Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello again, dear listeners, this is your host, Molly Conger,
Speaker 2: once again bringing you a rerun. I'm so sorry. I
Speaker 2: promise I will be back next week with a brand
Speaker 2: new Weird Little Guy for you. This pair of episodes
Speaker 2: originally aired back in November of twenty twenty four. It's
Speaker 2: one of the more lighthearted story arcs we've had on
Speaker 2: Weird Little Guys. It tells the story of a half
Speaker 2: baked plot to take over a small town in Tennessee
Speaker 2: so a conspiracy theory blogger and a militia chaplin could
Speaker 2: prove once and for all that Barack Obama was born
Speaker 2: in Kenya. He wasn't, obviously, and they didn't succeed. It's
Speaker 2: just a silly little story about a lesser known chapter
Speaker 2: in the history of right wing extremists refusing to accept
Speaker 2: election results. If you missed it last time around, I
Speaker 2: hope you will enjoy one of the only stories I've
Speaker 2: told so far where nobody really got hurt except me.
Speaker 2: It did cause me some agony to dig up and
Speaker 2: listen to hours of old episodes of g Gordon Liddy's
Speaker 2: talk radio show so that I could find the exact
Speaker 2: moment in history when a conspiracy theorist called the guy
Speaker 2: who did Watergate to tell him about the armed standoff
Speaker 2: he and his friends were going to have after breakfast,
Speaker 2: but it was worth it. It's a fun episode. On
Speaker 2: April first, twenty ten, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter Francis
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick the Third walked into the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.
Speaker 2: That was no surprise to anyone in Madisonville. Fitzpatrick had
Speaker 2: become a frequent visitor to this courthouse in a small
Speaker 2: town in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. A
Speaker 2: year earlier, in March of two thousand nine, he asked
Speaker 2: a Monroe County grand jury to indict President Barack Obama
Speaker 2: on charges of treason. The grand jury declined to do so.
Speaker 2: In the year that followed, he had been a regular
Speaker 2: fixture in the County court Clerk's office, demanding information about
Speaker 2: the county's jury selection process. After the grand jury's refusal
Speaker 2: to accept his presentation of evidence against Barack Obama, he
Speaker 2: could only conclude that the process itself was deeply corrupt
Speaker 2: and sinister forces were conspiring against him to suppress the
Speaker 2: truth that Barack Houssain Obama was not the rightful president
Speaker 2: of the United States, that he was born in Kenya,
Speaker 2: that he had rigged the two thousand eight election, and
Speaker 2: he was guilty of high treason. Walter Fitzpatrick was more
Speaker 2: than prepared to put Barack Obama on trial, but now
Speaker 2: he believed the whole Damn's system was guilty and he
Speaker 2: wasn't going to let them get away with it. He
Speaker 2: just needed some backup. I'm Molly Konger, and this is
Speaker 2: where the little guys as in writing this. It's a
Speaker 2: few days after the twenty twenty four presidential election. Every
Speaker 2: election has winners and losers, and not everybody is happy
Speaker 2: with the results. It's probably no surprise to you that
Speaker 2: I count myself among those of us who aren't thrilled
Speaker 2: with the results this time around. But sometimes disappointment, dread,
Speaker 2: and dissatisfaction aren't enough. For some people, an undesirable election
Speaker 2: outcome is simply unacceptable. Literally, they can't accept it, it
Speaker 2: can't be true, and it can't be allowed to stand.
Speaker 2: As with my Halloween episode, I'm a little behind the
Speaker 2: curve here in terms of seasonal content. At this rate,
Speaker 2: I'll be doing a Christmas special on Groundhog's Day. But
Speaker 2: elections and weird little guys go together like peanut butter
Speaker 2: and jelly. Well, no, no, that's not true. You do
Speaker 2: find them together often, but they don't usually mix well.
Speaker 2: So maybe it's more like oil and water. Neither of
Speaker 2: those analogies are really giving me what I want in
Speaker 2: my personal experience. Right wing extremists and election results go
Speaker 2: together like blue gatorade and raw onions. When I covered
Speaker 2: the January sixth ride at the Capitol in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: those were the two things I saw people pulling out
Speaker 2: of their backpacks the most. Think. Some right wing influencer
Speaker 2: convinced a lot of people who'd never been to a
Speaker 2: riot before that you should carry a raw white onion
Speaker 2: cut in half in a ziploc baggie because rubbing it
Speaker 2: on your face is a homeopathic remedy for tear gas.
Speaker 2: Just a heads up, that is not true. Do not
Speaker 2: do that. Do not rub a raw onion on your
Speaker 2: eyeballs at any time, and definitely don't do it after
Speaker 2: exposure to a chemical irritant. And if you can only
Speaker 2: pack one thing to drink in a situation like that,
Speaker 2: make it water. Or else you'll be washing pepper spray
Speaker 2: and onion juice out of your eyes with gatorade, which
Speaker 2: doctors do not recommend. That's just some free advice for you,
Speaker 2: but I thought it would make perfect sense to do
Speaker 2: some kind of election themed weird little guy. And to
Speaker 2: be honest, I'm bored of January sixth stories. I'm sure
Speaker 2: I'll get to some of them on this show eventually.
Speaker 2: And there were some guys there who were very strange
Speaker 2: guys even before they were trying to stop the steal.
Speaker 2: And if the guy they were fighting for that day
Speaker 2: follows through on his promise to pardon them all, some
Speaker 2: of them will make their way back into the news
Speaker 2: one way or another, whether that's running for office or
Speaker 2: building a bomb. But right now today, I'm sick of
Speaker 2: thinking about the twenty twenty election results because I'm sick
Speaker 2: of thinking about the twenty twenty four election results. And
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty election was not the first time right
Speaker 2: wing extremists couldn't accept the results. So come with me
Speaker 2: to the distant past. Two thousand and eight. I voted
Speaker 2: for president for the first time that year, making me
Speaker 2: one of nearly seventy million Americans who cast a ballot
Speaker 2: for Barack Obama. He won handle it, beating John McCain
Speaker 2: by more than seven percent in the popular vote and
Speaker 2: pulling in three hundred and sixty five electoral votes to
Speaker 2: McCain's one hundred and seventy three. Barack Obama was promising hope, change,
Speaker 2: and healthcare. John McCain was burdened by George W. Bush's
Speaker 2: rock bottom approval ratings and his support for Bush's now
Speaker 2: increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. It seemed like a new
Speaker 2: day had dawned. We were all going to get healthcare,
Speaker 2: and we had finally elected our first black president. Of course,
Speaker 2: not everyone was on board. We'd had more than two
Speaker 2: centuries of white men named James, John, William, and George. Literally,
Speaker 2: of the forty two presidents before Obama, eighteen of them
Speaker 2: were named James, John William, or George. About forty percent
Speaker 2: of the total presidential time until two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: was under a guy with one of those four names.
Speaker 2: We elected two two different guys named Franklin. We hadn't
Speaker 2: really been getting a lot of variety. Conspiracy theories about
Speaker 2: Barack Obama's race, religion, and place of birth are creatures
Speaker 2: of racism, pure and simple. There's no talking your way
Speaker 2: around that fact. He has a foreign sounding name and
Speaker 2: he is not white. There was a lot of anxiety
Speaker 2: that someone who didn't look like the American presidents we'd
Speaker 2: had before couldn't possibly have the same American values. During
Speaker 2: the primary, Mark Penn, a senior campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 2: wrote a memo suggesting that they should highlight the fact
Speaker 2: that Obama spent some of his childhood in Indonesia while
Speaker 2: emphasizing Clinton's Midwest roots, writing, his.
Speaker 3: Roots and basic American values and culture are at best limited.
Speaker 3: I cannot imagine electing a president during a time of
Speaker 3: war who was not at his center fun mentally American
Speaker 3: in his thinking and in his values.
Speaker 2: The Clinton campaign didn't end up going with this strategy,
Speaker 2: but the memo got out, and this idea that Barack
Speaker 2: Obama was an American bled into a conspiracy theory that
Speaker 2: he was not American at all and had in fact
Speaker 2: been born in Kenya. During the two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: election season, surveys showed that as many as a third
Speaker 2: of Republican voters believe there may be some truth to
Speaker 2: the idea that Barack Obama was born outside of the
Speaker 2: United States. An analysis published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity,
Speaker 2: and Politics in twenty nineteen acknowledged that, yes, the best
Speaker 2: predictor of believing in any conspiracy theory is a pre
Speaker 2: existing belief in any other conspiracy theory. People who are
Speaker 2: prone to believing unsubstantiated claims often believe many of them.
Speaker 2: But while there are certainly people of all political orientations
Speaker 2: who are willing to entertain the theory, the study found
Speaker 2: that belief in this particular conspiracy theory was uniquely correlated
Speaker 2: to the believer's own race, party affiliation, and most importantly,
Speaker 2: their level of racial resentment toward African Americans. So to
Speaker 2: be clear, there are multiple studies published in journals across
Speaker 2: a range of disciplines over the course of nearly twenty
Speaker 2: years that have found measurable correlations. Here, the people who
Speaker 2: trafficked in Birtherism were white Republicans with a measurable level
Speaker 2: of racial animus. This was never about getting to the truth.
Speaker 2: It was an intense fear of a black president. In
Speaker 2: June of two thousand and eight, just days after Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton conceded the primary and Obama was the presumptive nominee.
Speaker 2: His campaign released a copy of his birth certificate showing
Speaker 2: he had in fact been born in Hawaii. But you
Speaker 2: can't kill a conspiracy with facts that's never worked. And
Speaker 2: confronted with what should have been the final answer to
Speaker 2: the question, Berthers just doubled down the birth certificate was
Speaker 2: simply fake. This only fueled the fire, and in August
Speaker 2: of two thousand and eight, the first of countless lawsuits
Speaker 2: was filed. And oddly enough, we've already talked about this
Speaker 2: particular lawsuit on this show in the first episode about
Speaker 2: the Pennsylvania clansman Berry Black. Philip Burg's lawsuit alleged that
Speaker 2: Obama had been born in Kenya, and this relied on
Speaker 2: a sworn affidavit written by Ron McCrae about a phone
Speaker 2: call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother
Speaker 2: through a translator. Ron McCrae was the homophobic street preacher
Speaker 2: who spent years harassing the owners of the Costanova Lounge,
Speaker 2: a gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. It was located
Speaker 2: across the street from a farm owned by some clansmen.
Speaker 2: Berg's lawsuit was dismissed and the judge called it frivolous
Speaker 2: and not worthy of discussion, which is true, but that
Speaker 2: became the playbook. Berthers around the country filed frivolous and
Speaker 2: baffling lawsuits. They filed them in federal court houses, county
Speaker 2: circuit courts, state supreme courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals,
Speaker 2: state boards of election, state administrative courts. They filed complaints
Speaker 2: and requests for injunctions and petitions anywhere they could find
Speaker 2: a bureaucrat sitting in a desk. For just the years
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight through twenty twelve, I found over
Speaker 2: two hundred complaints in various forms, filed with every kind
Speaker 2: of court you can imagine, and some kinds of courts
Speaker 2: I've never heard of, and they lost every single one.
Speaker 2: They seemed convinced that they could find the right collection
Speaker 2: of words, the right legal incantation, that, if presented to
Speaker 2: the right judge and the right jury, would wake America
Speaker 2: from this national nightmare of an Obama presidency. But the
Speaker 2: lawsuits weren't working. Judge after judge sent them packing. In
Speaker 2: most cases they didn't even get a hearing. They were
Speaker 2: submitting complaints that had absolutely no legal basis to proceed,
Speaker 2: No basis in reality even and in the cases that
Speaker 2: did get a foot in the door, they were submitting
Speaker 2: forged documents and relying on already debunked claims. Lawyers were sanctioned,
Speaker 2: fines were levied, and suit after suit was dismissed. But undeterred,
Speaker 2: the Birthers found a new way forward. If they couldn't
Speaker 2: get justice through civil suits, they would simply have to
Speaker 2: have the President of the United States arrested. In June
Speaker 2: of two thousand and nine, one hundred and seventy two
Speaker 2: extremely devoted conspiracy theorists convened. They called themselves the Super
Speaker 2: American grand Jury. Now that's not a real thing. Grand
Speaker 2: juries are real. Of course, we don't need to get
Speaker 2: bogged down in the specifics because they vary from state
Speaker 2: to state. But generally speaking, a grand jury is a
Speaker 2: group of citizens convened by a court and tasked with
Speaker 2: issuing indictments. So a prosecutor will briefly summarize a case.
Speaker 2: They'll put on a little bit of evidence, maybe some witnesses,
Speaker 2: and the grand jurors will just if there's probable cause
Speaker 2: to believe a crime has been committed by the individual.
Speaker 2: The prosecutor is seeking to indict. They aren't deciding if
Speaker 2: anyone is innocent or guilty. They're not trying the case.
Speaker 2: It's a much lower standard here. They're just deciding is
Speaker 2: this something that should proceed as a case at all.
Speaker 2: You've probably heard the saying you can get a grand
Speaker 2: jury to indict a ham sandwich. It's a pretty low
Speaker 2: bar to clear at this stage. But we're not here
Speaker 2: to talk about real grand juries because that barely factors
Speaker 2: into the story at all. I just want to be
Speaker 2: clear that grand juries are real, they do exist, and
Speaker 2: this was not one. A grand jury is made up
Speaker 2: of grand jurors who have received an official summons from
Speaker 2: a real court, and they are presented real potential cases
Speaker 2: by a real prosecutor, and they make real determinations about
Speaker 2: which cases get an indictments. There are six states that
Speaker 2: allow citizen initiated grand juries in Oklahoma, Nevada, Kansas, Nebraska,
Speaker 2: New Mexico, and North Dakota. There is a process through
Speaker 2: which you can collect enough signatures on a petition to
Speaker 2: force a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate
Speaker 2: an alleged crime. That's not what this was either. They
Speaker 2: didn't have a petition they submitted to a court. They
Speaker 2: didn't do it in any of those states. I'm just saying.
Speaker 2: Avenues do exist. And in some states like California, you
Speaker 2: can submit a written complaint to request a grand jury
Speaker 2: investigation into a criminal allegation, but they're under no obligation
Speaker 2: to follow up. And in Tennessee, the fact that is
Speaker 2: about to become very relevant. State law allows any citizen
Speaker 2: to apply to testify before a county grand jury about
Speaker 2: an alleged offense that is prosecutable in that county. But
Speaker 2: the idea of a citizens grand jury like the super
Speaker 2: American grand jury, is not something these particular extremists invented
Speaker 2: in their modern iteration. Most of these citizens grand jury
Speaker 2: groups were trying to arrest Barack Obama for various invented crimes,
Speaker 2: but they also popped up in the early two thousands
Speaker 2: among nine to eleven truthers who wanted to arrest George
Speaker 2: Bush during the Malheir National Wildlife Refuge occupation. A few
Speaker 2: years back, militia members who supported the Bundy family convened
Speaker 2: fake grand juries to indict local officials and even some
Speaker 2: reporters whose coverage they found lacking. Conspiracy theory. Frequent flier
Speaker 2: Larry Clayman has not only indicted Joe Biden with a
Speaker 2: fake grand jury, he even convicted him. But according to
Speaker 2: Daniel Levatas the author of The Terrorist next Door, a
Speaker 2: two thousand and four book on the American militia movement,
Speaker 2: these citizen grand juries actually date back to the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies with Christian identity extremists. Christian identity has come up before.
Speaker 2: We talked about it briefly in the episode about Christopher Hassen,
Speaker 2: the Coastguard lieutenant who was stockpiling guns and planning to
Speaker 2: assassinate the Supreme Court, but was too addicted to opiates
Speaker 2: to make much progress. He'd spend some time researching Christian
Speaker 2: identity online before writing to a longtime white nationalist leader
Speaker 2: named Harold Covington about his plans to make changes to
Speaker 2: society with quote a little focused violence and Christian identity
Speaker 2: kind of sounds like it might mean someone whose identity
Speaker 2: is Christian. Right, It's just someone who considers themselves to
Speaker 2: be a Christian. But that's not what it means at all.
Speaker 2: It refers to a specific set of extremist beliefs that
Speaker 2: white Europeans are God's true chosen people. It is a
Speaker 2: deeply anti Semitic belief system, and one whose followers are
Speaker 2: often very willing to age and violence. The earliest example
Speaker 2: levatas sites of a written threat to bring a citizen's
Speaker 2: grand jury indictment is a tax protester in Michigan in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two who threatened to indict local authorities trying
Speaker 2: to enforce a core order. And in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 2: Richard Butler, another weird little Guy's recurring character, led a
Speaker 2: group of fifty followers to try to arrest a policeman
Speaker 2: in Kurdalene, Idaho before the officer could testify against a
Speaker 2: member of the group who'd been charged with assault with
Speaker 2: a deadly weapon. Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan Nations
Speaker 2: yet at that point, but he was already a prominent
Speaker 2: figure within Christian identity. So the super American Grand j
Speaker 2: had deep roots in dark places, and it was not
Speaker 2: so super and not a grand jury at all. It
Speaker 2: was just a collection of conspiracists who wrote their own
Speaker 2: indictment against the president, and then they went to a
Speaker 2: federal courthouse in Washington, d c. And filed it Judge
Speaker 2: Royce Lamberth promptly dismissed them. I guess maybe dismiss is
Speaker 2: a tricky word to use here, because a real indictment
Speaker 2: can be dismissed by a judge, and that's not what
Speaker 2: happened here, because this was not a real indictment. What
Speaker 2: Judge Lamberth actually did was issue in order denying them
Speaker 2: permission to have even filed it at all. Writing, any
Speaker 2: self styled indictment or presentment issued by such a group
Speaker 2: has no force under the Constitution or laws of the
Speaker 2: United States. Judge Lamberth took senior status in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: He's kind of retired but still working, so he is
Speaker 2: actually still a federal judge in DC today and has
Speaker 2: presided over quite a few of the January sixth cases,
Speaker 2: most notably the trial of the QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three, fourteen years after he kicked those
Speaker 2: Birthers out of his court for trying to arrest the President.
Speaker 2: He was dismayed to see Republican politicians trafficking in rhetoric
Speaker 2: that downplayed the events of January sixth, writing in a
Speaker 2: court filing in one of those cases.
Speaker 3: The Court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept
Speaker 3: that they did anything wrong. But in my thirty seven
Speaker 3: years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when
Speaker 3: such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream. I
Speaker 3: have been dismayed to see distortions in outright falsehoods seep
Speaker 3: into the public consciousness. I've been shocked to watch some
Speaker 3: public figures try to rewrite history. Clement rioters behaved in
Speaker 3: an orderly fashion like ordinary tourists. I'm mortalizing convicted January
Speaker 3: sixth defendants as political prisoners or even incredibly hostages. That
Speaker 3: is all preposterous. The Court fears that such destructive, misguided
Speaker 3: rhetoric could pressage further danger to our country.
Speaker 2: So the Super American grand Jury's first indictment didn't work,
Speaker 2: But that didn't stop them. That's sort of a theme here.
Speaker 2: Nothing really seems to deter them. One of those Super
Speaker 2: American grandeurors was a Georgia man named Carl Swenson. Swinson
Speaker 2: is a very special kind of conspiracy theorist called a
Speaker 2: sovereign citizen. It's a strange and complicated set of beliefs
Speaker 2: that I can't really do justice in the time we
Speaker 2: have for this story. But it's a kind of legal
Speaker 2: magical thinking. There's a lot of crossover between sovereign citizens
Speaker 2: and other kinds of conspiratorial belief, and a not insignificant
Speaker 2: amount of sovereign citizen belief within the militia movement, and
Speaker 2: sovereign citizens generally believe that there are certain secret procedural
Speaker 2: loopholes that they can use to avoid being subject to
Speaker 2: the law, anything from traffic stops to income taxes. To
Speaker 2: be honest, it's almost always traffic stops and income taxes.
Speaker 2: You've probably heard jokes about a guy in a courtroom
Speaker 2: proclaiming that the judge has no authority over him because
Speaker 2: there's gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom and
Speaker 2: that means that admiralty law is in effect. Or maybe
Speaker 2: you've heard of someone being pulled over and refusing to
Speaker 2: produce a driver's license, arguing with the cop that they
Speaker 2: don't need a driver's license because they're not driving, they're traveling,
Speaker 2: and it's different. I've only seen one in court in
Speaker 2: real life, and it was a young woman appealing a
Speaker 2: conviction for driving without a license. She just kept yelling
Speaker 2: at the judge. I do not contract with the Department
Speaker 2: of mone Vehicles. It did not work. She was unsuccessful
Speaker 2: in that appeal. A month after Judge Lamberth told the
Speaker 2: Super American Grand Jury that they couldn't just make their
Speaker 2: own grand jury, Carl Swenson and a few of the
Speaker 2: others submitted a new case to the court. If they
Speaker 2: couldn't be their own grand jury, then the court should
Speaker 2: convene one for them. Judge Lamberth once again declined, explaining
Speaker 2: that a general grievance about the government doesn't give them
Speaker 2: standing to file this complaint. There was some kind of
Speaker 2: procedural mishap in the court clerk's office, though, and the
Speaker 2: docket was left open by accident. This normally wouldn't matter
Speaker 2: at all, no lawyer would keep filing motions at a
Speaker 2: closed case. But they did not have lawyers, and one
Speaker 2: of Swinson's co petitioners, Penny Kelso, filed a buzz There
Speaker 2: are seven page document four years later, demanding that the
Speaker 2: judge take action. It has a lot of prayers in
Speaker 2: it and links to blogs and random excerpts from the Constitution,
Speaker 2: And the last page is just illegible handwritten notes, and
Speaker 2: I can kind of make out something about Benghazi, and
Speaker 2: she signed this whole thing Penny Kelso DVM, which is
Speaker 2: technically true. Penny Kelso does have a doctorate of veterinary medicine,
Speaker 2: but the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has suspended
Speaker 2: her license half a dozen times for things like watching
Speaker 2: a C section on someone's dog, duct taping bandages to
Speaker 2: animals in a way that caused harm, improperly confining animals
Speaker 2: in a kennel, and falsifying records related to mandatory continuing
Speaker 2: the education hours. Penny doesn't actually come up again in
Speaker 2: this story. She's not really relevant here. I just wanted
Speaker 2: to make sure you know that at least one person
Speaker 2: involved in this whole situation has killed a puppy. So
Speaker 2: they couldn't sue the president, they couldn't issue their own
Speaker 2: federal indictment, they couldn't make a judge convene a federal
Speaker 2: grand jury. But they had incontrovertible proof that Barack Obama
Speaker 2: could not be the president, and it was their duty
Speaker 2: as Americans to have him arrested. If this false president's
Speaker 2: collaborators in Washington, d C. Wouldn't heed their demands, maybe
Speaker 2: a grand jury. Foreman in a small town in rural
Speaker 2: Tennessee would Sweetwater, Tennessee is a small town straddling the
Speaker 2: line between McMinn and Monroe counties of geography, that explains
Speaker 2: why Sweetwater resident Walter Fitzpatrick would eventually go to jail
Speaker 2: for trying to perform citizens' arrests on courthouse employees in
Speaker 2: both counties. In March of two thousand and nine, he
Speaker 2: drafted his own indictment against Barack Obama. He went down
Speaker 2: to the county courthouse and notarized the following letter.
Speaker 3: I have observed and extensively recorded treacherous attacks by military
Speaker 3: political aristocrats against the United States Constitution for twenty years now,
Speaker 3: and yet another betrayal, you have broken in and entered
Speaker 3: the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, dissembling,
Speaker 3: and deceit, posing as an imposter president and commander in
Speaker 3: chief who has stripped civilian command and control over the
Speaker 3: military establishment. Known military criminal actors command racketeers are now
Speaker 3: free in the exercise of military government, intent upon destruction
Speaker 3: of America's constitutional government, free from constitutional restraint and following
Speaker 3: your criminal example, military commanders deployed US Army active duty
Speaker 3: combat troops into the small civilian community of Samson, Alabama,
Speaker 3: last week, in a demonstration of their newly received despotic
Speaker 3: domestic police power. We come now to this reckoning. I
Speaker 3: accuse you and your military political criminal assistance of treason.
Speaker 3: I name you and your military criminal associates as traitors.
Speaker 3: Your criminal ascension manifests this clear and present danger. You
Speaker 3: fundamentally changed our form of government. The Constitution no longer works.
Speaker 3: Confident holding your silent agreement and admission, I identify you
Speaker 3: as a foreign born domestic enemy. My sworn duty, mister Obama,
Speaker 3: is to stand against what you stand for. You're not
Speaker 3: my president, you're not my commander in chief. Obedient to
Speaker 3: the Constitution and submission of this criminal accusation, I remain
Speaker 3: steadfast and born fighting. Walter Francis Fitzpatrick the Third.
Speaker 2: There's a lot going on there. You probably have some
Speaker 2: questions about Walter's claims. Will take him one at a time.
Speaker 2: The twenty years of experience fighting the treacherous attacks on
Speaker 2: the Constitution by the military political aristocrats, well that's about
Speaker 2: how long he's been writing a blog. He started his
Speaker 2: blog jag Hunters, after he was pushed out of the Navy.
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick was allowed to serve out his nineteen and a
Speaker 2: half years, rounding up to twenty so he could receive
Speaker 2: his pension, but his last four years in the Navy
Speaker 2: were humiliating. He was convicted in a court martial in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety for improperly accounting for the morale, welfare and
Speaker 2: recreation funds for the sailors aboard the USS Mars, of
Speaker 2: which he was the executive officer at the time. He
Speaker 2: was found not guilty on charges of stealing twenty eight
Speaker 2: hundred dollars, misappropriate another ten four hundred dollars, and improper
Speaker 2: use of a government vehicle, and his only sentence was
Speaker 2: a reprimand all things considered, it could have been worse.
Speaker 2: He was basically convicted of bad record keeping and given
Speaker 2: a talking to. He didn't have to go to the
Speaker 2: brig He didn't get kicked out or demoted, or lose
Speaker 2: his pension or any of his access to veterans' benefits.
Speaker 2: He served out his twenty years and retired and collected
Speaker 2: a pension, but he spent four years sitting at a desk.
Speaker 2: He was passed over for promotions. He was humiliated and
Speaker 2: angry and he stayed angry at the government for a
Speaker 2: very long time. Sometimes I get a little lost in
Speaker 2: the weeds. When I started writing this week's episode, it
Speaker 2: was supposed to be about a guy we haven't gotten
Speaker 2: to yet and aren't really going to get to today.
Speaker 2: But when you start pulling the narrative threads and looking
Speaker 2: for the beginning of the story, there's always more beginnings
Speaker 2: than you think. It's probably more than enough backstory on
Speaker 2: Walter Fitzpatrick to say that his distrust of the government
Speaker 2: comes from his decades long, deeply held belief that he
Speaker 2: was a victim of a grave injustice at this nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety court martial. But as I spend more and more
Speaker 2: time really getting to know each of these weird little guys,
Speaker 2: patterns start to emerge, and I think Walter Fitzpatrick fits
Speaker 2: into the Frank Sweeney archetype. I did two episodes a
Speaker 2: while back about a lifelong con man named Frank Sweeney.
Speaker 2: He got into all sorts of hijinks and cross paths
Speaker 2: with all kinds of people, going to federal prison half
Speaker 2: a dozen times for various frauds and threats. But the
Speaker 2: one thing that connected everything in Frank's life was an
Speaker 2: overwhelming sense of personal grievance. He had been wronged. He
Speaker 2: had been wronged, and the only way to make it
Speaker 2: right was to make that lust for vengeance the sole
Speaker 2: focus of his life, no matter where that path took
Speaker 2: him until he felt satisfied. For Frank, that meant spending
Speaker 2: several years writing threatening postcards to a stranger who made
Speaker 2: a passing comment about where he was parked at the
Speaker 2: post office, and I see echoes of that same mindset here.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety four, Fitzpatrick had successfully recruited his Congressman
Speaker 2: Norm Dix as an advocate on his behalf, and Congressman
Speaker 2: Dix wrote several letters to the Navy advocating for a
Speaker 2: new trial for Fitzpatrick. He did his best as an
Speaker 2: elective representative to help a constituent seek redress through the
Speaker 2: proper channels, and he was ultimately unsuccessful. Fitzpatrick continued communicating
Speaker 2: with Norm Dix and later Congressman Adam Smith throughout the
Speaker 2: nineties and early two thousands, badgering their staff regularly and
Speaker 2: demanding his decade old case be revisited. There wasn't really
Speaker 2: much anyone could do, but both representatives met with him
Speaker 2: and heard his complaints and did what they could. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, Fitzpatrick was banned from Congressman Smith's
Speaker 2: to Koma offices. It's unclear what led to the ban,
Speaker 2: but a letter filed with the court said that they
Speaker 2: would continue to serve him as a constituent, but he
Speaker 2: was only allowed to communicate with the Congressman or his
Speaker 2: staff by letter. And in two thousand and three, two
Speaker 2: female staffers in Norm Dix's office got restraining orders against Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 2: In her petition to the court, one of those staffers wrote,
Speaker 2: over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that
Speaker 2: mister Fitzpatrick's rage was building. He had difficulty looking me
Speaker 2: in the eye, and he was so angry he often
Speaker 2: paced in our lobby. He has no respect for the
Speaker 2: work we've done for him over the years. The last
Speaker 2: straw was an incident in October of two thousand and
Speaker 2: three when Fitzpatrick refused to leave the office and physically
Speaker 2: prevented the employee from leaving by blocking the door, forcing
Speaker 2: her to call the police. Police reports show multiple violations
Speaker 2: of these restraining orders and several complaints, though no prosecutions
Speaker 2: for trespass, harassment, and domestic violence. He was angry he
Speaker 2: had been wronged and their inability to help him was unforgivable.
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick was coming into regular contact with the police in
Speaker 2: Kitsap County, Washington until moved to Tennessee in two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven. But back to Fitzpatrick's trees and allegations, you
Speaker 2: probably noticed that he only barely mentioned the president's citizenship.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's in there, don't get me wrong. He
Speaker 2: does call Obama a foreign born enemy, but that's pretty
Speaker 2: secondary here. This indictment for treason isn't really about that.
Speaker 2: This is a brand new tactic. He's accusing the president
Speaker 2: of having violated the Posse Comatatis Act, and that did
Speaker 2: actually kind of happen, not in the way he's claiming. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Barack Obama did not violate the Posse Commatatus Act, but
Speaker 2: it's not a wholly fabricated allegation. The Posse Commatatus Act
Speaker 2: dates back to the end of reconstruction after the Civil War,
Speaker 2: and it prohibits the use of the US military in
Speaker 2: civilian policing. It doesn't apply to the National Guard under
Speaker 2: the direction of a state governor, and there are exceptions
Speaker 2: Federal troops can be deployed domestically in certain situations, like
Speaker 2: if the President invokes the Insurrection Act, or if there
Speaker 2: is some kind of emergency involving nuclear materials or significant
Speaker 2: amounts of explosive ordinance that can't be safely dealt with otherwise.
Speaker 2: But generally speaking, the United States military cannot engage in
Speaker 2: domestic civilian policing. It's not something that comes up very
Speaker 2: often for normal people. Under normal circumstances, You're probably never
Speaker 2: having conversations about the Posse Commatatus Act. But it's a
Speaker 2: big boogeyman in anti government movements, and the allegation Fitzpatrick
Speaker 2: is making in this letter alludes to an actual incident.
Speaker 2: On March tenth, two thousand and nine, Michael McClendon carried
Speaker 2: out what is still the deadliest mass shooting in the
Speaker 2: history of Alabama, killing ten people, injuring six others, and
Speaker 2: ultimately taking his own life. It wasn't political or ideological,
Speaker 2: it wasn't racially motivated. It's just a terrible, sad story
Speaker 2: about gun violence in America. He was an angry young
Speaker 2: man with a gun, and he made his problems everybody
Speaker 2: else's but Clendon. First drove to his mother's house in Kinston, Alabama,
Speaker 2: where he shot and killed her and then burnt her
Speaker 2: house down. Then he drove to his uncle's house and
Speaker 2: nearby Samson, Alabama, and shot his uncle, two cousins, and
Speaker 2: several of their neighbors. Then he went to his grandmother's
Speaker 2: house and shot and killed her. And as he fled
Speaker 2: the third crime scene, he was firing at random from
Speaker 2: his car window, shooting bystanders. He killed a gas station attendant,
Speaker 2: passing motorists and injured several pedestrians. When sheriff's deputies tried
Speaker 2: to run him off the road, he shot one of
Speaker 2: them too. With more than a dozen people shot across
Speaker 2: three towns spanning two counties, law enforcement was stretched pretty thin.
Speaker 2: There were multiple crime scenes, ten dead bodies, half a
Speaker 2: dozen seriously injured survivors, including an infant, and the shooter
Speaker 2: was on the move, and so someone at the Geneva
Speaker 2: County Sheriff's office made a phone call to nearby Fort
Speaker 2: Rucker to ask for help. The army officer who responded
Speaker 2: to the request later said that he believed at the
Speaker 2: time that what he was doing was lawful, citing his
Speaker 2: own experience assisting in disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. His
Speaker 2: intention was only to be what he called a good neighbor,
Speaker 2: and for a period of about five hours that afternoon,
Speaker 2: several soldiers from Fort Rucker assisted local law enforcement at
Speaker 2: traffic checkpoints near the crime scenes and stood guard at
Speaker 2: the makeshift morgue that they'd set up to store the bodies.
Speaker 2: And this was in fact a violation of the Posse
Speaker 2: Comma Tatis Act. Soldiers from the United States Army should
Speaker 2: not have been participating in traffic checkpoints. That is against
Speaker 2: the law, and the officer who made that call was disciplined.
Speaker 2: But it was a local mistake. This wasn't something that
Speaker 2: was run up the chain of command all the way
Speaker 2: to the president. This didn't go through the Pentagon. They
Speaker 2: didn't convene the Joint chiefs of Staff. It was just
Speaker 2: someone from the sheriff's office made a phone call to
Speaker 2: a guy he knew at the army base, and they
Speaker 2: did something they didn't realize was wrong. I won't claim
Speaker 2: to be familiar with the details of military chain of
Speaker 2: command or military law or anything, but I'm not sure
Speaker 2: the commander in chief can be charged with treason because
Speaker 2: one guy in Alabama accidentally broke the law. This actual
Speaker 2: violation of the Possecomatatis Act was enough to send a
Speaker 2: certain kind of guy into hysterics. I mean, look, I'm
Speaker 2: not making excuses for it. Any kind of precedent for
Speaker 2: that sort of thing should be avoided. The potential for
Speaker 2: abuse is extreme and terrifying. But anti government activists could
Speaker 2: finally point to a real thing that happened as proof
Speaker 2: that Barack Obama was about to institute martial law. Federal
Speaker 2: troops really were setting up checkpoints. It happened. It's not
Speaker 2: a drill. For someone like Walter Fitzpatrick. This was all
Speaker 2: the evidence he needed to have the President hanged for treason.
Speaker 2: And that gets us back to where we started this
Speaker 2: long journey, back to the beginning of the story. Walter
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick accused the president of treason in March two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine. He took his complaint down to the courthouse
Speaker 2: and he got it noted. He applied to present it
Speaker 2: to a Monroe County grand jury, and they chose not
Speaker 2: to indict the president, probably mostly because even if there
Speaker 2: was probable cause here, which there wasn't. The Monroe County,
Speaker 2: Tennessee Circuit Court does not have jurisdiction in a case
Speaker 2: involving the President of the United States committing treason, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but that's not how Fitzpatrick saw it. In his mind,
Speaker 2: this could only mean that there is corruption afoot. Again
Speaker 2: and again, Walter Fitzpatrick made the trip to the county courthouse.
Speaker 2: He harassed the court clerk. He tried forcing his way
Speaker 2: into the grand jury proceedings to make his presentation again,
Speaker 2: and they did hear him out once more. They allowed
Speaker 2: him to present the grand jury. In December of two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine. That grand jury again declined to indict
Speaker 2: President Barack Obama for treason, and at this point they
Speaker 2: were done humoring him. Hearing this evidence again wasn't going
Speaker 2: to change anything. He was on several occasions refused entrance
Speaker 2: into the courtroom while the grand jury was hearing real cases.
Speaker 2: And just like those years, he spent getting angrier and
Speaker 2: angrier at his congressman's office staff. These people were as
Speaker 2: helpful as they were required to be. They were doing
Speaker 2: their jobs, but there wasn't really anything they could do
Speaker 2: that would satisfy him because his requests weren't reasonable. They
Speaker 2: couldn't give him what he wanted, But in his mind
Speaker 2: this inability to assist him could only mean that they
Speaker 2: were active fighting against him, and so they too became
Speaker 2: subjects of his investigations. They were all guilty now of
Speaker 2: obstruction of justice, and they too must be arrested. In
Speaker 2: March of twenty ten, a year after he first charged
Speaker 2: the President with treason, Walter Fitzpatrick sent a letter to
Speaker 2: the police chief in Madisonville, Tennessee. If no one else
Speaker 2: was interested in justice, he was just going to have
Speaker 2: to do it himself.
Speaker 3: Chief Breeden, please accept this notice of the necessity, authority,
Speaker 3: and intent to conduct a series of imminent citizens arrests
Speaker 3: throughout Monroe County, Tennessee. The first arrest plan must be
Speaker 3: constructed and crafted in cooperation with the Madisonville Police Department.
Speaker 3: Wisdom dictates the first arrest plan be one that is
Speaker 3: acceptable to your police chief colleagues throughout Monroe County. An
Speaker 3: arrest plan that can be used again and again time
Speaker 3: is not a friend. Planning must begin immediately. Contact information
Speaker 3: is provided separately. Fair Wins following sees Walter Francis Fitzpatrick third.
Speaker 2: Notice that he's not asking for permission and he's not
Speaker 2: making a threat. He's letting him know he feels like
Speaker 2: he and the police chief have the same level of
Speaker 2: authority here. They're both absolutely empowered to make these kinds
Speaker 2: of arrests, and he just thinks it would be best
Speaker 2: if they collaborated on this plan. He's not threatening to
Speaker 2: break the law, because he doesn't think he is. He's
Speaker 2: inviting the police chief to participate in what he believes
Speaker 2: is a perfectly rational and legal course of action. It's
Speaker 2: not clear if the police chief wrote him back. I'm
Speaker 2: sure they had some conversations about this plan that didn't
Speaker 2: go how Fitzpatrick had hoped, but there was no talking
Speaker 2: him out of it. He was going to arrest the
Speaker 2: people who were staying ending in his way, with or
Speaker 2: without their help, and on April first, twenty ten, he
Speaker 2: tried it. Lad the room, tired arguing with official pressures.
Speaker 4: Play lead the room.
Speaker 5: You were under ARRESTA placing you under arrest, mister Petway,
Speaker 5: you are.
Speaker 6: Under citizens or whatever around around, I'm placing you under
Speaker 6: I asked you to be her room less.
Speaker 7: Now I ask you the room US coort this Gilman
Speaker 7: out of the room.
Speaker 8: Mister Petway is under citizens.
Speaker 2: Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached Grand jury Foreman
Speaker 2: Gary Petway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying
Speaker 2: to indict. And Petway doesn't look excited to see Fitzpatrick,
Speaker 2: but he looks more exasperated than anything else. He doesn't
Speaker 2: look afraid of the old man lurching towards him, saying
Speaker 2: over and over again, I'm placing you under arrest. Pet
Speaker 2: Way is just sort of backing away from him and
Speaker 2: repeating please leave, please leave the room, and pointing towards
Speaker 2: the door. And the video we have of this incident
Speaker 2: is not police bodycam footage, but you'd be forgiven for
Speaker 2: assuming that's where it came from. It was recorded on
Speaker 2: someone's cell phone, a Motorola droid to be precise. If
Speaker 2: you remember those by Carl Swenson, the sovereign citizen who
Speaker 2: had been agitating for people all over the country to
Speaker 2: take this kind of action in their local courts ever
Speaker 2: since Judge Lamberth denied his petition in federal court the
Speaker 2: year before.
Speaker 9: He did this for us.
Speaker 10: What do you intend to do for him and for
Speaker 10: this country if we don't come to his assistance, if
Speaker 10: we don't get to the courthouse If we don't call him,
Speaker 10: if we don't walk and march on that courthouse and
Speaker 10: that Sheriff's department, we don't deserve the freedoms we have.
Speaker 9: I must do. I plan on marching on that courthouse.
Speaker 2: Carl Swinson was one of several supporters who showed up
Speaker 2: at the courthouse with Fitzpatrick that day. Swenson recorded the
Speaker 2: incident and posted it online, exhorting his followers to show
Speaker 2: up at the next hearing. The website he was running
Speaker 2: at the time, rise Upfoamerica dot com is gone now.
Speaker 2: That url does still go to a real website, but
Speaker 2: it belongs to some kind of construction consortium now, and
Speaker 2: the homepage is a six year old blog post about
Speaker 2: the pros and cons of different kinds of carpet tiles.
Speaker 2: One of the other supporters who witnessed Fitzpatrick's arrest that
Speaker 2: day was a man named Darren Huff. Like Swenson, Huff
Speaker 2: had made the drive to Madisonville from his home in Georgia.
Speaker 2: He was a member of the Oath Keepers and was
Speaker 2: also the chaplain of a separate militia group that was
Speaker 2: just called the Georgia Militia. When Fitzpatrick was granted bond.
Speaker 2: A few days after his arrest, Darren Huff made the
Speaker 2: drive back up to Tennessee to meet with him. They
Speaker 2: weren't going to suffer this indignity in silence. They made
Speaker 2: a plan, and two weeks later, when Fitzpatrick was due
Speaker 2: back in court, Darren Huff was outside the courthouse with
Speaker 2: a crowd of supporters, prepared to take over the whole
Speaker 2: damn town by force if they had to. And Darren
Speaker 2: Huff was the weird little guy I had in mind
Speaker 2: when I sat down to start this week's episode. I
Speaker 2: was thinking about guys who did something weird because they
Speaker 2: were mad about an election, and I had a vague
Speaker 2: recollection of some research I did on the oath Keepers
Speaker 2: back in twenty nineteen when Oathkeeper's founder Stuart Rhodes was
Speaker 2: front row center, right behind the podium at a Trump
Speaker 2: campaign rally, and I did a little more digging around
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty, when the Oathkeepers were starting to make
Speaker 2: no about what would eventually become the January sixth insurrection.
Speaker 2: I'd collected a few odds and ends about Oathkeepers who
Speaker 2: got arrested for a variety of crimes over the years
Speaker 2: trying to convince people that this could be a serious problem.
Speaker 2: And there are plenty of strange little stories in there,
Speaker 2: like an oathkeeper in Ohio who was being investigated for
Speaker 2: mortgage fraud back in twenty ten and the investigators completely
Speaker 2: accidentally discovered that he was making napalm in his garage,
Speaker 2: Or how Oathkeepers leaders Stuart Rhodes advised members to take
Speaker 2: it upon themselves to prevent voter fraud in the twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen election in a plan that definitely was not meant
Speaker 2: to function as voter intimidation. And there's the story of
Speaker 2: that car load of Oathkeepers who were arrested in Florida
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen. They were charged with violating the curfew
Speaker 2: order put in place during the state of emergency after
Speaker 2: Hurricane Mit. The militia members were driving around dressed as
Speaker 2: police officers, cruising around town in the dark with a
Speaker 2: car full of rifles, dressed as cops patrolling for looters.
Speaker 2: And obviously there's the entire saga of the Oathkeeper's role
Speaker 2: in January sixth, But like I said, right now, I'm
Speaker 2: tired of that story. But then I remembered Darren Huff
Speaker 2: and his plans to citizens arrest a whole county courthouse
Speaker 2: because he didn't think Barack Obama was the real president.
Speaker 2: It was sort of a micro January sixth an hour
Speaker 2: south of Knoxville, but eleven years too soon. At this
Speaker 2: point in the run of this show, I think I
Speaker 2: have to stop apologizing for writing so much preamble that
Speaker 2: the actual story I'm getting to is in part two.
Speaker 2: I should just admit to myself that I'm doing that
Speaker 2: on purpose. Sure, I could launch right into a story
Speaker 2: about Darren showing up at the courthouse with a gun.
Speaker 2: That would still be an interesting weird little guy. But
Speaker 2: Darren and his gun outside of a courthouse three hours
Speaker 2: away from his home across state lines, trying to arrest
Speaker 2: a grand jury foreman in a small town that he
Speaker 2: has no connection to, just doesn't make any sense, does it.
Speaker 2: Trying to explain that a retired Navy vette was convinced
Speaker 2: his county court could arrest the president sounds like a
Speaker 2: silly little joke without the context that this was a
Speaker 2: nationwide movement motivated by a racist conspiracy theory. These aren't
Speaker 2: just stories about one weird little guy at a time.
Speaker 2: It's a whole network None of this happens in a vacuum,
Speaker 2: which is why the same stories keep playing out with
Speaker 2: different characters, and the same characters keep showing up in
Speaker 2: each other's stories. An oathkeeper tried to arrest the president
Speaker 2: in two thousand. The oath keepers tried to overturn the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty election. The woman whose blog chronicled Walter Fitzpatrick's
Speaker 2: efforts fueling the conspiracy and driving more supporters to show
Speaker 2: up in Madisonville tried to obtain government records in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two related to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's families, immigration, and naturalization,
Speaker 2: and the same woman was a central figure in the
Speaker 2: brief frenzy of birther conspiracies about Kamala Harris in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. When Jared Taylor, America's leading purveyor of pseudo
Speaker 2: academic eugenicist polemics, had to go to court in twenty
Speaker 2: eighteen over a permit for his annual race science conference,
Speaker 2: he sought help from Birther lawyer Van Erian, the same
Speaker 2: lawyer who worked on Karl Swenson's lawsuits to keep Barack
Speaker 2: Obama off the ballot in twenty twelve, cutting straight to
Speaker 2: the chase and getting to Darren's story wouldn't just be
Speaker 2: miss the forest for the trees, it would be ignoring
Speaker 2: a whole thriving white supremacist ecosystem, because when you turn
Speaker 2: over a big rock, there's more than one weird bug
Speaker 2: under there. And to be honest, I really just wanted
Speaker 2: to have plenty of room to explore Darren Huff's fascinating
Speaker 2: legal strategy because not to spoil it, but he does
Speaker 2: end up in federal prison for a little bit. It's
Speaker 2: such a rare treat to have so much incredible source material,
Speaker 2: and I really don't want to have to cut the
Speaker 2: audio of a man who got pulled over on his
Speaker 2: way to commit a federal crime and used that opportunity
Speaker 2: to try to recruit a state trooper into his militia.
Speaker 2: So until next week, don't be rude to your court clerk,
Speaker 2: and please, for the love of God, do not put
Speaker 2: gatorade in your eyes. When we left off last week,
Speaker 2: Walter Francis Fitzpatrick had been taken into custody outside the
Speaker 2: Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee, on April first, twenty ten.
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick barged into a closed grand jury proceeding and attempted
Speaker 2: to place Monroe County grand Jury Foreman Gary Petway under
Speaker 2: citizen's arrest. Fitzpatrick had written up his own arrest warrant,
Speaker 2: charging Petway with obstruction of justice for his refusal to
Speaker 2: issue an indictment against Barack Obama for treason. Walter Fitzpatrick
Speaker 2: did not have the authority to draw up his own
Speaker 2: arrest warrants any more than a county court in hour
Speaker 2: south of Knoxville had the authority to indict the president
Speaker 2: on a federal crime. But none of that really mattered
Speaker 2: to the small crowd of supporters outside, who were sure
Speaker 2: that they were closer than ever to arresting the president.
Speaker 2: Darren Huff, an oathkeeper from Georgia, was among those supporters.
Speaker 2: He was standing by with his video camera, hoping to
Speaker 2: capture Fitzpatrick's victory against the corrupt county grand jury.
Speaker 8: You have been notified, You've been told mister Petway has
Speaker 8: just been placed under citizen's arrest.
Speaker 5: My name is Walter Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 8: I have just placed mister Petway under citizen's arrest.
Speaker 2: But when the doors opened again, it was not Gary
Speaker 2: Petway who was being escorted out by the Sheriff's deputies.
Speaker 2: It was Walter Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 11: They're leaving or why?
Speaker 5: Because you just interrupted a court proceeding. The rest of
Speaker 5: us would get arrested for that. However, all of you
Speaker 5: think you're special. So now we're leaving the courthouse, and
Speaker 5: then why then you free to go? Otherwise you're gonna
Speaker 5: get arrested to afraid to come.
Speaker 2: Back in, No, sir, and he could have just left,
Speaker 2: As the deputy points out, he's kind of being treated
Speaker 2: with kid gloves here. He's already broken the law, but
Speaker 2: nobody really wants to deal with this old crank and
Speaker 2: his fan club. But instead of leaving, Fitzpatrick pivoted. Now
Speaker 2: he's placing the sheriff himself under arrest. In the audio recording,
Speaker 2: you can hear the deputy sigh dramatically as Fitzpatrick begins
Speaker 2: reading the officers their rights and they realize that the
Speaker 2: only way Fitzpatrick is leaving the building is in handcuffs.
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick was charged with interfering with a grand jury, resisting arrest,
Speaker 2: and inciting a riot. He was held in the county
Speaker 2: jail over the weekend, during which time he reportedly refused
Speaker 2: to eat or drink, and was offered a fifteen hundred
Speaker 2: dollars bond on the condition that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Speaker 2: On April seventh, twenty ten, the day after Fitzpatrick was released,
Speaker 2: Darren Huff made the drive from his home in Georgia
Speaker 2: back up to Madisonville. In a text message Huff sent
Speaker 2: a friend on his way home that night, he said
Speaker 2: he'd spent the day meeting with Fitzpatrick going over the plan.
Speaker 2: They were coordinating with multiple groups to show up for
Speaker 2: what Huff called Phase two. When Walter Fitzpatrick appeared for
Speaker 2: his court date on April twentieth, he wasn't going to
Speaker 2: be alone.
Speaker 1: I'm Molly Conger. This is where the guys.
Speaker 2: This episode is about Darren Huff. I mean, the last
Speaker 2: episode was supposed to be about Darren Huff. That was
Speaker 2: the story I sat down to write in the first place.
Speaker 2: But my vague recollection of the story of some oathkeeper
Speaker 2: with a hair brain scheme to citizens' arrest and entire
Speaker 2: county court turned up something a little more complicated that
Speaker 2: keeps happening. It turns out history is always a little messy.
Speaker 2: No one is really the sole protagonist in their own story.
Speaker 2: Life doesn't really work that way. But if you listened
Speaker 2: to last week's episode, now you have some contexts for
Speaker 2: the baffling confidence Walter Fitzpatrick and Aaron Huff seemed to
Speaker 2: have in their plan. They'd both been completely swept up
Speaker 2: in this nationwide right wing mania of Birtherism, the conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory that Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as the
Speaker 2: president of the United States because he had been born
Speaker 2: in Kenya. Walter Fitzpatrick as bizarre and disconnected from reality
Speaker 2: as his ideas sound. Was far from the only American
Speaker 2: who was barging into a court clerk's office every week
Speaker 2: to demand something be done about the president's acts of treason.
Speaker 2: It was everywhere. Everyone from Chuck Norris to Donald Trump
Speaker 2: was asking is Barack Obama a natural born citizen of
Speaker 2: the United States. Politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and
Speaker 2: Newt Gingrich flirted with the idea, walking right up to
Speaker 2: the line and then claiming they'd misspoken or been misunderstood.
Speaker 2: Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann said she would proudly produce her
Speaker 2: own birth certificate. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby denied that he'd
Speaker 2: told a newspaper that he'd like to see Barack Obama's
Speaker 2: birth certificate. Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt said he'd been taken
Speaker 2: out of context after telling a reporter that there was
Speaker 2: no legitimate reason for the president not to produce his
Speaker 2: birth certificate. This wasn't something that existed only at the
Speaker 2: lunatic fringe of political discourse. Mainstream politicians and celebrities were
Speaker 2: just asking questions, never mind the kinds of things their
Speaker 2: supporters might do to try to get answers. So, after
Speaker 2: an entire year of unsuccessfully petitioning his local county grand
Speaker 2: jury to bring charges against Barack Obama, Walter Fitzpatrick was frustrated,
Speaker 2: and when he barged into that courtroom on April first,
Speaker 2: twenty ten, both Keeper Darren Huff and sovereign Citizen Carl
Speaker 2: Swinson were among those waiting just outside. And after the
Speaker 2: tables were turned that day, with this citizen's arrest turning
Speaker 2: into just a citizen getting arrested, Darren Hoffen Carl Swinson
Speaker 2: vowed to return not just to support their friend at
Speaker 2: his next court date, but to carry out a bigger, better,
Speaker 2: version of the plan.
Speaker 9: You who have been on the fence must get off
Speaker 9: of that fence. Please go to the courthouse en mass
Speaker 9: demand justice. He is honoring his oath.
Speaker 12: To all of you out there who have taken that oath,
Speaker 12: I ask you right now to honor yours. Get down there,
Speaker 12: get him out of jail, and make sure that justice
Speaker 12: is served.
Speaker 9: My name is CARLS. Winston.
Speaker 2: The call was put out. If you believe in the cause,
Speaker 2: if you believe in the constitution, you must stand with
Speaker 2: Walter Fitzpatrick against the Monroe County courts. He was scheduled
Speaker 2: to appear on April twentieth, and true patriots had an
Speaker 2: obligation to be there. Between Fitzpatrick's release on the sixth
Speaker 2: and his court date on the twentieth, they had just
Speaker 2: two weeks to prepare, according to the court records. Darren
Speaker 2: Huff appeared in several videos about the events in Madisonville
Speaker 2: that were posted on Carl Swinson's website Rise Upfroamerica dot com.
Speaker 2: Archived pages of that site do still exist, and I
Speaker 2: can read the text on those pages, but the videos
Speaker 2: were all embedded with flash player, so Darren's calls to
Speaker 2: action maybe lost to the sands of time. But we
Speaker 2: have some pretty solid sources that can give us an
Speaker 2: idea of what was on Darren's mind during those two weeks,
Speaker 2: because Darren Huff has never, once in his life shut
Speaker 2: his goddamn mouth. On April fifteenth, Darren Huff stopped at
Speaker 2: the Chase Bank in Hiram, Georgia. He ran a small
Speaker 2: business doing outdoor lighting, so he stopped by often to
Speaker 2: deposit checks. According to Erica, the bank teller who testified
Speaker 2: at his trial, most of the employees at the branch
Speaker 2: knew him well enough to make friendly conversation, but if
Speaker 2: she was working, he would wait in her line even
Speaker 2: if another teller was free. But that evening he wasn't
Speaker 2: making his usual jokes. He was deadly serious. Erica testified
Speaker 2: that Huff just launched right into telling her about Walter
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick and his upcoming trial in Madisonville, Tennessee, a situation
Speaker 2: she had no context for. She'd never heard of Walter Fitzpatrick,
Speaker 2: and she'd never been to Madisonville, Tennessee. She was the
Speaker 2: only teller at the counter, the bank was about to
Speaker 2: close for the night, and suddenly this normally friendly customer
Speaker 2: is leaning over the counter, telling her that he was
Speaker 2: going to be spending this weekend mounting an anti aircraft
Speaker 2: gun to the back of his pickup truck because he
Speaker 2: and his militia were going to take over a small
Speaker 2: town in Tennessee on Tuesday. A conversation got so intense
Speaker 2: that another employee went to go get the manager, Shane.
Speaker 2: In his testimony at trial, Shane too said that Huff
Speaker 2: was a regular customer at the bank, and over the
Speaker 2: years he'd gotten to know him a bit. Sometime in
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine, Huff got really political, and when
Speaker 2: he made small talk with the bank tellers, it was
Speaker 2: usually about his anti government beliefs and various conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: So when another employee came to get him that night
Speaker 2: because Huff was making Erica uncomfortable, he probably wasn't surprised.
Speaker 2: He tried guiding the conversation back to safer territory, asking
Speaker 2: Huff if he'd be taking his video camera with him
Speaker 2: again on this trip, but the response was an alarming one.
Speaker 2: Huff told it would be kind of hard to hold
Speaker 2: the camera because he planned to be quote on the
Speaker 2: front line with two Ak forty sevens. He told the
Speaker 2: bank employees that they'd probably see him on the news
Speaker 2: next week, and as he was leaving, he told Erica,
Speaker 2: it was nice knowing you. If I never see you again.
Speaker 2: Not to get ahead of myself, but I do want
Speaker 2: to jump ahead here and say. Darren Huff would later
Speaker 2: accuse those two bank employees of lying under oath. Obviously,
Speaker 2: there's no proving what was or wasn't said at the
Speaker 2: bank that evening, But within hours of that interaction, Erica
Speaker 2: was on the phone with Madisonville, Tennessee, Police Chief Greg Breeden,
Speaker 2: and he recorded that phone call, so we have a
Speaker 2: fairly contemporaneous recollection of what was said. She related to
Speaker 2: Chief Breden that Huff told her that he was intending
Speaker 2: to travel to Madisonville, Tennessee, on April twenty for Walter
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick's court hearing, that he would be armed with AK
Speaker 2: forty seven's and an anti aircraft gun, that he would
Speaker 2: be with other militia members, and that the group intended
Speaker 2: to carry out citizens arrests of various local officials and
Speaker 2: seize control of the courthouse. And Darren Huff was found
Speaker 2: to be in possession of printed copies of those citizens
Speaker 2: arrest warrants, and he would later admit under oath that
Speaker 2: at that time he was in possession of an anti
Speaker 2: aircraft gun and a pedestal mount that could be installed
Speaker 2: in the bed of his truck. She would have had
Speaker 2: no way of knowing any of that at the time
Speaker 2: if he hadn't told her himself, and she's on tape
Speaker 2: reporting it to the police long before she could have
Speaker 2: read anything in the news or been coached by an
Speaker 2: FBI agent to say these things. Both Shane and Erica
Speaker 2: were understandably deeply unsettled by that interaction. Imediately after leaving
Speaker 2: work that evening, Erica called a friend who worked in
Speaker 2: local government, who helped her find the phone number for
Speaker 2: the Madisonville, Tennessee Police Department. Jane's wife urged him to
Speaker 2: call their own sheriff in Paulding County, Georgia, and by
Speaker 2: the end of the night, both bank employees had shared
Speaker 2: their concerns with the police, and by Monday they'd met
Speaker 2: with FBI agents. And it was on Monday, April nineteenth,
Speaker 2: the day before the planned occupation of Madisonville, Tennessee, that
Speaker 2: an FBI agent knocked on Darren Huff's front door Supervisory
Speaker 2: Special Agent Charles Reed, accompanied by a couple of deputies
Speaker 2: from the Paulding County Sheriff's Office, just wanted to have
Speaker 2: a word with him. Then Darren Huff voluntarily stepped out
Speaker 2: onto his front porch and he chatted with the agent
Speaker 2: for about as long as it took him to finish
Speaker 2: a cigarette. It was a brief conversation. Agent Reid recalls
Speaker 2: that Huff was pretty open about his plan to drive
Speaker 2: to Tennessee in the morning. He said he'd have his
Speaker 2: CULT forty five on his hip and his AK forty
Speaker 2: seven was in the truck. He freely volunteered to the
Speaker 2: agent that he was a member of both the Oath
Speaker 2: Keepers and the Georgia Militia. He said that the plan
Speaker 2: was to execute citizens, arrest warrants, and quote take back Madisonville,
Speaker 2: but that the group would not resort to violence unless
Speaker 2: they were provoked. When Darren Huff took the stand at
Speaker 2: his own trial, he recalled telling agent read that evening
Speaker 2: that he'd love it if the FBI would be there
Speaker 2: in Madisonville again. Remember last week that letter that Walter
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick sent the police chief of Madisonville before all of
Speaker 2: this got started. He wasn't making threats. He was inviting
Speaker 2: the police to be part of his plan. And that's
Speaker 2: the same mindset Darren has here. He even gave the
Speaker 2: FBI agent his business card. I had to double check
Speaker 2: here because Darren's business cards do come up again later,
Speaker 2: but it sounds like the business card he gave Agent
Speaker 2: Reed the night before the big day was just a
Speaker 2: normal business card, a real one for his outdoor lighting business.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until after he was arrested that he got
Speaker 2: new business cards printed that said Darren Huff, right wing
Speaker 2: extremist and potential domestic terrorist. But when he finished his cigarette,
Speaker 2: the conversation was over. Agent Reid had no reason to
Speaker 2: arrest him. Huff had expressed to him a plan to
Speaker 2: commit a federal crime, the one he would eventually be
Speaker 2: arrested for, but he hadn't actually done it yet. There
Speaker 2: was no federal crime here until Darren Huff put his
Speaker 2: guns in the truck and drove across the state line
Speaker 2: from Georgia into Tennessee with the intent to engage in
Speaker 2: a little civil disorder. So Agent Reid left, but another
Speaker 2: agent stayed nearby all night, watching and waiting for the truck.
Speaker 2: To pull out of the driveway. Darren Huff was under
Speaker 2: FBI surveillance when he hit the road just before dawn
Speaker 2: on April twentieth, twenty ten. At six fifteen am, he
Speaker 2: was observed crossing the state line, and just after seven am,
Speaker 2: Tennessee State Trooper Michael Wilson followed Huff's truck as he
Speaker 2: took Exit sixty off I seventy five towards Madisonville. Whether
Speaker 2: or not Huff rolled through the stop sign at the
Speaker 2: bottom of the exit ramp is a matter of some debate,
Speaker 2: but Trooper Wilson flashed his blue lights and pulled him over.
Speaker 2: This traffic stop ends up being central to Huff's case
Speaker 2: on appeal, but it isn't where he got arrested. He
Speaker 2: actually didn't even get a ticket, but Trooper Wilson and
Speaker 2: Darren Huff spent over an hour together there on the
Speaker 2: shoulder of Tennessee Highway sixty eight. When Huff was asked
Speaker 2: to step out of the vehicle, he had his CULT
Speaker 2: forty five on his hip. The officer unholstered the weapon,
Speaker 2: removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and put the weapon
Speaker 2: in his patrol car for safe keeping. Darren Huff produced
Speaker 2: a valid Georgia driver's license, but he didn't have his
Speaker 2: truck's registration on him. He assured the officer that the
Speaker 2: gun was legal and handed him a piece of paper
Speaker 2: that he said was a gun carry permit. In his testimony,
Speaker 2: the trooper said the document looked quote, very unprofessional, and
Speaker 2: he was concerned it might not be real. He spent
Speaker 2: an hour going back and forth with Dispatch about this
Speaker 2: strange document and was never able to verify whether Huff
Speaker 2: actually had a valid carry permit for that gun. And
Speaker 2: during that while they were trying to sort it out,
Speaker 2: Darren Huff talked. He talked a lot, He ran his
Speaker 2: mouth the entire time, and the entire conversation was recorded
Speaker 2: on the officer's dash cam, which was connected to a
Speaker 2: microphone on his uniform. And in their conversation, Darren explained
Speaker 2: his whole plan. They had arrest warrants for the grand
Speaker 2: jury foreman, the district attorney, the sheriff, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, etc.
Speaker 2: He recommended some YouTube videos the officers should watch to
Speaker 2: learn more about Barack Obama's crimes, and he told them
Speaker 2: they needed to be reading Walter Fitzpatrick's blog In the
Speaker 2: portions of this audio that I could find, the officers
Speaker 2: seemed to be playing along. They're mostly just letting him
Speaker 2: talk without interruption, but occasionally they asked some questions about
Speaker 2: how exactly the plan is going to work, and Darren's
Speaker 2: happy to explain because he's actually going to need their help.
Speaker 13: And then at that point they would be placed in
Speaker 13: the custody and you know, turn this man over you.
Speaker 13: I don't have handcuffs, you know, somebody we would need
Speaker 13: somebody like you guys there, And I can't tell you
Speaker 13: how much I appreciate you guys listening.
Speaker 2: Again, this is exactly like Fitzpatrick's letter to the police chief.
Speaker 2: He's telling the cops what they plan to do and
Speaker 2: trying to get them to be a part of it.
Speaker 2: The audio is a little fuzzy because they're standing on
Speaker 2: the side of the highway in the rain, but he
Speaker 2: wants the officers to agree to receive these prisoners once
Speaker 2: they've been citizens arrested. But that wasn't all. He was
Speaker 2: worried about a lot more than just the corrupt government
Speaker 2: in Monroe County, Tennessee. He shared his concerns about the
Speaker 2: Affordable Care Act, which had just been signed into law
Speaker 2: a few weeks earlier. Of course, he was upset that
Speaker 2: this was communism, obviously, but more importantly, he was very
Speaker 2: worried because this law requires that all Americans be implanted
Speaker 2: with the mark of the Beast, as foretold in Revelations.
Speaker 13: Luke ten eighteen, Jesus says, and I beheld Satan as
Speaker 13: lightning fall from heaven. The Greek translation for lightning is barack.
Speaker 13: Now Jesus didn't speak Greek. He spoke Hebrews, so you
Speaker 13: can look it up into Hebrew. It's still barack and
Speaker 13: from heaven transplaced from Hebrew. Who or oh bomba?
Speaker 8: So Jesus said, out of his own list, I saw
Speaker 8: Satan as bomba.
Speaker 2: He went on to explain that he was opposed to
Speaker 2: the war in the Middle East, though he notes that
Speaker 2: he does think quote Muslims suck end quote, but also
Speaker 2: nine to eleven was an inside job. He tells the
Speaker 2: officers that they, who are all white men, are God's
Speaker 2: true chose people, that Caucasians are the real Israelites, and
Speaker 2: biblical prophecy foretold the re establishment of Israel in seventeen
Speaker 2: seventy six. Remember last week when we touched briefly on
Speaker 2: Christian identity. That's what this is. Darren Huff is a
Speaker 2: self proclaimed pastor in the Christian Identity movement. He's standing
Speaker 2: there on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops,
Speaker 2: reaching Christian identity and trying to recruit them to the Oathkeepers.
Speaker 2: It remains very unclear to me why the trooper gave
Speaker 2: Huff his gun back, but he did. At eight thirteen am.
Speaker 2: He handed Darren Huff a written warning, returned his CULT
Speaker 2: forty five, and told him he was free to go.
Speaker 2: The men shook hands, and Huff thanked the officer and
Speaker 2: he took a few steps back toward his truck before
Speaker 2: he stopped, turned around and said, let me pre warn you.
Speaker 2: If enough of us show up today, we are going
Speaker 2: to proceed forward in this citizen's arrest. That's why I
Speaker 2: have my forty five. Ain't no government official going peacefully.
Speaker 2: And then he slid his COLT forty five back into
Speaker 2: his holster, climbed into his pickup truck that said oath
Speaker 2: Keepers all down one side, and drove the last few
Speaker 2: miles into Madisonville, Tennessee. At five o'clock that morning, more
Speaker 2: than fifty police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around
Speaker 2: Monroe County, Tennessee, gathered for a briefing. There were FBI
Speaker 2: agents from the Joint Terraces and Task Force, and at
Speaker 2: least one representative from the Department of Homeland Security. They'd
Speaker 2: been monitoring the online chatter about Walter Fitzpatrick's hearing at
Speaker 2: the courthouse at nine am, and they were worried. The
Speaker 2: intelligence they had was that as many as six hundred
Speaker 2: people might be on their way to Madisonville, Tennessee. They
Speaker 2: had undercovers stationed in nearby businesses and snipers on rooftops.
Speaker 2: One of those undercover officers was Mike Hall, the director
Speaker 2: of a regional violent crime task Force in Tennessee. In
Speaker 2: plain clothes, he got a table at Donna's in Cafe,
Speaker 2: a block from City Hall, where Fitzpatrick's supporters would be
Speaker 2: meeting for breakfast. And maybe the police should have known
Speaker 2: that they probably weren't expecting six hundred armed militiamen if
Speaker 2: they knew that they had booked tables at Donna's Cafe.
Speaker 2: But that's neither here nor there, and by the time
Speaker 2: breakfast was over, barely twenty supporters were packed into the
Speaker 2: dining room, finishing their biscuits and coffee as Darren Huff
Speaker 2: gave a rousing speech about taking his AK forty seven
Speaker 2: down to the courthouse. Carl Swinson's dead website isn't exactly
Speaker 2: easy to navigate, so maybe the whole speech was there
Speaker 2: at some point, but I was only able to dig
Speaker 2: up an audio file of the first six minutes or so,
Speaker 2: and it's pretty inspiring stuff.
Speaker 8: So as a Christians, as lieutenant commander said, I'm Chaplin
Speaker 8: for the Georgia Militia, so I look at things a
Speaker 8: little bit differently, and I look at them basically, and
Speaker 8: I told these guys, and I tell everybody, I'm not
Speaker 8: a very smart guy. In fact, the only thing that
Speaker 8: I know about the Constitution are the first few amendments.
Speaker 8: Those leave me the hell alone ones.
Speaker 9: That's what I know.
Speaker 8: And I know them well enough to say you're wrong.
Speaker 13: You can't do this.
Speaker 2: Over the sound of clinking forks on plates, the Christian
Speaker 2: Identity Militia, Chaplin explained that they are preparing for spiritual war,
Speaker 2: that we are already in the end times, as we're
Speaker 2: told in revelations. See the founding of the United States
Speaker 2: was biblical prophecy God knew that in seventeen seventy six
Speaker 2: the thirteen Tribes of Israel would be called back together
Speaker 2: as the thirteen Colonies. Yes, at thirteen, I know it's twelve,
Speaker 2: twelve tribes of Israel. You know it's twelve. But Darren
Speaker 2: is counting Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manassa separately. That's why
Speaker 2: he thinks it's thirteen. And I know that because he
Speaker 2: mentions Joseph's sons specifically, because otherwise I might have assumed
Speaker 2: he was talking about something different. We don't need to
Speaker 2: get into the specifics here. But adherents of Christian identity
Speaker 2: believe that they are the real Israelites, so they have
Speaker 2: to explain the existence of actual Jews some other way,
Speaker 2: and that usually boils down to a theory that Ashkenazi
Speaker 2: Jews are actually descended from a Turkic race called the Kasars.
Speaker 2: Christian identity guys really love this book from the seventies
Speaker 2: called The Thirteenth Tribe, which makes the case for this theory. Honestly,
Speaker 2: please don't make me explain the Kasar hypothesis every time
Speaker 2: I see a guy posting about Kasars. I'm just not
Speaker 2: having a good time. But what Darren was saying might
Speaker 2: actually be weirder.
Speaker 6: Jacob went like this, he blessed them the way God
Speaker 6: intended him to bless them. That crossing of the arms
Speaker 6: is on that flag. That's where that cross comes from.
Speaker 6: It has nothing to do with rednecks. It has nothing
Speaker 6: to do with the Confederacy. It has everything to do
Speaker 6: with God's shows people.
Speaker 2: Now this was a new one for me. I've never
Speaker 2: heard this one before. What he's saying here is that
Speaker 2: the Confederate flag symbolizes Jacob's blessing of Joseph's sons. I
Speaker 2: don't know what the aid to be to see here is,
Speaker 2: but I guess the Confederacy was the thirteenth tribe of Israel. Honestly,
Speaker 2: I don't want to know. I don't want to know.
Speaker 2: That way lies madness. So after his big speech, Darren
Speaker 2: Huff steps outside. Mike Hall, our undercover officer, testified that
Speaker 2: he overheard Huff's conversation with a man that he doesn't name,
Speaker 2: but who, like Huff, was visibly armed, and Huff laments
Speaker 2: to this man that he wishes they had more people,
Speaker 2: saying quote, today would be a good day to do it.
Speaker 2: Because it's raining and the police wouldn't expect them to
Speaker 2: make a move in the rain. And Darren Hoff wasn't
Speaker 2: the only one who excused himself from the table after
Speaker 2: this speech. Carl Swinson, our sovereign citizen and the primary
Speaker 2: instigator of the online uproar calling people to Madisonville, got
Speaker 2: a phone call to make.
Speaker 4: All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here with my special
Speaker 4: guest with a ton of Colonel Terry Laken and his attorney,
Speaker 4: Paul Jensen. Colonel Laken is the Army officer who has
Speaker 4: challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama to act as commander
Speaker 4: in chief. Also with me is doctor Jerome Corsy and
Speaker 4: going to Tennessee.
Speaker 2: And Carl, Carl.
Speaker 4: You're on the air.
Speaker 2: That's right, It's Carl and Tennessee. And he was live
Speaker 2: on air with g Gordon Liddy and Jerome Corcy. I
Speaker 2: have to admit I spent the better part of an
Speaker 2: afternoon chasing down this fifteen year old episode of morning
Speaker 2: Talk radio, so I am going to tell you about it.
Speaker 2: On April twelfth, twenty ten, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry
Speaker 2: Laken did not report for duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Instead,
Speaker 2: he drove to the Pentagon in Washington, d C. Where
Speaker 2: he was read his rights by his commanding officer, Colonel
Speaker 2: Gordon Ray Roberts. Lincoln's unit deployed to Afghanistan that week
Speaker 2: without him. The eighteen year veteran wasn't afraid to return
Speaker 2: to Afghanistan. This deployment would have been the seventh of
Speaker 2: his career and his second to Afghanistan. In two thousand
Speaker 2: and four, he was the Army's Flight surgeon of the year.
Speaker 2: He'd been awarded a Meritorious Service Medal and a Bronze Star.
Speaker 2: He was on track to be promoted to full colonel
Speaker 2: within the next year. But he had come to realize
Speaker 2: that his deployment orders were unlawful, not on ideological grounds.
Speaker 2: He wasn't pro testing the war. He hadn't suddenly become
Speaker 2: a peace activist after seeing the horrors of war firsthand. No. No,
Speaker 2: the doctor was refusing to deploy unless he could see
Speaker 2: the president's birth certificate.
Speaker 7: I will disobey my orders to deploy it because I
Speaker 7: and I believe all servicemen and women and the American
Speaker 7: people deserve the truth about President Obama's constitutional eligibility to
Speaker 7: the office of the Presidency and the Commander in Chief.
Speaker 2: A week after disobeying his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Laken appeared
Speaker 2: as a guest on The G. Gordon Liddy Show. Decades
Speaker 2: after dabbling it being an FBI agent doing dirty tricks
Speaker 2: for Richard Dixon and spending a little time in prison
Speaker 2: for his role in the Watergate scandal, Lyddy really hit
Speaker 2: his stride as an extremely right wing talk radio host
Speaker 2: who regularly encouraged listeners to do things like shoot federal
Speaker 2: agents in the head. Robert Evans put out a taggering
Speaker 2: six part series of episodes on G. Gordon Liddy on
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards last year, So if you're interested in
Speaker 2: hearing some outrageously racist clips of Liddy's radio show, I
Speaker 2: believe those are in part six. But today we're just
Speaker 2: talking about one episode of The G. Gordon Liddy Show,
Speaker 2: the one that aired on April twentieth, twenty ten, because
Speaker 2: that's the episode Carl Swinson called into during the second hour.
Speaker 2: In the first hour of the show, Lyddy interviewed Colonel
Speaker 2: Laken and Lacln's attorney, a California personal injury lawyer named
Speaker 2: Paul Jensen. You might be wondering why an army officer
Speaker 2: facing a court martial would hire a civilian personal injury lawyer,
Speaker 2: And that's a great question. The answer is unclear. In
Speaker 2: my experience, conspiracy theorists and extremists tend to hire attorneys
Speaker 2: who share their beliefs rather than ones who have, say,
Speaker 2: relevant experience in a particular area of law. But in
Speaker 2: this case, it seems very worth mentioning that Paul Jensen
Speaker 2: was a longtime associate of friend to and occasional attorney
Speaker 2: for Roger Stone. In two thousand and seven, it was
Speaker 2: Paul Jensen, acting as Stone's attorney, who publicly released a
Speaker 2: copy of a letter the pair claimed they had sent
Speaker 2: to the FBI about Elliot Spitzer's alleged habit of wearing
Speaker 2: nothing but long black socks during his liaisons with sex workers.
Speaker 2: And Jensen represented Stone in twenty sixteen when he was
Speaker 2: sued over allegations that he'd been involved in a coordinated
Speaker 2: campaign of voter intimidation. It was Jensen who drafted the
Speaker 2: paperwork to incorporate Stop the Steel in twenty sixteen. So
Speaker 2: after this interview, G. Gordon Liddy opened the phones to
Speaker 2: hear from listeners on the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Speaker 2: Caller after caller thanked Colonel Laken for his courage and
Speaker 2: shared their own theories about how they could finally get
Speaker 2: to the truth of Barack Obama's birth, and then, after
Speaker 2: an advertisement for gold coins, another birther called into the show,
Speaker 2: but this one wasn't just sitting idly by while Barack
Speaker 2: Obama pretended to be the president.
Speaker 11: Lieutenant Colonel, I want to thank you for everything you're doing,
Speaker 11: and I want to give you some encouragement here. I'm
Speaker 11: in the city of Madisonville, Tennessee, right now in Monroe County,
Speaker 11: where they've had this area on lockdown with FBI, TDI,
Speaker 11: local police and troopers all because of Lieutenant Commander Walter
Speaker 11: Fitzpatrick and his attempts to affect arrest using a criminal
Speaker 11: complaint against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and in this case,
Speaker 11: the grand jury members here and the town of Madison senysuits.
Speaker 11: People are gathering now, but it is a tenuous situation
Speaker 11: at best.
Speaker 2: Carl closed the call by saying things were getting pretty
Speaker 2: heated out there in Tennessee and everything they were doing
Speaker 2: was quote indirect support of the message being pushed by
Speaker 2: Colonel Laken and Lyddy himself. G Gordon Lydy asked Carl
Speaker 2: to email the show's producer the video of Darren Huff's
Speaker 2: traffic stop so they could get that up on the
Speaker 2: website within the hour. The next caller, Julian Texas, was
Speaker 2: very worried about her sons. They were active duty soldiers
Speaker 2: deployed overseas. She wasn't worried about them being in the war.
Speaker 2: She was worried that because their deployment orders had been
Speaker 2: issued by a false president, that they could ultimately be
Speaker 2: liable for war crimes. I didn't listen to the rest
Speaker 2: of the episode. I don't know if they resolved that,
Speaker 2: but after darren rousing speech to the assembled supporters and
Speaker 2: Carl's bold statements on a national radio show, they both
Speaker 2: had to admit that nothing was going to happen that day.
Speaker 2: Their little crowd of twenty was outnumbered three to one
Speaker 2: by a very visible police presence, and according to Walter
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick's blog, a fair number of those supporters who turned
Speaker 2: up were middle aged women, one of whom brought several
Speaker 2: minor children with her. Darren had a truck full of
Speaker 2: guns and was bragging about how he had four hundred
Speaker 2: rounds for his AK forty seven, but they just didn't
Speaker 2: have the numbers to do anything that day. The only
Speaker 2: time anybody actually got close to the courthouse was when
Speaker 2: Darren Huff took a bag of biscuits over to a
Speaker 2: detective on the courthouse steps. By the time Fitzpatrick's hearing
Speaker 2: was over, Darren was bored, he was tired, and he's
Speaker 2: ready to go home. So everybody just left. Nothing happened,
Speaker 2: nobody got arrested. That night, Oathkeeper's founder Stuart Rhodes saw
Speaker 2: the video Carl Swinson posted online of Darren getting pulled
Speaker 2: over on his way to Madisonville. The truck says oath Keepers,
Speaker 2: all down one side and huge letters. You really can't
Speaker 2: miss it. It's the official logo of the Oathkeepers, and
Speaker 2: Rhodes called Swenson immediately and demanded he take the video down.
Speaker 2: It was embarrassing, and within days Rhodes himself showed up
Speaker 2: to speak with Darren Huff in person. He was furious.
Speaker 2: He demanded to know why Huff was so intent on
Speaker 2: making Madisonville the flash point. Now, Rhodes isn't the kind
Speaker 2: of guy who's actually concerned about there being a flash point.
Speaker 2: He wants one. That's the whole idea, right. Eventually the
Speaker 2: militia will come into some kind of conflict, But this
Speaker 2: wasn't the one he wanted because he thought Darren's ideas
Speaker 2: were foolish and embarrassing, and he revoked Darren's oathkeepers membership
Speaker 2: undeterred though Darren Huff returned to Tennessee a week later.
Speaker 2: He had a paper map of the state of Tennessee,
Speaker 2: and he'd circled the location of the sheriff's offices in
Speaker 2: every county within a two hour drive of Madisonville. It's
Speaker 2: not clear how many sheriffs he actually managed to speak with,
Speaker 2: but when he pulled into a parking lot at a
Speaker 2: county office building in Lenore City, Tennessee, he happened to
Speaker 2: come across Loudon County Sheriff Tim Geider and Cumberland County
Speaker 2: Sheriff Butch Burgess as they were getting out of their cars.
Speaker 2: They relate for a meeting, so this conversation was short.
Speaker 2: But Huff asked Sheriff Geiter if he'd be willing to
Speaker 2: arrest a fellow sheriff. At trial, Sheriff Geiter couldn't really
Speaker 2: remember much about this brief interaction, but he said he
Speaker 2: probably told this stranger in a parking lot that he'd
Speaker 2: need to know more about a situation like that in
Speaker 2: order to make a determination. But yes, hypothetically he did
Speaker 2: have the authority to arrest another sheriff. Darren Huff was
Speaker 2: trying to recruit law enforcement officers to assist with the plan.
Speaker 2: He wasn't giving up, but he was running off time.
Speaker 2: Fitzpatrick's next hearing was scheduled for May fourth, and he
Speaker 2: needed to find a sheriff who would be there to
Speaker 2: take his prisoners into custody. He must not have had
Speaker 2: much success on the twenty eighth, though, because two days later,
Speaker 2: on April thirtieth, he was back at it, driving around
Speaker 2: Tennessee looking for sheriffs who believed in the constitution. He
Speaker 2: was up near Knoxville when he got pulled over. This
Speaker 2: time around, there's no debate about whether or not he
Speaker 2: ran a stop sign. This wasn't a traffic stop. There
Speaker 2: is a federal warrant for his arrest. Darren Huff was
Speaker 2: charged with violating Title eighteen, Section two thirty one sub
Speaker 2: section A two, and that's interesting. You probably don't believe me,
Speaker 2: but hang on. A second. Section two thirty one is
Speaker 2: civil disorders, and it covers three separate crimes that don't
Speaker 2: really go together. A one makes it a crime to
Speaker 2: teach someone else how to make or use a gun
Speaker 2: or a bomb if you know or have reason to
Speaker 2: know that they'll use that information in furtherance of a
Speaker 2: civil disorder. A two, which was Darren's crime, makes it
Speaker 2: illegal to transport a firearm or a bomb across eight
Speaker 2: lines if you know or have reason to know that
Speaker 2: the gun or explosive device is going to be used
Speaker 2: in a civil disorder. And A three makes it illegal
Speaker 2: to be in a cops way during a civil disorder,
Speaker 2: So that one doesn't really belong right. The first two
Speaker 2: are about guns and bombs, and the third one is
Speaker 2: just about being annoying. But that's the one that's really
Speaker 2: gotten to work out in the last couple of years
Speaker 2: because it was used in hundreds of January sixth cases.
Speaker 2: But eighteen USC. Two thirty one A two is uncommon.
Speaker 2: I mean, people get charged for doing this kind of thing,
Speaker 2: but usually they get charged with conspiracy to do whatever
Speaker 2: it was. They were going to do when they got
Speaker 2: where they were going, and then maybe they'll tack on
Speaker 2: some kind of gun crime, and Subsection A one just
Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense at all. There's are a whole
Speaker 2: separate law that makes it a crime to distribute information
Speaker 2: about bomb making, and that one has a harsher penalty
Speaker 2: than this, So I don't know why we need this
Speaker 2: one at all. So I was confused by this choice
Speaker 2: of statute, and I couldn't think of any place I'd
Speaker 2: ever seen this statute before. And it turns out that's
Speaker 2: because I hadn't seen it before, and I still haven't
Speaker 2: even after looking pretty hard. When Darren Huff appealed his conviction,
Speaker 2: it was noted in the appellate record that this particular
Speaker 2: statute had actually never been construed by an appellate court before,
Speaker 2: so this was the first time a court of appeals
Speaker 2: was examining this statute. But just because people don't get
Speaker 2: charged with this very often doesn't make it any less
Speaker 2: of a real law. And it does pretty well describe
Speaker 2: what he did, because he didn't really do anything, did he?
Speaker 2: But they were really worried that he might, or at
Speaker 2: least they were worried that he would continue to create
Speaker 2: situations where someone else might because if you get enough
Speaker 2: anxious people with guns together enough times, eventually something is
Speaker 2: going to go wrong in a way that escalates pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: So some federal agent or prosecutor got creative and they
Speaker 2: found a crime because technically, yeah, he put guns in
Speaker 2: his truck and he drove to another state. And when
Speaker 2: he was doing it, the plan that he had in
Speaker 2: his mind was that he was going to have that
Speaker 2: gun around in case the county judge didn't appreciate him
Speaker 2: barging into her courtroom. So the intent is pretty clear.
Speaker 2: He told anyone within earshot for two weeks what he
Speaker 2: was going to do. He wanted to lead an armed
Speaker 2: mom on to the courthouse. He made videos about it,
Speaker 2: he told his bank teller, he told a bunch of
Speaker 2: state troopers, he gave a speech. And you don't actually
Speaker 2: have to end up carrying out the plan to be
Speaker 2: guilty of showing up to the plan with a gun.
Speaker 2: And in the end, a jury agreed. They found Darren
Speaker 2: Huff guilty of interstate transportation of a firearm with the
Speaker 2: intention to use it unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder.
Speaker 2: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, and
Speaker 2: Darren had already completed his four year sentence by the
Speaker 2: time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen. Now, normally that's all I would really have
Speaker 2: to say about a criminal case. We already talked all
Speaker 2: the way through the actual timeline of events, so you
Speaker 2: already know what happened, and I just told you how
Speaker 2: the trial ended. He was convicted by a jury, appealed unsuccessfully,
Speaker 2: and served a sentence. But this trial is really just
Speaker 2: oh special. I mean, first of all, it went to trial.
Speaker 2: That's pretty rare. In twenty twenty two, just two point
Speaker 2: three percent of people charged with federal crimes actually went
Speaker 2: to trial. But it's so much more than that. Darren
Speaker 2: Huff really really wanted to be in the driver's seat
Speaker 2: when it came to his criminal defense. One thing you
Speaker 2: have to remember about Darren Huff is that he's got
Speaker 2: a little sovereign citizen in him. He seems at times
Speaker 2: to take issue with that label. But when he was
Speaker 2: asked how he felt about the gold fringe on the
Speaker 2: flag at his trial, he was very evasive, and in
Speaker 2: the year and a half between his arrest and his trial,
Speaker 2: he kept insisting that his public defenders file motions based
Speaker 2: on legal arguments that he had invented, and when they
Speaker 2: refused to file some of the more bizarre ones, he
Speaker 2: fired them releast you tried to. In March of twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: his public defender was begging him to consider the plea
Speaker 2: deal they were being offered, explaining over and over again
Speaker 2: that it was the best deal he was going to get,
Speaker 2: and the motions he was drafting on his own just
Speaker 2: don't have any basis in the law, and they have
Speaker 2: no legal merit, and they really seem to be trying
Speaker 2: to explain to him that you can't just file how
Speaker 2: you feel. There has to be case law. It has
Speaker 2: to be based in something. And after months of bitter
Speaker 2: emails back and forth about you know, we can't file
Speaker 2: stuff that you made up, and Darren's accusing them of
Speaker 2: working against him, and the original public defenders file a
Speaker 2: motion to withdraw, saying that the relationship has soured irreparably
Speaker 2: and they can't continue. And during this brief period of
Speaker 2: time before a new public defender could be appointed, Darren
Speaker 2: files some of those motions he want wanted the ones
Speaker 2: he wrote, including one that just reads comes the defendant
Speaker 2: in the above entitled action, Darren Wesley huff And moves
Speaker 2: the court to clarify its position on the Second Amendment
Speaker 2: US Constitution. And when his second public defender was assigned,
Speaker 2: a man named Scott Green, there were just three months
Speaker 2: to go before trial, and in those three months he
Speaker 2: did his job. He filed motions to suppress the statements
Speaker 2: Darren made during the traffic stop, motions to prevent the
Speaker 2: prosecution from bringing up his extremist beliefs, the kinds of
Speaker 2: things you'd expect to see. And he seemed to be
Speaker 2: humoring his client when it came to some of his
Speaker 2: unique ideas about the law. But like the attorneys before him,
Speaker 2: he wasn't willing to put his name on nonsense. And
Speaker 2: after another round of these emails back and forth, where
Speaker 2: this exasperated attorney is trying to explain to him that
Speaker 2: motions have to be based on the law, Darren threatened
Speaker 2: to fire him, writing if you do not have the
Speaker 2: courage or kahunahs necessary to represent me, then please let
Speaker 2: me know. I think that's supposed to say kahones, but
Speaker 2: it says kah u and as cohunas maybe that's a
Speaker 2: regional variation. He mets balls and then email is included
Speaker 2: in this bizarre fifteen page document that he submitted to
Speaker 2: the court complaining about and trying to fire his lawyer.
Speaker 2: But he ends the document by saying, quote, is the
Speaker 2: Second Amendment part of the Constitution?
Speaker 9: Yes?
Speaker 2: Or no? Wherefore Darren Wesley Huff moves this court to
Speaker 2: dismiss the indictment against him. I don't really know where
Speaker 2: to start with. That's that's really not how it works.
Speaker 2: And this lawyer tried to withdraw from the case, saying,
Speaker 2: you know, he doesn't want me to be his lawyer anymore.
Speaker 2: This is not working out. He can't do this, and
Speaker 2: the judge said no, they were too close to trial.
Speaker 2: They would just have to work it out because they
Speaker 2: want a trial together. And Green really does seem to
Speaker 2: have done his best here. On the eve of the trial,
Speaker 2: he filed five separate documents, each one called mister Huff's
Speaker 2: Special Request, and they were sort of fanciful jury instructions.
Speaker 2: It probably will not surprise you that mister Green declined
Speaker 2: to continue working with Darren on his appeal and Darren's
Speaker 2: attitude did not improve once he was in federal prison.
Speaker 2: One email he sent his new lawyer mister Gully during
Speaker 2: the appeal starts off by accusing Gully of withholding the
Speaker 2: trial transcripts, but they just hadn't been made yet. It
Speaker 2: takes a long time to produce those, But he writes
Speaker 2: to his lawyer, I am thus left to wonder whether
Speaker 2: you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or
Speaker 2: if you possibly received your degree from a remedial online school,
Speaker 2: or that you simply take me for a fool. You, sir,
Speaker 2: have made a mockery of the system that purports to
Speaker 2: provide me with effective assistance of counsel. Later, in the
Speaker 2: same email, he explains to his lawyer that the government
Speaker 2: can't charge him with a gun crime because he exists
Speaker 2: outside of the federal government's jurisdiction on such matters, and
Speaker 2: then he threatens to have his attorney indicted, disbarred, and institutionalized.
Speaker 2: Mister Gully's response to this letter doesn't seem to be
Speaker 2: in the appellate record, but from what I can see,
Speaker 2: he did the best he could with a losing case.
Speaker 2: We'd be doing episodes about Walter Fitzpatrick and his entourage
Speaker 2: for weeks if I told you every weird thing that
Speaker 2: I found, But I can't resist. Just a few more,
Speaker 2: if you'll indulge me. When Fitzpatrick finally did get arraigned
Speaker 2: in Monroe County for that original April first attempt to
Speaker 2: arrest the grand jury foreman, it did not go well.
Speaker 2: The judge that he'd accused of treason was presiding, and
Speaker 2: as she's flipping through the exhibits, sort of glancing over
Speaker 2: the paperwork and the citizens arrest warrants, she noted that
Speaker 2: the court clerk, miss Cook, was accused by Fitzpatrick of
Speaker 2: some pretty serious crimes. And so the judge turns to
Speaker 2: the clerk who's there in the courtroom and says, miss Cook,
Speaker 2: have you been levying war against the United States? And
Speaker 2: the clerk says, I don't think so, your honor. And
Speaker 2: I wish that I had an audio recording of this.
Speaker 2: I just have the transcript. But Fitzpatrick is having a
Speaker 2: lot of outbursts during this hearing, and at this point
Speaker 2: he says, are you making fun of me? Is that
Speaker 2: what's going on here? Am I being mocked? And they
Speaker 2: just ignored him and continue the proceeding. I would have
Speaker 2: loved to have seen it, and I wish the officer
Speaker 2: who testified at Huff's trial had been more specific about
Speaker 2: exactly who it was that he overheard Darren Huff talking to.
Speaker 2: In the morning of April twentieth, outside Donna's Cafe, Huff
Speaker 2: had a quiet conversation with someone about calling off the
Speaker 2: operation that day. The officer did mention that Huff was
Speaker 2: speaking to a man with a revolver on his hip,
Speaker 2: and that the man had gotten out of a PT
Speaker 2: cruiser with Georgia license plates. Carl Swenson's from Georgia. But
Speaker 2: I know Carl Swenson was driving a two thousand and
Speaker 2: nine Honda Civic Hybrid that day, trust me, I checked.
Speaker 2: I have got a state trooper on tape calling in
Speaker 2: his plates when they saw him on the highway. And
Speaker 2: in his blog, Walter Fitzpatrick thanked my name most of
Speaker 2: the people who showed up there that day, and most
Speaker 2: of them were women, and very few of them were
Speaker 2: from Georgia. But we do know for sure that Bill Luhman,
Speaker 2: a Marine Corps veteran and crane operator from Waco, Georgia,
Speaker 2: was there that day. And you'd be a fool to
Speaker 2: believe Bill Lowman would walk as far as his own
Speaker 2: mailbox without a gun, so if I had to put
Speaker 2: money on it, I think the person Darren Huff was
Speaker 2: making tactical decisions with was the same man who'd accompanied
Speaker 2: him to Walter's house two weeks earlier when they put
Speaker 2: this whole plan together, a fellow member of the Georgia
Speaker 2: Militia and the Oathkeepers. Now my main wheelhouse is not
Speaker 2: the Militia movement, so I can't say I'm surprised. I'd
Speaker 2: never heard of Bill Luhman before, and I didn't have
Speaker 2: any real prior knowledge about the Georgia Militia. But in
Speaker 2: some old blog posts, Luhman is referred to as a
Speaker 2: leader in the Georgia Militia. That may have just been
Speaker 2: his local chapter. There were at least a dozen units
Speaker 2: around the state of this larger group calling itself the
Speaker 2: Georgia Militia, and his name does not appear in the
Speaker 2: court record for the four members of the Georgia Militia
Speaker 2: who were arrested in twenty eleven for a plot that
Speaker 2: included plans to blow up the Federal building in Atlanta
Speaker 2: and maybe murder government officials with risin.
Speaker 9: In.
Speaker 2: Just a side note, if you do try to google
Speaker 2: Georgia white supremacist rice In attack, the more recent result
Speaker 2: you'll get is for an unrelated white supremacist plot to
Speaker 2: carry out a biological terrorist attack. In that case, in
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen, a neo Nazi had actually successfully created the
Speaker 2: deadly poison, but he accidentally exposed himself to it, so
Speaker 2: he showed up at the emergency room before he could
Speaker 2: actually hurt anybody else. But this is not that one.
Speaker 2: This is the one from twenty eleven. But again, Bill
Speaker 2: Luhman nothing to do with the rice In attacks, just
Speaker 2: the same militia. And I found an old event for
Speaker 2: a tea party picnic in North Carolina in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: That list Lumen is a speaker and his title in
Speaker 2: the program is Constitutionalist icon from Georgia, and he appeared
Speaker 2: on stage with such heroes of the Patriot movement as
Speaker 2: James Renwick. Manship. That name is not familiar to you,
Speaker 2: I'm sure, but you might remember the photo of the
Speaker 2: guy in the George Washington costume wading into the reflecting
Speaker 2: pool at the Capitol during the January sixth riot as
Speaker 2: a sort of symbolic crossing the Delaware moment. But my
Speaker 2: favorite manship moment is the time he showed up at
Speaker 2: my local library dressed as Thomas Jefferson and refused to
Speaker 2: break character as he ranted in the first person about
Speaker 2: how he never had sexual relations with enslaved women. And
Speaker 2: Bill Luman is very much still around and active in
Speaker 2: the same kinds of conspiracy spaces. He posts, give or
Speaker 2: take one hundred times a day every day on Trump's
Speaker 2: Truth social platform, and all of his posts are in
Speaker 2: all caps. He starts every day by posting this message,
Speaker 2: Good morning patriots and grassroots warriors that are standing up
Speaker 2: for our constitution and precious way of life. Good morning
Speaker 2: to all veterans that serve honorably sempify my fellow Marines.
Speaker 2: May America bless God again into our nation, our homes,
Speaker 2: and our heart's heart emoji. Seriously, he posts that every morning.
Speaker 2: He's very committed, and he still thinks Barack Obama is
Speaker 2: a Kenyan born Muslim. He still posts a lot about
Speaker 2: hanging people for treason, but the reasons have shifted, you know, COVID,
Speaker 2: Ukraine election fraud, whatever. As I'm writing this right now,
Speaker 2: he's still posting. He posted a picture of a marine
Speaker 2: shaking hands with a dog, And there was a post
Speaker 2: this evening that was a screenshot from Braveheart with the
Speaker 2: text confirm Matt Gates or else written over mel Gibson's face.
Speaker 2: His last post was a thread documenting the progress of
Speaker 2: his homemade banana nutbread. At the time of recording, I
Speaker 2: can report that he added cream cheese icing to it
Speaker 2: and it was quote stellar. He's pretty popular over their
Speaker 2: own truth social he was even retruthed last year by
Speaker 2: Donald Trump himself after posting some incoherent theory about stolen
Speaker 2: votes from the twenty twenty election. Well, he wasn't retruthed,
Speaker 2: he was quote truthed, whatever the truth social equivalent of
Speaker 2: a quote tweet is. Lumann had suggested that the people
Speaker 2: responsible for the dominion voting machines should be tried for treason,
Speaker 2: and Trump quoted the post, adding a lot has been
Speaker 2: made of this lately, what do you think? And that
Speaker 2: must have been a huge day for Bill. The post
Speaker 2: went pretty viral, a lot of the keyboard warriors out
Speaker 2: here posting seventeen memes a day about January sixth. Political
Speaker 2: prisoners absolutely still believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya,
Speaker 2: and Walter Fitzpatrick went on to try his whole citizens
Speaker 2: arrest thing in neighboring McMinn County too. He was eventually
Speaker 2: convicted of perjury and extortion there, as well as getting
Speaker 2: some more charges in Monroe County after he stole the
Speaker 2: grand jury rolls. Those stolen documents were located by the
Speaker 2: FBI in the Connecticut home of Sharon Rondeau, the conspiracy
Speaker 2: theory blogger whose commitment to questioning the citizenship of politicians
Speaker 2: has remained strong over the years. She is still asking
Speaker 2: questions about Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris. Fitzpatrick published a
Speaker 2: memoir last year about his quest for justice in his
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety court martial. I didn't read it. It's like
Speaker 2: four hundred pages long. He's in his seventies now and
Speaker 2: he still occasionally updates his blog, jag Hunters. The most
Speaker 2: recent post is just a link to someone else's video,
Speaker 2: and it's just like a mind numbing thirty minute mashup
Speaker 2: of clips. I can't even really explain it. It's like
Speaker 2: actual footage of Trump rallies mixed in with like mypolo commercials.
Speaker 2: A TikTok video of someone doing the macarena, but the
Speaker 2: lyrics have been changed to be about Donald Trump. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I tapped out when it got to a
Speaker 2: clip of Russell Brand praying with Tucker Carlson. I guess
Speaker 2: what I'm getting at here is these guys don't go away.
Speaker 2: The cause of the day changes, whether it's nine to eleven, truth, eartherism, COVID, denial, QAnon,
Speaker 2: stop the steal. But it's a lot of the same
Speaker 2: core ideas and honestly, it's a lot of the same
Speaker 2: individual guys. In one newspaper photo of Walter Fitzpatrick outside
Speaker 2: of the courthouse after a hearing in McMinn County in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, the man standing next to him is Field McConnell.
Speaker 2: And Field McConnell is a former commercial airline pilot who
Speaker 2: retired in two thousand and six after refusing to submit
Speaker 2: to a neurological exam. He had become obsessed with the
Speaker 2: idea that nine to eleven was an inside job and
Speaker 2: was convinced that Boeing had rigged all of their planes
Speaker 2: with explosives and they were planning an upcoming nine to
Speaker 2: eleven style attack. In twenty nineteen, he got really into QAnon.
Speaker 2: An attorney in Florida who represents the family of a
Speaker 2: missing child had to get a restraining order against him
Speaker 2: after he made a series of YouTube videos threatening to
Speaker 2: kill her and accusing her of having trafficked the missing child.
Speaker 2: The day I'm recording this, he was a guest on
Speaker 2: a podcast hosted by a small scale QAnon influencer. I
Speaker 2: would tell you what they talked about, but it kind
Speaker 2: of sounded like he was calling in from the bottom
Speaker 2: of the ocean. This episode took me days longer to
Speaker 2: write than it should have, because every new name I
Speaker 2: turned up in the comments on a fifteen year old
Speaker 2: blog post took me on some long, strange path that
Speaker 2: some character in this story had taken in the year.
Speaker 2: Since there are no lone wolves, no one is self
Speaker 2: radicalizing in a vacuum. People don't just wake up one
Speaker 2: day and drive three hours with a camcorder and a
Speaker 2: truck full of guns for no reason at all. And
Speaker 2: with each passing week, as I immerse myself in the archives,
Speaker 2: piecing together one weird little guy's story at a time,
Speaker 2: the clearer the connective tissue between them becomes. But for
Speaker 2: all the weird twists and turns in this strange tale
Speaker 2: of the Birther militia trying to take over a small
Speaker 2: town in Tennessee. The best thing I found buried in
Speaker 2: all of these documents was this moment from the trial
Speaker 2: when Darren Huff took the stand himself. The prosecutor had
Speaker 2: asked him about some business cards that he made after
Speaker 2: his arrest. On the front, it said Darren Huff, right
Speaker 2: wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist, and on the back
Speaker 2: there was a picture of a gun. So on cross examination,
Speaker 2: Huff's defense attorney was trying to testimony that would show
Speaker 2: the jury that those business cards were obviously a joke,
Speaker 2: that this was just his sense of humor. So he
Speaker 2: asked Darren about some shirts, and Darren gave the following answer.
Speaker 2: I had a friend who had a T shirt shop,
Speaker 2: and I said, can you make me a couple of
Speaker 2: shirts because apparently this government wants to label me. The
Speaker 2: first one that he had made me said, I am
Speaker 2: the god fearing gun toting, flag waving right wing extremists
Speaker 2: the government warned you about. And the other one said
Speaker 2: I finally made Homeland Securities Potential Domestic Terrorists watch list
Speaker 2: and all I got was this lousy T shirt. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the point behind them was for humor, and they have
Speaker 2: been received as such. Another one that was one of
Speaker 2: my initial shirts said patriotism is not a spectator sport.
Speaker 2: And then there's something that I have never seen in
Speaker 2: a federal court transcript before, as this big bearded militia
Speaker 2: man is describing his funny terrorism shirts. The court reporter
Speaker 2: types in parentheses, witness crying should put it on the
Speaker 2: record that he cried. Weird Little Guys as a production
Speaker 2: of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
Speaker 2: recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Speaker 2: Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
Speaker 2: wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Speaker 2: Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
Speaker 2: podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
Speaker 2: but I almost certainly will not answer it. You can
Speaker 2: exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on
Speaker 2: the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Don't post anything that's going
Speaker 2: to make you one of my weird Blue Guys