speaker 2: into live grenades. And the diagram of the pipe bomb
Speaker 2: he drew in jail in two thousand and four. He's
Speaker 2: remarkably similar to the device he made in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident.
Speaker 2: In the jail back in two thousand and four, you know,
Speaker 2: the sheriff's office contact of the FBI, and they said, Hey,
Speaker 2: we've got these weird drawings. What do you guys think
Speaker 2: about this. There's no indication that there was follow up
Speaker 2: from there, but apparently they held on to them. Those
Speaker 2: drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for
Speaker 2: twenty years. It's kind of surprising that they still had
Speaker 2: those drawings in twenty nineteen, but they are included in
Speaker 2: the affidavit for the search warrant. So in the spring
Speaker 2: of twenty eighteen, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.
Speaker 2: He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off
Speaker 2: and showing them to a kid he volunteers with based
Speaker 2: on his eBay review history. He's painting miniature models of
Speaker 2: Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald, and he's
Speaker 2: getting into model rocketry. In March, he took a solo
Speaker 2: vacation to Amsterdam. His trip Advisor count provides a pretty
Speaker 2: robust log of his travels. He wasn't a big fan
Speaker 2: of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review not really
Speaker 2: for Gentiles, and writing that he felt shorted by the
Speaker 2: lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.
Speaker 2: He felt that it had been quote scrubbed of shock
Speaker 2: due to the new PC way all museums are going.
Speaker 2: He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum,
Speaker 2: writing if you were looking for the story of the
Speaker 2: full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well this
Speaker 2: display doesn't have it. It Like many museums today have
Speaker 2: had to lighten up on their truth so as not
Speaker 2: to offend anyone. He did, however, really enjoy the Museum
Speaker 2: of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.
Speaker 2: In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners,
Speaker 2: he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms
Speaker 2: he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used
Speaker 2: them in European brothels. And for what it's worth, the
Speaker 2: Anne frank House got his seal of approval as a
Speaker 2: World War II history buff the Ripley's Believe It or
Speaker 2: Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that his hostel
Speaker 2: did not provide a traditional American breakfast with quote hot meats.
Speaker 2: I don't know why you would expect a cheap hostel
Speaker 2: in Amsterdam to have American breakfast, but he was not
Speaker 2: satisfied and just as an aside about his trip Advisor reviews,
Speaker 2: I think that was my favorite thing about researching this.
Speaker 2: He loves to review the cell site location data in
Speaker 2: one of the search warrant affidavits shows that he likely
Speaker 2: dropped off that very first threat letter at a USPS
Speaker 2: dropbox in a strip mall near the Dulles Airport just
Speaker 2: before boarding an Air France flight from DC to Madrid
Speaker 2: on September twenty first, twenty seventeen. So while his letter
Speaker 2: threatening to throw piss and shit at Civil War reenactors
Speaker 2: was making its way to Cedar Creek, he was on
Speaker 2: his way to Spain. He hated the bullfighting, but he
Speaker 2: raved about the burger king on Plaza de Castilla. Apparently
Speaker 2: the burger king at home is always getting his order wrong.
Speaker 2: He had to go all the way to Spain to
Speaker 2: get his whopper with no onions and no pickles. The
Speaker 2: burger king in his hometown only gets four stars from
Speaker 2: gerald And Since visiting Italy in April twenty seventeen, he
Speaker 2: rated four different Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on
Speaker 2: how the pizza measures up to the pizza in Rome
Speaker 2: is given out two just like Romes, and two were
Speaker 2: failures according to Gerald, So maybe he's done. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: out of his system. Three threatening letters and one bomb
Speaker 2: that didn't go off, and then he's back to his hobbies.
Speaker 2: But on June nineteenth, twenty eighteen, his local newspaper ran
Speaker 2: a story about the upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek. The
Speaker 2: event was just four months away and the board of
Speaker 2: directors wanted everyone to know that the reenactment weekend would
Speaker 2: have additional security after the incident the year before. Days
Speaker 2: after the paper ran that story, a pair of identical
Speaker 2: letters were mailed to the newspaper, the Winchester Star, and
Speaker 2: the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation. The first letters, the envelopes
Speaker 2: had a symbol where the return address should be, but
Speaker 2: for some reason, these letters had a version of the
Speaker 2: anti fascist symbol with the red flag on top and
Speaker 2: the black flag behind, which is reversed from the original letters.
Speaker 2: I think he probably just downloaded a new image and
Speaker 2: didn't notice that it was different. I don't think he
Speaker 2: realized he was signaling a preference for anarchism over communism.
Speaker 2: Or vice versa. You know, both versions of that symbol
Speaker 2: exist and are perfectly real and valid and are used
Speaker 2: by different people, but they are in fact different symbols
Speaker 2: and do mean something slightly different. I don't think Gerald
Speaker 2: knew that. And this time both letters were addressed to
Speaker 2: Joe Derezo, the president of the foundation's board, and they
Speaker 2: threatened to kill his mother with a car bomb if
Speaker 2: he didn't call off the reenactment in October. Dereza later
Speaker 2: told agents that he took the threat seriously enough that
Speaker 2: he began checking underneath his mother's car for explosive devices.
Speaker 2: But the language in the letters was odd and oddly specific.
Speaker 2: Though the Winchester Star art didn't actually mention what those
Speaker 2: increased security measures would be, the letter writer seemed to know.
Speaker 2: One of the private discussions the board had was about
Speaker 2: banning spectators from bringing bags of any kind to the event,
Speaker 2: but they were worried that this would be an issue
Speaker 2: for people like parents with diaper bags. The letter writer
Speaker 2: said there were quote many ways for us to sneak
Speaker 2: in a surprise, specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of
Speaker 2: a diaper bag, and the board had also quietly been
Speaker 2: in contact with the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors,
Speaker 2: and the letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting
Speaker 2: that he'd already outsmarted their security.
Speaker 3: We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.
Speaker 3: We have found a man that's going to pose as
Speaker 3: an enactor to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.
Speaker 3: We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles, all made into small IEDs.
Speaker 2: In the completely real and very serious way that real
Speaker 2: Antifa terror cells sign off their terrorism threat letters, the
Speaker 2: letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: We are the ones that did it to you last year.
Speaker 3: We used a bad bomb guy. His mercury switch and
Speaker 3: rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered
Speaker 3: in nuts. Just so you know we are real and returning. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just so you know we're real. Okay, it's such a
Speaker 3: weird mess, but silly or not, the letters recipient was
Speaker 3: terrified they were threatening to blow up his mom, and
Speaker 3: there really was a real bomb the year before, so
Speaker 3: you know he's not bluffing. You already know he really
Speaker 3: can build a bomb, so you can't laugh it off
Speaker 3: while it's happening, but in hindsight, what a goofy hass
Speaker 3: sign off. Just so you know, we had a bad
Speaker 3: bomb guy last year, but we're very real and we
Speaker 3: fixed that. Okay, We're real.
Speaker 2: A sixth letter, the third in this second batch, was
Speaker 2: sent to John Bucheister, that vendor in Pennsylvania who had
Speaker 2: spoken to the media about being there when the bomb
Speaker 2: was discovered in twenty seventeen. He'd gotten a letter in
Speaker 2: the first batch too, thanking him for spreading that rumor
Speaker 2: that someone had been arrested for placing the bomb. Confusingly,
Speaker 2: the letter he got in July twenty eighteen was addressed
Speaker 2: to Joe, just like the letter sent to Joe Derezo
Speaker 2: the same week, and it seemed to be speaking to
Speaker 2: Joe Derezzo asking for him to call off the event,
Speaker 2: which presumably Derezo could do as president of the board.
Speaker 2: But John Buchheister is just a guy in Pennsylvania who
Speaker 2: sells antiques and Civil War reproductions. This letter, like the others,
Speaker 2: threatened to kill Derezo's mother.
Speaker 3: Since we can't seem to get you to stop this
Speaker 3: celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe
Speaker 3: if we go after your volunteers that help out. You
Speaker 3: will stop this. I like the idea of burning your
Speaker 3: mother alive in a car bomb.
Speaker 2: Days after these letters were received, the Foundation announced on
Speaker 2: July third, twenty eighteen, they were calling off the reenactment
Speaker 2: in October. You know, they got that letter in twenty
Speaker 2: seventeen and they decided we're going to soldier On, We're
Speaker 2: going to have the event, And then there was a
Speaker 2: real bomb. People were really in danger. So when they
Speaker 2: got this second set of letters in the middle of
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, they decided, we got to call it off.
Speaker 2: It's not safe. What if the bomb goes off this year.
Speaker 2: We know this guy's not bluffing, we know he got
Speaker 2: a bomb in the tent last year. We can't risk it.
Speaker 2: And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum
Speaker 2: where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed.
Speaker 3: A lot of.
Speaker 2: Users agreed that it was the right thing to do.
Speaker 2: It's just not worth the risk people bring their children,
Speaker 2: their families. Others didn't think it was right to let
Speaker 2: the terrorists win, with one poster noting that he never
Speaker 2: stopped going to NASCAR races after nine to eleven. I
Speaker 2: don't know that NASCAR was like a big target for
Speaker 2: al Qaida. But he's been carrying that weight for years,
Speaker 2: I guess. But some posters were starting to ask questions
Speaker 2: like why Cedar Creek and why only Cedar Creek. It's
Speaker 2: not the largest or most high profile reenactment, even in
Speaker 2: just the immediate area. I mean, I don't know if
Speaker 2: you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that
Speaker 2: part of Virginia just is a hippl war battlefield every
Speaker 2: town has. When every town has a plaque and Cedar
Speaker 2: Creek was a Union victory, wouldn't these people be happier
Speaker 2: targeting or reenactment of a Confederate win. And then, after
Speaker 2: pages and pages of going back and forth about this
Speaker 2: decision on the forum, Gerald himself weighed in.
Speaker 3: I volunteer at Cedar Creek. From what we have been told,
Speaker 3: and this is not for general release. The foundation has
Speaker 3: received threats of bodily harm to the board members. They're
Speaker 3: families and everyone that helps out. Then there is the
Speaker 3: very high cost of security. It is It's sad that
Speaker 3: we live in a world with such a hostile climate
Speaker 3: to the Confederacy ANDPS has taken battle flags out of
Speaker 3: all its stores and statues are being taken down. Here
Speaker 3: in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy
Speaker 3: is being changed. I do not know if they will
Speaker 3: officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision. Last
Speaker 3: year they refused to say much, and rumors were all
Speaker 3: over the place. We all need to maybe send some
Speaker 3: money to the foundation for expenses, as this was their
Speaker 3: only way of raising funds. With the fall of so
Speaker 3: many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I
Speaker 3: now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual
Speaker 3: Confederacy fell.
Speaker 2: So he is victim and perpetrator here lingering in the
Speaker 2: comment section, watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about
Speaker 2: how the community should respond to what he has done.
Speaker 2: It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer
Speaker 2: returns to the scene of the crime just to take
Speaker 2: in the aftermath, and again, just as sudden as the
Speaker 2: letters began, they stopped again. He got what he wanted.
Speaker 2: The event was canceled in October, just before the now
Speaker 2: canceled event would have been approaching, Joe Derezo resigned as
Speaker 2: head of the foundation's board. He didn't feel the board
Speaker 2: was taking the threat seriously enough, although it's unclear what
Speaker 2: discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been
Speaker 2: no threats in several months and the event was already canceled,
Speaker 2: so I don't know what prompted him to resign just
Speaker 2: then In October and the local paper, The Winchester Star,
Speaker 2: ran an article about Derezo's resignation, and like clockwork, a
Speaker 2: few days after the article ran, the letter started up again.
Speaker 2: The foundation got a letter addressed to Derezzo, who again
Speaker 2: had just resigned, saying we're sorry to see you go,
Speaker 2: and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director,
Speaker 2: Jeanette Schaefer. And I'm sorry it gets gross here. I mean,
Speaker 2: none of this was good, but it gets gross again.
Speaker 2: I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right,
Speaker 2: Like is this just for shock value? Does this add
Speaker 2: information to the story? Do you need to know exactly
Speaker 2: what he said in order for the story to make sense?
Speaker 2: But given his prior conviction for a crime of a
Speaker 2: sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.
Speaker 2: He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the
Speaker 2: scariest and the nastiest like this kind of ties back
Speaker 2: into his own past. The letter writer told Derezo that
Speaker 2: his quote pretty mother and bald headed dad, we're safe
Speaker 2: now that he'd resigned. But quote if Jeanette Schaeffer thinks
Speaker 2: she is safe, well she is right, but her children
Speaker 2: are not. If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate
Speaker 2: being men in chains, we will come after her girls.
Speaker 2: We have a convicted rapist that would love to introduce
Speaker 2: them to his penis. There are letters that are a
Speaker 2: lot more graphic than this when it comes to the
Speaker 2: sexual threats to those girls. It's in the court record.
Speaker 2: If you're interested in that, I don't see the value
Speaker 2: in proceeding further. You get it at this point. But again,
Speaker 2: even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something
Speaker 2: off about them. The letter writer seems to know way
Speaker 2: too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar
Speaker 2: Creek Battlefield Foundation. He knows a lot about the personal
Speaker 2: lives of these individuals and the way that they interact
Speaker 2: in this space, and the way they run this organization,
Speaker 2: which again is not large. This is not a massive,
Speaker 2: significant operation. This is a pretty small, regional annual event.
Speaker 2: One of the letters in this patch threatened to shoot
Speaker 2: a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor
Speaker 2: center in the morning, and members of the board told
Speaker 2: federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor
Speaker 2: center was only open on a limited basis and not
Speaker 2: many people knew about that. You'd have to be really
Speaker 2: close to the operation to know that Pat, who's the
Speaker 2: board's only full time employee, sometimes opened up the visitor
Speaker 2: center in the morning alone. And the letter tried to
Speaker 2: cast blame on a rat in the organization, claiming that
Speaker 2: their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.
Speaker 2: But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen. But in twenty fourteen, Mowbray was at the
Speaker 2: center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of
Speaker 2: his re enactment unit. And it's not just the letters
Speaker 2: that seemed to be escalating in intensity the same way
Speaker 2: he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake
Speaker 2: posted on the subredit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia,
Speaker 2: asking for recommendations for a good lawyer. He owned a
Speaker 2: lot of antique and reproduction firearms, and was an enthusiastic
Speaker 2: hobbyist in black powder weapons. But he wanted a real gun,
Speaker 2: a gun that shoots real bullets, and when he went
Speaker 2: to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything
Speaker 2: after pulling a background check. Now, his own account of
Speaker 2: the situation is sort of murky and one sided, and
Speaker 2: some of the details I've been able to verify indicate
Speaker 2: that he's not telling the truth. But it appears that
Speaker 2: despite having no felony record, that's true, his conviction for
Speaker 2: child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic
Speaker 2: violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because
Speaker 2: of that. There's no information in any of the hundreds
Speaker 2: of pages of court documents I read that gives me
Speaker 2: any real insight into why he may have wanted to
Speaker 2: buy a gun that week in particular. But if I
Speaker 2: were one of the people who had gotten one of
Speaker 2: those lefts, that timing would take my breath away. He
Speaker 2: also traveled to Paris that October, somehow squeezing it into
Speaker 2: his busy schedule of threatening letters. He loved the Louver
Speaker 2: and Notre Dumb, noting in his review that the movie
Speaker 2: The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice,
Speaker 2: and he visited several notable World War II historical sites.
Speaker 2: He'd boasted on Reddit earlier that month that he was
Speaker 2: thinking of getting into World War II re enacting because
Speaker 2: the Civil War scene was dying out. McDonald's and Five
Speaker 2: Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with
Speaker 2: run review saying seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing
Speaker 2: an old friend to me. Cheap and consistent food that
Speaker 2: is the same flavor around the world. Fair enough, But
Speaker 2: when he got home it was back to business, firing
Speaker 2: off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween,
Speaker 2: again threatening to bomb the annual parade. The letter demanded
Speaker 2: that the mayor quote sold the flying of Confederate flags
Speaker 2: and post it on Facebook, then we will leave you alone.
Speaker 2: Don't and someone is going to die. The ninth and
Speaker 2: final letter was sent to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
Speaker 2: after the embattled organization announced in December twenty eighteen that
Speaker 2: they would be holding the reenactment in twenty nineteen. This
Speaker 2: letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full time employee,
Speaker 2: that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes. The letter
Speaker 2: asked him, would you like to bury, your sister, your brother.
Speaker 2: We could also just kill you when you sit alone
Speaker 2: in the visitor center. We have a guy that likes
Speaker 2: to rape, we could send him to visit your sister.
Speaker 2: What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter
Speaker 2: that really aren't fit to repeat. I mean, they're gross.
Speaker 2: It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the
Speaker 2: actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in
Speaker 2: a way that feels specific enough to be alarming. What
Speaker 2: makes a quote unquote true threat in the eyes of
Speaker 2: the law is kind of a moving target. You never
Speaker 2: really know where the line is where a federal prosecutor
Speaker 2: is going to say, I'm taking that one to a
Speaker 2: grand jury. But in my experience reading cases like this,
Speaker 2: mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly when, where,
Speaker 2: and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.
Speaker 2: The law does not like to see that. But by
Speaker 2: this time, the Feds already know it's Gerald. By the
Speaker 2: time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to
Speaker 2: rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten
Speaker 2: Gerald's phone records from Sprint. They've been conducting physical surveillance
Speaker 2: with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit
Speaker 2: and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff
Speaker 2: around the door, and again suddenly the letter stopped. But
Speaker 2: this time there's no explanation. When the letters stopped before,
Speaker 2: it was because he got something that he wanted, but
Speaker 2: this time they just stop. In a letter to the
Speaker 2: court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his
Speaker 2: senses sometime in December twenty eighteen and realized that what
Speaker 2: he was doing was wrong. It seems a little bit
Speaker 2: more likely to me that one of the FBI agents
Speaker 2: following him around said something to him, and that's not uncommon.
Speaker 2: I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent
Speaker 2: writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy
Speaker 2: about threatening to behead a senator or something. Sometimes they'll
Speaker 2: come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you
Speaker 2: post this? Because you can't do that, don't do it again.
Speaker 2: And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because
Speaker 2: the guy didn't stop posting. So the next conversation had
Speaker 2: a very different tone. And I don't know if that's
Speaker 2: what happened here. It doesn't say. And for as insanely
Speaker 2: detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are There's
Speaker 2: some really important details missing right here. If they were
Speaker 2: following him around in November of twenty eighteen, while these
Speaker 2: letters are still being sent, why wasn't he arrested until
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two. It's clear they spent all of twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen investigating the case. There are search weren't applications here
Speaker 2: for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account,
Speaker 2: and warrant served on his cell phone provider for his
Speaker 2: cell location data. The warrants were executed at various times
Speaker 2: throughout twenty nineteen, with the physical search of his home
Speaker 2: and his storage unit happening in October twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 2: they have him dead to rights. The cell site location
Speaker 2: data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were
Speaker 2: mailed on the days that they were mailed. For some
Speaker 2: of the letters, he drove out of state to mail them,
Speaker 2: far from his home. So we have the GPS coordinates
Speaker 2: showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving to
Speaker 2: a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS drop box,
Speaker 2: and then coming back home. And we know that on
Speaker 2: the days that he did that, the letter was picked
Speaker 2: up at that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility,
Speaker 2: so it's there's not a lot of other explanations for
Speaker 2: why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days. And
Speaker 2: they found the image file for that Antifa logo that
Speaker 2: was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in
Speaker 2: his house. We have drone footage from the twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: reenactment showing his car approaching the area where the bomb
Speaker 2: was found shortly before it was placed there. But they
Speaker 2: gathered all of this evidence, I mean more evidence than
Speaker 2: I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this. I
Speaker 2: mean pages and pages of maps showing his GPS coordinates
Speaker 2: on the days the letters were mailed.
Speaker 3: And they gathered all.
Speaker 2: This evidence and they did nothing with it. The documents
Speaker 2: associated with all of these search warrants were sealed. That's normal.
Speaker 2: Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest is made.
Speaker 2: So nobody knew that his house had been searched except Gerald.
Speaker 2: Sue Gerald knew. I think he had to know. But
Speaker 2: after six months, the ceiling order expired. That can happen.
Speaker 2: I think in most cases they're sort of set to
Speaker 2: auto expire after a certain amount of time. But you'll
Speaker 2: see in cases where they haven't made a move yet,
Speaker 2: the prosecutor will apply to continue ceiling. It's not uncommon.
Speaker 2: I think in this case they must have forgotten to
Speaker 2: file a motion to continue the ceiling. That's the only
Speaker 2: explanation I can think of for why they would let
Speaker 2: these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready to charge him.
Speaker 2: But the ceiling order expired and somebody noticed immediately, because
Speaker 2: the very same day, Justin Rolick wrote an article for
Speaker 2: Courts with the headline disgruntled Civil War reenactor allegedly framed
Speaker 2: Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit. Journalists don't write
Speaker 2: their own headlines, but somebody's got to do something about that.
Speaker 2: That's a mouthful. Next, the Washington Post ran an article
Speaker 2: with the headline, a Civil war reenactment group got threats
Speaker 2: from Antifa. It was a disgruntled actor. FBI says again
Speaker 2: the headlines, what are we doing, folks? But even after
Speaker 2: these two articles ran in February of twenty twenty, the
Speaker 2: case sat still. Well, because I can't say that because
Speaker 2: there was no case. He hadn't been charged. He did
Speaker 2: retain an attorney at this point, and she told The
Speaker 2: Washington Post that he had no idea why he was
Speaker 2: being investigated, which like comee yes, you doo, yeah you do.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until September of twenty twenty two, just
Speaker 2: days before the five year statute of limitations would run
Speaker 2: out for that first letter sent in September twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: that Gerald Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Speaker 2: The last bit of his Internet activity I can find
Speaker 2: before his arrest on October six, twenty twenty two, is
Speaker 2: a post he made the afternoon before He spent a
Speaker 2: few hours lying to post on a forum for sext
Speaker 2: all enthusiasts, with his final message being praised for a
Speaker 2: customer service representative named Patrice at a Canadian company called
Speaker 2: sex Doll Queen. Patrese always answers his emails and once
Speaker 2: sent him a free sex doll head as compensation after
Speaker 2: ups damaged the case his doll arrived in. There's no
Speaker 2: explanation for the nearly three years between solving the case
Speaker 2: and arresting the perpetrator. And maybe it's like those cases
Speaker 2: I mentioned before where they give a guy a talking
Speaker 2: to and they say, you know, if I have to
Speaker 2: come back. It's game over. But you know, just knock
Speaker 2: it off. But I've seen cases like that, and usually
Speaker 2: it's mentioned there will be some sort of incident that
Speaker 2: brings the agent back to his door. But there's no
Speaker 2: indication here of any new conduct, certainly no charged conduct
Speaker 2: in the years between the search warrant and the arrest warrant. Right,
Speaker 2: So if they did all this work, they search his house,
Speaker 2: you know, hypothetically they say to him, hey, Bud, knock
Speaker 2: it off, or we have to charge you. If that
Speaker 2: had happened, you would assume that there would be some
Speaker 2: new incident, but there's not. Maybe it was a change
Speaker 2: in office priorities, or somebody wanted this one close specifically,
Speaker 2: And there was some turnover in the US Attorney's office
Speaker 2: in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing
Speaker 2: that really coincides with this timeline. The assistant US attorney
Speaker 2: whose name is on that warrant in twenty nineteen left
Speaker 2: to become a judge. In March of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: the US Attorney in the Western District left to become
Speaker 2: a judge. In March twenty twenty, the current US attorney
Speaker 2: was sworn in in October twenty twenty one, And that's
Speaker 2: a lot of in and out, but none of that
Speaker 2: does anything to explain how this case got lost. From
Speaker 2: October twenty nineteen to September of twenty twenty two, I
Speaker 2: spent way too much time, like browsing press releases and
Speaker 2: looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track
Speaker 2: the paw patterns in the federal indictments coming out of
Speaker 2: this office to try to make these pieces fit together,
Speaker 2: and they just don't. They don't. There's no obvious rationale
Speaker 2: for this timeline, and I don't expect they're going to
Speaker 2: tell us. Drake pled guilty in April twenty twenty three
Speaker 2: in an agreement that dropped most of the charges. He
Speaker 2: only had to plead guilty to one count of possessing
Speaker 2: an unregistered explosive device and one count of stalking. The
Speaker 2: stalking count was specifically regarding the letter sent to Joe Derezo.
Speaker 2: Accounts related to the letters sent to everybody else were
Speaker 2: dropped in exchange. And that's normal. This is really common.
Speaker 2: Data published by the Pew Research Center last year shows
Speaker 2: nearly ninety percent of people charged with the federal crime
Speaker 2: just plead guilty, they take plea agreements. Eight percent of
Speaker 2: cases end up dismissed, leaving only two point three percent
Speaker 2: of people charged with the federal crime who actually take
Speaker 2: their case to trial. The system desperately needs people to
Speaker 2: plead guilty, which is a huge motivator for overcharging. Right
Speaker 2: you say to a guy, hey, we got you on
Speaker 2: twenty counts. You're going away for one hundred and ten years,
Speaker 2: but hey, maybe we can make a deal for twenty years,
Speaker 2: and then you've saved the United States government the cost
Speaker 2: of a trial. It's not a great setup overall, right,
Speaker 2: that our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice,
Speaker 2: because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of
Speaker 2: the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.
Speaker 2: I mean it would fall apart instantly. Just something to
Speaker 2: think about. So when you look at this and you
Speaker 2: see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not
Speaker 2: because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.
Speaker 2: They just didn't want to pay for a trial. And
Speaker 2: nine years in prison is enough. So yes, technically he
Speaker 2: is only guilty legally of build the bomb and sending
Speaker 2: the letters to Joe Derezo threatening to blow up his mom,
Speaker 2: the letters threatening to rape Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters
Speaker 2: are among those dropped counts. So in the eyes of
Speaker 2: the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts,
Speaker 2: not because he was acquitted, he was not found not guilty,
Speaker 2: but he is not guilty of them in the sense
Speaker 2: that he was not prosecuted for those they were dropped.
Speaker 2: Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays
Speaker 2: out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to
Speaker 2: your own conclusion. But the law is what the law is.
Speaker 2: He is not guilty of those things. He's currently serving
Speaker 2: his nine year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Myeland, Michigan.
Speaker 2: He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer
Speaker 2: to his son. He'll be seventy two when he's released
Speaker 2: in twenty thirty. The government has not yet responded to
Speaker 2: his motion to seal certain case documents related to the
Speaker 2: dropped counts. He wrote a letter from prison in December
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three that certain information in his indictment has
Speaker 2: caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.
Speaker 2: He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of
Speaker 2: graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and
Speaker 2: influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the
Speaker 2: plea agreement. Again, he's not guilty of those things, but
Speaker 2: it's in the indictment. So in the end, it turns
Speaker 2: out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on
Speaker 2: Confederate War reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg Grade.
Speaker 2: It's just Gerald, a weird little guy who's Maddie got
Speaker 2: kicked out of his Civil War club.
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