WEBVTT - CZM Rewind: Magic Beans 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:10.360 Cool Zone Media. On the morning of February two, twenty seventeen, 0:00:11.000 --> 0:00:14.159 William Christopher Gibbs had just finished his overnight shift as 0:00:14.200 --> 0:00:16.960 a forklift operator to poultry processing plant and a small 0:00:17.000 --> 0:00:21.400 town in North Georgia. It was technically eight am on 0:00:21.440 --> 0:00:24.880 a Thursday morning, but he'd just gotten off work and 0:00:24.920 --> 0:00:26.759 he wanted to relax and have a few beers with 0:00:26.760 --> 0:00:31.080 a friend. Around noon, he got a phone call from 0:00:31.080 --> 0:00:34.200 another friend who wanted to join them, but he needed 0:00:34.240 --> 0:00:37.800 a ride. Gibbs agreed to drive down to the gas 0:00:37.800 --> 0:00:40.760 station to pick him up, but he'd need to rearrange 0:00:40.800 --> 0:00:44.320 some things in his car first. As he was cleaning 0:00:44.320 --> 0:00:47.880 out the front seat of his car, he touched something wet. 0:00:49.360 --> 0:00:51.280 A bottle he'd left on the floor of the passenger 0:00:51.400 --> 0:00:58.320 side was leaking. He panicked. He spent four hours considering 0:00:58.360 --> 0:01:02.760 his options before finally driving himself to the emergency room. 0:01:03.360 --> 0:01:07.000 He had to tell the truth he was sick, and 0:01:07.080 --> 0:01:10.640 if he wanted help, he'd have to tell them he'd 0:01:10.640 --> 0:01:15.040 been making ricin. It looked like a slam dunk case, 0:01:16.000 --> 0:01:18.080 But less than two weeks before his trial was set 0:01:18.120 --> 0:01:23.000 to begin, a judge dismissed the indictment not for lack 0:01:23.040 --> 0:01:27.559 of evidence. The case was solid, but at the eleventh hour, 0:01:28.120 --> 0:01:33.080 his public defender made an incredible discovery. A clerical error 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:37.960 had accidentally legalized the possession of ricin, and no one 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:45.520 noticed for over a decade. I'm Molly Conger, and this 0:01:46.440 --> 0:02:06.040 is weird Little Guys. The story of William Christopher Gibbs 0:02:06.080 --> 0:02:09.880 and his bottle full of liquid risin isn't actually very long. 0:02:11.200 --> 0:02:14.680 That was most of it, to be honest. But by 0:02:14.680 --> 0:02:16.920 the time I realized how little meat there was to 0:02:17.000 --> 0:02:21.040 the case, I'd already committed to a couple of interesting tangents. 0:02:22.440 --> 0:02:24.960 I mean, I wasted a whole day learning about ricin. 0:02:25.440 --> 0:02:28.880 I can't just throw that away. And it does introduce 0:02:28.960 --> 0:02:32.200 some new elements into the Weird Little Guy's extended universe. 0:02:33.400 --> 0:02:37.160 We will eventually have to talk about the Church of 0:02:37.200 --> 0:02:41.120 the Creator. That was part of what made this story 0:02:41.200 --> 0:02:45.440 so sensational. Back in twenty seventeen, when this twenty seven 0:02:45.520 --> 0:02:48.000 year old confessed to a nurse in rural Georgia that 0:02:48.040 --> 0:02:52.080 he'd accidentally exposed himself to homemade ricin, he was wearing 0:02:52.080 --> 0:02:54.680 a motorcycle jacket with a big patch on the chest 0:02:55.280 --> 0:02:57.000 that marked him as a member of a group called 0:02:57.040 --> 0:03:01.640 the Creativity Alliance. I doubt the nurse knew what it meant, 0:03:02.720 --> 0:03:05.080 but I imagine she described it to the cop that she 0:03:05.200 --> 0:03:10.080 immediately called about the bioweapon in the parking lot. The 0:03:10.160 --> 0:03:14.440 Church of the Creator doesn't actually exist anymore, not under 0:03:14.440 --> 0:03:18.440 that name. The group William Christopher Gibbs had joined in 0:03:18.480 --> 0:03:21.760 the months before his arrest is called the Creativity Alliance. 0:03:23.080 --> 0:03:26.079 Depending on who you ask, it's either a successor to 0:03:27.080 --> 0:03:31.960 or a schism from the original church. There are a 0:03:32.000 --> 0:03:35.600 lot of almost identical sounding names in this story, so 0:03:36.280 --> 0:03:42.720 I apologize in advance. In nineteen seventy three, Ben Clausen, 0:03:43.000 --> 0:03:46.040 an aspiring politician in Florida and the inventor of the 0:03:46.040 --> 0:03:50.080 wall mounted electric can opener, self published a book called 0:03:50.360 --> 0:03:55.800 Nature's Eternal Religion. It would become the foundational text of 0:03:55.840 --> 0:03:59.920 the weird new religion he'd just invented. He called it 0:03:59.920 --> 0:04:06.560 the Church of the Creator, or just creativity, and religion 0:04:06.600 --> 0:04:09.800 isn't the word I would use, but it's the one 0:04:09.800 --> 0:04:14.400 they use. Just ask the Bureau of Prisons. They're constantly 0:04:14.440 --> 0:04:17.640 fielding lawsuits from incarcerated neo Nazis who argue that their 0:04:17.680 --> 0:04:21.440 religious liberties are being violated by prison policies that ban 0:04:21.560 --> 0:04:25.560 their religious texts. Clausen would go on to write a 0:04:25.600 --> 0:04:29.039 book called The White Man's Bible. They call the head 0:04:29.040 --> 0:04:34.120 of the church haunt effects Maximus. They have commandments and 0:04:34.279 --> 0:04:41.760 religious holidays. We've talked about racist religions before. There are 0:04:41.800 --> 0:04:45.040 a couple of episodes that have touched on Christian identity, 0:04:45.680 --> 0:04:49.960 a wildly racist and anti semitic spin on regular Christianity 0:04:50.720 --> 0:04:55.120 that preaches that white Europeans are God's chosen people. But 0:04:55.200 --> 0:04:58.599 this is something else, This is not like that at all. 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:04.359 They're both anti Semitic, obviously, and they revolve around the 0:05:04.360 --> 0:05:10.640 superiority of white people, of course, but in creativity there 0:05:10.680 --> 0:05:15.000 is no God, there are no deities at all, there's 0:05:15.000 --> 0:05:20.160 no afterlife. It is, at its core, just an elaborate 0:05:20.200 --> 0:05:24.320 way to be racist, and in a unique twist, in 0:05:24.320 --> 0:05:29.000 addition to being anti Semitic, it's also quite explicitly anti Christian. 0:05:30.200 --> 0:05:34.279 Their race is their religion, Their highest belief is the 0:05:34.320 --> 0:05:37.599 superiority of the white man, and there is nothing above him. 0:05:39.960 --> 0:05:43.400 I promise we'll explore this more another day. There's a 0:05:43.600 --> 0:05:47.039 lot of weird lore here. Clausen wrote a number of books, 0:05:47.080 --> 0:05:50.760 and they're all very boring. But Gibbs is far from 0:05:50.760 --> 0:05:52.680 the first member of the Church of the Creator who 0:05:52.680 --> 0:05:55.920 found himself under indictment, so we'll come back to it. 0:05:57.560 --> 0:06:02.520 But that brings us to rahoa. It's a shortened form 0:06:02.560 --> 0:06:04.800 of the phrase racial holy war. I've used the term 0:06:04.800 --> 0:06:06.880 a few times on the show. It's a pretty common 0:06:06.920 --> 0:06:09.640 refrain among guys who yearn for a white ethno state. 0:06:11.160 --> 0:06:14.680 Years ago, before I rotted out my brain reading the 0:06:14.720 --> 0:06:19.120 foundational texts of various Nazi groups, I just assumed that 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:24.320 rahoah was a modern term. It feels very online, very 0:06:24.360 --> 0:06:27.400 mid twenty tens to me, and I see it all 0:06:27.440 --> 0:06:30.279 the time in their online spaces, where it's mixed in 0:06:30.320 --> 0:06:33.720 with nim speak that I recognize as twenty first century inventions. 0:06:35.279 --> 0:06:40.400 But the word rahoah is actually older than I am. 0:06:40.480 --> 0:06:43.480 It first appeared in a February nineteen eighty six issue 0:06:43.480 --> 0:06:48.360 of Racial Loyalty, the Church of the Creator newsletter, and 0:06:48.400 --> 0:06:50.960 you can tell Clausen wasn't sure the term was going 0:06:51.000 --> 0:06:54.520 to catch on right away. The first announcement that he'd 0:06:54.560 --> 0:06:58.000 invented a new word is brief, and it's sort of 0:06:58.040 --> 0:07:02.719 buried on page five, and in this first announcement, Clausen says, 0:07:03.480 --> 0:07:06.640 we need a word for our struggle against the other races, 0:07:06.680 --> 0:07:12.200 something like jihad, but just for white people. And underneath 0:07:12.240 --> 0:07:15.160 his announcement that he's come up with this fantastic new word, 0:07:15.640 --> 0:07:18.720 he includes a pronunciation guide which he writes out as 0:07:19.920 --> 0:07:27.160 ra haa. He wrote out r ah h h dash 0:07:27.200 --> 0:07:33.080 aa that to me says rah and members of his 0:07:33.200 --> 0:07:35.760 church must have read that the same way I did, 0:07:35.840 --> 0:07:38.720 because a few months later he's revised this pronunciation guide 0:07:38.760 --> 0:07:44.000 to read ra ho wah r a h h o wah, 0:07:45.200 --> 0:07:48.040 which is clearer to me. That reads as rahah to me. 0:07:48.160 --> 0:07:52.200 But later publications of those essays omit both of those 0:07:52.280 --> 0:07:58.760 and they just say it rhymes with aloha. And Clausen 0:07:58.880 --> 0:08:02.000 was so committed to his new word that a year 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:06.640 later he published an entire book called rahoa This planet 0:08:06.800 --> 0:08:10.680 is all Ours. He later wrote another book called On 0:08:10.840 --> 0:08:15.320 the Brink of a Bloody Racial War. Racial holy war 0:08:15.840 --> 0:08:19.920 was central to the Church of the Creator, and over 0:08:20.000 --> 0:08:22.960 the years some members of the church followed through on 0:08:23.040 --> 0:08:27.280 that commandment. They racked up a couple of murders, some bombings, 0:08:27.360 --> 0:08:32.640 assorted weapons charges, assault cases. By nineteen ninety three, the 0:08:32.760 --> 0:08:37.280 church was facing mounting legal and financial problems. Clawson's wife 0:08:37.320 --> 0:08:41.679 had died and now he had cancer. In August of 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:45.800 nineteen ninety three, Ben Clausen died by suicide, leaving the 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:49.040 church in the hands of an unworthy successor, a man 0:08:49.080 --> 0:08:50.719 who failed to even show up to court when a 0:08:50.800 --> 0:08:53.000 lawsuit was filed by the family of a man murdered 0:08:53.040 --> 0:08:58.079 by a member of the church. Leaderless and broke, the 0:08:58.200 --> 0:09:04.000 church fell into disarray. In nineteen ninety six, a former member, 0:09:04.280 --> 0:09:08.360 a law student named Matt Hale, revived the group, forming 0:09:08.400 --> 0:09:11.480 a successor organization that he called the World Church of 0:09:11.520 --> 0:09:16.040 the Creator. This is a chapter that deserves its own episodes, 0:09:17.160 --> 0:09:20.040 but the short version of this arc is. In two 0:09:20.040 --> 0:09:23.720 thousand and two, under Matt Hale's leadership, the organization lost 0:09:23.760 --> 0:09:27.400 a trademark infringement lawsuit whiled by a religious organization that 0:09:27.640 --> 0:09:30.040 had already trademarked the phrase Church of the Creator in 0:09:30.080 --> 0:09:33.840 the eighties. A judge ordered Matt Hale and his World 0:09:33.920 --> 0:09:37.319 Church of the Creator to stop using the name. He 0:09:37.480 --> 0:09:41.319 wasn't allowed to call it that anymore. He did not 0:09:42.000 --> 0:09:45.760 take it well, and he heavily implied to his security 0:09:45.880 --> 0:09:49.400 chief that he'd really like it if that man would 0:09:49.559 --> 0:09:53.520 murder the judge who'd ruled against them. The man he 0:09:53.600 --> 0:09:56.120 tried to solicit for the murder of a federal judge 0:09:56.840 --> 0:09:59.400 was an FBI informant, and Matthew Hale will be in 0:09:59.480 --> 0:10:03.640 prison and twenty thirty six. It was after Hale went 0:10:03.679 --> 0:10:06.040 to prison that the church split into the two factions 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:11.120 we have today, the Creativity Alliance and the Creativity Movement. 0:10:12.559 --> 0:10:15.840 The two groups hate each other, obviously, and the differences 0:10:15.880 --> 0:10:18.719 between them aren't the point right now. But all that 0:10:18.840 --> 0:10:24.600 to say Creativity is a Nazi religion. You don't necessarily 0:10:24.720 --> 0:10:26.920 have to be a member of any of those organizations 0:10:27.000 --> 0:10:29.880 to be an adherent of the religion, but if you 0:10:29.960 --> 0:10:32.360 are a member of a group, it's probably one of 0:10:32.400 --> 0:10:34.720 those two splinter groups that formed after matt Hale went 0:10:34.760 --> 0:10:40.080 to prison. And that is where we find William Christopher Gibbs, 0:10:41.000 --> 0:10:43.440 the man who made Risin and Georgia in twenty seventeen. 0:10:45.360 --> 0:10:49.760 By all accounts, he discovered Creativity online sometime in the 0:10:49.800 --> 0:10:54.160 summer of twenty sixteen, and he got really into it, 0:10:55.040 --> 0:10:59.199 really fast. He created an account on the forums run 0:10:59.240 --> 0:11:02.920 by the Creativity Alliance in June of twenty sixteen, and 0:11:03.040 --> 0:11:07.520 their July newsletter published a letter from him. By September, 0:11:07.600 --> 0:11:11.679 he was considering getting rahoa tattooed across his back, and 0:11:11.840 --> 0:11:14.240 he was stopped by a cop after people complained about 0:11:14.280 --> 0:11:16.920 him hanging around a public park trying to hand out 0:11:16.960 --> 0:11:23.959 racist flyers. After Gibbs was arrested, the Creativity Movement, the 0:11:24.120 --> 0:11:28.559 other faction of the church, issued a public statement clarifying 0:11:28.600 --> 0:11:33.400 that he was not one of theirs. They claimed that 0:11:33.480 --> 0:11:35.640 he had actually reached out to them when he was 0:11:35.679 --> 0:11:40.160 trying to join, but the messages he sent were very weird. 0:11:41.880 --> 0:11:46.320 Quote he struck us as one of the most dysfunctional, incoherent, 0:11:46.679 --> 0:11:53.120 and mentally ill people we have come across. The statement read. Now, 0:11:53.160 --> 0:11:57.679 that might sound unfair, but I read four frivolous lawsuits 0:11:57.720 --> 0:12:00.960 that he wrote, and hundreds of posts that he's made 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:04.199 on Facebook across multiple different accounts over the course of 0:12:04.240 --> 0:12:08.439 the last decade, and I'm willing to bet dysfunctional and 0:12:08.600 --> 0:12:13.640 incoherent was an understatement. It can be pretty hard to 0:12:13.800 --> 0:12:18.400 understand what he's trying to communicate. Sometimes the thoughts just 0:12:19.080 --> 0:12:23.480 don't always quite connect. I should say at this point 0:12:24.120 --> 0:12:26.640 that Gibbs's mother would later tell the police that her 0:12:26.720 --> 0:12:31.679 son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This doesn't appear anywhere in 0:12:31.720 --> 0:12:34.600 the court records. It was never raised as a defense, 0:12:34.720 --> 0:12:38.400 There was no request for a competency evaluation. All we 0:12:38.559 --> 0:12:40.680 have is his mother's claim at the time of his arrest. 0:12:42.040 --> 0:12:45.040 And obviously, mental illness doesn't cause racism. Racism isn't a 0:12:45.080 --> 0:12:48.079 mental illness. The two are generally unrelated, and normally I 0:12:48.120 --> 0:12:51.079 wouldn't even bring it up, especially considering the lack of 0:12:51.160 --> 0:12:55.240 cooperation here. You can't diagnose a man based on his posts, 0:12:56.600 --> 0:13:01.920 but there's definitely something going on there. I think anyone 0:13:01.960 --> 0:13:05.000 who read any significant amount of his writing would be 0:13:05.080 --> 0:13:07.520 able to tell that this is someone who's struggling with something, 0:13:08.800 --> 0:13:12.040 and at least one of these Nazi groups could tell. 0:13:14.040 --> 0:13:17.640 Colin Campbell, the Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Alliance, on 0:13:17.679 --> 0:13:20.640 the other hand, didn't see any red flags in this 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:25.760 potential new member. After Gibbs was arrested, Campbell acknowledged that 0:13:25.960 --> 0:13:30.040 Gibbs had recently successfully completed his six month probationary period 0:13:30.280 --> 0:13:33.440 and joined the group as a member, but he claimed 0:13:33.480 --> 0:13:38.040 that Gibbs had quote hardly any contact with us, just 0:13:38.240 --> 0:13:41.240 enough to pass as rational and dedicated to one hundred 0:13:41.280 --> 0:13:46.120 percent legal white civil rights. And I doubt that Gibbs 0:13:46.160 --> 0:13:49.640 had any sort of background knowledge or understanding of the 0:13:49.720 --> 0:13:53.840 schisms within the movement. This is just something he found online. 0:13:55.120 --> 0:13:57.199 He may not have even realized that these were two 0:13:57.800 --> 0:14:00.559 very different groups run by people who hate at each other. 0:14:01.840 --> 0:14:04.640 But when one group turned him away because he seemed unstable, 0:14:05.760 --> 0:14:11.200 the other welcomed him. So on February two, twenty seventeen, 0:14:12.000 --> 0:14:15.160 Gibbs was wearing his Creativity Alliance patch when he got 0:14:15.160 --> 0:14:19.440 to the hospital, complaining of rice and exposure, and shortly 0:14:19.520 --> 0:14:22.440 after he arrived, someone at the hospital called the police. 0:14:24.840 --> 0:14:28.600 What about HIPPA, you're probably asking, or maybe you're not, 0:14:29.320 --> 0:14:32.680 But his lawyers did, and the judge denied a motion 0:14:32.840 --> 0:14:35.960 to suppress evidence stemming from disclosures made by the hospital. 0:14:37.280 --> 0:14:41.000 HIPPA does allow medical providers to disclose what would otherwise 0:14:41.040 --> 0:14:45.080 be protected information if it's necessary to prevent a serious 0:14:45.160 --> 0:14:47.320 and imminent threat to the health and safety of others, 0:14:48.280 --> 0:14:52.040 like if, for example, if a patient comes into the 0:14:52.120 --> 0:14:54.880 hospital and says he was trying to make a biological weapon, 0:14:55.040 --> 0:15:00.640 and it's outside in his car. Within the hour, investigators 0:15:00.680 --> 0:15:04.000 from the Fannin County Sheriff's Office were in his hospital room. 0:15:05.520 --> 0:15:08.360 He wasn't under arrest. They just wanted to get a 0:15:08.400 --> 0:15:12.360 better idea what was going on here and how alarmed 0:15:12.440 --> 0:15:16.320 they should be. Gibbs explained that he'd ground up the 0:15:16.400 --> 0:15:18.280 castor beans and put them in a bottle of nail 0:15:18.280 --> 0:15:21.640 polish remover, and that all of those implements and materials 0:15:21.680 --> 0:15:25.960 were in his car outside. Gibbs assured the officer that 0:15:26.080 --> 0:15:30.320 it's quote, nothing to worry about, and when the officer 0:15:30.440 --> 0:15:33.680 pressed him, asking if the substance in the car was poisonous, 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:40.400 Gibbs replied, quote, he said, it's not unless it's inhaled 0:15:40.520 --> 0:15:46.760 or injected. This singular line in one filing written by 0:15:46.800 --> 0:15:50.400 the judge has a citation in the footnotes to a 0:15:50.560 --> 0:15:54.280 sealed document, and it never comes up again. There's never 0:15:54.360 --> 0:15:57.280 any other mention of Gibbs having communicated with anyone about 0:15:57.360 --> 0:15:59.920 making the rice, and so I guess it'll be a 0:16:00.000 --> 0:16:04.880 mystery forever. But he's assuring the officer that there's no 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:08.280 danger to the public. It's fine, don't worry about it. 0:16:08.320 --> 0:16:11.400 It's not a big deal. But at the same time, 0:16:12.440 --> 0:16:15.360 he's gone to the emergency room because he thinks he's 0:16:15.440 --> 0:16:19.360 been poisoned. And as this conversation is happening, he's pretty 0:16:19.440 --> 0:16:23.160 agitated that he isn't receiving adequate treatment for this exposure. 0:16:23.200 --> 0:16:25.920 He's upset that they haven't given him an IV for example, 0:16:27.360 --> 0:16:30.680 And in an interview later that evening, he's hacking and 0:16:30.920 --> 0:16:34.480 coughing and nervously asking an FBI agent what are the 0:16:34.520 --> 0:16:38.440 symptoms of rice and poisoning? So he clearly thinks he's 0:16:38.480 --> 0:16:43.880 been exposed to something very dangerous. The officer called him 0:16:43.880 --> 0:16:48.000 back up, and by around eight o'clock that evening, deputies 0:16:48.040 --> 0:16:49.880 had moved all of the other cars in the parking 0:16:49.920 --> 0:16:52.480 lot out of what they were now calling the hot zone. 0:16:53.840 --> 0:16:56.480 A hazmat team from another county arrived to search the car. 0:16:57.800 --> 0:17:01.240 FBI agents rolled up in black suv, and the Army 0:17:01.320 --> 0:17:05.200 National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destructions Civil Support team was 0:17:05.280 --> 0:17:09.679 on site to provide assistance if needed. The bottle recovered 0:17:09.720 --> 0:17:13.480 by the hasmat team tested positive for risin, but it 0:17:13.600 --> 0:17:15.840 was a small amount and it was all contained within 0:17:15.920 --> 0:17:20.399 the vehicle. There was no danger to the public. Gibbs 0:17:20.480 --> 0:17:25.359 was released from the hospital. He was fine after being 0:17:25.400 --> 0:17:28.960 interrogated that night by the FBI. Gibbs was initially held 0:17:28.960 --> 0:17:32.000 at the county jail on just a misdemeanor charge of 0:17:32.080 --> 0:17:36.240 reckless conduct. A few weeks later, though, a federal grand 0:17:36.320 --> 0:17:39.639 jury indicted him on a single count of possession of 0:17:39.680 --> 0:17:43.040 a biological agent or toxin by a person who didn't 0:17:43.040 --> 0:17:48.920 have the proper registration. That section one's seventy five B 0:17:50.000 --> 0:17:55.040 of Title eighteen of the US Code one seventy five B. 0:17:56.119 --> 0:17:59.320 The B is so critical here because one seventy five 0:17:59.440 --> 0:18:03.120 B isn't a subcategory of section one seventy five, it's 0:18:03.160 --> 0:18:08.639 its own section Section one seventy five Prohibitions with respect 0:18:08.680 --> 0:18:12.680 to biological weapons that carries a ten year sentence, and 0:18:12.760 --> 0:18:17.159 one seventy five B is a paltry five years. The 0:18:17.200 --> 0:18:20.440 difference between the two is intent. You have to prove 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:23.200 that the defendant intended to use the toxin as a 0:18:23.280 --> 0:18:26.000 weapon if you want to charge them under one seventy five. 0:18:27.320 --> 0:18:30.119 One seventy five B just means you had something you 0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:34.520 weren't supposed to have. That section was newly written in 0:18:34.560 --> 0:18:38.120 two thousand and one. Certainly, as some sort of frantic 0:18:38.320 --> 0:18:41.920 post nine to eleven crackdown on scientists without update paperwork. 0:18:43.200 --> 0:18:45.880 Maybe they just wanted to know who had what, where, 0:18:46.160 --> 0:18:49.320 when and why, even if it wasn't something they were 0:18:49.359 --> 0:18:53.000 planning to use as a weapon. Or maybe they just 0:18:53.080 --> 0:18:55.119 wanted to be sure they could charge cases where the 0:18:55.160 --> 0:19:01.120 facts were fuzzy, bit of both. I think so. When 0:19:01.160 --> 0:19:04.360 I read news coverage of this case and the reports 0:19:04.400 --> 0:19:08.760 all say the case against Gibbs was dismissed because Congress 0:19:08.960 --> 0:19:14.440 forgot to make risin illegal, I thought that can't be right. 0:19:15.800 --> 0:19:18.639 I've read cases from this time period that ended in 0:19:18.720 --> 0:19:22.159 a conviction related to ricin. There was one in Georgia 0:19:22.320 --> 0:19:24.840 just a few years before this, some militia guys with 0:19:24.920 --> 0:19:27.480 a hair brain scheme to disperse the toxin over large 0:19:27.520 --> 0:19:31.040 areas in major cities. It never would have worked. It 0:19:31.440 --> 0:19:36.320 wasn't a workable plan. They didn't even have risin, and 0:19:36.520 --> 0:19:38.760 there was no indication that they had any idea how 0:19:38.800 --> 0:19:43.040 to make it or had sought that knowledge. It's a 0:19:43.200 --> 0:19:46.639 scary sounding plot, but even the judge doubted that a 0:19:46.800 --> 0:19:48.840 seventy year old man was going to figure out how 0:19:48.840 --> 0:19:53.719 to do anything with those beans he bought. The hiccup 0:19:53.800 --> 0:19:57.560 is right here, though, those elderly militia men with a 0:19:57.840 --> 0:20:01.800 bag of raw castor beans were charged with section one 0:20:02.000 --> 0:20:05.959 seventy five. They were only conspiring to make the ricin. 0:20:07.280 --> 0:20:10.600 They did have the beans, and they were intending to 0:20:10.760 --> 0:20:15.280 use them as a weapon. Most cases, where someone is 0:20:15.359 --> 0:20:18.880 arrested because they had some kind of biological agent or toxin, 0:20:19.840 --> 0:20:21.679 they go ahead and charge them with intent to use 0:20:21.720 --> 0:20:24.520 it as a weapon. Why else would the cops be 0:20:24.600 --> 0:20:27.960 at your house and a hazmat suit? Right, And that 0:20:28.080 --> 0:20:33.159 law is pretty broad. It is enough to just attempt, threaten, 0:20:33.400 --> 0:20:37.360 or conspire to use it as a weapon. You don't 0:20:37.359 --> 0:20:39.280 even have to have a plan that would actually work. 0:20:40.160 --> 0:20:43.520 I mean, in that militia case, they just had the beans. 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:47.600 They hadn't even made the poison yet. So in the 0:20:47.640 --> 0:20:50.440 Gibbs case, they must not have felt that they could 0:20:50.520 --> 0:20:54.639 meet even that burden. I guess they really thought that 0:20:54.720 --> 0:20:56.560 they wouldn't be able to convince a jury that he 0:20:56.720 --> 0:20:58.760 was ever going to do anything other than spill it 0:20:58.840 --> 0:21:02.320 in his car, so they charged him with the lesser 0:21:02.400 --> 0:21:07.600 offense one seventy five B. And again that's just having 0:21:07.720 --> 0:21:12.080 one of these biological agents or toxins without properly registering 0:21:12.200 --> 0:21:16.960 that possession with the government. And those two laws they're 0:21:17.000 --> 0:21:20.360 in the same chapter. They use most of the same words. 0:21:21.480 --> 0:21:24.119 How could it be that one of them applies to 0:21:24.240 --> 0:21:29.560 risin and one of them doesn't. The answer took me 0:21:30.040 --> 0:21:34.280 too long to figure out. It's very complicated and it's 0:21:34.560 --> 0:21:39.400 very silly. So just to get a little schoolhouse rock 0:21:39.480 --> 0:21:44.440 on you here. We have laws, right. The United States 0:21:44.520 --> 0:21:48.040 Code is the codification of all of the permanent federal statutes, 0:21:48.600 --> 0:21:51.440 those things that become law after Congress passes a bill. 0:21:53.080 --> 0:21:56.000 But we also have something called the Code of Federal Regulations. 0:21:57.640 --> 0:22:01.159 After passing a law, Congress can delegate the authority to 0:22:01.320 --> 0:22:04.080 a government agency to write the regulations that help that 0:22:04.200 --> 0:22:09.600 agency interpret and implement those laws. It's more complicated than that, 0:22:09.800 --> 0:22:12.879 but I know nobody wants to hear me struggle to 0:22:13.000 --> 0:22:18.720 explain regulatory law, so I'm not gonna so. In this case, 0:22:19.400 --> 0:22:21.760 Congress passed a bill that said it's illegal to have 0:22:21.840 --> 0:22:28.080 biological agents or toxins. Okay, solid law, But they're not 0:22:28.240 --> 0:22:32.120 experts on microbiology, so they leave it to the Department 0:22:32.160 --> 0:22:35.080 of Health and Human Services to list what sorts of 0:22:35.200 --> 0:22:39.800 things need to be criminalized by this law specifically, and 0:22:40.000 --> 0:22:45.160 Risin was on that list. In the first Code section 0:22:46.119 --> 0:22:50.280 there actually is no list. It just says biological agent 0:22:50.400 --> 0:22:55.560 or toxin and that's defined very broadly. But in this 0:22:55.960 --> 0:22:59.560 specific section in one seventy five B, the Code section 0:22:59.600 --> 0:23:02.600 that requies requires you to register with the Secretary of 0:23:02.640 --> 0:23:05.840 Health and Human Services if you possess certain what are 0:23:05.920 --> 0:23:11.879 called select agents. Got a list them. They're select agents. 0:23:11.920 --> 0:23:15.640 You have to select them. So instead of listing those 0:23:15.720 --> 0:23:19.480 select agents by name in the law, it specified that 0:23:19.600 --> 0:23:22.920 it applied to biological agents and toxins that are quote 0:23:23.560 --> 0:23:27.359 listed as non overlap or overlap select biological agent or 0:23:27.440 --> 0:23:30.880 toxin in sections seventy three point four and seventy three 0:23:30.920 --> 0:23:36.120 point five of Title forty two, Code of Federal Regulations. Okay, 0:23:36.240 --> 0:23:40.480 so I assume Risin must be missing from that list, right, 0:23:40.640 --> 0:23:43.879 That's why the case got dropped. So I found a 0:23:43.920 --> 0:23:46.159 copy of the twenty seventeen version of the Code of 0:23:46.200 --> 0:23:48.840 Federal Regulations and I flipped a Title forty two, section 0:23:49.000 --> 0:23:53.920 seventy three, and Risin's on the list. I control eft 0:23:53.960 --> 0:23:56.560 it I found Risin in section seventy three. I can 0:23:56.640 --> 0:24:00.960 see it what happened, and here's it gets so silly. 0:24:02.400 --> 0:24:03.959 So the law was passed in two thousand and one. 0:24:04.640 --> 0:24:07.000 In two thousand and one, the statute made specific reference 0:24:07.040 --> 0:24:08.720 to the list of toxins found in the Code of 0:24:08.800 --> 0:24:12.080 Federal Regulations, Title forty two, Section seventy two point six. 0:24:13.359 --> 0:24:15.320 Then in two thousand and two, the Department of Health 0:24:15.320 --> 0:24:18.640 and Human Services made some formatting updates to their rules 0:24:18.680 --> 0:24:22.080 and regulations, so Congress amended the law in two thousand 0:24:22.080 --> 0:24:25.720 and two to match the updated reference. So now the 0:24:25.840 --> 0:24:27.879 law says that the list is in appendix A of 0:24:27.960 --> 0:24:32.560 section seventy two. Perfect, everything's matching up. In two thousand 0:24:32.560 --> 0:24:36.160 and four, Congress amended the law again, updating that reference 0:24:36.520 --> 0:24:39.520 again because Health and Human Services had made some more 0:24:39.520 --> 0:24:41.879 formatting changes, And now the list of toxins is in 0:24:42.040 --> 0:24:45.560 section seventy three point four in seventy three point five perfect. 0:24:45.880 --> 0:24:50.600 The law and the regulation still match until three months later, 0:24:52.160 --> 0:24:54.960 Health and Human Services did a little bit of reformatting 0:24:55.200 --> 0:24:59.240 of their rules and regulations. They eliminated an unnecessary section, 0:24:59.440 --> 0:25:04.280 so everything got shifted by point one. So now the 0:25:04.359 --> 0:25:07.600 list of toxins with risin on it is section seventy 0:25:07.600 --> 0:25:11.400 three point three and the law wasn't amended to match. 0:25:12.880 --> 0:25:16.720 It's like a dead link, right, the law requires the list. 0:25:17.440 --> 0:25:19.720 The law says that the things on the list are illegal, 0:25:20.880 --> 0:25:24.520 but it points you to a really specific place, and 0:25:24.680 --> 0:25:27.760 that's not where the list is anymore. And if it 0:25:27.840 --> 0:25:30.119 only criminalizes the things on the list and there is 0:25:30.280 --> 0:25:49.639 no list, then it's not illegal. Obviously this was a mistake. 0:25:50.680 --> 0:25:56.720 They'd made updates in tandem twice before. Twice the regulations 0:25:56.840 --> 0:25:59.240 changed and they updated the law to match so that 0:25:59.359 --> 0:26:02.320 the numbers still matched. They just didn't do it the 0:26:02.400 --> 0:26:06.320 third time. And in the law it lists the name 0:26:06.800 --> 0:26:09.240 of the regulation they're talking about. It just has the 0:26:09.320 --> 0:26:13.600 wrong number. Surely that doesn't make it legal to make risin. 0:26:15.359 --> 0:26:18.440 But I found two judges who said that's exactly what 0:26:18.560 --> 0:26:22.400 it did in this case. In twenty eighteen, a judge 0:26:22.400 --> 0:26:25.200 in the Northern Destruct of Georgia dismissed the indictment against 0:26:25.200 --> 0:26:30.159 William Christopher Gibbs. Judge Richard's Story wrote, it falls to 0:26:30.280 --> 0:26:33.240 Congress to write the laws or to amend them if 0:26:33.240 --> 0:26:37.560 they yield unfair or unwanted results. The role of the courts, 0:26:37.600 --> 0:26:39.879 on the other hand, is limited to fairly reading and 0:26:39.960 --> 0:26:45.240 applying the law's Congress rights, not to change them. In 0:26:45.359 --> 0:26:49.920 other words, Congress fucked up, But a judge can't change 0:26:49.920 --> 0:26:53.720 the law. He can't apply the law that he thinks 0:26:53.800 --> 0:26:58.200 should have been passed. Citing that decision in the Gibbs case, 0:26:58.280 --> 0:27:01.480 judge James Moody and Arkansas missed a similar case against 0:27:01.480 --> 0:27:06.199 Alexander Jordan in twenty twenty. Jordan was twenty one when 0:27:06.240 --> 0:27:09.080 he called nine one one in a panic, believing he'd 0:27:09.119 --> 0:27:13.600 poisoned himself. He claimed that he'd created the risin because 0:27:13.600 --> 0:27:16.840 he was thinking of ending his own life, and when 0:27:16.880 --> 0:27:19.439 first responders arrived, he did warn them to be careful 0:27:19.480 --> 0:27:22.320 around the substance. He didn't want people to get hurt. 0:27:24.320 --> 0:27:26.840 After his arrest, he was sent to a psychiatric facility 0:27:26.880 --> 0:27:31.360 to await trial, but the trial ever came. Congress amended 0:27:31.400 --> 0:27:34.480