CZM Rewind: Arrested Democracy

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Speaker 38 Coolzone Media.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 This pair of episodes originally aired back in November of 2024.

Speaker 38 It's one of the more light-hearted story arcs we've had on weird little guys.

Speaker 38 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 chaplain could prove once and for all that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Speaker 38 He wasn't, obviously, and they didn't succeed.

Speaker 38 It's just a silly little story about a lesser-known chapter in the history of right-wing extremists refusing to accept election results.

Speaker 38 So 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.

Speaker 38 It did cause me some agony to dig up and listen to hours of old episodes of G.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But it was worth it. It's a fun episode.

Speaker 38 On April 1st, 2010, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III walked into the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 A year earlier, in March of 2009, he asked a Monroe County grand jury to indict President Barack Obama on charges of treason.

Speaker 38 The grand jury declined to do so.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 After the grand jury's refusal to accept 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.

Speaker 38 That Barack Hussein Obama was not the rightful president of the United States. That he was born in Kenya, that he had rigged the 2008 election, and he was guilty of high treason.

Speaker 38 Walter Fitzpatrick was more than prepared to put Barack Obama on trial, but now he believed the whole damn system was guilty and he wasn't going to let them get away with it.

Speaker 38 He just needed some backup.

Speaker 38 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 38 As I'm writing this, it's a few days after the 2024 presidential election.

Speaker 38 Every election has winners and losers, and not everybody is happy with the results.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But sometimes, disappointment, dread, and dissatisfaction aren't enough.

Speaker 38 For some people, an undesirable election outcome is simply unacceptable.

Speaker 38 Literally, they can't accept it. It can't be true and it can't be allowed to stand.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But 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.

Speaker 38 So maybe it's more like oil and water.

Speaker 38 Neither of those analogies are really giving me what I want.

Speaker 38 In my personal experience, right-wing extremists and election results go together like Blue Gatorade and raw onions.

Speaker 38 When I covered the January 6th riot at the Capitol in 2021, those those were the two things I saw people pulling out of their backpacks the most.

Speaker 38 I think some right-wing influencer convinced a lot of people who'd never been to a 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.

Speaker 38 Just a heads up, that is... Not true.
Do not do that. Do not rub a raw onion on your eyeballs at any time.
And definitely don't do it after exposure to a chemical irritant.

Speaker 38 And if you can only pack one thing to drink in a situation like that, make it water.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But I thought it would make perfect sense to do some kind of election-themed weird little guy.

Speaker 38 And to be honest, I'm bored of January 6th stories.

Speaker 38 I'm sure I'll get to some of them on this show eventually. There were some guys there who were very strange guys even before they were trying to stop the steal.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But right now, today,

Speaker 38 I'm sick of thinking about the 2020 election results because I'm sick of thinking about the 2024 election results.

Speaker 38 And the 2020 election was not the first time right-wing extremists couldn't accept the results.

Speaker 38 So come with me to the distant past, 2008.

Speaker 38 I voted for president for the first time that year, making me one of nearly 70 million Americans who cast a ballot for Barack Obama.

Speaker 38 He won handily, beating John McCain by more than 7% in the popular vote and pulling in 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173.

Speaker 38 Barack Obama was promising hope, change, and health care. John McCain was burdened by George W.
Bush's rock-bottom approval ratings and his support for Bush's now increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

Speaker 38 It seemed like a new day had dawned. We were all going to get health care, and we had finally elected our first black president.

Speaker 38 Of course, not everyone was on board.

Speaker 38 We'd had more than two centuries of white men named James, John, William, and George. Literally, of the 42 presidents before Obama, 18 of them were named James, John, William, or George.

Speaker 38 About 40% of the total presidential time until 2008 2008 was under a guy with one of those four names.

Speaker 38 We elected two different guys named Franklin.

Speaker 38 We hadn't really been getting a lot of variety.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 He has a foreign-sounding name and he is not white.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 During the primary, Mark Penn, a senior campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, wrote a memo suggesting that they should highlight the fact that Obama spent some of his childhood in Indonesia while emphasizing Clinton's Midwest roots, writing,

Speaker 60 His roots and basic American values and culture are at best limited.

Speaker 60 I cannot imagine electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.

Speaker 38 The Clinton campaign didn't end up going with this strategy, but the memo got out.

Speaker 38 And this idea that Barack Obama was un-American bled into a conspiracy theory that he was not

Speaker 38 American at all and had in fact been born in Kenya.

Speaker 38 During the 2008 election season, surveys showed that as many as a third of Republican voters believed there may be some truth to the idea that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States.

Speaker 38 An analysis published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in 2019 acknowledged that Yes, the best predictor of believing in any conspiracy theory is a pre-existing belief in any other conspiracy theory.

Speaker 38 People who are prone to believing unsubstantiated claims often believe many of them.

Speaker 38 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 to the believer's own race, party affiliation, and most importantly, their level of racial resentment toward African Americans.

Speaker 38 So to be clear, there are multiple studies published in journals across a range of disciplines over the course of nearly 20 years that have found measurable correlations here.

Speaker 38 The people who trafficked in birtherism were white Republicans with a measurable level of racial animus.

Speaker 38 This was never about getting to the truth. It was an intense fear of a black president.

Speaker 38 In June of 2008, just just days after Hillary 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.

Speaker 38 But you can't kill a conspiracy with facts. That's never worked.

Speaker 38 And confronted with what should have been the final answer to the question, Birthers just doubled down. The birth certificate was simply fake.
This only fueled the fire.

Speaker 38 And in August of 2008, the first of

Speaker 38 countless lawsuits was filed.

Speaker 38 And oddly enough, we've already talked about this particular lawsuit on this show in the first episode about the Pennsylvania Klansman Barry Black.

Speaker 38 Philip Berg's lawsuit alleged that Obama had been born in Kenya.

Speaker 38 And this relied on a sworn affidavit written by Ron McRae about a phone call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother through a translator.

Speaker 38 Ron McRae was the homophobic street preacher who spent years harassing the owners of the Casanova Lounge, a gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that was located across the street from a farm owned by some Klansmen.

Speaker 38 Berg's lawsuit was dismissed, and the judge called it frivolous and not worthy of discussion, which is true.

Speaker 38 But that became the playbook. Birthers around the country filed frivolous and baffling lawsuits.

Speaker 38 They filed them in federal courthouses, county circuit courts, state supreme courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, state boards of election, state administrative courts.

Speaker 38 They filed complaints and requests for injunctions and petitions anywhere they could find a bureaucrat sitting at a desk.

Speaker 38 For just the years 2008 through 2012, I found over 200 complaints in various forms filed with every kind of court you can imagine, and some kinds of courts I've never heard of.

Speaker 38 And they lost every single one.

Speaker 38 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 from this national nightmare of an Obama presidency.

Speaker 38 But the lawsuits weren't working. Judge after judge sent them packing.

Speaker 38 In most cases, they didn't even get a hearing. They were submitting complaints that had absolutely no legal basis to proceed, no basis in reality, even.

Speaker 38 And in the cases that did get a foot in the door, they were submitting forged documents and relying on already debunked claims.

Speaker 38 Lawyers were sanctioned, fines were levied, and suit after suit was dismissed.

Speaker 38 But undeterred, the birthers found a new way forward.

Speaker 38 If they couldn't get justice through civil suits, they would simply have to have the president of the United States arrested.

Speaker 38 In June of 2009, 172 extremely devoted conspiracy theorists convened.

Speaker 38 They called themselves the Super American Grand Jury.

Speaker 38 Now, that's not a real thing.

Speaker 38 Grand juries are real, of course.

Speaker 38 We don't need to get bogged down in the specifics because they vary from state to state.

Speaker 38 But generally speaking, a grand jury is a group of citizens convened by a court and tasked with issuing indictments.

Speaker 38 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 decide if there's probable cause to believe a crime has been committed by the individual the prosecutor is seeking to indict.

Speaker 38 They aren't deciding if anyone is innocent or guilty. They're not trying the case.
It's a much lower standard here. They're just deciding, is this something that should proceed as a case at all?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But we're not here to talk about real grand juries because that barely factors into the story at all. I just want to be clear that grand juries are real, they do exist, and this was not one.

Speaker 38 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 by a real prosecutor and they make real determinations about which cases get indictments.

Speaker 38 There are six states that allow citizen initiated grand juries.

Speaker 38 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 force a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate an alleged crime.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And in some states, like California, you can submit a written complaint to request a grand jury investigation into a criminal allegation, but they're under no obligation to follow up.

Speaker 38 And in Tennessee, a 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.

Speaker 38 But the idea of a citizens grand jury like the Super American Grand Jury is not something these particular extremists invented.

Speaker 38 In their modern iteration, most of these citizens grand jury groups were trying to arrest Barack Obama for various invented crimes.

Speaker 38 But they also popped up in the early 2000s among 9-11 truthers who wanted to arrest George Bush.

Speaker 38 During the Malher National 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.

Speaker 38 Conspiracy theory frequent flyer Larry Klayman has not only indicted Joe Biden with a fake grand jury, he even convicted him.

Speaker 38 But according to Daniel Levitas, the author of The Terrorist Next Door, a 2004 book on the American militia movement, these citizen grand juries actually date back to the 1970s with Christian identity extremists.

Speaker 38 Christian identity has come up before.

Speaker 38 We talked about it briefly in the episode about Christopher Hassen, the Coast Guard lieutenant who was stockpiling guns and planning to assassinate the Supreme Court, but was too addicted to opiates to make much progress.

Speaker 38 He'd spent some time researching Christian identity online before writing to a longtime white nationalist leader named Harold Covington about his plans to to make changes to society with, quote, a little focused violence.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But that's not what it means at all.

Speaker 38 It refers to a specific set of extremist beliefs that white Europeans are God's true chosen people.

Speaker 38 It is a deeply anti-Semitic belief system and one whose followers are often very willing to engage in violence.

Speaker 38 The earliest example Lebitas cites of a written threat to bring a citizen's grand jury indictment is a tax protester in Michigan in 1972 who threatened to indict local authorities trying to enforce a court order.

Speaker 38 And in 1975, Richard Butler, another weird little guy's recurring character, led a group of 50 followers to try to arrest a policeman in Curtaline, Idaho, before the officer could testify against a member of the group who'd been charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

Speaker 38 Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan nations yet at that point, but he was already a prominent figure within Christian identity.

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Speaker 38 So, the super American grand jury had deep roots in dark places.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And then they went to a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., and filed it.

Speaker 38 Judge Royce Lamberth promptly dismissed them.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 What Judge Lamberth actually did was issue an order denying them 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.

Speaker 38 Judge Lamberth took senior status in 2013, meaning he's kind of retired but still working, so he is actually still a federal judge in D.C.

Speaker 38 today and has presided over quite a few of the January 6th cases, most notably the trial of the QAnon shaman, Jacob Chansley.

Speaker 38 In 2023, 14 years after he kicked those berthers out of his court for trying to arrest the president, he was dismayed to see Republican politicians trafficking in rhetoric that downplayed the events of January 6th.

Speaker 38 Writing in a court filing in one of those cases,

Speaker 60 The court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they did anything wrong.

Speaker 60 But in my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.

Speaker 60 I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness.

Speaker 60 I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved in an orderly fashion like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6th defendants as political prisoners, or even, incredibly, hostages.

Speaker 60 That is all preposterous. The court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.

Speaker 38 So, the Super American grand jury's first indictment didn't work.

Speaker 38 But that didn't stop them. That's sort of a theme here.
Nothing really seems to deter them.

Speaker 38 One of those super-American grand jurors was a Georgia man named Carl Swenson.

Speaker 38 Swenson is a very special kind of conspiracy theorist called a sovereign citizen.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And 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.

Speaker 38 To be honest, it's almost always traffic stops and income taxes.

Speaker 38 You've probably heard jokes about a guy in a courtroom 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I've only seen one in court in real life, and it was a young woman appealing a conviction for driving without a license.

Speaker 38 She just kept yelling at the judge, I do not contract with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Speaker 38 It did not work. She was unsuccessful in that appeal.

Speaker 38 A month after Judge Lamberth told the 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.

Speaker 38 If they couldn't be their own grand jury, then the court should convene one for them.

Speaker 38 Judge Lamberth once again declined, explaining that a general grievance about the government doesn't give them standing to file this complaint.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 No lawyer would keep filing motions in a closed case.

Speaker 38 But they did not have lawyers. And one of Swenson's co-petitioners, Penny Kelso, filed a bizarre seven-page document four years later, demanding that the judge take action.

Speaker 38 It has a lot of prayers in it and links to blogs and random excerpts from the Constitution.

Speaker 38 And the last page is just illegible handwritten notes, and I can kind of make out something about Benghazi.

Speaker 38 And she she signed this whole thing,

Speaker 38 Penny Kelso,

Speaker 38 DVM,

Speaker 38 which is technically true. Penny Kelso does have a doctorate of veterinary medicine.

Speaker 38 But the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has suspended her license half a dozen times for things like botching 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 education hours.

Speaker 38 Penny doesn't actually come up again in 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.

Speaker 38 So they couldn't sue the president. They couldn't issue their own federal indictment.
They couldn't make a judge convene a federal grand jury.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 wouldn't heed their demands, maybe a grand jury foreman in a small town in rural Tennessee would.

Speaker 38 Sweetwater, Tennessee is a small town straddling the line between McMinn and Monroe counties.

Speaker 38 A bit 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.

Speaker 38 In March of 2009, he drafted his own indictment against Barack Obama.

Speaker 38 He went down to the county courthouse and notarized the following letter.

Speaker 60 I have observed and extensively recorded treacherous attacks by military political aristocrats against the United States Constitution for 20 years.

Speaker 60 Now, in yet another betrayal, you have broken in and entered the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, dissembling, and deceit.

Speaker 60 Posing as an imposter president and commander-in-chief, you have stripped civilian command and control over the military establishment.

Speaker 60 Known military criminal actors, command racketeers, are now free in the exercise of military government intent intent upon destruction of America's constitutional government.

Speaker 60 Free from constitutional restraint and following your criminal example, military commanders deployed U.S.

Speaker 60 Army active duty combat troops into the small civilian community of Samson, Alabama last week in a demonstration of their newly received despotic domestic police power. We come now to this reckoning.

Speaker 60 I accuse you and your military political criminal assistants of treason. I name you and your military criminal associates as traitors.
Your criminal ascension manifests a clear and present danger.

Speaker 60 You fundamentally changed our form of government. The Constitution no longer works.
Confident in holding your silent agreement and admission, I identify you as a foreign-born domestic enemy.

Speaker 60 My sworn duty, Mr. Obama, is to stand against what you stand for.
You are not my president. You are not my commander-in-chief.

Speaker 60 Obedient to the Constitution and submission of this criminal accusation, I remain steadfast and born fighting, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III.

Speaker 38 There's a lot going on there.

Speaker 38 You probably have some questions about Walter's claims. We'll take them one at a time.

Speaker 38 The 20 years of experience fighting the treacherous attacks on the Constitution by the military political aristocrats?

Speaker 38 Well, that's about how long he's been writing a blog. He started his blog, Jag Hunters, after he was pushed out of the Navy.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick was allowed to serve out his 19 and a half years, rounding up to 20, so he could receive his pension. But his last four years in the Navy were humiliating.

Speaker 38 He was convicted in a court-martial in 1990 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.

Speaker 38 He was found not guilty on charges of stealing $2,800,

Speaker 38 misappropriating another $10,400,

Speaker 38 and improper use of a government vehicle. And his only sentence was a reprimand.

Speaker 38 All things considered, it could have been worse. He was basically convicted of bad record keeping and given a talking to.

Speaker 38 He didn't have to go to the brig. He didn't get kicked out or demoted or lose his pension or any of his access to veterans benefits.
He served out his 20 years and retired and collected a pension.

Speaker 38 But he spent four years sitting at a desk. He was passed over for promotions.

Speaker 38 He was humiliated and angry. And he stayed angry at the government.
for a very long time.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But when you start pulling the narrative threads and looking for the beginning of the story, there's always more beginnings than you think.

Speaker 38 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 1990 court-martial.

Speaker 38 But as I spend more and more time really getting to know each of these weird little guys,

Speaker 38 patterns start to emerge.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 He got into all sorts of hijinks and crossed paths with all kinds kinds of people, going to federal prison half a dozen times for various frauds and threats.

Speaker 38 But the one thing that connected everything in Frank's life was an overwhelming sense of personal grievance. He had been wronged.

Speaker 38 He had been wronged and the only way to make it 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And I see echoes of that same mindset here.

Speaker 38 In 1994, Fitzpatrick had successfully recruited his congressman, Norm Dix, as an advocate on his behalf.

Speaker 38 And Congressman Dix wrote several letters to the Navy advocating for a new trial for Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 38 He did his best as an elected representative to help a constituent seek redress through the proper channels.

Speaker 38 And he was ultimately unsuccessful.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick continued communicating with Norm Dix and later Congressman Adam Smith throughout the 90s and early 2000s, badgering their staff regularly and demanding his decade-old case be revisited.

Speaker 38 There wasn't really much anyone could do, but both representatives met with him and heard his complaints and did what they could.

Speaker 38 In 2002, Fitzpatrick was banned from Congressman Smith's Tacoma offices.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And in 2003, two female staffers in Norm Dix's office got restraining orders against Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 38 In her petition to the court, one of those staffers wrote,

Speaker 38 Over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that Mr. Fitzpatrick's rage was building.
He had difficulty looking me in the eye, and he was so angry he often paced in our lobby.

Speaker 38 He has no respect for the work we've done for him over the years.

Speaker 38 The last straw was an incident in October of 2003 when Fitzpatrick refused refused to leave the office and physically prevented the employee from leaving by blocking the door, forcing her to call the police.

Speaker 38 Police reports show multiple violations of these restraining orders and several complaints, though no prosecutions for trespass, harassment, and domestic violence.

Speaker 38 He was angry. He had been wronged.
and their inability to help him was unforgivable.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick was coming into regular contact with the police in Kitsap County, Washington until he moved to Tennessee in 2007.

Speaker 38 But back to Fitzpatrick's treason allegations.

Speaker 38 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 secondary here.

Speaker 38 This indictment for treason isn't really about that. This is a brand new tactic.

Speaker 38 He's accusing the president of having violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

Speaker 38 And

Speaker 38 that did actually kind of happen.

Speaker 38 Not in the way he's claiming, obviously. Barack Obama did not violate the Posse Comitatus Act, but it's not a wholly fabricated allegation.

Speaker 38 The Posse Comitatus Act dates back to the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and it prohibits the use of the U.S. military in civilian policing.

Speaker 38 It doesn't apply to the National Guard under the direction of a state governor, and there are exceptions.

Speaker 38 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 ordnance that can't be safely dealt with otherwise.

Speaker 38 But generally speaking, the United States military cannot engage in domestic civilian policing.

Speaker 38 It's not something that comes up very often for normal people under normal circumstances. You're probably never having conversations about the Posse Comitatus Act.

Speaker 38 But it's a big boogeyman in anti-government movements.

Speaker 38 And the allegation Fitzpatrick is making in this letter alludes to an actual incident.

Speaker 38 On March 10th, 2009, Michael McClendon carried out what is still the deadliest mass shooting in the history of Alabama, killing 10 people, injuring six others, and ultimately taking his own life.

Speaker 38 It wasn't political or ideological. It wasn't racially motivated.

Speaker 38 It's just a terrible, sad story about gun violence in America. He was an angry young man with a gun and he made his problems everybody else's.

Speaker 38 McClendon first drove to his mother's house in Kinston, Alabama, where he shot and killed her and then burned her house down.

Speaker 38 Then he drove to his uncle's house in nearby Samson, Alabama and shot his uncle, two cousins, and several of their neighbors.

Speaker 38 Then he went to his grandmother's house and shot and killed her.

Speaker 38 And as he fled the third crime scene, he was firing at random from his car window, shooting bystanders.

Speaker 38 He killed a a gas station attendant, a passing motorist, and injured several pedestrians.

Speaker 38 When sheriff's deputies tried to run him off the road, he shot one of them too.

Speaker 38 With more than a dozen people shot across three towns spanning two counties, law enforcement was stretched pretty thin.

Speaker 38 There were multiple crime scenes, 10 dead bodies, half a dozen seriously injured survivors, including an infant, and the shooter was on the move.

Speaker 38 And so someone at the Geneva County Sheriff's Office made a phone call to nearby Fort Rucker to ask for help.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 His intention was only to be what he called a good neighbor.

Speaker 38 And for a period of about five hours that afternoon, several soldiers 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.

Speaker 38 And this was, in fact, a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Soldiers from the United States Army should not have been participating in traffic checkpoints.
That is against the law.

Speaker 38 And the officer who made that call was disciplined. But it was a local mistake.
This wasn't something that was run up the chain of command all the way to the president.

Speaker 38 This didn't go through the Pentagon. They didn't convene the joint chiefs of staff.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I won't claim to be familiar with the details of military chain of 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.

Speaker 38 But this actual violation of the Posse Comitatus Act was enough to send a certain kind of guy into hysterics. I mean, look, I'm not making excuses for it.

Speaker 38 Any kind of precedent for that sort of thing should be avoided. The potential for abuse is extreme and terrifying.

Speaker 38 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 troops really were setting up checkpoints.

Speaker 38 It happened. It's not a drill.

Speaker 38 For someone like Walter Fitzpatrick, this was all the evidence he needed to have the president hanged for treason.

Speaker 38 And that gets us back to where we started, this long journey back to the beginning of the story.

Speaker 38 Walter Fitzpatrick accused the president of treason in March 2009. He took his complaint down to the courthouse and he got it notarized.

Speaker 38 He applied to present it to a Monroe County grand jury and they chose not to indict the president.

Speaker 38 Probably mostly because even if there was probable cause here, which there wasn't,

Speaker 38 the Monroe County, Tennessee Circuit Court does not have jurisdiction in a case involving the president of the United States committing treason unfortunately

Speaker 38 but that's not how fitzpatrick saw it

Speaker 38 in his mind this could only mean that there is corruption afoot

Speaker 38 Again and again,

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And they did hear him out once more. They allowed him to present to the grand jury in December of 2009.

Speaker 38 That grand jury again declined to indict President Barack Obama for treason.

Speaker 38 And at this point, they were done humoring him. Hearing this evidence again wasn't going to change anything.

Speaker 38 He was on several occasions refused entrance into the courtroom while the grand jury was hearing real cases.

Speaker 38 And just like those years he spent getting angrier and angrier at his congressman's office staff, these people were as helpful as they were required to be.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But in his mind, this inability to assist him could only mean that they were actively fighting against him.

Speaker 38 And so they too became subjects of his investigations.

Speaker 38 They were all guilty now of obstruction of justice, and they too must be arrested.

Speaker 38 In March of 2010, A year after he first charged the president with treason, Walter Fitzpatrick sent a letter to the police chief in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 If no one else was interested in justice, he was just going to have to do it himself.

Speaker 60 Chief Breeden, please accept this notice of the necessity, authority, and intent to conduct a series of imminent citizens' arrests throughout Monroe County, Tennessee.

Speaker 60 The first arrest plan must be constructed and crafted in cooperation with the Madisonville Police Department.

Speaker 60 Wisdom dictates the first arrest plan be one that is acceptable to your police chief colleagues throughout Monroe County, an arrest plan that can be used again and again. Time is not a friend.

Speaker 60 Planning must begin immediately. Contact information is provided separately.
Fair wins, following C's, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III.

Speaker 38 Notice that he's not asking for permission and he's not making a threat.

Speaker 38 He's letting him know.

Speaker 38 He feels like he and the police chief have the same level of authority here.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 He's not threatening to break the law because he doesn't think he is.

Speaker 38 He's inviting the police chief to participate in what he believes is a perfectly rational and legal course of action.

Speaker 38 It's not clear if the police chief wrote him back. I'm sure they had some conversations about this plan that didn't go how Fitzpatrick had had hoped.

Speaker 38 But there was no talking him out of it. He was going to arrest the people who were standing in his way with or without their help.

Speaker 38 And on April 1st, 2010,

Speaker 36 he tried it.

Speaker 64 Please leave the room. Please leave the room, sir.
I'm charging you with official oppression. Mr.
Fitzpatrick, please leave the room.

Speaker 64 Please leave the room. I'm placing you under arrest, Mr.
Ketler. You are under citizens of what I'm around.

Speaker 64 I'm placing you under arrest, Mr. Nicholas.
You must now come to the master leave room. I'll hurt when you escort this gentleman out of the room.
Mr. Petway is under citizens' arrest.

Speaker 38 Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached grand jury foreman Gary Petway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying to indict.

Speaker 38 And Petway doesn't look excited to see Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 38 But he looks more exasperated than anything else. He doesn't look afraid of the old man man lurching towards him, saying over and over again, I'm placing you under arrest.

Speaker 38 Petway is just sort of backing away from him and repeating, please leave, please leave the room, and pointing towards the door.

Speaker 38 And the video we have of this incident is not police body cam footage, but you'd be forgiven for assuming that's where it came from.

Speaker 38 It was recorded on someone's cell phone, a Motorola droid, to be precise, if you remember those,

Speaker 38 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 65 He did this for us. What do you intend to do for him and for this country?

Speaker 65 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 65 I know what I must do. I plan on marching on that courthouse.

Speaker 38 Carl Swenson was one of several supporters who showed up at the courthouse with Fitzpatrick that day.

Speaker 38 Swenson recorded the incident and posted it online, exhorting his followers to show up at the next hearing.

Speaker 38 The website he was running at the time, riseupforamerica.com, is gone now.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 One of the other supporters who witnessed Fitzpatrick's arrest that day was a man named Darren Huff.

Speaker 38 Like Swenson, Huff had made the drive to Madisonville from his home in Georgia.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 When Fitzpatrick was granted bond a few days after his arrest, Darren Huff made the drive back up to Tennessee to meet with him.

Speaker 38 They weren't going to suffer this indignity in silence. They made a plan.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And Darren Huff was the weird little guy I had in mind when I sat down to start this week's episode.

Speaker 38 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 2019 when Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes was front row center right behind the podium at a Trump campaign rally.

Speaker 38 And I did a little more digging around in 2020 when the oath keepers were starting to make noise about what would eventually become the January 6th insurrection.

Speaker 38 I'd collected a few odds and ends about oath keepers who got arrested for a variety of crimes over the years, trying to convince people that this could be a serious problem.

Speaker 38 And there are plenty of strange little stories in there.

Speaker 38 Like an oathkeeper in Ohio who was being investigated for mortgage fraud back in 2010, and the investigators completely accidentally discovered that he was making napalm in his garage.

Speaker 38 Or how oathkeepers leader Stuart Rhodes advised members to take it upon themselves to prevent voter fraud in the 2016 election in a plan that definitely was not meant to function as voter intimidation.

Speaker 38 And there's the story of that carload of oath keepers who were arrested in Florida in 2019.

Speaker 38 They were charged with violating the curfew order put in place during the state of emergency after Hurricane Michael.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And obviously, there's the entire saga of the Oath Keepers role in January 6th, but like I said, right now, I'm tired of that story.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 It was sort of a micro January 6th, an hour south of Knoxville, but 11 years too soon.

Speaker 38 At this 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?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 That would still be an interesting, weird little guy.

Speaker 38 But 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?

Speaker 38 Trying to explain that a retired Navy vet was convinced his county court could arrest the president sounds like a silly little joke without the context that this was a nationwide movement motivated by a racist conspiracy theory.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And the same characters keep showing up in each other's stories. An oath keeper tried to arrest the president in 2010.

Speaker 38 The oath keepers tried to overturn the 2020 election.

Speaker 38 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 2022 related to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's family's immigration and naturalization.

Speaker 38 And the same woman was a central figure in the brief frenzy of birther conspiracies about Kamala Harris in 2024.

Speaker 38 When Jared Taylor, America's leading purveyor of pseudo-academic eugenicist polemics, had to go to court in 2018 over a permit for his annual race science conference, he sought help from birther lawyer Van Erien.

Speaker 38 the same lawyer who worked on Carl Swenson's lawsuits to keep Barack Obama off the ballot in 2012.

Speaker 38 Cutting straight to the chase and getting to Darren's story wouldn't just be missing the forest for the trees, it would be ignoring a whole thriving white supremacist ecosystem.

Speaker 38 Because when you turn over a big rock, there's more than one weird bug under there.

Speaker 38 And to be honest, I really just wanted to have plenty of room to explore Darren Huff's fascinating legal strategy.

Speaker 38 Because, not to spoil it, but he does end up in federal prison for a little bit.

Speaker 38 It's such a rare treat to have so much incredible source material.

Speaker 38 And I really don't want to have to cut the audio of a man who got pulled over on his way to commit a federal crime and used that opportunity to try to recruit a state trooper into his militia.

Speaker 38 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.

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Speaker 38 When we left off last week, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III had been taken into custody outside the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 On April 1st, 2010, Fitzpatrick barged into a closed grand jury proceeding and attempted to place Monroe County Grand Jury Foreman Gary Petway under citizens' arrest.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick had written up his own arrest warrant, charging Petway with obstruction of justice for his refusal to issue an indictment against Barack Obama for treason.

Speaker 38 Walter Fitzpatrick did not have the authority to draw up his own arrest warrants any more than a county court an hour south of Knoxville had the authority to indict the president on a federal crime.

Speaker 38 But none of that really mattered to the small crowd of supporters outside who were sure that they were closer than ever to arresting the president.

Speaker 38 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 67 You have been notified, you have been told Mr. Petway has just been placed under citizens' arrest.

Speaker 67 My name is Walter Fitzpatrick. I have just placed Mr.
Petway under citizens' arrest.

Speaker 38 You're going to have to step outside.

Speaker 38 But when the doors opened again, it was not Gary Petway who was being escorted out by the sheriff's deputies.

Speaker 38 It was Walter Fitzpatrick.

Speaker 67 We're leaving now, sir. Why?

Speaker 68 Because you just interrupted a court proceeding.

Speaker 68 The rest of us would get arrested for that. However, all of you think you're special.

Speaker 68 So now we're leaving the courthouse. And then what? And then you're free to go.
Otherwise, you're going to get arrested today.

Speaker 67 Not free to come back in.

Speaker 68 No, sir.

Speaker 38 And he could have just left.

Speaker 38 As the deputy points out, he's kind of being treated with kid gloves here.

Speaker 38 He's already broken the law, but nobody really wants to deal with this old crank and his fan club.

Speaker 38 But instead of leaving, Fitzpatrick pivoted.

Speaker 38 Now he's placing the sheriff himself under arrest.

Speaker 38 In the audio recording, you can hear the deputy sigh dramatically as Fitzpatrick begins begins reading the officers their rights.

Speaker 38 And they realize that the only way Fitzpatrick is leaving the building is in handcuffs.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick was charged with interfering with a grand jury, resisting arrest, and inciting a riot.

Speaker 38 He was held in the county jail over the weekend, during which time he reportedly refused to eat or drink. and was offered a $1,500 bond on the condition that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

Speaker 38 On April 7th, 2010, the day after Fitzpatrick was released, Darren Huff made the drive from his home in Georgia back up to Madisonville.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 They were coordinating with multiple groups to show up for what Huff called phase two.

Speaker 38 When Walter Fitzpatrick appeared for his court date on April 20th, he wasn't going to be alone.

Speaker 38 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But my vague recollection of the story of some oathkeeper with a harebrain scheme to citizens arrest an entire county court turned up something a little more complicated. That keeps happening.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But if you listen to last week's episode, now you have some context for the baffling confidence Walter Fitzpatrick and Darren Huff seemed to have in their plan.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Walter Fitzpatrick, as bizarre and disconnected from reality as his ideas sound, was far 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.

Speaker 38 It was everywhere. Everyone from Chuck Norris to Donald Trump was asking, is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the United States?

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman said she would proudly produce her own birth certificate.

Speaker 38 Alabama Senator Richard Shelby denied that he'd told a newspaper that he'd like to see Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 This wasn't wasn't something that existed only at the lunatic fringe of political discourse. Mainstream politicians and celebrities were just asking questions,

Speaker 38 never mind the kinds of things their supporters might do to try to get answers.

Speaker 38 So after an entire year of unsuccessfully petitioning his local county grand jury to bring charges against Barack Obama, Walter Fitzpatrick was frustrated.

Speaker 38 And when he barged into that courtroom on April 1st, 2010, oathkeeper Darren Huff and sovereign citizen Carl Swenson were among those waiting just outside.

Speaker 38 And after the tables were turned that day with this citizen's arrest turning into just a citizen getting arrested, Darren Huff and Carl Swenson vowed to return,

Speaker 38 not just to support their friend at his next court date, but to carry out a bigger, better version of the plan.

Speaker 65 You who have been on the fence must get off of that fence, please.

Speaker 65 Go to the courthouse en masse and demand justice.

Speaker 65 He is honoring his oath. 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 65 My name is Carl Swenson.

Speaker 38 The call was put out. If you believe in the cause, if you believe in the Constitution,

Speaker 38 you must stand with Walter Fitzpatrick against the Monroe County courts.

Speaker 38 He was scheduled to appear on April 20th, and true patriots had an obligation to be there.

Speaker 38 Between Fitzpatrick's release on the 6th and his court date on the 20th, they had just two weeks to prepare.

Speaker 38 According to the court records, Darren Huff appeared in several videos about the events in Madisonville that were posted on Carl Swenson's website, riseupforamerica.com.

Speaker 38 Archived pages of that site do still exist, and I can read the text on those pages, but the videos were all embedded with Flash Player, so Darren's calls to action may be lost to the sands of time.

Speaker 38 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 his goddamn mouth.

Speaker 38 On April 15th, 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.

Speaker 38 According to Erica, the bank teller who testified at his trial, most of the employees at the branch 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.

Speaker 38 But that evening, he wasn't making his usual jokes. He was deadly serious.

Speaker 38 Erica testified that Huff just launched right into telling her about Walter Fitzpatrick and his upcoming trial in Madisonville, Tennessee, a situation she had no context for.

Speaker 38 She'd never heard of Walter Fitzpatrick and she'd never been to Madisonville, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 She was the only teller at the counter.

Speaker 38 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 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.

Speaker 38 The conversation got so intense that another employee went to go get the manager, Shane.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Sometime in 2009, 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.

Speaker 38 So when another employee came to get him that night because Huff was making Erica uncomfortable, he probably wasn't surprised.

Speaker 38 He tried guiding the conversation back to safer territory, asking Huff if he'd be taking his video video camera with him again on this trip. But the response was an alarming one.

Speaker 38 Huff told him it would be kind of hard to hold the camera because he planned to be, quote, on the front line with two AK-47s.

Speaker 38 He told the bank employees that they'd probably see him on the news next week.

Speaker 38 And as he was leaving, he told Erica, It was nice knowing you if I never see you again.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Obviously, 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.

Speaker 38 So we have a fairly contemporaneous recollection of what was said.

Speaker 38 She relayed to Chief Breeden that Huff told her that he was intending to travel to Madisonville, Tennessee on April 20th for Walter Fitzpatrick's court hearing, that he would be armed with AK-47s 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.

Speaker 38 And Darren Huff was found to be in possession of printed copies of those citizens' arrest warrants.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 She would have had no way of knowing any of that at the time if he hadn't told her himself.

Speaker 38 And she's on tape 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.

Speaker 38 Both Shane and Erica were, understandably, deeply unsettled by that interaction.

Speaker 38 Immediately after leaving work that evening, Erica called a friend who worked in local government who helped her find the phone number for the Madisonville, Tennessee Police Department.

Speaker 38 Shane'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.

Speaker 38 And by Monday, they'd met with FBI agents.

Speaker 38 And it was on Monday, April 19th, the day before the planned occupation of Madisonville, Tennessee, that an FBI agent knocked on Darren Huff's front door.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And 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 a cigarette.
It was a brief conversation.

Speaker 38 Agent Reed recalls that Huff was pretty open about his plan to drive to Tennessee in the morning. He said he'd have his Colt 45 on his hip and his AK-47 was in the truck.

Speaker 38 He freely volunteered to the agent that he was a member of both the Oath Keepers and the Georgia militia.

Speaker 38 He said that the plan was to execute citizens' arrest warrants and, quote, take back Madisonville.

Speaker 38 But that the group would not resort to violence unless they were provoked.

Speaker 38 When Darren Huff took the stand at his own trial, he recalled telling Agent Reed that evening that he'd love it if the FBI would be there in Madisonville.

Speaker 38 Again, remember last week that letter that Walter Fitzpatrick sent the police chief of Madisonville before all of this got started.

Speaker 38 He wasn't making threats.

Speaker 38 He was inviting the police to be part of his plan.

Speaker 38 And that's the same mindset Darren has here.

Speaker 38 He even gave the FBI agent his business card.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But when he finished his cigarette, the conversation was over.

Speaker 38 Agent Reed had no reason to arrest him.

Speaker 38 Huff had expressed to him a plan to commit a federal crime, the one he would eventually be arrested for,

Speaker 38 but he hadn't actually done it yet.

Speaker 38 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 a little civil disorder.

Speaker 38 So Agent Reed left.

Speaker 38 But another agent stayed nearby all night, watching and waiting for the truck to pull out of the driveway.

Speaker 38 Darren Huff was under FBI surveillance when he hit the road just before dawn on April 20th, 2010.

Speaker 38 At 6.15 a.m., he was observed crossing the state line. And just after 7 a.m., Tennessee State Trooper Michael Wilson followed Huff's truck as he took exit 60 off I-75 towards Madisonville.

Speaker 38 Whether or not Huff rolled through the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp is a matter of some debate.

Speaker 38 But Trooper Wilson flashed his blue lights and pulled him over.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But Trooper Wilson and Darren Huff spent over an hour together there on the shoulder of Tennessee Highway 68.

Speaker 38 When Huff was asked to step out of the vehicle, he had his Colt 45 on his hip.

Speaker 38 The officer unholstered the weapon, removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and put the weapon in his patrol car for safekeeping.

Speaker 38 Darren Huff produced a valid Georgia driver's license, but he didn't have his truck's registration on him.

Speaker 38 He assured the officer the gun was legal and handed him a piece of paper that he said was a gun carry permit.

Speaker 38 In his testimony, the trooper said the document looked, quote, very unprofessional, and he was concerned it might not be real.

Speaker 38 He spent an hour going back and forth with dispatch about this strange document and was never able to verify verify whether Huff actually had a valid carry permit for that gun.

Speaker 38 And during that hour, while they were trying to sort it out, Darren Huff talked.

Speaker 38 He talked a lot. He ran his mouth the entire time.

Speaker 38 And the entire conversation was recorded on the officer's dash cam, which was connected to a microphone on his uniform.

Speaker 38 And in their conversation, Darren explained his whole plan. They had arrest warrants for the grand jury foreman, the district attorney, the sheriff, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 In the portions of this audio that I could find, the officers seemed to be playing along. They're mostly just letting him talk without interruption.

Speaker 38 But occasionally they asked some questions about how exactly the plan is going to work.

Speaker 38 And Darren's happy to explain because he's actually going to need their help.

Speaker 69 And then at that point they'll be placed into custody and, you know, turn this man over to you.

Speaker 38 I don't have handcuffs.

Speaker 69 You know, so I mean, we would need somebody like you guys there. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate you guys listening.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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 they've been citizens arrested.

Speaker 38 But that wasn't all. He was worried about a lot more than just the corrupt government in Monroe County, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 He shared his concerns about the Affordable Care Act, which had just been signed into law a few weeks earlier.

Speaker 38 Of course, he was upset that this was communism, obviously.

Speaker 38 But more importantly, he was very worried because this law requires that all Americans be implanted with the mark of the beast, as foretold in Revelations.

Speaker 69 Luke 10, 18, Jesus says, and I beheld Satan and his lightning fall from heaven.

Speaker 69 The Greek translation for lightning is Barak.

Speaker 69 Now, Jesus didn't speak Greek. He spoke Hebrew.
so you can look it up in the Hebrew. It's still Barak.

Speaker 38 And from heaven, translates from Hebrew, who or O Bama.

Speaker 69 So Jesus said out of his own lips, I saw Satan as Barak Bama.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But also, 9-11 was an inside job.

Speaker 38 He tells the officers that they, who are all white men, are God's true chosen people, that Caucasians are the real Israelites, and biblical prophecy foretold the reestablishment of Israel in 1776.

Speaker 38 Remember last week when we touched briefly on Christian identity?

Speaker 38 That's what this is. Darren Huff is a self-proclaimed pastor in the Christian identity movement.

Speaker 38 He's standing there on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops, preaching Christian identity and trying to recruit them to the oath keepers.

Speaker 38 It remains very unclear to me why the trooper gave Huff his gun back, but he did.

Speaker 38 At 8.13 a.m., he handed Darren Huff a written warning, returned his Colt 45,

Speaker 38 and told him he was free to go.

Speaker 38 The men shook hands and Huff Huff thanked the officer and he took a few steps back toward his truck before he stopped, turned around,

Speaker 38 and said,

Speaker 38 Let me pre-warn you, if enough of us show up today, we are going to proceed forward in this citizen's arrest. That's why I have my 45.

Speaker 38 Ain't no government official going peacefully.

Speaker 38 And then he slid his Colt 45 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.

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Speaker 38 At five o'clock that morning, more than 50 police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around Monroe County, Tennessee, gathered for a briefing.

Speaker 38 There were FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and at least one representative from the Department of Homeland Security.

Speaker 38 They'd been monitoring the online chatter about Walter Fitzpatrick's hearing at the courthouse at 9 a.m.

Speaker 38 and they were worried. The intelligence they had was that as many as 600 people might be on their way to Madisonville, Tennessee.

Speaker 38 They had undercovers stationed in nearby businesses and snipers on rooftops.

Speaker 38 One of those undercover officers was Mike Hall, the director of a regional violent crime task force in Tennessee.

Speaker 38 In plain clothes, he got a table at Donna's, a cafe a block from City Hall, where Fitzpatrick's supporters would be meeting for breakfast.

Speaker 38 And maybe the police should have known that they probably weren't expecting 600 armed militiamen if they knew that they had booked tables at Donna's cafe.

Speaker 38 But that's neither here nor there.

Speaker 38 And by the time breakfast was over, barely 20 supporters were packed into the dining room, finishing their biscuits and coffee, as Darren Huff gave a rousing speech about taking his AK-47 down to the courthouse.

Speaker 38 Carl Swenson's dead website isn't exactly easy to navigate, so maybe the whole speech was there at some point.

Speaker 38 But I was only able to dig up an audio file of the first six minutes or

Speaker 38 And it's pretty inspiring stuff.

Speaker 67 So, as a Christian, as Lieutenant Commander said, I'm chaplain for the Georgia militia. So, I look at things a little bit differently.

Speaker 21 And I look at them basically.

Speaker 67 And I told these guys and I tell everybody, I'm not a very smart guy.

Speaker 67 In fact, the only thing that I know about the Constitution are the first few amendments, those leave-me the hell-alone ones-that's what I know, and I know them well enough to say, you're wrong.

Speaker 67 You can't do this.

Speaker 38 Over the sound of clinking forks on plates, the Christian Identity Militia chaplain explains that they are preparing for spiritual war, that we are already in the end times as foretold in Revelations.

Speaker 38 See, the founding of the United States was biblical prophecy. God knew that in 1776, the 13 tribes of Israel would be called back together as the 13 colonies.

Speaker 38 Yes, 13.

Speaker 38 I know it's 12, 12 tribes of Israel. You know it's 12.
But Darren is counting Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, separately. That's why he thinks it's 13.

Speaker 38 And I know that because he mentions Joseph's sons specifically.

Speaker 38 Because otherwise I might have assumed he was talking about something different.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And that usually boils down to a theory that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descended from a Turkic race called the Khazars.

Speaker 38 Christian identity guys really love this book from the 70s called The 13th Tribe, which makes the case for this theory.

Speaker 38 Honestly, please don't make me explain the Khazar hypothesis. Every time I see a guy posting about Khazars, I'm just not having a good time.

Speaker 38 But what Darren was saying might actually be weirder.

Speaker 48 Jacob went like this,

Speaker 67 and he blessed them the way God intended him to bless them.

Speaker 67 That crossing of the arms

Speaker 67 is on that flag.

Speaker 67 That's where that cross comes from. It has nothing to do with rednecks.

Speaker 60 It has nothing to to do with the Confederacy.

Speaker 67 It has everything to do with God's chosen people.

Speaker 38 Now, this was a new one for me. I've never heard this one before.

Speaker 38 What he's saying here is that the Confederate flag symbolizes Jacob's blessing of Joseph's sons.

Speaker 38 I don't know what the A to B to C here is,

Speaker 38 but I guess the Confederacy was the 13th tribe of Israel. Honestly, I don't want to know.
I don't want to know. That way lies madness.

Speaker 38 So after his big speech, Darren Huff steps outside.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And Huff laments to this man that he wishes they had more people,

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And Darren Huff wasn't the only one who excused himself from the table after this speech.

Speaker 38 Carl Swenson, our sovereign citizen and the primary instigator of the online uproar calling people to Madisonville, had a phone call to make.

Speaker 70 All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here with my special guest, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Laken and his attorney, Paul Jensen.

Speaker 70 Colonel Laken is the Army officer who has challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama to act as Commander-in-Chief.

Speaker 71 Also with me is Dr.

Speaker 70 Jerome Corsi. And going to Tennessee and Carl.
Carl, you're on the air.

Speaker 38 That's right. It's Carl in Tennessee.
And he was live on air with G. Gordon Liddy and Jerome Corsi.

Speaker 38 I have to admit, I spent the better part of an afternoon chasing down this 15-year-old episode of Morning Talk Radio, so I am going to tell you about it.

Speaker 38 On April 12, 2010, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry Laken did not report for duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Speaker 38 Instead, He drove to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he was read his rights by his commanding officer, Colonel Gordon Ray Roberts.

Speaker 38 Lincoln's unit deployed to Afghanistan that week without him. The 18-year veteran wasn't afraid to return to Afghanistan.

Speaker 38 This deployment would have been the seventh of his career and his second to Afghanistan. In 2004, he was the Army's Flight Surgeon of the Year.

Speaker 38 He'd been awarded a Meritorious Service Medal and a Bronze Star.

Speaker 38 He was on track to be promoted to full colonel within the next year.

Speaker 38 But he had come to realize that his deployment orders were unlawful.

Speaker 38 Not on ideological grounds. He wasn't protesting the war.
He hadn't suddenly become a peace activist after seeing the horrors of war firsthand. No, no.

Speaker 38 The doctor was refusing to deploy unless he could see the president's birth certificate.

Speaker 66 I will disobey my orders to deploy 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 38 A week after disobeying his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Aiken appeared as a guest on the G. Gordon Liddy Show.

Speaker 38 Decades after dabbling at being an FBI agent, doing dirty tricks for Richard Dixon and spending a little time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, Liddy really hit his stride as an extremely right-wing talk radio host host who regularly encouraged listeners to do things like shoot federal agents in the head.

Speaker 38 Robert Evans put out a staggering six-part series of episodes on G. Gordon Liddy on Behind the Bastards last year.

Speaker 38 So if you're interested in hearing some outrageously racist clips of Liddy's radio show, I believe those are in part six.

Speaker 38 But today we're just talking about one episode of the G. Gordon Liddy Show, the one that aired on April 20th, 2010, because that's the episode Carl Swenson called into during the second hour.

Speaker 38 In the first hour of the show, Liddy interviewed Colonel Laken and Laken's attorney, a California personal injury lawyer named Paul Jensen.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 The answer is unclear.

Speaker 38 In my experience, experience, conspiracy theorists and extremists tend to hire attorneys who share their beliefs rather than ones who have, say, relevant experience in a particular area of law.

Speaker 38 But in this case, it seems very worth mentioning that Paul Jensen was a longtime associate of, friend to, and occasional attorney for...

Speaker 38 Roger Stone.

Speaker 38 In 2007, it was Paul Jensen, acting as Stone's attorney, who publicly released a 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.

Speaker 38 And Jensen represented Stone in 2016 when he was sued over allegations that he'd been involved in a coordinated campaign of voter intimidation.

Speaker 38 It was Jensen who drafted the paperwork to incorporate Stop the Steal in 2016.

Speaker 38 So, after this interview, G. Gordon Liddy opened the phones to hear from listeners on the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Speaker 38 Caller after caller thanked Colonel Lakin for his courage and shared their own theories about how they could finally get to the truth of Barack Obama's birth.

Speaker 38 And then, after an advertisement for gold coins, Another birther called into the show.

Speaker 38 But this one wasn't just sitting idly by while Barack Obama pretended to be the president.

Speaker 72 Lieutenant Colonel, I want to thank you for everything you're doing, and I want to give you some encouragement here.

Speaker 72 I'm in the city of Madisonville, Tennessee, right now in Monroe County, where they've had this area on lockdown with FBI,

Speaker 72 TBI, local police, and troopers, all because of Lieutenant Commander Walter Fitzpatrick and his attempts to effect arrest using a criminal complaint against Barack Obama and

Speaker 72 Nancy Pelosi, and in this case, the grand jury members here in the town of Madison Center. People are gathering now, but

Speaker 72 it is a tenuous situation at best.

Speaker 38 Carl closed the call by saying things were getting pretty heated out there in Tennessee.

Speaker 38 And everything they were doing was, quote, in direct support of the message being pushed by Colonel Laken and Liddy himself. G.

Speaker 38 Gordon Liddy 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.

Speaker 38 The next caller, Julie in Texas, was very worried about her sons. They were active duty soldiers deployed overseas.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 I didn't listen to the rest of the episode. I don't know if they resolved that.

Speaker 38 But after Darren's 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.

Speaker 38 Their little crowd of 20 was outnumbered three to one by a very visible police presence.

Speaker 38 And according to Walter Fitzpatrick's blog, a fair number of those supporters who turned up were middle-aged middle-aged women, one of whom brought several minor children with her.

Speaker 38 Darren had a truck full of guns and was bragging about how he had 400 rounds for his AK-47, but they just didn't have the numbers to do anything that day.

Speaker 38 The only time anybody actually got close to the courthouse was when Darren Huff took a bag of biscuits over to a detective on the courthouse steps.

Speaker 38 By the time Fitzpatrick's hearing was over, Darren was bored, he was tired, and he was ready ready to go home. So everybody just left.

Speaker 38 Nothing happened. Nobody got arrested.

Speaker 38 That night, Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes saw the video Carl Swenson posted online of Darren getting pulled over on his way to Madisonville.

Speaker 38 The truck says Oath Keepers all down one side in huge letters. You really can't miss it.
It's the official logo of the Oath Keepers.

Speaker 38 And Rhodes called Swenson immediately and demanded he take the video down. It was embarrassing.

Speaker 38 And within days, Rhodes himself showed up to speak with Darren Huff in person.

Speaker 38 He was furious.

Speaker 38 He demanded to know why Huff was so intent on making Madisonville the flashpoint.

Speaker 38 Now, Rhodes isn't the kind of guy who's actually concerned about there being a flashpoint. He wants one.
That's the whole idea, right? Eventually the militia will come into some kind of conflict.

Speaker 38 But this wasn't the one he wanted

Speaker 38 because he thought Darren's ideas were foolish and embarrassing. And he revoked Darren's oathkeeper's membership.

Speaker 38 Undeterred though, Darren Huff returned to Tennessee a week later.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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 come across Loudoun County Sheriff Tim Guider and Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess as they were getting out of their cars.

Speaker 38 They were late for a meeting, so this conversation was short.

Speaker 38 But Huff asked Sheriff Guider if he'd be willing to arrest a fellow sheriff.

Speaker 38 At trial, Sheriff Guider couldn't really 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.

Speaker 38 But yes, hypothetically, he did have the authority to arrest another sheriff.

Speaker 38 Darren Huff was trying to recruit law enforcement officers to assist with the plan.

Speaker 38 He wasn't giving up,

Speaker 38 but he was running off time.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick's next hearing was scheduled for May 4th, and he needed to find a sheriff who would be there to take his prisoners into custody.

Speaker 38 He must not have had much success on the 28th, though, because two days later, on April 30th, he was back at it, driving around Tennessee, looking for sheriffs who believed in the Constitution.

Speaker 38 He was up near Knoxville when he got pulled over.

Speaker 38 This time around, there's no debate about whether or not he ran a stop sign.

Speaker 38 This wasn't a traffic stop.

Speaker 38 There was a federal warrant for his arrest.

Speaker 38 Darren Huff was charged with violating Title 18, Section 231, Subsection A2.

Speaker 38 And that's interesting.

Speaker 38 You probably don't believe me, but hang on a second.

Speaker 38 Section 231 is civil disorders, and it covers three separate crimes that don't really go together.

Speaker 38 A1 makes it a crime to 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.

Speaker 38 A2, which was Darren's crime, makes it illegal to transport a firearm or a bomb across state lines if you know or have reason to know that the gun or explosive device is going to be used in a civil disorder.

Speaker 38 And A3 makes it illegal to be in a cop's 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.

Speaker 38 But that's the one that's really gotten to work out in the last couple of years because it was used in hundreds of January 6 cases.

Speaker 38 But 18 USC 231A2 is

Speaker 38 uncommon.

Speaker 38 I mean, people get charged for doing this kind of thing, but usually they get charged with conspiracy to do whatever it was they were going to do when they got where they were going.

Speaker 38 And then maybe they'll tack on some kind of gun crime.

Speaker 38 And subsection A1 just doesn't make any sense at all. There's already a whole separate law that makes it a crime to distribute information about bomb making.

Speaker 38 And that one has a harsher penalty than this. So I don't know why we need this one at all.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And I still haven't, even after looking pretty hard.

Speaker 38 When Darren Huff appealed his conviction, it was noted in the appellate record that this particular statute had actually never been construed by an appellate court before.

Speaker 38 So this was the first time a court of appeals was examining this statute.

Speaker 38 But just because people don't get charged with this very often doesn't make it any less of a real law.

Speaker 38 And it does pretty well describe what he did

Speaker 38 because

Speaker 38 he didn't really do

Speaker 38 anything, did he?

Speaker 38 But they were really worried that he might,

Speaker 38 or at least they were worried that he would continue to create situations where someone else might.

Speaker 38 Because if you get enough anxious people with guns together enough times,

Speaker 38 Eventually something is going to go wrong in a way that escalates pretty quickly.

Speaker 38 So some federal agent or prosecutor got creative and they found a crime. Because technically, yeah, he put guns in his truck and he drove to another state.

Speaker 38 And when he was doing it, the plan that he had in his mind was that he was going to have that gun around

Speaker 38 in case the county judge didn't appreciate him barging into her courtroom.

Speaker 38 So, the intent is pretty clear. He told anyone within earshot for two weeks what he was going to do.

Speaker 38 He wanted to lead an armed mob onto the courthouse. He made videos about it.
He told his bank teller. He told a bunch of state troopers.
He gave a speech.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 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 2016.

Speaker 38 Now, normally that's all I would really have to say about a criminal case. We already talked all the way through the actual timeline of events, so You already know what happened.

Speaker 38 And I just told you how the trial ended. He was convicted by a jury, appealed unsuccessfully, and served his sentence.

Speaker 38 But this trial is really just so special. I mean, first of all, it went to trial.
That's pretty rare.

Speaker 38 In 2022, just 2.3%

Speaker 38 of people charged with federal crimes actually went to trial.

Speaker 38 But it's so much more than that. Darren Huff really,

Speaker 38 really wanted to be in the driver's seat when it came to his criminal defense.

Speaker 38 One thing you have to remember about Darren Huff is that he's got a little sovereign citizen in him.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And in the year and a half between his arrest and his trial,

Speaker 38 He kept insisting that his public defenders file motions based on legal arguments that he had invented.

Speaker 38 And when they refused to file some of the more bizarre ones, he fired them. Or at least he tried to.

Speaker 38 In March of 2011, his public defender was begging him to consider the plea 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.

Speaker 38 And they really seemed to be trying to explain to him that you can't just file how you feel. There has to be case law.
It has to be based in something.

Speaker 38 And after months of bitter emails back and forth about, you know, we can't file stuff that you made up,

Speaker 38 and Darren's accusing them of working against him, and the original public defenders file a motion to withdraw, saying that their relationship has soured irreparably and they can't continue.

Speaker 38 And during this brief period of time before a new public defender could be appointed, Darren files some of those motions he wanted. The ones he wrote,

Speaker 38 including one that just reads,

Speaker 38 comes the defendant in the above entitled action, Darren Wesley Huff, and moves the court to clarify its position on the Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution.

Speaker 38 And when his second public defender was assigned, a man named Scott Greene, there were just three months to go before trial. And in those three months, he did his job.

Speaker 38 He filed motions to suppress the statements Darren made during the traffic stop, motions to prevent the prosecution from bringing up his extremist beliefs, the kinds of things you'd expect to see.

Speaker 38 And he seemed to be humoring his client when it came to some of his unique ideas about the law.

Speaker 38 But like the attorneys before him, he wasn't willing to put his name on nonsense.

Speaker 38 And after another round of these emails back and forth, where this exasperated attorney is trying to explain to him that motions have to be based on the law, Darren threatened to fire him, writing,

Speaker 38 If you do not have the courage or kahunas necessary to represent me, then please let me know.

Speaker 38 I think that's supposed to say kahones, but it says K-A-H-U-N-A-S, kahunas.

Speaker 38 Maybe that's a regional variation. He means balls.

Speaker 38 And that email is included in this bizarre 15-page document that he submitted to the court complaining about and trying to fire his lawyer.

Speaker 38 But he ends the document by saying, quote, is the Second Amendment part of the Constitution? Yes or no?

Speaker 38 Wherefore, Darren Wesley Huff moves this court to dismiss the indictment against him.

Speaker 38 I don't really know where to start with that. That's That's really not how it works.

Speaker 38 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.
I can't do this.

Speaker 38 And the judge said, no,

Speaker 38 they were too close to trial. They would just have to work it out because they're going to trial together.

Speaker 38 And Green really does seem to have done his best here.

Speaker 38 On the eve of the trial, he filed five separate documents, each one called Mr. Huff's special request.

Speaker 38 And they were sort of fanciful jury instructions.

Speaker 38 It probably will not surprise you that Mr. Green declined to continue working with Darren on his appeal.
And Darren's attitude did not improve once he was in federal prison.

Speaker 38 One email he sent his new lawyer, Mr. Gulley, during the appeal, starts off by accusing Gully of withholding the trial transcripts, but they just hadn't been made yet.

Speaker 38 It takes a long time to produce those.

Speaker 38 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, or that you simply take me for a fool.

Speaker 38 You, sir, have made a mockery of the system that purports to provide me with effective assistance of counsel.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And then he threatens to have his attorney indicted, disbarred, and institutionalized.

Speaker 38 Mr. Gulley'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.

Speaker 38 We'd be doing episodes about Walter Fitzpatrick and his entourage entourage 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.

Speaker 38 When Fitzpatrick finally did get arraigned in Monroe County for that original April 1st attempt to arrest the grand jury foreman,

Speaker 38 it did not go well.

Speaker 38 The judge that he'd accused of treason was presiding.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 And so the judge turns to the clerk who's there on the courtroom and says, Miss Cook, have you been levying war against the United States?

Speaker 38 And the clerk says, I don't think so, Your Honor.

Speaker 38 And I wish that I had an audio recording of this. I just have the transcript.
But Fitzpatrick is having a lot of outbursts during this hearing. And at this point, he says, are you making fun of me?

Speaker 38 Is that what's going on here? Am I being mocked?

Speaker 38 And they just ignore him and continue the proceeding.

Speaker 38 I would have loved to have seen it.

Speaker 38 And I wish the officer who testified at Huff's trial had been more specific about exactly who it was that he overheard Darren Huff talking to in the morning of April 20th outside Donna's cafe.

Speaker 38 Huff had a quiet conversation with someone about calling off the operation that day.

Speaker 38 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 cruiser with Georgia license plates.

Speaker 38 Carl Swenson's from Georgia, but I know Carl Swenson was driving a 2009 Honda Civic hybrid that day. Trust me, I checked.

Speaker 38 I've got a state trooper on tape calling in his plates when they saw him on the highway.

Speaker 38 And in his blog, Walter Fitzpatrick thanked, by name, most of the people who showed up there that day. And most of them were women.
And very few of them were from Georgia.

Speaker 38 But we do know for sure

Speaker 38 that Bill Lohman, a Marine Corps veteran and crane operator from Waco, Georgia, was there that day.

Speaker 38 And you'd be a fool to believe Bill Lohman would walk as far as his own mailbox without a gun.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 A fellow member of the Georgia militia and the Oath Keepers.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But in some old blog posts, Luhman is referred to as a leader in the Georgia militia. That may have just been his local chapter.

Speaker 38 There were at least a dozen units around the state of this larger group calling itself the Georgia militia.

Speaker 38 And his name does not.

Speaker 38 appear in the court record for the four members of the Georgia militia who were arrested in 2011 for a plot that included plans to blow up the federal building in Atlanta and maybe murder government officials with Ricin.

Speaker 38 And just a side note: if you do try to Google Georgia white supremacist Ricin attack,

Speaker 38 the more recent result you'll get is for an unrelated white supremacist plot to carry out a biological terrorist attack.

Speaker 38 In that case, in 2017, a neo-Nazi had actually successfully created the deadly poison, but he accidentally exposed himself to it, so he showed up at the emergency room before he could actually hurt anybody else.

Speaker 38 But this is not that one. This is the one from 2011.
But again, Bill Luhmann, nothing to do with the Ricin attacks, just the same militia.

Speaker 38 And I found an old event for a tea party picnic in North Carolina in 2013 that lists Luhmann as a speaker, and his title in the program is Constitutionalist Icon from Georgia.

Speaker 38 And he appeared on stage with such heroes of the Patriot movement as James Renwick Manship.

Speaker 38 That name is not familiar to you, I'm sure, but you might remember the photo of the guy in the George Washington costume.

Speaker 38 wading into the reflecting pool at the Capitol during the January 6th riot as a sort of symbolic crossing the Delaware moment.

Speaker 38 But my favorite manship moment is the time he showed up at my local library dressed as Thomas Jefferson and refused to break character as he ranted in the first person about how he never had sexual relations with enslaved women.

Speaker 38 And Bill Lumin is very much still around and active in the same kinds of conspiracy spaces. He posts give or take a hundred times a day, every day, on Trump's Truth Social platform.

Speaker 38 And all of his posts are in all caps. He starts every day by posting this message.

Speaker 38 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.
Semperfy, my fellow Marines.

Speaker 38 May America bless God again into our nation, our homes, and our hearts, heart emoji.

Speaker 38 Seriously, he posts that every morning. He's very committed.

Speaker 38 And he still thinks Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. He still posts a lot about hanging people for treason.

Speaker 38 But the reasons have shifted. You know, COVID, Ukraine, election fraud, whatever.

Speaker 38 As I'm writing this, Right now, he's still posting.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 His last post was a thread documenting the progress of his homemade banana nut bread. At the time of recording, I can report that he added cream cheese icing to it, and it was, quote, Stellar.

Speaker 38 He's pretty popular over there on Truth Social. He was even re-truthed last last year by Donald Trump himself after posting some incoherent theory about stolen votes from the 2020 election.

Speaker 38 Well, he wasn't re-truthed. He was quote-truthed, whatever the truth social equivalent of a quote tweet is.

Speaker 38 Luhmann had suggested that the people responsible for the Dominion voting machines should be tried for treason. And Trump quoted the post, adding,

Speaker 38 A lot has been made of this lately. What do you think?

Speaker 38 And that must have been a huge day for Bill. The post went pretty viral.

Speaker 38 A lot of the keyboard warriors out here posting 17 memes a day about January 6th political prisoners absolutely still believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Speaker 38 And Walter Fitzpatrick went on to try his whole citizen's arrest thing in neighboring McMinn County, too.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 Those stolen documents were located by the FBI in the Connecticut home of Sharon Rondeau, the conspiracy theory blogger whose commitment to questioning the citizenship of politicians has remained strong over the years.

Speaker 38 She is still asking questions about Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris.

Speaker 38 Fitzpatrick published a memoir last year about his quest for justice in his 1990 court-martial.

Speaker 38 I didn't read it. It's like 400 pages long.

Speaker 38 He's in his 70s now, and he still occasionally updates his blog, Jag Hunters.

Speaker 38 The most recent post is just a link to someone else's video, and it's just like a mind-numbing 30-minute mashup of clips.

Speaker 38 I can't even really explain it.

Speaker 38 It's like actual footage of Trump rallies mixed in with like MyPillow commercials, a TikTok video of someone doing the macarena, but the lyrics have been changed to be about Donald Trump.

Speaker 38 I don't know. I tapped out when it got to a clip of Russell Brand praying with Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 38 I guess what I'm getting at here is these guys don't go away.

Speaker 38 The cause of the day changes, whether it's 9-11 truth, bertherism, COVID denial, QAnon, stop the steal.

Speaker 38 But it's a lot of the same core ideas. And honestly, it's a lot of the same individual guys.

Speaker 38 In one newspaper photo of Walter Fitzpatrick outside of the courthouse after a hearing in McMinn County in 2014, the man standing next to him is Field McConnell.

Speaker 38 And Field McConnell is a former commercial airline pilot who retired in 2006 after refusing to submit to a neurological exam.

Speaker 38 He had become obsessed with the idea that 9-11 was an inside job and was convinced that Boeing had rigged all of their planes with explosives and they were planning an upcoming 9-11 style attack.

Speaker 38 In 2019, he got really into QAnon.

Speaker 38 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 kill her and accusing her of having trafficked the missing child.

Speaker 38 The day I'm recording this, he was a guest guest on a podcast hosted by a small-scale QAnon influencer.

Speaker 38 I would tell you what they talked about, but it kind of sounded like he was calling in from the bottom of the ocean.

Speaker 38 This episode took me days longer to write than it should have, because every new name I turned up in the comments on a 15-year-old blog post took me on some long, strange path that some character in this story had taken in the years since.

Speaker 38 There are no lone wolves. No one is self-radicalizing in a vacuum.
People don't just wake up one day and drive three hours with a camcorder and a truck full of guns for no reason at all.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 38 But for all the weird twists and turns in this strange tale of the Berther 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.

Speaker 38 The prosecutor had asked him about some business cards that he made after his arrest. On the front, it said, Darren Huff, right-wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist.

Speaker 38 And on the back, there was a picture of a gun.

Speaker 38 So on cross-examination, Huff's defense attorney was trying to elicit testimony that would show the jury that those business cards were obviously a joke, that this was just his sense of humor.

Speaker 38 So he asked Darren about some shirts.

Speaker 38 And Darren gave the following answer.

Speaker 38 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 government wants to label me.

Speaker 38 The first one that he had made me said, I am the God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving, right-wing extremist the government warned you about.

Speaker 38 And the other one said,

Speaker 38 I finally made Homeland Security's potential domestic terrorist watch list and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Speaker 38 Obviously, the point behind them was for humor, and they have been received as such.

Speaker 38 Another one that was one of my initial shirts said, patriotism is not a spectator sport.

Speaker 38 And then there's something that I have never seen in an official federal court transcript before.

Speaker 38 As this big bearded militiaman is describing his funny terrorism shirts, the court reporter types in parentheses:

Speaker 38 witness crying.

Speaker 38 She put it on the record that he cried.

Speaker 38 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 38 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

Speaker 38 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.

Speaker 38 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 38 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.

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