In 2010, conspiracy theorists around the country were convinced that Barack Obama was not the rightful president. Some of them filed lawsuits. Some of them tried to have the President indicted. And when none of that worked, some of them took matters into their own hands and tried to arrest the county court employees they thought were standing in their way. In the first half of this story, Walter Fitzpatrick unsuccessfully storms the courtroom in Madisonville, Tennessee. The outcry over his arrest would motivate Oath Keeper Darren Huff to rally supporters for a second attempt. Sources: Jardina A, Traugott M. The Genesis of the Birther Rumor: Partisanship, Racial Attitudes, and Political Knowledge. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. 2019;4(1):60-80. doi:10.1017/rep.2018.25 Josh Pasek, Tobias H. Stark, Jon A. Krosnick, Trevor Tompson, What motivates a conspiracy theory? Birther beliefs, partisanship, liberal-conservative ideology, and anti-Black attitudes, Electoral Studies, Volume 40, 2015 Hughey, M.W. Show Me Your Papers! Obama’s Birth and the Whiteness of Belonging. Qual Sociol 35, 163–181 (2012). https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/birther-movement-founder-trump-clinton-228304 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna33388485 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/us/12alabama.html https://www.newsherald.com/story/news/crime/2018/10/19/vigilante-group-oath-keepers-arrested-in-mexico-beach-following-hurricane-michael/9509280007/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oath-keepers-poll-watching_n_58122566e4b0990edc2f8178 https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/hate-group-expert-daniel-levitas-discusses-posse-comitatus-christian-identity-movement-and https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2009mc00346/137380/2/0.pdf https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/25/judge-lamberth-jan-6-trump-00137960 https://www.tncourts.gov/rules/rules-criminal-procedure/6 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nå er det en linkup hos Coprix, og på torsdag får alle Coop-medlemmer pizza grandiosa til bare 30 kroner.
Kun på torsdag hos Coprix.
Fortort!
Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring comes The Unborn, a shocking true story.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and a secret she would kill to protect.
She went crazy.
Shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house out.
Listen to The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Had enough of this country?
Ever dreamt about starting your own?
I planted the flag.
This is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Or maybe not.
No country willingly gives up their territory.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
That's Escape from Z-A-Q-I-S-T-A-N on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
He said he was going to kill me!
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
On April 1, 2010, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III walked into the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.
That was no surprise to anyone in Madisonville.
Fitzpatrick had become a frequent visitor to this courthouse in a small town in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
A year earlier, in March of 2009, he asked a Monroe County grand jury to indict President Barack Obama on charges of treason.
The grand jury declined to do so.
In the year that followed, he had been a regular fixture in the county court clerk's office, demanding information about the county's jury selection process.
After the grand jury's refusal to accept his presentation of evidence against Barack Obama, he could only conclude that the process itself was deeply corrupt, and sinister forces were conspiring against him to suppress the truth.
That Barack 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.
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.
He just needed some backup.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I'm Molly Conger.
As I'm writing this, it's a few days after the 2024 presidential election.
Every election has winners and losers and not everybody is happy with the results.
It's probably no surprise to you that I count myself among those of us who aren't thrilled with the results this time around.
But sometimes, disappointment, dread, and dissatisfaction aren't enough.
For some people, an undesirable election outcome is simply unacceptable.
Literally, they can't accept it.
It can't be true, and it can't be allowed to stand.
As with my Halloween episode, I'm a little behind the curve here in terms of seasonal content.
At this rate, I'll be doing a Christmas special on Groundhog's Day.
But elections and weird little guys go together like peanut butter and jelly.
Well, no.
No, that's not true.
You do find them together often, but they don't usually mix well.
So maybe it's more like oil and water.
Neither of those analogies are really giving me what I want.
In my personal experience, right-wing extremists and election results go together like blue Gatorade and raw onions.
When I covered the January 6th riot at the Capitol in 2021, those were the two things I saw people pulling out of their backpacks the most.
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.
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.
And if you can only pack one thing to drink in a situation like that, make it water.
Or else you'll be washing pepper spray and onion juice out of your eyes with Gatorade, which doctors do not recommend.
That's just some free advice for you.
But I thought it would make perfect sense to do some kind of election-themed weird little guy.
And to be honest, I'm bored of January 6th stories.
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.
And if the guy they were fighting for that day follows through on his promise to pardon them all, some of them will make their way back into the news one way or another, whether that's running for office or building a bomb.
But right now, today, I'm sick of thinking about the 2020 election results because I'm sick of thinking about the 2024 election results.
And the 2020 election was not the first time right-wing extremists couldn't accept the results.
So come with me to the distant past.
2008.
2008.
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.
He won handily, beating John McCain by more than 7% in the popular vote and pulling in 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173.
Barack Obama was promising hope, change, and healthcare.
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.
It seemed like a new day had dawned.
We were all going to get healthcare, and we had finally elected our first black president.
Of course, not everyone was on board.
We'd had more than two 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.
About 40% of the total presidential time until 2008 was under a guy with one of those four names.
We elected two different guys named Franklin.
We hadn't really been getting a lot of variety.
Conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's race, religion, and place of birth are creatures of racism, pure and simple.
There's no talking your way around that fact.
He has a foreign-sounding name, and he is not white.
There was a lot of anxiety that someone who didn't look like the American presidents we'd had before couldn't possibly have the same American values.
During the primary, Mark Penn, a senior campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, wrote a memo suggesting that they should highlight the fact that Obama spent some of his childhood in Indonesia while emphasizing Clinton's Midwest roots, writing,"...his roots and basic American values and culture are at best limited.
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." The Clinton campaign didn't end up going with this strategy, but the memo got out.
And this idea that Barack Obama was un-American bled into a conspiracy theory that he was not American at all, and had in fact been born in Kenya.
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.
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.
People who are prone to believing unsubstantiated claims often believe many of them.
But while there are certainly people of all political orientations who are willing to entertain the theory, the study found that belief in this particular conspiracy theory was uniquely correlated to the believer's own race, party affiliation and religion.
and most importantly, their level of racial resentment toward African Americans.
So to be clear, there are multiple studies published in journals across a range of disciplines over the course of nearly 20 years that have found measurable correlations here.
The people who trafficked in birtherism were white Republicans with a measurable level of racial animus.
This was never about getting to the truth.
It was an intense fear of a black president.
In June of 2008, 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.
But you can't kill a conspiracy with facts.
That's never worked.
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.
And in August of 2008, the first of countless lawsuits was filed.
And oddly enough, we've already talked about this particular lawsuit on this show in the first episode about the Pennsylvania Klansman Barry Black Philip Berg's lawsuit alleged that Obama had been born in Kenya.
And this relied on a sworn affidavit written by Ron McCray about a phone call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother through a translator.
Ron McCray 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.
Berg's lawsuit was dismissed, and the judge called it frivolous and not worthy of discussion.
Which is true.
But that became the playbook.
Birthers around the country filed frivolous and baffling lawsuits.
They filed them in federal courthouses, county circuit courts, state supreme courts, the board of immigration appeals, state boards of election, state administrative courts.
They filed complaints and requests for injunctions and petitions anywhere they could find a bureaucrat sitting in a desk.
For just the years 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.
And they lost every single one.
They seemed convinced that they could find the right collection of words, the right legal incantation that, if presented to the right judge and the right jury, would wake America from this national nightmare of an Obama presidency.
But the lawsuits weren't working.
Judge after judge sent them packing.
In most cases, they didn't even get a hearing.
They were submitting complaints that had absolutely no legal basis to proceed.
No basis in reality, even.
And in the cases that did get a foot in the door, they were submitting forged documents and relying on already debunked claims.
Lawyers were sanctioned, fines were levied, and suit after suit was dismissed.
But undeterred, the birthers found a new way forward.
If they couldn't get justice through civil suits, they would simply have to have the President of the United States arrested.
In June of 2009, 172 extremely devoted conspiracy theorists convened.
They called themselves the Super American Grand Jury.
Now, that's not a real thing.
Grand juries are real, of course.
We don't need to get bogged down in the specifics because they vary from state to state.
But generally speaking, a grand jury is a group of citizens convened by a court...
And tasked with issuing indictments.
So a prosecutor will briefly summarize a case, they'll put on a little bit of evidence, maybe some witnesses, and the grand jurors will decide if there's probable cause to believe a crime has been committed by the individual the prosecutor is seeking to indict.
They aren't deciding if anyone is innocent or guilty.
They're not trying the case.
It's a much lower standard here.
They're just deciding, is this something that should proceed as a case at all?
You've probably heard the saying, you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
It's a pretty low bar to clear at this stage.
But we're not here to talk about real grand juries because that barely factors into the story at all.
I just want to be clear that grand juries are real.
They do exist.
And this was not one.
A grand jury is made up of grand jurors who have received an official summons from a real court, and they are presented real potential cases by a real prosecutor, and they make real determinations about which cases get indictments.
There are six states that allow citizen-initiated grand juries.
In Oklahoma, Nevada, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, and North Dakota, there is a process through which you can collect enough signatures on a petition to force a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate an alleged crime.
That's not what this was either.
They didn't have a petition they submitted to a court.
They didn't do it in any of those states.
I'm just saying avenues do exist.
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.
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.
But the idea of a citizen's grand jury, like the Super American Grand Jury, is not something these particular extremists invented.
In their modern iteration, most of these citizen's grand jury groups were trying to arrest Barack Obama for various invented crimes.
But they also popped up in the early 2000s among 9-11 truthers who wanted to arrest George Bush.
During the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation a few years back, militia members who supported the Bundy family convened fake grand juries to indict local officials and even some reporters whose coverage they found lacking.
Conspiracy theory frequent flyer Larry Klayman has not only indicted Joe Biden with a fake grand jury, he even convicted him.
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.
Christian identity has come up before.
We talked about it briefly in the episode about Christopher Hassan, 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.
He'd spend some time researching Christian identity online before writing to a longtime white nationalist leader named Harold Covington about his plans to make changes to society with, quote, a little focused violence.
And Christian identity kind of sounds like it might mean someone whose identity is Christian, right?
It's just someone who considers themselves to be a Christian, right?
But that's not what it means at all.
It refers to a specific set of extremist beliefs that white Europeans are God's true chosen people.
It is a deeply anti-Semitic belief system and one whose followers are often very willing to engage in violence.
The earliest example Levitas 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.
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 Curdalene, Idaho, before the officer could testify against a member of the group who'd been charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan Nations yet at that point, but he was already a prominent figure within Christian identity.
Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this and why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloan Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert.
The swampy Louisiana bayou.
And the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seemed to have it all.
A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way.
What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.
They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.
You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now.
Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy.
Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything.
A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.
She went batshit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house down.
Audio Web presents The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is your country falling apart?
Feeling tired?
Depressed?
A little bit revolutionary?
Consider this.
Start your own country.
I planted the flag.
I just kind of looked out of like, this is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Everybody's doing it.
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
I am the Queen of Ladonia.
I'm Jackson I, King of Kaepernberg.
I am the Supreme Leader of the Grand Republic of Mintonia.
Be part of a great colonial tradition.
Well, why can't I drag my own country?
My forefathers did that themselves.
What could go wrong?
No country willingly gives up their territory.
I was making rockets with a black powder, you know, with explosive warheads.
Oh, my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Bullets.
We need help!
We need help!
We still have the off-road portion to go.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
And we're losing daylight fast.
That's Escape from Z-A-Qistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
Someone, he said he was going to kill me!
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.
Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
No one was safe.
No one could stop it.
Police spun their wheels.
Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.
We thought it was over.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come home.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, my little creeps.
It's your favorite ghost host, Teresa.
And guess what?
Haunting is back, dropping just in time for spooky season.
Now I know you've probably been wandering the mortal plane, wondering when I'd be back to fill your ears with deliciously unsettling stories.
Well, wonder no more, because we've got a ghoulishly good lineup ready for you.
Let's just say things get a bit extra.
We're talking spirits, demons, and the kind of supernatural chaos that'll make your spooky season complete.
You know how much I love this time of year.
It's the one time I'm actually on trend.
So grab your pumpkin spice, dust off that Ouija board, just don't call me unless it's urgent, and tune in for new episodes every week.
Remember, the veils are thin, the stories are spooky, and your favorite ghost host is back and badder than ever.
Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So the super American grand jury had deep roots in dark places.
And it was not so super and not a grand jury at all.
It was just a collection of conspiracists who wrote their own indictment against the president.
And then they went to a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. and filed it.
Judge Royce Lamberth promptly dismissed them.
I guess maybe dismiss is a tricky word to use here because a real indictment can be dismissed by a judge, and that's not what happened here because this was not a real indictment.
What Judge Lamberth actually did was issue 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." 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. today and has presided over quite a few of the January 6 cases, most notably the trial of the QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley.
In 2023, 14 years after he kicked those birthers out of his court for trying to arrest the president, he was dismayed to see Republican politicians trafficking in rhetoric that downplayed the events of January 6th.
Writing in a court filing in one of those cases...
The court is accustomed to defendants who refuse to accept that they did anything wrong.
But in my thirty-seven years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.
I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness.
I've 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.
That is all preposterous.
The court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.
So the Super American Grand Jury's first indictment didn't work.
But that didn't stop them.
That's sort of a theme here.
Nothing really seems to deter them.
One of those Super American Grand Jurors was a Georgia man named Carl Swenson.
Swenson is a very special kind of conspiracy theorist called a sovereign citizen.
It's a strange and complicated set of beliefs that I can't really do justice in the time we have for this story, but it's a kind of legal, magical thinking.
There's a lot of crossover between sovereign citizens and other kinds of conspiratorial belief and a not insignificant amount of sovereign citizen belief within the militia movement.
And sovereign citizens generally believe that there are certain secret procedural loopholes that they can use to avoid being subject to the law.
Anything from traffic stops to income taxes.
To be honest, it's almost always traffic stops and income taxes.
You've probably heard jokes about a guy in a courtroom proclaiming that the judge has no authority over him because there's gold fringe on the flag in the courtroom and that means that admiralty law is in effect.
Or maybe you've heard of someone being pulled over and refusing to produce a driver's license, arguing with the cop that they don't need a driver's license because they're not driving, they're traveling, and it's different.
I've only seen one in court in real life, and it was a young woman appealing a conviction for driving without a license.
She just kept yelling at the judge, I do not contract with the Department of Motor Vehicles!
It did not work.
She was unsuccessful in that appeal.
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.
If they couldn't be their own grand jury, then the court should convene one for them.
Judge Lamberth once again declined, explaining that a general grievance about the government doesn't give them standing to file this complaint.
There was some kind of procedural mishap in the court clerk's office, though, and the docket was left open by accident.
This normally wouldn't matter at all.
No lawyer would keep filing motions at a closed case.
But they did not have lawyers.
And one of Swenson's co-petitioners, Penny Kelso, filed a bizarre seven-page document four years later demanding that the judge take action.
It has a lot of prayers in it and links to blogs and random excerpts from the Constitution, And the last page is just illegible handwritten notes, and I can kind of make out something about Benghazi.
And she signed this whole thing.
Penny Kelso, DVM. Which is technically true.
Penny Kelso does have a doctorate of veterinary medicine.
But the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has suspended 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.
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.
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.
But they had incontrovertible proof that Barack Obama could not be the president.
And it was their duty as Americans to have him arrested.
If this false president's collaborators in Washington, D.C. wouldn't heed their demands, maybe a grand jury foreman in a small town in rural Tennessee would.
Sweetwater, Tennessee is a small town straddling the line between McMinn and Monroe counties.
A bit of geography that explains why Sweetwater resident Walter Fitzpatrick would eventually go to jail for trying to perform citizen's arrests on courthouse employees in both counties.
In March of 2009, he drafted his own indictment against Barack Obama.
He went down to the county courthouse and notarized the following letter.
I have observed and extensively recorded treacherous attacks by military political aristocrats against the United States Constitution for twenty years.
Now, in yet another betrayal, you have broken in and entered the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, dissembling and deceit.
Posing as an imposter president and commander-in-chief, you have stripped civilian command and control over the military establishment.
Known military criminal actors, command racketeers, are now free in the exercise of military government intent upon destruction of America's constitutional government.
Free from constitutional restraint and following your criminal example, military commanders deployed U.S. 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.
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 as clear and present danger.
You fundamentally changed our form of government.
The Constitution no longer works.
Confident holding your silent agreement and admission, I identify you as a foreign-born domestic enemy.
My sworn duty, Mr.
Obama, is to stand against what you stand for.
You are not my president.
You are not my commander-in-chief.
Obedient to the constitution and submission of this criminal accusation, I remain steadfast and born fighting Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III. There's a lot going on there.
You probably have some questions about Walter's claims.
We'll take them one at a time.
The 20 years of experience fighting the treacherous attacks on the Constitution by the military political aristocrats?
Well, that's about how long he's been writing a blog.
He started his blog, Jag Hunters, after he was pushed out of the Navy.
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.
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.
He was found not guilty on charges of stealing $2,800, misappropriating another $10,400, and improper use of a government vehicle.
And his only sentence was a reprimand.
All things considered, it could have been worse.
He was basically convicted of bad record keeping and given a talking to.
He didn't have to go to the brig.
He didn't get kicked out or demoted or lose his pension or any of his access to veterans benefits.
He served out his 20 years and retired and collected a pension.
But he spent four years sitting at a desk.
He was passed over for promotions.
He was humiliated and angry.
And he stayed angry at the government for a very long time.
Sometimes I get a little lost in the weeds.
When I started writing this week's episode, it was supposed to be about a guy we haven't gotten to yet and aren't really going to get to today.
But when you start pulling the narrative threads and looking for the beginning of the story, there's always more beginnings than you think.
It's probably more than enough backstory on Walter Fitzpatrick to say that his distrust of the government comes from his decades-long deeply held belief that he was a victim of a grave injustice at this 1990 court-martial.
But as I spend more and more time really getting to know each of these weird little guys, patterns start to emerge.
And I think Walter Fitzpatrick fits into the Frank Sweeney archetype.
I did two episodes a while back about a lifelong con man named Frank Sweeney.
He got into all sorts of hijinks and cross paths with all kinds of people, going to federal prison half a dozen times for various frauds and threats.
But the one thing that connected everything in Frank's life was an overwhelming sense of personal grievance.
He had been wronged.
He had been wronged, and the only way to make it right was to make that lust for vengeance the sole focus of his life, no matter where that path took him, until he felt satisfied.
For Frank that meant spending several years writing threatening postcards to a stranger who made a passing comment about where he was parked at the post office and I see echoes of that same mindset here In 1994, Fitzpatrick had successfully recruited his congressman, Norm Dix, as an advocate on his behalf.
And Congressman Dix wrote several letters to the Navy advocating for a new trial for Fitzpatrick.
He did his best as an elective representative to help a constituent seek redress through the proper channels.
And it was ultimately unsuccessful.
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.
There wasn't really much anyone could do, but both representatives met with him and heard his complaints and did what they could.
In 2002, Fitzpatrick was banned from Congressman Smith's Tacoma offices.
It's unclear what led to the ban, but a letter filed with the court said that they would continue to serve him as a constituent, but he was only allowed to communicate with the congressman or his staff by letter.
And in 2003, two female staffers in Norm Dix's office got restraining orders against Fitzpatrick.
In her petition to the court, one of those staffers wrote, Over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that 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.
He has no respect for the work we've done for him over the years.
The last straw was an incident in October of 2003, when Fitzpatrick refused to leave the office and physically prevented the employee from leaving by blocking the door, forcing her to call the police.
Police reports show multiple violations of these restraining orders and several complaints, though no prosecutions for, trespass, harassment, and domestic violence.
He was angry.
He had been wronged, and their inability to help him was unforgivable.
Fitzpatrick was coming into regular contact with the police in Kitsap County, Washington, until he moved to Tennessee in 2007.
But back to Fitzpatrick's treason allegations.
You probably noticed that he only barely mentioned the president's citizenship.
I mean, it's in there.
Don't get me wrong.
He does call Obama a foreign-born enemy.
But that's pretty secondary here.
This indictment for treason isn't really about that.
This is a brand new tactic.
He's accusing the president of having violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
And that did actually kind of happen.
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.
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.
It doesn't apply to the National Guard under the direction of a state governor, and there are exceptions.
Federal troops can be deployed domestically in certain situations, like if the president invokes the Insurrection Act, or if there is some kind of emergency involving nuclear materials or significant amounts of explosive ordinance that can't be safely dealt with otherwise.
But generally speaking, the United States military cannot engage in domestic civilian policing.
It's not something that comes up very often for normal people under normal circumstances.
You're probably never having conversations about the Posse Comitatus Act.
But it's a big boogeyman in anti-government movements.
And the allegation Fitzpatrick is making in this letter alludes to an actual incident.
On March 10, 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.
It wasn't political or ideological.
It wasn't racially motivated.
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.
McClendon first drove to his mother's house in Kinston, Alabama, where he shot and killed her and then burned her house down.
Then he drove to his uncle's house in nearby Samson, Alabama, and shot his uncle, two cousins, and several of their neighbors.
Then he went to his grandmother's house and shot and killed her.
And as he fled the third crime scene, he was firing at random from his car window, shooting bystanders, killed a gas station attendant, a passing motorist, and injured several pedestrians.
When sheriff's deputies tried to run him off the road, he shot one of them, too.
With more than a dozen people shot across three towns spanning two counties, law enforcement was stretched pretty thin.
There were multiple crime scenes, ten dead bodies, half a dozen seriously injured survivors, including an infant, and the shooter was on the move.
And so someone at the Geneva County Sheriff's Office made a phone call to nearby Fort Rucker to ask for help.
The Army officer who responded to the request later said that he believed at the time that what he was doing was lawful, citing his own experience assisting in disaster response after Hurricane Katrina.
His intention was only to be what he called a good neighbor.
And for a period of about five hours that afternoon, several soldiers from Fort Rucker assisted local law enforcement at traffic checkpoints near the crime scenes and stood guard at the makeshift morgue that they'd set up to store the bodies.
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.
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.
This didn't go through the Pentagon.
They didn't convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It was just someone from the sheriff's office made a phone call to a guy he knew at the army base.
And they did something they didn't realize was wrong.
I won't claim to be familiar with the details of military chain of 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.
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.
Any kind of precedent for that sort of thing should be avoided.
The potential for abuse is extreme and terrifying.
But anti-government activists could finally point to a real thing that happened as proof that Barack Obama was about to institute martial law.
Federal troops really were setting up checkpoints.
It happened.
It's not a drill.
For someone like Walter Fitzpatrick, this was all the evidence he needed to have the president hanged for treason.
And that gets us back to where we started, this long journey back to the beginning of the story.
Walter Fitzpatrick accused the president of treason in March 2009.
He took his complaint down to the courthouse and he got it notarized.
He applied to present it to a Monroe County grand jury.
And they chose not to indict the president.
Probably mostly because even if there was probable cause here, which there wasn't, the Monroe County, Tennessee Circuit Court does not have jurisdiction in a case involving the President of the United States committing treason, unfortunately.
But that's not how Fitzpatrick saw it.
In his mind, this could only mean that there is corruption afoot.
Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this and why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seemed to have it all.
A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way.
What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.
They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.
You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now.
Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy.
Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything.
A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.
She went batshit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house down.
Audio Up presents The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is your country falling apart?
Feeling tired?
Depressed?
A little bit revolutionary?
Consider this.
Start your own country.
I planted the flag.
I just kind of looked out of like, this is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Everybody's doing it.
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
I am the Queen of Ladonia.
I'm Jackson I, King of Kaepernberg.
I am the Supreme Leader of the Grand Republic of Mintonia.
Be part of a great colonial tradition.
Well, why can't I drag my own country?
My forefathers did that themselves.
What could go wrong?
No country willingly gives up their territory.
I was making a rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warheads.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Bullets.
We need help!
We still have the off-road portion to go.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
And we're losing daylight fast.
That's Escape from Z-A-Qistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
Someone, he said he was going to kill me!
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.
Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
No one was safe.
No one could stop it.
Police spun their wheels.
Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.
We thought it was over.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, my little creeps.
It's your favorite ghost host, Teresa.
And guess what?
Haunting is back, dropping just in time for spooky season.
Now I know you've probably been wandering the mortal plane, wondering when I'd be back to fill your ears with deliciously unsettling stories.
Well, wonder no more, because we've got a ghoulishly good lineup ready for you.
Let's just say things get a bit extra.
We're talking spirits, demons, and the kind of supernatural chaos that'll make your spooky season complete.
You know how much I love this time of year.
It's the one time I'm actually on trend.
So grab your pumpkin spice, dust off that Ouija board, just don't call me unless it's urgent, and tune in for new episodes every week.
Remember, the veils are thin, the stories are spooky, and your favorite ghost host is back and badder than ever.
Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Again and again, Walter Fitzpatrick made the trip to the county courthouse.
He harassed the court clerk.
He tried forcing his way into the grand jury proceedings to make his presentation again.
And they did hear him out once more.
They allowed him to present to the grand jury in December of 2009.
That grand jury again declined to indict President Barack Obama for treason.
And at this point, they were done humoring him.
Hearing this evidence again wasn't going to change anything.
He was on several occasions refused entrance into the courtroom while the grand jury was hearing real cases.
And just like those years he spent getting angrier and angrier at his congressman's office staff, these people were as helpful as they were required to be.
They were doing their jobs, but there wasn't really anything they could do that would satisfy him because his requests weren't reasonable.
They couldn't give him what he wanted.
But in his mind, this inability to assist him could only mean that they were actively fighting against him.
And so they too became subjects of his investigations.
They were all guilty now of obstruction of justice, and they too must be arrested.
In March of 2010, a year after he first charged the president with treason, Walter Fitzpatrick sent a letter to the police chief in Madisonville, Tennessee.
If no one else was interested in justice, he was just going to have to do it himself.
Chief Breeden, please accept this notice of the necessity, authority, and intent to conduct a series of imminent citizens' arrests throughout Monroe County, Tennessee.
The first arrest plan must be constructed and crafted in cooperation with the Madisonville Police Department.
Wisdom dictates the first arrest plan be one that is acceptable to your police chief colleagues throughout Monroe County, an arrest plan that can be used again and again.
Time is not a friend.
Planning must begin immediately.
Contact information is provided separately.
Fair winds, following seas, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III. Notice that he's not asking for permission.
And he's not making a threat.
He's letting him know.
He feels like he and the police chief have the same level of authority here.
They're both absolutely empowered to make these kinds of arrests, and he just thinks it would be best if they collaborated on this plan.
He's not threatening to break the law because he doesn't think he is.
He's inviting the police chief to participate in what he believes is a perfectly rational and legal course of action.
It's not clear if the police chief wrote him back.
I'm sure they had some conversations about this plan that didn't go how Fitzpatrick had hoped.
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.
And on April 1st, 2010, he tried it.
Ladies, leave the room.
Ladies, leave the room, sir.
I'm charging you with official impressions.
Mr. Fitzpatrick, please leave the room.
Please leave the room.
You are under arrest.
Please leave the room.
I'm placing you under arrest, Mr. Petway.
You are under citizen's arrest.
I'm placing you under arrest.
I asked you to leave the room, sir.
You must now come to me.
I asked you to leave the room.
I have to.
Will you escort this gentleman out of the room?
Mr. Petway is under citizen's arrest.
Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached grand jury foreman Gary Petway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying to indict.
*music* And Pettway doesn't look excited to see Fitzpatrick.
But he looks more exasperated than anything else.
He doesn't look afraid of the old man lurching towards him, saying over and over again, I'm placing you under arrest.
Pettway is just sort of backing away from him and repeating, please leave, please leave the room, and pointing towards the door.
And the video we have of this incident is not police body cam footage, but you'd be forgiven for assuming that's where it came from.
It was recorded on someone's cell phone, a Motorola Droid, to be precise, if you remember those, by Carl Swenson, the sovereign citizen who had been agitating for people all over the country to take this kind of action in their local courts ever since Judge Lamberth denied his petition in federal court the year before.
He did this for us.
What do you intend to do for him?
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.
I know what I must do.
I plan on marching on that courthouse.
Carl Swenson was one of several supporters who showed up at the courthouse with Fitzpatrick that day.
Swenson recorded the incident and posted it online, exhorting his followers to show up at the next hearing.
The website he was running at the time, riseupforamerica.com, is gone now.
That URL does still go to a real website, but it belongs to some kind of construction consortium now, and the homepage is a six-year-old blog post about the pros and cons of different kinds of carpet tiles.
One of the other supporters who witnessed Fitzpatrick's arrest that day was a man named Darren Hough.
Like Swenson, Hough had made the drive to Madisonville from his home in Georgia.
He was a member of the Oath Keepers and was also the chaplain of a separate militia group that was just called the Georgia Militia.
When Fitzpatrick was granted bond a few days after his arrest, Darren Huff made the drive back up to Tennessee to meet with him.
They weren't going to suffer this indignity in silence.
They made a plan.
And two weeks later, when Fitzpatrick was due back in court, Darren Huff was outside the courthouse with a crowd of supporters, prepared to take over the whole damn town by force if they had to.
And Darren Huff was the weird little guy I had in mind when I sat down to start this week's episode.
I was thinking about guys who did something weird because they were mad about an election, and I had a vague recollection of some research I did on the Oath Keepers back in 2019, when Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes was front row center, right behind the podium, at a Trump campaign rally.
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.
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.
And there are plenty of strange little stories in there.
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.
Or how Oath Keepers 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.
And there's the story of that carload of Oath Keepers who were arrested in Florida in 2019.
They were charged with violating the curfew order put in place during the state of emergency after Hurricane Michael.
The militia members were driving around dressed as police officers, cruising around town in the dark with a car full of rifles, dressed as cops, patrolling for looters.
And, obviously, there's the entire saga of the Oathkeeper's role in January 6th, but, like I said, right now, I'm tired of that story.
But then I remembered Darren Huff and his plans to citizens arrest a whole county courthouse because he didn't think Barack Obama was the real president.
It was sort of a micro January 6th, an hour south of Knoxville, but 11 years too soon.
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.
I should just admit to myself that I'm doing that on purpose.
Sure, I could launch right into a story about Darren showing up at the courthouse with a gun.
That would still be an interesting weird little guy.
But Darren and his gun outside of a courthouse three hours away from his home across state lines trying to arrest a grand jury foreman in a small town that he has no connection to just doesn't make any sense, does it?
Trying to explain that a retired Navy 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.
These aren't just stories about one weird little guy at a time.
It's a whole network.
None of this happens in a vacuum, which is why the same stories keep playing out with different characters, and the same characters keep showing up in each other's stories.
An oath keeper tried to arrest the president in 2010.
The oath keepers tried to overturn the 2020 election.
The woman whose blog chronicled Walter Fitzpatrick's efforts, fueling the conspiracy and driving more supporters to show up in Madisonville, tried to obtain government records in 2022 related to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's families' immigration and naturalization.
And the same woman was a central figure in the brief frenzy of birther conspiracies about Kamala Harris in 2024.
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 Erion.
The same lawyer who worked on Carl Swenson's lawsuits to keep Barack Obama off the ballot in 2012.
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.
Because when you turn over a big rock, there's more than one weird bug under there.
And to be honest, I really just wanted to have plenty of room to explore Darren Huff's fascinating legal strategy.
Because, not to spoil it, but he does end up in federal prison for a little bit.
It's such a rare treat to have so much incredible source material.
And I really don't want to have to cut the audio of a man who got pulled over on his way to commit a federal crime and used that opportunity to try to recruit a state trooper into his militia.
So, until next week, don't be rude to your court clerk.
And please, for the love of God, do not put Gatorade in your eyes.
We're Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring comes The Unborn, a shocking true story.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and a secret she would kill to protect.
She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house out.
Listen to The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Had enough of this country?
Ever dreamt about starting your own?
I planted the flag.
This is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Or maybe not.
No country willingly gives up their territory.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
That's Escape from Z-A-Q-I-S-T-A-N on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
He said he was going to kill me!
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
