CZM Rewind: Arrested Democracy

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello again, dear listeners, this is your host, Molly Conger,
once again bringing you a rerun. I'm so sorry. I
promise I will be back next week with a brand
new Weird Little Guy for you. This pair of episodes
originally aired back in November of twenty twenty four. It's
one of the more lighthearted story arcs we've had on

(00:30):
Weird Little Guys. It tells the story of a half
baked plot to take over a small town in Tennessee
so a conspiracy theory blogger and a militia chaplin could
prove once and for all that Barack Obama was born
in Kenya. He wasn't, obviously, and they didn't succeed. It's

(00:51):
just a silly little story about a lesser known chapter
in the history of right wing extremists refusing to accept
election results. If you missed it last time around, I
hope you will enjoy one of the only stories I've
told so far where nobody really got hurt except me.
It did cause me some agony to dig up and

(01:13):
listen to hours of old episodes of g Gordon Liddy's
talk radio show so that I could find the exact
moment in history when a conspiracy theorist called the guy
who did Watergate to tell him about the armed standoff
he and his friends were going to have after breakfast,
but it was worth it. It's a fun episode. On

(01:39):
April first, twenty ten, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter Francis
Fitzpatrick the Third walked into the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.
That was no surprise to anyone in Madisonville. Fitzpatrick had
become a frequent visitor to this courthouse in a small
town in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. A

(02:01):
year earlier, in March of two thousand nine, he asked
a Monroe County grand jury to indict President Barack Obama
on charges of treason. The grand jury declined to do so.
In the year that followed, he had been a regular
fixture in the County court Clerk's office, demanding information about
the county's jury selection process. After the grand jury's refusal

(02:24):
to accept his presentation of evidence against Barack Obama, he
could only conclude that the process itself was deeply corrupt
and sinister forces were conspiring against him to suppress the
truth that Barack Houssain Obama was not the rightful president
of the United States, that he was born in Kenya,

(02:45):
that he had rigged the two thousand eight election, and
he was guilty of high treason. Walter Fitzpatrick was more
than prepared to put Barack Obama on trial, but now
he believed the whole Damn's system was guilty and he
wasn't going to let them get away with it. He
just needed some backup. I'm Molly Konger, and this is

(03:11):
where the little guys as in writing this. It's a
few days after the twenty twenty four presidential election. Every

(03:36):
election has winners and losers, and not everybody is happy
with the results. It's probably no surprise to you that
I count myself among those of us who aren't thrilled
with the results this time around. But sometimes disappointment, dread,
and dissatisfaction aren't enough. For some people, an undesirable election

(03:59):
outcome is simply unacceptable. Literally, they can't accept it, it
can't be true, and it can't be allowed to stand.
As with my Halloween episode, I'm a little behind the
curve here in terms of seasonal content. At this rate,
I'll be doing a Christmas special on Groundhog's Day. But

(04:21):
elections and weird little guys go together like peanut butter
and jelly. Well, no, no, that's not true. You do
find them together often, but they don't usually mix well.
So maybe it's more like oil and water. Neither of
those analogies are really giving me what I want in

(04:42):
my personal experience. Right wing extremists and election results go
together like blue gatorade and raw onions. When I covered
the January sixth ride at the Capitol in twenty twenty one,
those were the two things I saw people pulling out
of their backpacks the most. Think. Some right wing influencer
convinced a lot of people who'd never been to a

(05:04):
riot before that you should carry a raw white onion
cut in half in a ziploc baggie because rubbing it
on your face is a homeopathic remedy for tear gas.
Just a heads up, that is not true. Do not
do that. Do not rub a raw onion on your

(05:25):
eyeballs at any time, and definitely don't do it after
exposure to a chemical irritant. And if you can only
pack one thing to drink in a situation like that,
make it water. Or else you'll be washing pepper spray
and onion juice out of your eyes with gatorade, which
doctors do not recommend. That's just some free advice for you,

(05:48):
but I thought it would make perfect sense to do
some kind of election themed weird little guy. And to
be honest, I'm bored of January sixth stories. I'm sure
I'll get to some of them on this show eventually.
And there were some guys there who were very strange
guys even before they were trying to stop the steal.

(06:11):
And if the guy they were fighting for that day
follows through on his promise to pardon them all, some
of them will make their way back into the news
one way or another, whether that's running for office or
building a bomb. But right now today, I'm sick of
thinking about the twenty twenty election results because I'm sick

(06:32):
of thinking about the twenty twenty four election results. And
the twenty twenty election was not the first time right
wing extremists couldn't accept the results. So come with me
to the distant past. Two thousand and eight. I voted
for president for the first time that year, making me

(06:54):
one of nearly seventy million Americans who cast a ballot
for Barack Obama. He won handle it, beating John McCain
by more than seven percent in the popular vote and
pulling in three hundred and sixty five electoral votes to
McCain's one hundred and seventy three. Barack Obama was promising hope, change,
and healthcare. John McCain was burdened by George W. Bush's

(07:18):
rock bottom approval ratings and his support for Bush's now
increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. It seemed like a new
day had dawned. We were all going to get healthcare,
and we had finally elected our first black president. Of course,
not everyone was on board. We'd had more than two

(07:38):
centuries of white men named James, John, William, and George. Literally,
of the forty two presidents before Obama, eighteen of them
were named James, John William, or George. About forty percent
of the total presidential time until two thousand and eight
was under a guy with one of those four names.

(07:59):
We elected two two different guys named Franklin. We hadn't
really been getting a lot of variety. Conspiracy theories about
Barack Obama's race, religion, and place of birth are creatures
of racism, pure and simple. There's no talking your way
around that fact. He has a foreign sounding name and

(08:21):
he is not white. There was a lot of anxiety
that someone who didn't look like the American presidents we'd
had before couldn't possibly have the same American values. During
the primary, Mark Penn, a senior campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton,
wrote a memo suggesting that they should highlight the fact

(08:42):
that Obama spent some of his childhood in Indonesia while
emphasizing Clinton's Midwest roots, writing, his.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Roots and basic American values and culture are at best limited.
I cannot imagine electing a president during a time of
war who was not at his center fun mentally American
in his thinking and in his values.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
The Clinton campaign didn't end up going with this strategy,
but the memo got out, and this idea that Barack
Obama was an American bled into a conspiracy theory that
he was not American at all and had in fact
been born in Kenya. During the two thousand and eight

(09:26):
election season, surveys showed that as many as a third
of Republican voters believe there may be some truth to
the idea that Barack Obama was born outside of the
United States. An analysis published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity,
and Politics in twenty nineteen acknowledged that, yes, the best
predictor of believing in any conspiracy theory is a pre

(09:50):
existing belief in any other conspiracy theory. People who are
prone to believing unsubstantiated claims often believe many of them.
But while there are certainly people of all political orientations
who are willing to entertain the theory, the study found
that belief in this particular conspiracy theory was uniquely correlated

(10:12):
to the believer's own race, party affiliation, and most importantly,
their level of racial resentment toward African Americans. So to
be clear, there are multiple studies published in journals across
a range of disciplines over the course of nearly twenty
years that have found measurable correlations. Here, the people who

(10:35):
trafficked in Birtherism were white Republicans with a measurable level
of racial animus. This was never about getting to the truth.
It was an intense fear of a black president. In
June of two thousand and eight, just days after Hillary

(10:55):
Clinton conceded the primary and Obama was the presumptive nominee.
His campaign released a copy of his birth certificate showing
he had in fact been born in Hawaii. But you
can't kill a conspiracy with facts that's never worked. And
confronted with what should have been the final answer to

(11:16):
the question, Berthers just doubled down the birth certificate was
simply fake. This only fueled the fire, and in August
of two thousand and eight, the first of countless lawsuits
was filed. And oddly enough, we've already talked about this

(11:36):
particular lawsuit on this show in the first episode about
the Pennsylvania clansman Berry Black. Philip Burg's lawsuit alleged that
Obama had been born in Kenya, and this relied on
a sworn affidavit written by Ron McCrae about a phone
call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother

(11:58):
through a translator. Ron McCrae was the homophobic street preacher
who spent years harassing the owners of the Costanova Lounge,
a gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. It was located
across the street from a farm owned by some clansmen.
Berg's lawsuit was dismissed and the judge called it frivolous

(12:18):
and not worthy of discussion, which is true, but that
became the playbook. Berthers around the country filed frivolous and
baffling lawsuits. They filed them in federal court houses, county
circuit courts, state supreme courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals,

(12:39):
state boards of election, state administrative courts. They filed complaints
and requests for injunctions and petitions anywhere they could find
a bureaucrat sitting in a desk. For just the years
two thousand and eight through twenty twelve, I found over
two hundred complaints in various forms, filed with every kind

(13:01):
of court you can imagine, and some kinds of courts
I've never heard of, and they lost every single one.
They seemed convinced that they could find the right collection
of words, the right legal incantation, that, if presented to
the right judge and the right jury, would wake America

(13:24):
from this national nightmare of an Obama presidency. But the
lawsuits weren't working. Judge after judge sent them packing. In
most cases they didn't even get a hearing. They were
submitting complaints that had absolutely no legal basis to proceed,

(13:44):
No basis in reality even and in the cases that
did get a foot in the door, they were submitting
forged documents and relying on already debunked claims. Lawyers were sanctioned,
fines were levied, and suit after suit was dismissed. But undeterred,

(14:05):
the Birthers found a new way forward. If they couldn't
get justice through civil suits, they would simply have to
have the President of the United States arrested. In June
of two thousand and nine, one hundred and seventy two
extremely devoted conspiracy theorists convened. They called themselves the Super

(14:29):
American grand Jury. Now that's not a real thing. Grand
juries are real. Of course, we don't need to get
bogged down in the specifics because they vary from state
to state. But generally speaking, a grand jury is a
group of citizens convened by a court and tasked with

(14:50):
issuing indictments. So a prosecutor will briefly summarize a case.
They'll put on a little bit of evidence, maybe some witnesses,
and the grand jurors will just if there's probable cause
to believe a crime has been committed by the individual.
The prosecutor is seeking to indict. They aren't deciding if
anyone is innocent or guilty. They're not trying the case.

(15:12):
It's a much lower standard here. They're just deciding is
this something that should proceed as a case at all.
You've probably heard the saying you can get a grand
jury to indict a ham sandwich. It's a pretty low
bar to clear at this stage. But we're not here
to talk about real grand juries because that barely factors

(15:35):
into the story at all. I just want to be
clear that grand juries are real, they do exist, and
this was not one. A grand jury is made up
of grand jurors who have received an official summons from
a real court, and they are presented real potential cases

(15:55):
by a real prosecutor, and they make real determinations about
which cases get an indictments. There are six states that
allow citizen initiated grand juries in Oklahoma, Nevada, Kansas, Nebraska,
New Mexico, and North Dakota. There is a process through
which you can collect enough signatures on a petition to

(16:15):
force a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate
an alleged crime. That's not what this was either. They
didn't have a petition they submitted to a court. They
didn't do it in any of those states. I'm just saying.
Avenues do exist. And in some states like California, you
can submit a written complaint to request a grand jury

(16:36):
investigation into a criminal allegation, but they're under no obligation
to follow up. And in Tennessee, the fact that is
about to become very relevant. State law allows any citizen
to apply to testify before a county grand jury about
an alleged offense that is prosecutable in that county. But

(16:58):
the idea of a citizens grand jury like the super
American grand jury, is not something these particular extremists invented
in their modern iteration. Most of these citizens grand jury
groups were trying to arrest Barack Obama for various invented crimes,
but they also popped up in the early two thousands

(17:19):
among nine to eleven truthers who wanted to arrest George
Bush during the Malheir National Wildlife Refuge occupation. A few
years back, militia members who supported the Bundy family convened
fake grand juries to indict local officials and even some
reporters whose coverage they found lacking. Conspiracy theory. Frequent flier
Larry Clayman has not only indicted Joe Biden with a

(17:41):
fake grand jury, he even convicted him. But according to
Daniel Levatas the author of The Terrorist next Door, a
two thousand and four book on the American militia movement,
these citizen grand juries actually date back to the nineteen
seventies with Christian identity extremists. Christian identity has come up before.

(18:03):
We talked about it briefly in the episode about Christopher Hassen,
the Coastguard lieutenant who was stockpiling guns and planning to
assassinate the Supreme Court, but was too addicted to opiates
to make much progress. He'd spend some time researching Christian
identity online before writing to a longtime white nationalist leader
named Harold Covington about his plans to make changes to

(18:25):
society with quote a little focused violence and Christian identity
kind of sounds like it might mean someone whose identity
is Christian. Right, It's just someone who considers themselves to
be a Christian. But that's not what it means at all.

(18:46):
It refers to a specific set of extremist beliefs that
white Europeans are God's true chosen people. It is a
deeply anti Semitic belief system, and one whose followers are
often very willing to age and violence. The earliest example
levatas sites of a written threat to bring a citizen's

(19:06):
grand jury indictment is a tax protester in Michigan in
nineteen seventy two who threatened to indict local authorities trying
to enforce a core order. And in nineteen seventy five,
Richard Butler, another weird little Guy's recurring character, led a
group of fifty followers to try to arrest a policeman
in Kurdalene, Idaho before the officer could testify against a

(19:30):
member of the group who'd been charged with assault with
a deadly weapon. Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan Nations
yet at that point, but he was already a prominent
figure within Christian identity. So the super American Grand j

(20:00):
had deep roots in dark places, and it was not
so super and not a grand jury at all. It
was just a collection of conspiracists who wrote their own
indictment against the president, and then they went to a
federal courthouse in Washington, d c. And filed it Judge

(20:22):
Royce Lamberth promptly dismissed them. I guess maybe dismiss is
a tricky word to use here, because a real indictment
can be dismissed by a judge, and that's not what
happened here, because this was not a real indictment. What
Judge Lamberth actually did was issue in order denying them

(20:42):
permission to have even filed it at all. Writing, any
self styled indictment or presentment issued by such a group
has no force under the Constitution or laws of the
United States. Judge Lamberth took senior status in twenty thirteen.
He's kind of retired but still working, so he is

(21:03):
actually still a federal judge in DC today and has
presided over quite a few of the January sixth cases,
most notably the trial of the QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley
in twenty twenty three, fourteen years after he kicked those
Birthers out of his court for trying to arrest the President.
He was dismayed to see Republican politicians trafficking in rhetoric

(21:25):
that downplayed the events of January sixth, writing in a
court filing in one of those cases.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
The Court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept
that they did anything wrong. But in my thirty seven
years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when
such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream. I
have been dismayed to see distortions in outright falsehoods seep
into the public consciousness. I've been shocked to watch some
public figures try to rewrite history. Clement rioters behaved in

(21:57):
an orderly fashion like ordinary tourists. I'm mortalizing convicted January
sixth defendants as political prisoners or even incredibly hostages. That
is all preposterous. The Court fears that such destructive, misguided
rhetoric could pressage further danger to our country.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
So the Super American grand Jury's first indictment didn't work,
But that didn't stop them. That's sort of a theme here.
Nothing really seems to deter them. One of those Super
American grandeurors was a Georgia man named Carl Swenson. Swinson
is a very special kind of conspiracy theorist called a

(22:40):
sovereign citizen. It's a strange and complicated set of beliefs
that I can't really do justice in the time we
have for this story. But it's a kind of legal
magical thinking. There's a lot of crossover between sovereign citizens
and other kinds of conspiratorial belief, and a not insignificant
amount of sovereign citizen belief within the militia movement, and

(23:05):
sovereign citizens generally believe that there are certain secret procedural
loopholes that they can use to avoid being subject to
the law, anything from traffic stops to income taxes. To
be honest, it's almost always traffic stops and income taxes.
You've probably heard jokes about a guy in a courtroom

(23:26):
proclaiming that the judge has no authority over him because
there's gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom and
that means that admiralty law is in effect. Or maybe
you've heard of someone being pulled over and refusing to
produce a driver's license, arguing with the cop that they
don't need a driver's license because they're not driving, they're traveling,
and it's different. I've only seen one in court in

(23:50):
real life, and it was a young woman appealing a
conviction for driving without a license. She just kept yelling
at the judge. I do not contract with the Department
of mone Vehicles. It did not work. She was unsuccessful
in that appeal. A month after Judge Lamberth told the

(24:11):
Super American Grand Jury that they couldn't just make their
own grand jury, Carl Swenson and a few of the
others submitted a new case to the court. If they
couldn't be their own grand jury, then the court should
convene one for them. Judge Lamberth once again declined, explaining
that a general grievance about the government doesn't give them

(24:35):
standing to file this complaint. There was some kind of
procedural mishap in the court clerk's office, though, and the
docket was left open by accident. This normally wouldn't matter
at all, no lawyer would keep filing motions at a
closed case. But they did not have lawyers, and one

(24:55):
of Swinson's co petitioners, Penny Kelso, filed a buzz There
are seven page document four years later, demanding that the
judge take action. It has a lot of prayers in
it and links to blogs and random excerpts from the Constitution,
And the last page is just illegible handwritten notes, and

(25:19):
I can kind of make out something about Benghazi, and
she signed this whole thing Penny Kelso DVM, which is
technically true. Penny Kelso does have a doctorate of veterinary medicine,
but the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has suspended

(25:42):
her license half a dozen times for things like watching
a C section on someone's dog, duct taping bandages to
animals in a way that caused harm, improperly confining animals
in a kennel, and falsifying records related to mandatory continuing
the education hours. Penny doesn't actually come up again in

(26:05):
this story. She's not really relevant here. I just wanted
to make sure you know that at least one person
involved in this whole situation has killed a puppy. So
they couldn't sue the president, they couldn't issue their own
federal indictment, they couldn't make a judge convene a federal

(26:27):
grand jury. But they had incontrovertible proof that Barack Obama
could not be the president, and it was their duty
as Americans to have him arrested. If this false president's
collaborators in Washington, d C. Wouldn't heed their demands, maybe
a grand jury. Foreman in a small town in rural

(26:49):
Tennessee would Sweetwater, Tennessee is a small town straddling the
line between McMinn and Monroe counties of geography, that explains
why Sweetwater resident Walter Fitzpatrick would eventually go to jail
for trying to perform citizens' arrests on courthouse employees in
both counties. In March of two thousand and nine, he

(27:13):
drafted his own indictment against Barack Obama. He went down
to the county courthouse and notarized the following letter.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
I have observed and extensively recorded treacherous attacks by military
political aristocrats against the United States Constitution for twenty years now,
and yet another betrayal, you have broken in and entered
the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, dissembling,
and deceit, posing as an imposter president and commander in
chief who has stripped civilian command and control over the

(27:46):
military establishment. Known military criminal actors command racketeers are now
free in the exercise of military government, intent upon destruction
of America's constitutional government, free from constitutional restraint and following
your criminal example, military commanders deployed US Army active duty
combat troops into the small civilian community of Samson, Alabama,

(28:08):
last week, in a demonstration of their newly received despotic
domestic police power. We come now to this reckoning. I
accuse you and your military political criminal assistance of treason.
I name you and your military criminal associates as traitors.
Your criminal ascension manifests this clear and present danger. You

(28:30):
fundamentally changed our form of government. The Constitution no longer works.
Confident holding your silent agreement and admission, I identify you
as a foreign born domestic enemy. My sworn duty, mister Obama,
is to stand against what you stand for. You're not
my president, you're not my commander in chief. Obedient to
the Constitution and submission of this criminal accusation, I remain

(28:52):
steadfast and born fighting. Walter Francis Fitzpatrick the Third.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
There's a lot going on there. You probably have some
questions about Walter's claims. Will take him one at a time.
The twenty years of experience fighting the treacherous attacks on
the Constitution by the military political aristocrats, well that's about
how long he's been writing a blog. He started his

(29:22):
blog jag Hunters, after he was pushed out of the Navy.
Fitzpatrick was allowed to serve out his nineteen and a
half years, rounding up to twenty so he could receive
his pension, but his last four years in the Navy
were humiliating. He was convicted in a court martial in

(29:42):
nineteen ninety for improperly accounting for the morale, welfare and
recreation funds for the sailors aboard the USS Mars, of
which he was the executive officer at the time. He
was found not guilty on charges of stealing twenty eight
hundred dollars, misappropriate another ten four hundred dollars, and improper

(30:03):
use of a government vehicle, and his only sentence was
a reprimand all things considered, it could have been worse.
He was basically convicted of bad record keeping and given
a talking to. He didn't have to go to the
brig He didn't get kicked out or demoted, or lose

(30:25):
his pension or any of his access to veterans' benefits.
He served out his twenty years and retired and collected
a pension, but he spent four years sitting at a desk.
He was passed over for promotions. He was humiliated and
angry and he stayed angry at the government for a

(30:50):
very long time. Sometimes I get a little lost in
the weeds. When I started writing this week's episode, it
was supposed to be about a guy we haven't gotten
to yet and aren't really going to get to today.
But when you start pulling the narrative threads and looking

(31:10):
for the beginning of the story, there's always more beginnings
than you think. It's probably more than enough backstory on
Walter Fitzpatrick to say that his distrust of the government
comes from his decades long, deeply held belief that he
was a victim of a grave injustice at this nineteen
ninety court martial. But as I spend more and more

(31:32):
time really getting to know each of these weird little guys,
patterns start to emerge, and I think Walter Fitzpatrick fits
into the Frank Sweeney archetype. I did two episodes a
while back about a lifelong con man named Frank Sweeney.
He got into all sorts of hijinks and cross paths

(31:53):
with all kinds of people, going to federal prison half
a dozen times for various frauds and threats. But the
one thing that connected everything in Frank's life was an
overwhelming sense of personal grievance. He had been wronged. He
had been wronged, and the only way to make it

(32:14):
right was to make that lust for vengeance the sole
focus of his life, no matter where that path took
him until he felt satisfied. For Frank, that meant spending
several years writing threatening postcards to a stranger who made
a passing comment about where he was parked at the
post office, and I see echoes of that same mindset here.

(32:39):
In nineteen ninety four, Fitzpatrick had successfully recruited his Congressman
Norm Dix as an advocate on his behalf, and Congressman
Dix wrote several letters to the Navy advocating for a
new trial for Fitzpatrick. He did his best as an
elective representative to help a constituent seek redress through the
proper channels, and he was ultimately unsuccessful. Fitzpatrick continued communicating

(33:06):
with Norm Dix and later Congressman Adam Smith throughout the
nineties and early two thousands, badgering their staff regularly and
demanding his decade old case be revisited. There wasn't really
much anyone could do, but both representatives met with him
and heard his complaints and did what they could. In

(33:28):
two thousand and two, Fitzpatrick was banned from Congressman Smith's
to Koma offices. It's unclear what led to the ban,
but a letter filed with the court said that they
would continue to serve him as a constituent, but he
was only allowed to communicate with the Congressman or his
staff by letter. And in two thousand and three, two

(33:49):
female staffers in Norm Dix's office got restraining orders against Fitzpatrick.
In her petition to the court, one of those staffers wrote,
over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that
mister Fitzpatrick's rage was building. He had difficulty looking me
in the eye, and he was so angry he often

(34:11):
paced in our lobby. He has no respect for the
work we've done for him over the years. The last
straw was an incident in October of two thousand and
three when Fitzpatrick refused to leave the office and physically
prevented the employee from leaving by blocking the door, forcing
her to call the police. Police reports show multiple violations

(34:35):
of these restraining orders and several complaints, though no prosecutions
for trespass, harassment, and domestic violence. He was angry he
had been wronged and their inability to help him was unforgivable.
Fitzpatrick was coming into regular contact with the police in

(34:58):
Kitsap County, Washington until moved to Tennessee in two thousand
and seven. But back to Fitzpatrick's trees and allegations, you
probably noticed that he only barely mentioned the president's citizenship.
I mean, it's in there, don't get me wrong. He
does call Obama a foreign born enemy, but that's pretty

(35:20):
secondary here. This indictment for treason isn't really about that.
This is a brand new tactic. He's accusing the president
of having violated the Posse Comatatis Act, and that did
actually kind of happen, not in the way he's claiming. Obviously,

(35:43):
Barack Obama did not violate the Posse Commatatus Act, but
it's not a wholly fabricated allegation. The Posse Commatatus Act
dates back to the end of reconstruction after the Civil War,
and it prohibits the use of the US military in
civilian policing. It doesn't apply to the National Guard under
the direction of a state governor, and there are exceptions

(36:06):
Federal troops can be deployed domestically in certain situations, like
if the President invokes the Insurrection Act, or if there
is some kind of emergency involving nuclear materials or significant
amounts of explosive ordinance that can't be safely dealt with otherwise.
But generally speaking, the United States military cannot engage in

(36:27):
domestic civilian policing. It's not something that comes up very
often for normal people. Under normal circumstances, You're probably never
having conversations about the Posse Commatatus Act. But it's a
big boogeyman in anti government movements, and the allegation Fitzpatrick
is making in this letter alludes to an actual incident.

(36:52):
On March tenth, two thousand and nine, Michael McClendon carried
out what is still the deadliest mass shooting in the
history of Alabama, killing ten people, injuring six others, and
ultimately taking his own life. It wasn't political or ideological,
it wasn't racially motivated. It's just a terrible, sad story

(37:15):
about gun violence in America. He was an angry young
man with a gun, and he made his problems everybody
else's but Clendon. First drove to his mother's house in Kinston, Alabama,
where he shot and killed her and then burnt her
house down. Then he drove to his uncle's house and
nearby Samson, Alabama, and shot his uncle, two cousins, and

(37:38):
several of their neighbors. Then he went to his grandmother's
house and shot and killed her. And as he fled
the third crime scene, he was firing at random from
his car window, shooting bystanders. He killed a gas station attendant,
passing motorists and injured several pedestrians. When sheriff's deputies tried

(38:02):
to run him off the road, he shot one of
them too. With more than a dozen people shot across
three towns spanning two counties, law enforcement was stretched pretty thin.
There were multiple crime scenes, ten dead bodies, half a
dozen seriously injured survivors, including an infant, and the shooter
was on the move, and so someone at the Geneva

(38:25):
County Sheriff's office made a phone call to nearby Fort
Rucker to ask for help. The army officer who responded
to the request later said that he believed at the
time that what he was doing was lawful, citing his
own experience assisting in disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. His

(38:46):
intention was only to be what he called a good neighbor,
and for a period of about five hours that afternoon,
several soldiers from Fort Rucker assisted local law enforcement at
traffic checkpoints near the crime scenes and stood guard at
the makeshift morgue that they'd set up to store the bodies.

(39:06):
And this was in fact a violation of the Posse
Comma Tatis Act. Soldiers from the United States Army should
not have been participating in traffic checkpoints. That is against
the law, and the officer who made that call was disciplined.
But it was a local mistake. This wasn't something that

(39:26):
was run up the chain of command all the way
to the president. This didn't go through the Pentagon. They
didn't convene the Joint chiefs of Staff. It was just
someone from the sheriff's office made a phone call to
a guy he knew at the army base, and they
did something they didn't realize was wrong. I won't claim
to be familiar with the details of military chain of

(39:47):
command or military law or anything, but I'm not sure
the commander in chief can be charged with treason because
one guy in Alabama accidentally broke the law. This actual
violation of the Possecomatatis Act was enough to send a
certain kind of guy into hysterics. I mean, look, I'm

(40:08):
not making excuses for it. Any kind of precedent for
that sort of thing should be avoided. The potential for
abuse is extreme and terrifying. But anti government activists could
finally point to a real thing that happened as proof
that Barack Obama was about to institute martial law. Federal

(40:31):
troops really were setting up checkpoints. It happened. It's not
a drill. For someone like Walter Fitzpatrick. This was all
the evidence he needed to have the President hanged for treason.
And that gets us back to where we started this
long journey, back to the beginning of the story. Walter
Fitzpatrick accused the president of treason in March two thousand

(40:56):
and nine. He took his complaint down to the courthouse
and he got it noted. He applied to present it
to a Monroe County grand jury, and they chose not
to indict the president, probably mostly because even if there
was probable cause here, which there wasn't. The Monroe County,

(41:17):
Tennessee Circuit Court does not have jurisdiction in a case
involving the President of the United States committing treason, unfortunately,
but that's not how Fitzpatrick saw it. In his mind,
this could only mean that there is corruption afoot. Again

(41:49):
and again, Walter Fitzpatrick made the trip to the county courthouse.
He harassed the court clerk. He tried forcing his way
into the grand jury proceedings to make his presentation again,
and they did hear him out once more. They allowed
him to present the grand jury. In December of two
thousand and nine. That grand jury again declined to indict

(42:12):
President Barack Obama for treason, and at this point they
were done humoring him. Hearing this evidence again wasn't going
to change anything. He was on several occasions refused entrance
into the courtroom while the grand jury was hearing real cases.
And just like those years, he spent getting angrier and

(42:34):
angrier at his congressman's office staff. These people were as
helpful as they were required to be. They were doing
their jobs, but there wasn't really anything they could do
that would satisfy him because his requests weren't reasonable. They
couldn't give him what he wanted, But in his mind

(42:55):
this inability to assist him could only mean that they
were active fighting against him, and so they too became
subjects of his investigations. They were all guilty now of
obstruction of justice, and they too must be arrested. In
March of twenty ten, a year after he first charged

(43:19):
the President with treason, Walter Fitzpatrick sent a letter to
the police chief in Madisonville, Tennessee. If no one else
was interested in justice, he was just going to have
to do it himself.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Chief Breeden, please accept this notice of the necessity, authority,
and intent to conduct a series of imminent citizens arrests
throughout Monroe County, Tennessee. The first arrest plan must be
constructed and crafted in cooperation with the Madisonville Police Department.
Wisdom dictates the first arrest plan be one that is
acceptable to your police chief colleagues throughout Monroe County. An

(43:52):
arrest plan that can be used again and again time
is not a friend. Planning must begin immediately. Contact information
is provided separately. Fair Wins following sees Walter Francis Fitzpatrick third.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Notice that he's not asking for permission and he's not
making a threat. He's letting him know he feels like
he and the police chief have the same level of
authority here. They're both absolutely empowered to make these kinds
of arrests, and he just thinks it would be best
if they collaborated on this plan. He's not threatening to

(44:32):
break the law, because he doesn't think he is. He's
inviting the police chief to participate in what he believes
is a perfectly rational and legal course of action. It's
not clear if the police chief wrote him back. I'm
sure they had some conversations about this plan that didn't

(44:53):
go how Fitzpatrick had hoped, but there was no talking
him out of it. He was going to arrest the
people who were staying ending in his way, with or
without their help, and on April first, twenty ten, he
tried it. Lad the room, tired arguing with official pressures.

Speaker 4 (45:13):
Play lead the room.

Speaker 5 (45:15):
You were under ARRESTA placing you under arrest, mister Petway,
you are.

Speaker 6 (45:19):
Under citizens or whatever around around, I'm placing you under
I asked you to be her room less.

Speaker 7 (45:25):
Now I ask you the room US coort this Gilman
out of the room.

Speaker 8 (45:29):
Mister Petway is under citizens.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached Grand jury Foreman
Gary Petway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying
to indict. And Petway doesn't look excited to see Fitzpatrick,
but he looks more exasperated than anything else. He doesn't
look afraid of the old man lurching towards him, saying

(45:56):
over and over again, I'm placing you under arrest. Pet
Way is just sort of backing away from him and
repeating please leave, please leave the room, and pointing towards
the door. And the video we have of this incident
is not police bodycam footage, but you'd be forgiven for
assuming that's where it came from. It was recorded on

(46:19):
someone's cell phone, a Motorola droid to be precise. If
you remember those by Carl Swenson, the sovereign citizen who
had been agitating for people all over the country to
take this kind of action in their local courts ever
since Judge Lamberth denied his petition in federal court the
year before.

Speaker 9 (46:42):
He did this for us.

Speaker 10 (46:44):
What do you intend to do for him and for
this country if we don't come to his assistance, if
we don't get to the courthouse If we don't call him,
if we don't walk and march on that courthouse and
that Sheriff's department, we don't deserve the freedoms we have.

Speaker 9 (47:00):
I must do. I plan on marching on that courthouse.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Carl Swinson was one of several supporters who showed up
at the courthouse with Fitzpatrick that day. Swenson recorded the
incident and posted it online, exhorting his followers to show
up at the next hearing. The website he was running
at the time, rise Upfoamerica dot com is gone now.

(47:27):
That url does still go to a real website, but
it belongs to some kind of construction consortium now, and
the homepage is a six year old blog post about
the pros and cons of different kinds of carpet tiles.
One of the other supporters who witnessed Fitzpatrick's arrest that
day was a man named Darren Huff. Like Swenson, Huff

(47:51):
had made the drive to Madisonville from his home in Georgia.
He was a member of the Oath Keepers and was
also the chaplain of a separate militia group that was
just called the Georgia Militia. When Fitzpatrick was granted bond.
A few days after his arrest, Darren Huff made the
drive back up to Tennessee to meet with him. They

(48:12):
weren't going to suffer this indignity in silence. They made
a plan, and two weeks later, when Fitzpatrick was due
back in court, Darren Huff was outside the courthouse with
a crowd of supporters, prepared to take over the whole
damn town by force if they had to. And Darren
Huff was the weird little guy I had in mind

(48:34):
when I sat down to start this week's episode. I
was thinking about guys who did something weird because they
were mad about an election, and I had a vague
recollection of some research I did on the oath Keepers
back in twenty nineteen when Oathkeeper's founder Stuart Rhodes was
front row center, right behind the podium at a Trump
campaign rally, and I did a little more digging around

(48:57):
in twenty twenty, when the Oathkeepers were starting to make
no about what would eventually become the January sixth insurrection.
I'd collected a few odds and ends about Oathkeepers who
got arrested for a variety of crimes over the years
trying to convince people that this could be a serious problem.

(49:17):
And there are plenty of strange little stories in there,
like an oathkeeper in Ohio who was being investigated for
mortgage fraud back in twenty ten and the investigators completely
accidentally discovered that he was making napalm in his garage,
Or how Oathkeepers leaders Stuart Rhodes advised members to take

(49:38):
it upon themselves to prevent voter fraud in the twenty
sixteen election in a plan that definitely was not meant
to function as voter intimidation. And there's the story of
that car load of Oathkeepers who were arrested in Florida
in twenty nineteen. They were charged with violating the curfew
order put in place during the state of emergency after

(49:59):
Hurricane Mit. The militia members were driving around dressed as
police officers, cruising around town in the dark with a
car full of rifles, dressed as cops patrolling for looters.
And obviously there's the entire saga of the Oathkeeper's role

(50:21):
in January sixth, But like I said, right now, I'm
tired of that story. But then I remembered Darren Huff
and his plans to citizens arrest a whole county courthouse
because he didn't think Barack Obama was the real president.
It was sort of a micro January sixth an hour
south of Knoxville, but eleven years too soon. At this

(50:46):
point in the run of this show, I think I
have to stop apologizing for writing so much preamble that
the actual story I'm getting to is in part two.
I should just admit to myself that I'm doing that
on purpose. Sure, I could launch right into a story
about Darren showing up at the courthouse with a gun.
That would still be an interesting weird little guy. But

(51:09):
Darren and his gun outside of a courthouse three hours
away from his home across state lines, trying to arrest
a grand jury foreman in a small town that he
has no connection to, just doesn't make any sense, does it.
Trying to explain that a retired Navy vette was convinced
his county court could arrest the president sounds like a
silly little joke without the context that this was a

(51:33):
nationwide movement motivated by a racist conspiracy theory. These aren't
just stories about one weird little guy at a time.
It's a whole network None of this happens in a vacuum,
which is why the same stories keep playing out with
different characters, and the same characters keep showing up in

(51:55):
each other's stories. An oathkeeper tried to arrest the president
in two thousand. The oath keepers tried to overturn the
twenty twenty election. The woman whose blog chronicled Walter Fitzpatrick's
efforts fueling the conspiracy and driving more supporters to show
up in Madisonville tried to obtain government records in twenty

(52:16):
twenty two related to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's families, immigration, and naturalization,
and the same woman was a central figure in the
brief frenzy of birther conspiracies about Kamala Harris in twenty
twenty four. When Jared Taylor, America's leading purveyor of pseudo

(52:36):
academic eugenicist polemics, had to go to court in twenty
eighteen over a permit for his annual race science conference,
he sought help from Birther lawyer Van Erian, the same
lawyer who worked on Karl Swenson's lawsuits to keep Barack
Obama off the ballot in twenty twelve, cutting straight to
the chase and getting to Darren's story wouldn't just be

(52:59):
miss the forest for the trees, it would be ignoring
a whole thriving white supremacist ecosystem, because when you turn
over a big rock, there's more than one weird bug
under there. And to be honest, I really just wanted
to have plenty of room to explore Darren Huff's fascinating

(53:22):
legal strategy because not to spoil it, but he does
end up in federal prison for a little bit. It's
such a rare treat to have so much incredible source material,
and I really don't want to have to cut the
audio of a man who got pulled over on his

(53:42):
way to commit a federal crime and used that opportunity
to try to recruit a state trooper into his militia.
So until next week, don't be rude to your court clerk,
and please, for the love of God, do not put
gatorade in your eyes. When we left off last week,

(54:35):
Walter Francis Fitzpatrick had been taken into custody outside the
Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee, on April first, twenty ten.
Fitzpatrick barged into a closed grand jury proceeding and attempted
to place Monroe County grand Jury Foreman Gary Petway under
citizen's arrest. Fitzpatrick had written up his own arrest warrant,

(54:57):
charging Petway with obstruction of justice for his refusal to
issue an indictment against Barack Obama for treason. Walter Fitzpatrick
did not have the authority to draw up his own
arrest warrants any more than a county court in hour
south of Knoxville had the authority to indict the president
on a federal crime. But none of that really mattered

(55:19):
to the small crowd of supporters outside, who were sure
that they were closer than ever to arresting the president.
Darren Huff, an oathkeeper from Georgia, was among those supporters.
He was standing by with his video camera, hoping to
capture Fitzpatrick's victory against the corrupt county grand jury.

Speaker 8 (55:40):
You have been notified, You've been told mister Petway has
just been placed under citizen's arrest.

Speaker 5 (55:45):
My name is Walter Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 8 (55:46):
I have just placed mister Petway under citizen's arrest.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
But when the doors opened again, it was not Gary
Petway who was being escorted out by the Sheriff's deputies.
It was Walter Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 11 (56:03):
They're leaving or why?

Speaker 5 (56:05):
Because you just interrupted a court proceeding. The rest of
us would get arrested for that. However, all of you
think you're special. So now we're leaving the courthouse, and
then why then you free to go? Otherwise you're gonna
get arrested to afraid to come.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Back in, No, sir, and he could have just left,
As the deputy points out, he's kind of being treated
with kid gloves here. He's already broken the law, but
nobody really wants to deal with this old crank and
his fan club. But instead of leaving, Fitzpatrick pivoted. Now

(56:43):
he's placing the sheriff himself under arrest. In the audio recording,
you can hear the deputy sigh dramatically as Fitzpatrick begins
reading the officers their rights and they realize that the
only way Fitzpatrick is leaving the building is in handcuffs.

(57:04):
Fitzpatrick was charged with interfering with a grand jury, resisting arrest,
and inciting a riot. He was held in the county
jail over the weekend, during which time he reportedly refused
to eat or drink, and was offered a fifteen hundred
dollars bond on the condition that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
On April seventh, twenty ten, the day after Fitzpatrick was released,

(57:28):
Darren Huff made the drive from his home in Georgia
back up to Madisonville. In a text message Huff sent
a friend on his way home that night, he said
he'd spent the day meeting with Fitzpatrick going over the plan.
They were coordinating with multiple groups to show up for
what Huff called Phase two. When Walter Fitzpatrick appeared for

(57:51):
his court date on April twentieth, he wasn't going to
be alone.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
I'm Molly Conger. This is where the guys.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
This episode is about Darren Huff. I mean, the last
episode was supposed to be about Darren Huff. That was
the story I sat down to write in the first place.
But my vague recollection of the story of some oathkeeper
with a hair brain scheme to citizens' arrest and entire
county court turned up something a little more complicated that

(58:40):
keeps happening. It turns out history is always a little messy.
No one is really the sole protagonist in their own story.
Life doesn't really work that way. But if you listened
to last week's episode, now you have some contexts for
the baffling confidence Walter Fitzpatrick and Aaron Huff seemed to

(59:01):
have in their plan. They'd both been completely swept up
in this nationwide right wing mania of Birtherism, the conspiracy
theory that Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as the
president of the United States because he had been born
in Kenya. Walter Fitzpatrick as bizarre and disconnected from reality

(59:21):
as his ideas sound. Was far from the only American
who was barging into a court clerk's office every week
to demand something be done about the president's acts of treason.
It was everywhere. Everyone from Chuck Norris to Donald Trump
was asking is Barack Obama a natural born citizen of

(59:41):
the United States. Politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and
Newt Gingrich flirted with the idea, walking right up to
the line and then claiming they'd misspoken or been misunderstood.
Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann said she would proudly produce her
own birth certificate. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby denied that he'd

(01:00:07):
told a newspaper that he'd like to see Barack Obama's
birth certificate. Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt said he'd been taken
out of context after telling a reporter that there was
no legitimate reason for the president not to produce his
birth certificate. This wasn't something that existed only at the
lunatic fringe of political discourse. Mainstream politicians and celebrities were

(01:00:32):
just asking questions, never mind the kinds of things their
supporters might do to try to get answers. So, after
an entire year of unsuccessfully petitioning his local county grand
jury to bring charges against Barack Obama, Walter Fitzpatrick was frustrated,
and when he barged into that courtroom on April first,

(01:00:54):
twenty ten, both Keeper Darren Huff and sovereign Citizen Carl
Swinson were among those waiting just outside. And after the
tables were turned that day, with this citizen's arrest turning
into just a citizen getting arrested, Darren Hoffen Carl Swinson
vowed to return not just to support their friend at

(01:01:16):
his next court date, but to carry out a bigger, better,
version of the plan.

Speaker 9 (01:01:25):
You who have been on the fence must get off
of that fence. Please go to the courthouse en mass
demand justice. He is honoring his oath.

Speaker 12 (01:01:37):
To all of you out there who have taken that oath,
I ask you right now to honor yours. Get down there,
get him out of jail, and make sure that justice
is served.

Speaker 9 (01:01:48):
My name is CARLS. Winston.

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
The call was put out. If you believe in the cause,
if you believe in the constitution, you must stand with
Walter Fitzpatrick against the Monroe County courts. He was scheduled
to appear on April twentieth, and true patriots had an
obligation to be there. Between Fitzpatrick's release on the sixth
and his court date on the twentieth, they had just

(01:02:14):
two weeks to prepare, according to the court records. Darren
Huff appeared in several videos about the events in Madisonville
that were posted on Carl Swinson's website Rise Upfroamerica dot com.
Archived pages of that site do still exist, and I
can read the text on those pages, but the videos

(01:02:35):
were all embedded with flash player, so Darren's calls to
action maybe lost to the sands of time. But we
have some pretty solid sources that can give us an
idea of what was on Darren's mind during those two weeks,
because Darren Huff has never, once in his life shut

(01:02:56):
his goddamn mouth. On April fifteenth, Darren Huff stopped at
the Chase Bank in Hiram, Georgia. He ran a small
business doing outdoor lighting, so he stopped by often to
deposit checks. According to Erica, the bank teller who testified
at his trial, most of the employees at the branch

(01:03:17):
knew him well enough to make friendly conversation, but if
she was working, he would wait in her line even
if another teller was free. But that evening he wasn't
making his usual jokes. He was deadly serious. Erica testified
that Huff just launched right into telling her about Walter
Fitzpatrick and his upcoming trial in Madisonville, Tennessee, a situation

(01:03:41):
she had no context for. She'd never heard of Walter Fitzpatrick,
and she'd never been to Madisonville, Tennessee. She was the
only teller at the counter, the bank was about to
close for the night, and suddenly this normally friendly customer
is leaning over the counter, telling her that he was
going to be spending this weekend mounting an anti aircraft

(01:04:03):
gun to the back of his pickup truck because he
and his militia were going to take over a small
town in Tennessee on Tuesday. A conversation got so intense
that another employee went to go get the manager, Shane.
In his testimony at trial, Shane too said that Huff
was a regular customer at the bank, and over the
years he'd gotten to know him a bit. Sometime in

(01:04:26):
two thousand and nine, Huff got really political, and when
he made small talk with the bank tellers, it was
usually about his anti government beliefs and various conspiracy theories.
So when another employee came to get him that night
because Huff was making Erica uncomfortable, he probably wasn't surprised.

(01:04:47):
He tried guiding the conversation back to safer territory, asking
Huff if he'd be taking his video camera with him
again on this trip, but the response was an alarming one.
Huff told it would be kind of hard to hold
the camera because he planned to be quote on the
front line with two Ak forty sevens. He told the

(01:05:10):
bank employees that they'd probably see him on the news
next week, and as he was leaving, he told Erica,
it was nice knowing you. If I never see you again.
Not to get ahead of myself, but I do want
to jump ahead here and say. Darren Huff would later
accuse those two bank employees of lying under oath. Obviously,

(01:05:33):
there's no proving what was or wasn't said at the
bank that evening, But within hours of that interaction, Erica
was on the phone with Madisonville, Tennessee, Police Chief Greg Breeden,
and he recorded that phone call, so we have a
fairly contemporaneous recollection of what was said. She related to
Chief Breden that Huff told her that he was intending

(01:05:57):
to travel to Madisonville, Tennessee, on April twenty for Walter
Fitzpatrick's court hearing, that he would be armed with AK
forty seven's and an anti aircraft gun, that he would
be with other militia members, and that the group intended
to carry out citizens arrests of various local officials and
seize control of the courthouse. And Darren Huff was found

(01:06:20):
to be in possession of printed copies of those citizens
arrest warrants, and he would later admit under oath that
at that time he was in possession of an anti
aircraft gun and a pedestal mount that could be installed
in the bed of his truck. She would have had
no way of knowing any of that at the time
if he hadn't told her himself, and she's on tape

(01:06:43):
reporting it to the police long before she could have
read anything in the news or been coached by an
FBI agent to say these things. Both Shane and Erica
were understandably deeply unsettled by that interaction. Imediately after leaving
work that evening, Erica called a friend who worked in
local government, who helped her find the phone number for

(01:07:06):
the Madisonville, Tennessee Police Department. Jane's wife urged him to
call their own sheriff in Paulding County, Georgia, and by
the end of the night, both bank employees had shared
their concerns with the police, and by Monday they'd met
with FBI agents. And it was on Monday, April nineteenth,
the day before the planned occupation of Madisonville, Tennessee, that

(01:07:29):
an FBI agent knocked on Darren Huff's front door Supervisory
Special Agent Charles Reed, accompanied by a couple of deputies
from the Paulding County Sheriff's Office, just wanted to have
a word with him. Then Darren Huff voluntarily stepped out
onto his front porch and he chatted with the agent
for about as long as it took him to finish

(01:07:50):
a cigarette. It was a brief conversation. Agent Reid recalls
that Huff was pretty open about his plan to drive
to Tennessee in the morning. He said he'd have his
CULT forty five on his hip and his AK forty
seven was in the truck. He freely volunteered to the
agent that he was a member of both the Oath

(01:08:10):
Keepers and the Georgia Militia. He said that the plan
was to execute citizens, arrest warrants, and quote take back Madisonville,
but that the group would not resort to violence unless
they were provoked. When Darren Huff took the stand at
his own trial, he recalled telling agent read that evening

(01:08:31):
that he'd love it if the FBI would be there
in Madisonville again. Remember last week that letter that Walter
Fitzpatrick sent the police chief of Madisonville before all of
this got started. He wasn't making threats. He was inviting
the police to be part of his plan. And that's

(01:08:55):
the same mindset Darren has here. He even gave the
FBI agent his business card. I had to double check
here because Darren's business cards do come up again later,
but it sounds like the business card he gave Agent
Reed the night before the big day was just a
normal business card, a real one for his outdoor lighting business.

(01:09:18):
It wasn't until after he was arrested that he got
new business cards printed that said Darren Huff, right wing
extremist and potential domestic terrorist. But when he finished his cigarette,
the conversation was over. Agent Reid had no reason to
arrest him. Huff had expressed to him a plan to

(01:09:42):
commit a federal crime, the one he would eventually be
arrested for, but he hadn't actually done it yet. There
was no federal crime here until Darren Huff put his
guns in the truck and drove across the state line
from Georgia into Tennessee with the intent to engage in

(01:10:02):
a little civil disorder. So Agent Reid left, but another
agent stayed nearby all night, watching and waiting for the truck.
To pull out of the driveway. Darren Huff was under
FBI surveillance when he hit the road just before dawn
on April twentieth, twenty ten. At six fifteen am, he

(01:10:26):
was observed crossing the state line, and just after seven am,
Tennessee State Trooper Michael Wilson followed Huff's truck as he
took Exit sixty off I seventy five towards Madisonville. Whether
or not Huff rolled through the stop sign at the
bottom of the exit ramp is a matter of some debate,
but Trooper Wilson flashed his blue lights and pulled him over.

(01:10:50):
This traffic stop ends up being central to Huff's case
on appeal, but it isn't where he got arrested. He
actually didn't even get a ticket, but Trooper Wilson and
Darren Huff spent over an hour together there on the
shoulder of Tennessee Highway sixty eight. When Huff was asked
to step out of the vehicle, he had his CULT
forty five on his hip. The officer unholstered the weapon,

(01:11:14):
removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and put the weapon
in his patrol car for safe keeping. Darren Huff produced
a valid Georgia driver's license, but he didn't have his
truck's registration on him. He assured the officer that the
gun was legal and handed him a piece of paper
that he said was a gun carry permit. In his testimony,

(01:11:37):
the trooper said the document looked quote, very unprofessional, and
he was concerned it might not be real. He spent
an hour going back and forth with Dispatch about this
strange document and was never able to verify whether Huff
actually had a valid carry permit for that gun. And

(01:11:59):
during that while they were trying to sort it out,
Darren Huff talked. He talked a lot, He ran his
mouth the entire time, and the entire conversation was recorded
on the officer's dash cam, which was connected to a
microphone on his uniform. And in their conversation, Darren explained

(01:12:22):
his whole plan. They had arrest warrants for the grand
jury foreman, the district attorney, the sheriff, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, etc.
He recommended some YouTube videos the officers should watch to
learn more about Barack Obama's crimes, and he told them
they needed to be reading Walter Fitzpatrick's blog In the

(01:12:42):
portions of this audio that I could find, the officers
seemed to be playing along. They're mostly just letting him
talk without interruption, but occasionally they asked some questions about
how exactly the plan is going to work, and Darren's
happy to explain because he's actually going to need their help.

Speaker 13 (01:13:04):
And then at that point they would be placed in
the custody and you know, turn this man over you.
I don't have handcuffs, you know, somebody we would need
somebody like you guys there, And I can't tell you
how much I appreciate you guys listening.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
Again, this is exactly like Fitzpatrick's letter to the police chief.
He's telling the cops what they plan to do and
trying to get them to be a part of it.
The audio is a little fuzzy because they're standing on
the side of the highway in the rain, but he
wants the officers to agree to receive these prisoners once

(01:13:38):
they've been citizens arrested. But that wasn't all. He was
worried about a lot more than just the corrupt government
in Monroe County, Tennessee. He shared his concerns about the
Affordable Care Act, which had just been signed into law
a few weeks earlier. Of course, he was upset that
this was communism, obviously, but more importantly, he was very

(01:14:03):
worried because this law requires that all Americans be implanted
with the mark of the Beast, as foretold in Revelations.

Speaker 13 (01:14:12):
Luke ten eighteen, Jesus says, and I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven. The Greek translation for lightning is barack.
Now Jesus didn't speak Greek. He spoke Hebrews, so you
can look it up into Hebrew. It's still barack and
from heaven transplaced from Hebrew. Who or oh bomba?

Speaker 8 (01:14:33):
So Jesus said, out of his own list, I saw
Satan as bomba.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
He went on to explain that he was opposed to
the war in the Middle East, though he notes that
he does think quote Muslims suck end quote, but also
nine to eleven was an inside job. He tells the
officers that they, who are all white men, are God's
true chose people, that Caucasians are the real Israelites, and

(01:15:04):
biblical prophecy foretold the re establishment of Israel in seventeen
seventy six. Remember last week when we touched briefly on
Christian identity. That's what this is. Darren Huff is a
self proclaimed pastor in the Christian Identity movement. He's standing

(01:15:25):
there on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops,
reaching Christian identity and trying to recruit them to the Oathkeepers.
It remains very unclear to me why the trooper gave
Huff his gun back, but he did. At eight thirteen am.
He handed Darren Huff a written warning, returned his CULT

(01:15:48):
forty five, and told him he was free to go.
The men shook hands, and Huff thanked the officer and
he took a few steps back toward his truck before
he stopped, turned around and said, let me pre warn you.
If enough of us show up today, we are going

(01:16:08):
to proceed forward in this citizen's arrest. That's why I
have my forty five. Ain't no government official going peacefully.
And then he slid his COLT forty five back into
his holster, climbed into his pickup truck that said oath
Keepers all down one side, and drove the last few
miles into Madisonville, Tennessee. At five o'clock that morning, more

(01:16:47):
than fifty police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around
Monroe County, Tennessee, gathered for a briefing. There were FBI
agents from the Joint Terraces and Task Force, and at
least one representative from the Department of Homeland Security. They'd
been monitoring the online chatter about Walter Fitzpatrick's hearing at
the courthouse at nine am, and they were worried. The

(01:17:10):
intelligence they had was that as many as six hundred
people might be on their way to Madisonville, Tennessee. They
had undercovers stationed in nearby businesses and snipers on rooftops.
One of those undercover officers was Mike Hall, the director
of a regional violent crime task Force in Tennessee. In

(01:17:31):
plain clothes, he got a table at Donna's in Cafe,
a block from City Hall, where Fitzpatrick's supporters would be
meeting for breakfast. And maybe the police should have known
that they probably weren't expecting six hundred armed militiamen if
they knew that they had booked tables at Donna's Cafe.
But that's neither here nor there, and by the time

(01:17:54):
breakfast was over, barely twenty supporters were packed into the
dining room, finishing their biscuits and coffee as Darren Huff
gave a rousing speech about taking his AK forty seven
down to the courthouse. Carl Swinson's dead website isn't exactly
easy to navigate, so maybe the whole speech was there

(01:18:16):
at some point, but I was only able to dig
up an audio file of the first six minutes or so,
and it's pretty inspiring stuff.

Speaker 8 (01:18:28):
So as a Christians, as lieutenant commander said, I'm Chaplin
for the Georgia Militia, so I look at things a
little bit differently, and I look at them basically, and
I told these guys, and I tell everybody, I'm not
a very smart guy. In fact, the only thing that
I know about the Constitution are the first few amendments.
Those leave me the hell alone ones.

Speaker 9 (01:18:46):
That's what I know.

Speaker 8 (01:18:47):
And I know them well enough to say you're wrong.

Speaker 13 (01:18:50):
You can't do this.

Speaker 2 (01:18:54):
Over the sound of clinking forks on plates, the Christian
Identity Militia, Chaplin explained that they are preparing for spiritual war,
that we are already in the end times, as we're
told in revelations. See the founding of the United States
was biblical prophecy God knew that in seventeen seventy six

(01:19:16):
the thirteen Tribes of Israel would be called back together
as the thirteen Colonies. Yes, at thirteen, I know it's twelve,
twelve tribes of Israel. You know it's twelve. But Darren
is counting Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manassa separately. That's why
he thinks it's thirteen. And I know that because he

(01:19:37):
mentions Joseph's sons specifically, because otherwise I might have assumed
he was talking about something different. We don't need to
get into the specifics here. But adherents of Christian identity
believe that they are the real Israelites, so they have
to explain the existence of actual Jews some other way,

(01:20:00):
and that usually boils down to a theory that Ashkenazi
Jews are actually descended from a Turkic race called the Kasars.
Christian identity guys really love this book from the seventies
called The Thirteenth Tribe, which makes the case for this theory. Honestly,
please don't make me explain the Kasar hypothesis every time

(01:20:23):
I see a guy posting about Kasars. I'm just not
having a good time. But what Darren was saying might
actually be weirder.

Speaker 6 (01:20:36):
Jacob went like this, he blessed them the way God
intended him to bless them. That crossing of the arms
is on that flag. That's where that cross comes from.
It has nothing to do with rednecks. It has nothing
to do with the Confederacy. It has everything to do

(01:20:56):
with God's shows people.

Speaker 2 (01:21:01):
Now this was a new one for me. I've never
heard this one before. What he's saying here is that
the Confederate flag symbolizes Jacob's blessing of Joseph's sons. I
don't know what the aid to be to see here is,
but I guess the Confederacy was the thirteenth tribe of Israel. Honestly,

(01:21:28):
I don't want to know. I don't want to know.
That way lies madness. So after his big speech, Darren
Huff steps outside. Mike Hall, our undercover officer, testified that
he overheard Huff's conversation with a man that he doesn't name,
but who, like Huff, was visibly armed, and Huff laments

(01:21:50):
to this man that he wishes they had more people,
saying quote, today would be a good day to do it.
Because it's raining and the police wouldn't expect them to
make a move in the rain. And Darren Hoff wasn't
the only one who excused himself from the table after
this speech. Carl Swinson, our sovereign citizen and the primary

(01:22:12):
instigator of the online uproar calling people to Madisonville, got
a phone call to make.

Speaker 4 (01:22:20):
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here with my special
guest with a ton of Colonel Terry Laken and his attorney,
Paul Jensen. Colonel Laken is the Army officer who has
challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama to act as commander
in chief. Also with me is doctor Jerome Corsy and
going to Tennessee.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
And Carl, Carl.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
You're on the air.

Speaker 2 (01:22:45):
That's right, It's Carl and Tennessee. And he was live
on air with g Gordon Liddy and Jerome Corcy. I
have to admit I spent the better part of an
afternoon chasing down this fifteen year old episode of morning
Talk radio, so I am going to tell you about it.

(01:23:06):
On April twelfth, twenty ten, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry
Laken did not report for duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Instead,
he drove to the Pentagon in Washington, d C. Where
he was read his rights by his commanding officer, Colonel
Gordon Ray Roberts. Lincoln's unit deployed to Afghanistan that week

(01:23:27):
without him. The eighteen year veteran wasn't afraid to return
to Afghanistan. This deployment would have been the seventh of
his career and his second to Afghanistan. In two thousand
and four, he was the Army's Flight surgeon of the year.
He'd been awarded a Meritorious Service Medal and a Bronze Star.

(01:23:47):
He was on track to be promoted to full colonel
within the next year. But he had come to realize
that his deployment orders were unlawful, not on ideological grounds.
He wasn't pro testing the war. He hadn't suddenly become
a peace activist after seeing the horrors of war firsthand. No. No,

(01:24:08):
the doctor was refusing to deploy unless he could see
the president's birth certificate.

Speaker 7 (01:24:17):
I will disobey my orders to deploy it because I
and I believe all servicemen and women and the American
people deserve the truth about President Obama's constitutional eligibility to
the office of the Presidency and the Commander in Chief.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
A week after disobeying his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Laken appeared
as a guest on The G. Gordon Liddy Show. Decades
after dabbling it being an FBI agent doing dirty tricks
for Richard Dixon and spending a little time in prison
for his role in the Watergate scandal, Lyddy really hit
his stride as an extremely right wing talk radio host

(01:24:53):
who regularly encouraged listeners to do things like shoot federal
agents in the head. Robert Evans put out a taggering
six part series of episodes on G. Gordon Liddy on
Behind the Bastards last year, So if you're interested in
hearing some outrageously racist clips of Liddy's radio show, I

(01:25:13):
believe those are in part six. But today we're just
talking about one episode of The G. Gordon Liddy Show,
the one that aired on April twentieth, twenty ten, because
that's the episode Carl Swinson called into during the second hour.
In the first hour of the show, Lyddy interviewed Colonel
Laken and Lacln's attorney, a California personal injury lawyer named

(01:25:36):
Paul Jensen. You might be wondering why an army officer
facing a court martial would hire a civilian personal injury lawyer,
And that's a great question. The answer is unclear. In
my experience, conspiracy theorists and extremists tend to hire attorneys
who share their beliefs rather than ones who have, say,

(01:26:01):
relevant experience in a particular area of law. But in
this case, it seems very worth mentioning that Paul Jensen
was a longtime associate of friend to and occasional attorney
for Roger Stone. In two thousand and seven, it was
Paul Jensen, acting as Stone's attorney, who publicly released a

(01:26:24):
copy of a letter the pair claimed they had sent
to the FBI about Elliot Spitzer's alleged habit of wearing
nothing but long black socks during his liaisons with sex workers.
And Jensen represented Stone in twenty sixteen when he was
sued over allegations that he'd been involved in a coordinated
campaign of voter intimidation. It was Jensen who drafted the

(01:26:49):
paperwork to incorporate Stop the Steel in twenty sixteen. So
after this interview, G. Gordon Liddy opened the phones to
hear from listeners on the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Caller after caller thanked Colonel Laken for his courage and
shared their own theories about how they could finally get
to the truth of Barack Obama's birth, and then, after

(01:27:13):
an advertisement for gold coins, another birther called into the show,
but this one wasn't just sitting idly by while Barack
Obama pretended to be the president.

Speaker 11 (01:27:28):
Lieutenant Colonel, I want to thank you for everything you're doing,
and I want to give you some encouragement here. I'm
in the city of Madisonville, Tennessee, right now in Monroe County,
where they've had this area on lockdown with FBI, TDI,
local police and troopers all because of Lieutenant Commander Walter
Fitzpatrick and his attempts to affect arrest using a criminal

(01:27:51):
complaint against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and in this case,
the grand jury members here and the town of Madison senysuits.
People are gathering now, but it is a tenuous situation
at best.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
Carl closed the call by saying things were getting pretty
heated out there in Tennessee and everything they were doing
was quote indirect support of the message being pushed by
Colonel Laken and Lyddy himself. G Gordon Lydy asked Carl
to email the show's producer the video of Darren Huff's
traffic stop so they could get that up on the
website within the hour. The next caller, Julian Texas, was

(01:28:36):
very worried about her sons. They were active duty soldiers
deployed overseas. She wasn't worried about them being in the war.
She was worried that because their deployment orders had been
issued by a false president, that they could ultimately be
liable for war crimes. I didn't listen to the rest
of the episode. I don't know if they resolved that,

(01:28:59):
but after darren rousing speech to the assembled supporters and
Carl's bold statements on a national radio show, they both
had to admit that nothing was going to happen that day.
Their little crowd of twenty was outnumbered three to one
by a very visible police presence, and according to Walter
Fitzpatrick's blog, a fair number of those supporters who turned

(01:29:21):
up were middle aged women, one of whom brought several
minor children with her. Darren had a truck full of
guns and was bragging about how he had four hundred
rounds for his AK forty seven, but they just didn't
have the numbers to do anything that day. The only
time anybody actually got close to the courthouse was when
Darren Huff took a bag of biscuits over to a

(01:29:43):
detective on the courthouse steps. By the time Fitzpatrick's hearing
was over, Darren was bored, he was tired, and he's
ready to go home. So everybody just left. Nothing happened,
nobody got arrested. That night, Oathkeeper's founder Stuart Rhodes saw

(01:30:06):
the video Carl Swinson posted online of Darren getting pulled
over on his way to Madisonville. The truck says oath Keepers,
all down one side and huge letters. You really can't
miss it. It's the official logo of the Oathkeepers, and
Rhodes called Swenson immediately and demanded he take the video down.

(01:30:28):
It was embarrassing, and within days Rhodes himself showed up
to speak with Darren Huff in person. He was furious.
He demanded to know why Huff was so intent on
making Madisonville the flash point. Now, Rhodes isn't the kind
of guy who's actually concerned about there being a flash point.

(01:30:51):
He wants one. That's the whole idea, right. Eventually the
militia will come into some kind of conflict, But this
wasn't the one he wanted because he thought Darren's ideas
were foolish and embarrassing, and he revoked Darren's oathkeepers membership
undeterred though Darren Huff returned to Tennessee a week later.

(01:31:14):
He had a paper map of the state of Tennessee,
and he'd circled the location of the sheriff's offices in
every county within a two hour drive of Madisonville. It's
not clear how many sheriffs he actually managed to speak with,
but when he pulled into a parking lot at a
county office building in Lenore City, Tennessee, he happened to

(01:31:35):
come across Loudon County Sheriff Tim Geider and Cumberland County
Sheriff Butch Burgess as they were getting out of their cars.
They relate for a meeting, so this conversation was short.
But Huff asked Sheriff Geiter if he'd be willing to
arrest a fellow sheriff. At trial, Sheriff Geiter couldn't really

(01:31:57):
remember much about this brief interaction, but he said he
probably told this stranger in a parking lot that he'd
need to know more about a situation like that in
order to make a determination. But yes, hypothetically he did
have the authority to arrest another sheriff. Darren Huff was
trying to recruit law enforcement officers to assist with the plan.

(01:32:22):
He wasn't giving up, but he was running off time.
Fitzpatrick's next hearing was scheduled for May fourth, and he
needed to find a sheriff who would be there to
take his prisoners into custody. He must not have had
much success on the twenty eighth, though, because two days later,
on April thirtieth, he was back at it, driving around

(01:32:45):
Tennessee looking for sheriffs who believed in the constitution. He
was up near Knoxville when he got pulled over. This
time around, there's no debate about whether or not he
ran a stop sign. This wasn't a traffic stop. There
is a federal warrant for his arrest. Darren Huff was

(01:33:19):
charged with violating Title eighteen, Section two thirty one sub
section A two, and that's interesting. You probably don't believe me,
but hang on. A second. Section two thirty one is
civil disorders, and it covers three separate crimes that don't
really go together. A one makes it a crime to

(01:33:43):
teach someone else how to make or use a gun
or a bomb if you know or have reason to
know that they'll use that information in furtherance of a
civil disorder. A two, which was Darren's crime, makes it
illegal to transport a firearm or a bomb across eight
lines if you know or have reason to know that

(01:34:03):
the gun or explosive device is going to be used
in a civil disorder. And A three makes it illegal
to be in a cops way during a civil disorder,
So that one doesn't really belong right. The first two
are about guns and bombs, and the third one is
just about being annoying. But that's the one that's really

(01:34:26):
gotten to work out in the last couple of years
because it was used in hundreds of January sixth cases.
But eighteen USC. Two thirty one A two is uncommon.
I mean, people get charged for doing this kind of thing,
but usually they get charged with conspiracy to do whatever

(01:34:48):
it was. They were going to do when they got
where they were going, and then maybe they'll tack on
some kind of gun crime, and Subsection A one just
doesn't make any sense at all. There's are a whole
separate law that makes it a crime to distribute information
about bomb making, and that one has a harsher penalty
than this, So I don't know why we need this

(01:35:08):
one at all. So I was confused by this choice
of statute, and I couldn't think of any place I'd
ever seen this statute before. And it turns out that's
because I hadn't seen it before, and I still haven't
even after looking pretty hard. When Darren Huff appealed his conviction,

(01:35:29):
it was noted in the appellate record that this particular
statute had actually never been construed by an appellate court before,
so this was the first time a court of appeals
was examining this statute. But just because people don't get
charged with this very often doesn't make it any less
of a real law. And it does pretty well describe

(01:35:52):
what he did, because he didn't really do anything, did he?
But they were really worried that he might, or at
least they were worried that he would continue to create
situations where someone else might because if you get enough

(01:36:12):
anxious people with guns together enough times, eventually something is
going to go wrong in a way that escalates pretty quickly.
So some federal agent or prosecutor got creative and they
found a crime because technically, yeah, he put guns in

(01:36:32):
his truck and he drove to another state. And when
he was doing it, the plan that he had in
his mind was that he was going to have that
gun around in case the county judge didn't appreciate him
barging into her courtroom. So the intent is pretty clear.
He told anyone within earshot for two weeks what he

(01:36:55):
was going to do. He wanted to lead an armed
mom on to the courthouse. He made videos about it,
he told his bank teller, he told a bunch of
state troopers, he gave a speech. And you don't actually
have to end up carrying out the plan to be
guilty of showing up to the plan with a gun.

(01:37:16):
And in the end, a jury agreed. They found Darren
Huff guilty of interstate transportation of a firearm with the
intention to use it unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, and
Darren had already completed his four year sentence by the
time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in
twenty sixteen. Now, normally that's all I would really have

(01:37:40):
to say about a criminal case. We already talked all
the way through the actual timeline of events, so you
already know what happened, and I just told you how
the trial ended. He was convicted by a jury, appealed unsuccessfully,
and served a sentence. But this trial is really just
oh special. I mean, first of all, it went to trial.

(01:38:03):
That's pretty rare. In twenty twenty two, just two point
three percent of people charged with federal crimes actually went
to trial. But it's so much more than that. Darren
Huff really really wanted to be in the driver's seat
when it came to his criminal defense. One thing you

(01:38:26):
have to remember about Darren Huff is that he's got
a little sovereign citizen in him. He seems at times
to take issue with that label. But when he was
asked how he felt about the gold fringe on the
flag at his trial, he was very evasive, and in
the year and a half between his arrest and his trial,

(01:38:48):
he kept insisting that his public defenders file motions based
on legal arguments that he had invented, and when they
refused to file some of the more bizarre ones, he
fired them releast you tried to. In March of twenty eleven,
his public defender was begging him to consider the plea

(01:39:08):
deal they were being offered, explaining over and over again
that it was the best deal he was going to get,
and the motions he was drafting on his own just
don't have any basis in the law, and they have
no legal merit, and they really seem to be trying
to explain to him that you can't just file how
you feel. There has to be case law. It has

(01:39:29):
to be based in something. And after months of bitter
emails back and forth about you know, we can't file
stuff that you made up, and Darren's accusing them of
working against him, and the original public defenders file a
motion to withdraw, saying that the relationship has soured irreparably

(01:39:50):
and they can't continue. And during this brief period of
time before a new public defender could be appointed, Darren
files some of those motions he want wanted the ones
he wrote, including one that just reads comes the defendant
in the above entitled action, Darren Wesley huff And moves

(01:40:11):
the court to clarify its position on the Second Amendment
US Constitution. And when his second public defender was assigned,
a man named Scott Green, there were just three months
to go before trial, and in those three months he
did his job. He filed motions to suppress the statements
Darren made during the traffic stop, motions to prevent the

(01:40:33):
prosecution from bringing up his extremist beliefs, the kinds of
things you'd expect to see. And he seemed to be
humoring his client when it came to some of his
unique ideas about the law. But like the attorneys before him,
he wasn't willing to put his name on nonsense. And
after another round of these emails back and forth, where

(01:40:56):
this exasperated attorney is trying to explain to him that
motions have to be based on the law, Darren threatened
to fire him, writing if you do not have the
courage or kahunahs necessary to represent me, then please let
me know. I think that's supposed to say kahones, but
it says kah u and as cohunas maybe that's a

(01:41:22):
regional variation. He mets balls and then email is included
in this bizarre fifteen page document that he submitted to
the court complaining about and trying to fire his lawyer.
But he ends the document by saying, quote, is the
Second Amendment part of the Constitution?

Speaker 9 (01:41:42):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:41:42):
Or no? Wherefore Darren Wesley Huff moves this court to
dismiss the indictment against him. I don't really know where
to start with. That's that's really not how it works.
And this lawyer tried to withdraw from the case, saying,
you know, he doesn't want me to be his lawyer anymore.
This is not working out. He can't do this, and

(01:42:05):
the judge said no, they were too close to trial.
They would just have to work it out because they
want a trial together. And Green really does seem to
have done his best here. On the eve of the trial,
he filed five separate documents, each one called mister Huff's

(01:42:25):
Special Request, and they were sort of fanciful jury instructions.
It probably will not surprise you that mister Green declined
to continue working with Darren on his appeal and Darren's
attitude did not improve once he was in federal prison.
One email he sent his new lawyer mister Gully during

(01:42:47):
the appeal starts off by accusing Gully of withholding the
trial transcripts, but they just hadn't been made yet. It
takes a long time to produce those, But he writes
to his lawyer, I am thus left to wonder whether
you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or
if you possibly received your degree from a remedial online school,

(01:43:09):
or that you simply take me for a fool. You, sir,
have made a mockery of the system that purports to
provide me with effective assistance of counsel. Later, in the
same email, he explains to his lawyer that the government
can't charge him with a gun crime because he exists
outside of the federal government's jurisdiction on such matters, and

(01:43:31):
then he threatens to have his attorney indicted, disbarred, and institutionalized.
Mister Gully's response to this letter doesn't seem to be
in the appellate record, but from what I can see,
he did the best he could with a losing case.
We'd be doing episodes about Walter Fitzpatrick and his entourage

(01:43:53):
for weeks if I told you every weird thing that
I found, But I can't resist. Just a few more,
if you'll indulge me. When Fitzpatrick finally did get arraigned
in Monroe County for that original April first attempt to
arrest the grand jury foreman, it did not go well.

(01:44:13):
The judge that he'd accused of treason was presiding, and
as she's flipping through the exhibits, sort of glancing over
the paperwork and the citizens arrest warrants, she noted that
the court clerk, miss Cook, was accused by Fitzpatrick of
some pretty serious crimes. And so the judge turns to

(01:44:34):
the clerk who's there in the courtroom and says, miss Cook,
have you been levying war against the United States? And
the clerk says, I don't think so, your honor. And
I wish that I had an audio recording of this.
I just have the transcript. But Fitzpatrick is having a

(01:44:54):
lot of outbursts during this hearing, and at this point
he says, are you making fun of me? Is that
what's going on here? Am I being mocked? And they
just ignored him and continue the proceeding. I would have
loved to have seen it, and I wish the officer
who testified at Huff's trial had been more specific about

(01:45:18):
exactly who it was that he overheard Darren Huff talking to.
In the morning of April twentieth, outside Donna's Cafe, Huff
had a quiet conversation with someone about calling off the
operation that day. The officer did mention that Huff was
speaking to a man with a revolver on his hip,
and that the man had gotten out of a PT

(01:45:39):
cruiser with Georgia license plates. Carl Swenson's from Georgia. But
I know Carl Swenson was driving a two thousand and
nine Honda Civic Hybrid that day, trust me, I checked.
I have got a state trooper on tape calling in
his plates when they saw him on the highway. And
in his blog, Walter Fitzpatrick thanked my name most of

(01:46:01):
the people who showed up there that day, and most
of them were women, and very few of them were
from Georgia. But we do know for sure that Bill Luhman,
a Marine Corps veteran and crane operator from Waco, Georgia,
was there that day. And you'd be a fool to

(01:46:21):
believe Bill Lowman would walk as far as his own
mailbox without a gun, so if I had to put
money on it, I think the person Darren Huff was
making tactical decisions with was the same man who'd accompanied
him to Walter's house two weeks earlier when they put
this whole plan together, a fellow member of the Georgia

(01:46:43):
Militia and the Oathkeepers. Now my main wheelhouse is not
the Militia movement, so I can't say I'm surprised. I'd
never heard of Bill Luhman before, and I didn't have
any real prior knowledge about the Georgia Militia. But in
some old blog posts, Luhman is referred to as a

(01:47:04):
leader in the Georgia Militia. That may have just been
his local chapter. There were at least a dozen units
around the state of this larger group calling itself the
Georgia Militia, and his name does not appear in the
court record for the four members of the Georgia Militia
who were arrested in twenty eleven for a plot that

(01:47:25):
included plans to blow up the Federal building in Atlanta
and maybe murder government officials with risin.

Speaker 9 (01:47:35):
In.

Speaker 2 (01:47:35):
Just a side note, if you do try to google
Georgia white supremacist rice In attack, the more recent result
you'll get is for an unrelated white supremacist plot to
carry out a biological terrorist attack. In that case, in
twenty seventeen, a neo Nazi had actually successfully created the

(01:47:56):
deadly poison, but he accidentally exposed himself to it, so
he showed up at the emergency room before he could
actually hurt anybody else. But this is not that one.
This is the one from twenty eleven. But again, Bill
Luhman nothing to do with the rice In attacks, just
the same militia. And I found an old event for

(01:48:19):
a tea party picnic in North Carolina in twenty thirteen.
That list Lumen is a speaker and his title in
the program is Constitutionalist icon from Georgia, and he appeared
on stage with such heroes of the Patriot movement as
James Renwick. Manship. That name is not familiar to you,

(01:48:40):
I'm sure, but you might remember the photo of the
guy in the George Washington costume wading into the reflecting
pool at the Capitol during the January sixth riot as
a sort of symbolic crossing the Delaware moment. But my
favorite manship moment is the time he showed up at
my local library dressed as Thomas Jefferson and refused to

(01:49:04):
break character as he ranted in the first person about
how he never had sexual relations with enslaved women. And
Bill Luman is very much still around and active in
the same kinds of conspiracy spaces. He posts, give or
take one hundred times a day every day on Trump's

(01:49:27):
Truth social platform, and all of his posts are in
all caps. He starts every day by posting this message,
Good morning patriots and grassroots warriors that are standing up
for our constitution and precious way of life. Good morning
to all veterans that serve honorably sempify my fellow Marines.

(01:49:48):
May America bless God again into our nation, our homes,
and our heart's heart emoji. Seriously, he posts that every morning.
He's very committed, and he still thinks Barack Obama is
a Kenyan born Muslim. He still posts a lot about
hanging people for treason, but the reasons have shifted, you know, COVID,

(01:50:12):
Ukraine election fraud, whatever. As I'm writing this right now,
he's still posting. He posted a picture of a marine
shaking hands with a dog, And there was a post
this evening that was a screenshot from Braveheart with the
text confirm Matt Gates or else written over mel Gibson's face.

(01:50:35):
His last post was a thread documenting the progress of
his homemade banana nutbread. At the time of recording, I
can report that he added cream cheese icing to it
and it was quote stellar. He's pretty popular over their
own truth social he was even retruthed last year by
Donald Trump himself after posting some incoherent theory about stolen

(01:50:58):
votes from the twenty twenty election. Well, he wasn't retruthed,
he was quote truthed, whatever the truth social equivalent of
a quote tweet is. Lumann had suggested that the people
responsible for the dominion voting machines should be tried for treason,
and Trump quoted the post, adding a lot has been
made of this lately, what do you think? And that

(01:51:22):
must have been a huge day for Bill. The post
went pretty viral, a lot of the keyboard warriors out
here posting seventeen memes a day about January sixth. Political
prisoners absolutely still believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya,
and Walter Fitzpatrick went on to try his whole citizens

(01:51:43):
arrest thing in neighboring McMinn County too. He was eventually
convicted of perjury and extortion there, as well as getting
some more charges in Monroe County after he stole the
grand jury rolls. Those stolen documents were located by the
FBI in the Connecticut home of Sharon Rondeau, the conspiracy

(01:52:04):
theory blogger whose commitment to questioning the citizenship of politicians
has remained strong over the years. She is still asking
questions about Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris. Fitzpatrick published a
memoir last year about his quest for justice in his
nineteen ninety court martial. I didn't read it. It's like

(01:52:26):
four hundred pages long. He's in his seventies now and
he still occasionally updates his blog, jag Hunters. The most
recent post is just a link to someone else's video,
and it's just like a mind numbing thirty minute mashup
of clips. I can't even really explain it. It's like

(01:52:48):
actual footage of Trump rallies mixed in with like mypolo commercials.
A TikTok video of someone doing the macarena, but the
lyrics have been changed to be about Donald Trump. I
don't know. I tapped out when it got to a
clip of Russell Brand praying with Tucker Carlson. I guess
what I'm getting at here is these guys don't go away.

(01:53:11):
The cause of the day changes, whether it's nine to eleven, truth, eartherism, COVID, denial, QAnon,
stop the steal. But it's a lot of the same
core ideas and honestly, it's a lot of the same
individual guys. In one newspaper photo of Walter Fitzpatrick outside
of the courthouse after a hearing in McMinn County in

(01:53:34):
twenty fourteen, the man standing next to him is Field McConnell.
And Field McConnell is a former commercial airline pilot who
retired in two thousand and six after refusing to submit
to a neurological exam. He had become obsessed with the
idea that nine to eleven was an inside job and

(01:53:54):
was convinced that Boeing had rigged all of their planes
with explosives and they were planning an upcoming nine to
eleven style attack. In twenty nineteen, he got really into QAnon.
An attorney in Florida who represents the family of a
missing child had to get a restraining order against him
after he made a series of YouTube videos threatening to

(01:54:16):
kill her and accusing her of having trafficked the missing child.
The day I'm recording this, he was a guest on
a podcast hosted by a small scale QAnon influencer. I
would tell you what they talked about, but it kind
of sounded like he was calling in from the bottom
of the ocean. This episode took me days longer to

(01:54:39):
write than it should have, because every new name I
turned up in the comments on a fifteen year old
blog post took me on some long, strange path that
some character in this story had taken in the year.
Since there are no lone wolves, no one is self
radicalizing in a vacuum. People don't just wake up one

(01:55:01):
day and drive three hours with a camcorder and a
truck full of guns for no reason at all. And
with each passing week, as I immerse myself in the archives,
piecing together one weird little guy's story at a time,
the clearer the connective tissue between them becomes. But for

(01:55:21):
all the weird twists and turns in this strange tale
of the Birther militia trying to take over a small
town in Tennessee. The best thing I found buried in
all of these documents was this moment from the trial
when Darren Huff took the stand himself. The prosecutor had
asked him about some business cards that he made after

(01:55:43):
his arrest. On the front, it said Darren Huff, right
wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist, and on the back
there was a picture of a gun. So on cross examination,
Huff's defense attorney was trying to testimony that would show
the jury that those business cards were obviously a joke,

(01:56:05):
that this was just his sense of humor. So he
asked Darren about some shirts, and Darren gave the following answer.
I had a friend who had a T shirt shop,
and I said, can you make me a couple of
shirts because apparently this government wants to label me. The
first one that he had made me said, I am

(01:56:27):
the god fearing gun toting, flag waving right wing extremists
the government warned you about. And the other one said
I finally made Homeland Securities Potential Domestic Terrorists watch list
and all I got was this lousy T shirt. Obviously,
the point behind them was for humor, and they have
been received as such. Another one that was one of

(01:56:49):
my initial shirts said patriotism is not a spectator sport.
And then there's something that I have never seen in
a federal court transcript before, as this big bearded militia
man is describing his funny terrorism shirts. The court reporter

(01:57:09):
types in parentheses, witness crying should put it on the
record that he cried. Weird Little Guys as a production
of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and

(01:57:32):
recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I almost certainly will not answer it. You can

(01:57:54):
exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on
the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Don't post anything that's going
to make you one of my weird Blue Guys

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