Arrested Democracy, Part 1 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.Original air date: 11/14/24Arrested Democracy, Part 2When Oath Keeper Darren Huff returned to Madisonville, Tennessee on April 20, 2010, he was planning to take control of the courthouse. It didn't quite work out that way. He didn't even see the inside of a courthouse until his own arrest a week later.Original air date: 11/21/24Part 1 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.2018.25Josh 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, 2015Hughey, 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 Part 2 Sources:https://www.politico.com/story/2010/04/army-birther-under-investigation-035823 https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/army-birther-lakin-released-from-leavenworth/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/04/26/gordon-liddy-on-shooting-from-the-lip/75754676-030f-4191-a9e3-a421855aea1f/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-six-g-gordon-liddy-the-126130442/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/roger-stone-kristin-davis-robert-mueller/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-party-accuses-republicans-voter-intimidation-federal-court https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/attorney-for-birther-army-doc-is-former-gop-staffer-and-anti-gay-crusader https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/gan/press/2011/11-01-11.html https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-than-1-of-defendants-in-federal-criminal-cases-were-acquitted-in-2022/ https://time.com/archive/6597707/the-secret-world-of-extreme-militias/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-vaxxers-charge-followers-to-join-fake-anthony-fauci-grand-jury/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4382623/fitzpatrick-v-bivins/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/5092131/united-states-v-huff-tv1/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69341723/united-states-v-darren-huff/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor promote aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I think it's a sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf inside you.
It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and on a recent episode of The One You Feed, Josh Radner from How I Met Your Mother joins us to talk about fame, self-acceptance, aging, and finding peace in discomfort.
That is the mercy of time.
That time, it is a healer.
To hear this and more on healing, identity, and the wisdom of slowing down, open your free iHeartRadio app, search One You Feed.
And listen now.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math& Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
Yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now, because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math& Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when we come face to face with death?
My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.
My parachute did not deploy.
I was kidnapped by a drug curtail.
When we step beyond the edge of what we know.
I clinically died.
The heart stopped beating.
Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes.
In return.
It's a miracle I was brought back.
Alive Again, a podcast about the strength of the human spirit.
Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media Hello again, dear listeners.
This is your host, Molly Conger, once again bringing you a rerun.
I'm so sorry.
I promise I will be back next week with a brand new Weird Little Guy for you.
This pair of episodes originally aired back in November of 2024.
It's one of the more lighthearted story arcs we've had on Weird Little Guys.
It tells the story of a half-baked plot to take over a small town in Tennessee, so a conspiracy theory blogger and a militia chaplain could prove once and for all that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
He wasn't, obviously, and they didn't succeed.
It's just a silly little story about a lesser-known chapter in the history of right-wing extremists refusing to accept election results.
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.
It did cause me some agony to dig up and listen to hours of old episodes of G. Gordon Liddy's talk radio show so that I could find the exact moment in history when a conspiracy theorist called the guy who did Watergate to tell me that he was a little bit of a mystery.
But it was worth it.
It's a fun episode.
On April 1st, 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.
Weird Little Guys 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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, 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 McRae about a phone call that he had had with Barack Obama's father's stepmother through a translator.
Ron McRae was the homophobic street preacher who spent years harassing the owners of the Casanova Lounge, a gay bar in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
It 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.
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...
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.
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.
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 spent 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.
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, Richard Butler wasn't leading the Aryan Nations yet at that point, But he was already a prominent figure within Christian identity.
Thank you.
you Thank you.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math& Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
The word on the street then was he's too country for pop.
But then once I got to country, it was he's too pop for country.
So I kind I just embraced that.
Like, yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now, because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math& Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.
Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding.
But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one.
The demand curve in action.
And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on everybody's business from Bloomberg Businessweek.
I'm Max Chafkin.
And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.
But guests like Business Week editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick.
Hey, I want to learn about VeChain.
I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.
So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when we come face to face with death?
My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.
My parachute did not deploy.
I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
I just remember everything getting dark.
I'm dying.
We step beyond the edge of what we know.
To open our consciousness to something more than just what's in that western box.
And we turn.
I clinically died.
The heart stopped beating.
Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes.
My name is Dan Bush.
My mission is simple.
To find, explore, and share these stories.
I'm not a victim, I'm a survivor.
You're strongest when you're the most vulnerable.
To remind us what it means to be alive.
Not just that I was the guy that cut his arm off, but I'm the guy who was smiling when he cut his arm off.
Alive Again.
A podcast about the fragility of life, the strength of the human spirit, and what it means to truly live.
Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Music playing 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, 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 37 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 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.
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 assistance of treason.
I name you and your military criminal associates as traitors.
Your criminal ascension manifests as clear and present danger.
You've 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're not my president.
You're 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.
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, 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 ten people, injuring six others, and ultimately taking his own life.
It wasn't political or ideological.
It wasn't racially motivated.
It's just a terrible, sad story 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.
He killed a gas station attendant.
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.
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.
Please leave the room.
Please leave the room, sir.
Mr. Fitzpatrick, please leave the room.
Please leave the room.
I'm placing you under arrest.
I asked you to leave the room, sir.
You must now come with me.
I asked you to leave the room.
I have, will you escort this gentleman out of the room?
Please leave the room.
Walter Fitzpatrick entered the courtroom and approached grand jury foreman Gary Pettway, a man he'd already spent months unsuccessfully trying to indict.
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 and for this country if we don't come to his assistance, if we don't get to the courthouse, if we don't call him, if we don't walk and march on that courthouse and that sheriff's department?
We don't deserve the freedoms we have.
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 Huff.
Like Swenson, Huff 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 Oath Keeper'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 family's 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.
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.
Gatorade in your eyes.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math & Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
The word on the street then was, he's too country for pop.
But then once I got to country, it was, he's too pop for country.
so I kind I just embraced that.
Like, yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now, because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when we come face to face with death?
My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.
My parachute did not deploy.
I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
I just remember everything getting dark.
I'm dying.
When we step beyond the edge of what we know...
To open our consciousness...
To something more than just what's in that Western box.
In return.
I clinically died.
The heart stopped beating.
Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes.
My name is Dan Bush.
My mission is simple.
To find, explore, and share these stories.
I'm not a victim.
I'm a survivor.
You're strongest when you're the most vulnerable.
To remind us what it means to be alive.
Not just that I was the guy that cut his arm off, but I'm the guy who was smiling when he cut his arm off.
Alive Again.
A podcast about the fragility of life, the strength of the human spirit, and what it means to truly live.
Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
*Painful music*
A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.
Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding.
But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one.
The demand curve in action.
And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on everybody's business from Bloomberg Businessweek.
I'm Max Chavkin.
And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.
But guests like Business Week editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backroom Hey, I want to learn about VeChain.
I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.
So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So When we left off last week, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick III had been taken into custody outside the Monroe County Courthouse in Madisonville, Tennessee.
On April 1, 2010, Fitzpatrick barged into a closed grand jury proceeding and attempted to place Monroe County grand jury foreman Gary Pettway under citizen's arrest.
Fitzpatrick had written up his own arrest warrant.
Charging Pettway with obstruction of justice for his refusal to issue an indictment against Barack Obama for treason.
Walter Fitzpatrick did not have the authority to draw up his own arrest warrants, any more than a county court an hour south of Knoxville had the authority to indict the president on a federal crime.
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.
Darren Huff, an oath keeper 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.
You have been notified, you have been told, Mr. Petway has just been placed under citizen's arrest.
My name is Walter Fitzpatrick.
I have just placed Mr. Petway under citizen's arrest.
You're going to have to step outside.
But when the doors opened again, it was not.
Gary Pettway, who was being escorted out by the sheriff's deputies.
It was Walter Fitzpatrick.
We're leaving now, sir.
Why?
Because you just interrupted a court proceeding.
The rest of us would get arrested for that.
However, all of you think you're special.
So now we're leaving the courthouse.
And then what?
Then you're free to go.
Otherwise you're going to get arrested today.
And I'm free to come back in.
No, sir.
And he could.
Have just left.
As the deputy points out, he's kind of being treated with kid gloves here.
He's already broken the law, but nobody really wants to deal with this old crank and his fan club.
But instead of leaving, Fitzpatrick pivoted.
Now he's placing the sheriff himself under arrest.
In the audio recording, you can hear the deputy sigh dramatically as Fitzpatrick begins reading the officers their rights.
And they realize that the only way Fitzpatrick is leaving the building is in handcuffs.
Fitzpatrick was charged with interfering with a grand jury, resisting arrest, and inciting a riot.
He was held in the county jail over the weekend, during which time he reportedly refused to eat or drink.
and was offered a $1,500 bond on the condition that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
On April 7, 2010, the day after Fitzpatrick was released, Darren Huff made the drive from his home in Georgia back up to Madisonville.
In a text message, Huff sent a friend on his way home that night.
He said he'd spent the day meeting with Fitzpatrick, going over the plan.
They were coordinating with multiple groups to show up for what Huff called Phase 2. When Walter Fitzpatrick appeared for his court date on April 20th, he wasn't going to be alone.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys This episode is about Darren Hough.
I mean, the last episode was supposed to be about Darren Hough.
That was the story I sat down to write in the first place.
But my vague recollection of the story of some oath-keeper with a harebrained scheme to citizen's arrest an entire county court turned up something a little more complicated.
That keeps happening.
It turns out history is always a little messy.
No one is really the sole protagonist in their own story.
Life doesn't really work that way.
But if you listened to last week's episode, now you have some context for the baffling confidence Walter Fitzpatrick and Darren Hough seemed to have in their plan.
They'd both been completely swept up in this nationwide right-wing mania of birtherism.
The conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as the President of the United States because he had been born in Kenya.
Walter Fitzpatrick, as bizarre and disconnected from reality as his ideas sound, was far from the only American who was barging into a court clerk's office every week to demand something be done about the President's acts of treason.
It was everywhere.
Everyone from Chuck Norris to Donald Trump was asking.
Is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the United States?
Politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich flirted with the idea, walking right up to the line and then claiming they'd misspoken or been misunderstood.
Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman said she would proudly produce her own birth certificate.
Alabama Senator Richard Shelby denied.
That he'd told a newspaper that he'd like to see Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt said he'd been taken out of context after telling a reporter that there was no legitimate reason for the president not to produce his birth certificate.
This wasn't something that existed only at the lunatic fringe of political discourse.
Mainstream politicians and celebrities were just asking questions.
Never mind the kinds of things their supporters might do to try to get answers.
So after an entire year of unsuccessfully petitioning his local county grand jury to bring charges against Barack Obama, Walter Fitzpatrick was frustrated.
And when he barged into that courtroom on April 1st, 2010, both keeper Darren Huff and sovereign citizen Carl Swenson were among those waiting just outside.
And after the tables were turned that day, with this citizen's arrest turning into just a citizen getting arrested, Darren Hoff and Carl Swenson vowed to return, not just to support their friend at his next court date, but to carry out a bigger, better version of the plan.
You who have been on the fence must get off of that fence.
Please go to the courthouse in mass and demand justice.
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.
My name is Carl Swenson.
The call was put out.
If you believe in the cause, if you believe in the Constitution, You must stand with Walter Fitzpatrick against the Monroe County courts.
He was scheduled to appear on April 20th, and true patriots had an obligation to be there.
Between Fitzpatrick's release on the 6th and his court date on the 20th, they had just two weeks to prepare.
According to the court records, Darren Huff appeared in several videos about the events in Madisonville that were posted on Carl Swenson's website, riseupforamerica.com.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But that evening...
He wasn't making his usual jokes.
He was deadly serious.
Erica testified that Huff just launched right into telling her about Walter Fitzpatrick and his upcoming trial in Madisonville, Tennessee, a situation she had no context for.
She'd never heard of Walter Fitzpatrick and she'd never been to Madisonville, Tennessee.
She was the only teller at the counter.
The bank was about to close for the night and suddenly this...
Normally friendly customer is leaning over the counter telling her that he was going to be spending this weekend mounting an anti-aircraft 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.
The conversation got so intense that another employee went to go get the manager, Shane.
In his testimony at trial, Shane too said that Huff was a regular customer at the bank and over the years he'd gotten to know him a bit.
Sometime in 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.
So when another employee came to get him that night because Huff was making Erica uncomfortable, he probably wasn't surprised.
He tried guiding the conversation back to safer territory, asking Huff, If he'd be taking his video camera with him again on this trip.
But the response was an alarming one.
Huff told 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.
He told the bank employees that they'd probably see him on the news next week.
And as he was leaving, he told Erica, it was nice knowing you if I never see you again.
Not to get ahead of myself, but I do want to jump ahead here and say Darren Huff would later accuse those two bank employees of lying under oath.
Obviously, there's no proving what was or wasn't said at the bank that evening.
But within hours of that interaction, Erica was on the phone with Madisonville, Tennessee, police chief Greg Breeden, and he recorded that phone call.
So we have a fairly contemporaneous recollection of what was said.
She 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.
And Darren Huff was found to be in possession of printed copies of those citizens' arrest warrants.
And he would later admit under oath that at that time he was in possession of an anti-aircraft gun and a pedestal mount that could be installed in the bed of his truck.
She would have had no way of knowing any of that at the time if he hadn't told her himself.
And she's on tape reporting it to the police long before she could have read anything in the news.
Or been coached by an FBI agent to say these things.
Both Shane and Erica were understandably, deeply unsettled by that interaction.
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.
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.
And by Monday, they'd met with FBI agents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He freely volunteered to the agent that he was a member of both the Oath Keepers and the Georgia militia.
He said that the plan was to execute citizen's arrest warrants and, quote, take back Madisonville.
But that the group would not resort to violence unless they were provoked.
When Darren Huff took the stand at his own trial, he recalled telling Agent Reed that evening that he'd love it if the FBI would be there in Madisonville.
Again, remember last week that letter that Walter Fitzpatrick sent the police chief of Madisonville before all of this got started?
He wasn't making threats.
He was inviting the police to be part of his plan.
And that's the same mindset Darren has here.
He even gave the FBI agent his business card.
I had to double-check here because Darren's business cards do come up again later, but it sounds like the business card he gave Agent Reed the night before the big day was just a normal business card, a real one for his outdoor lighting business.
It wasn't until after he was arrested that he got new business cards printed that said, Darren Huff, right-wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist.
But when he finished his cigarette, The conversation was over.
Agent Reed had no reason to arrest him.
Huff had expressed to him a plan to commit a federal crime, the one he would eventually be arrested for.
But he hadn't actually done it yet.
There was no federal crime here until Darren Huff put his guns in the truck and drove across the state line from Georgia into Tennessee with the intent to...
So Agent Reed left.
But another agent stayed nearby all night, watching and waiting for the truck to pull out of the driveway.
Darren Huff was under FBI surveillance when he hit the road just before dawn on April 20th, 2010.
At 6.15am, he was observed crossing the state line.
And just after 7am, Tennessee State Trooper Michael Wilson followed Huff's truck as he took Exit 60 off I-75 towards Madisonville.
Whether or not Huff rolled through the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp is a matter of some debate.
But Trooper Wilson flashed his blue lights and pulled him over.
This traffic stop ends up being central to Huff's case on appeal, but it isn't where he got arrested.
He actually didn't even get a ticket.
But Trooper Wilson and Darren Huff spent over an hour together there on the shoulder of Tennessee Highway 68. When Huff was asked to step out of the vehicle, he had his Colt.45 on his hip.
The officer unholstered the weapon, removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and put the weapon in his patrol car for safekeeping.
Darren Huff produced a valid Georgia driver's license, but he didn't have his truck's registration on him.
He assured the officer the gun was legal and handed him a piece of paper that he said was a gun carry permit.
In his testimony, the trooper said the document looked, quote, very unprofessional, and he was concerned it might not be real.
He spent an hour going back and forth with the dispatch about this strange document and was never able to verify whether Huff actually had a valid carry permit for that gun.
And during that hour, while they were trying to sort it out, Darren Huff talked.
He talked a lot.
He ran his mouth the entire time.
And the entire conversation was recorded on the officer's dash cam, which was connected to a microphone on his uniform.
And in their conversation, Darren explained his whole plan.
They had arrest warrants for the grand jury foreman, the district attorney, the sheriff, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, etc.
He recommended some YouTube videos the officers should watch to learn more about Barack Obama's crimes, and he told them they needed to be reading Walter Fitzpatrick's blog.
In the portions of this audio that I could find, the officers seem to be playing along.
They're mostly just letting him talk without interruption.
But occasionally they ask some questions about how exactly the plan is going to work.
And Darren's happy to explain.
Because he's actually going to need their help.
And then at that point, they would be placed into custody and, you know, turn this man over to you.
I don't have handcuffs.
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.
Again, this is exactly like Fitzpatrick's letter to the police chief.
He's telling the cops what they plan to do and trying to get them to be a part of it.
The audio is a little fuzzy because they're standing on the side of the highway in the rain, but he wants the officers to agree to receive these prisoners once they've been citizens arrested.
But that wasn't all.
He was worried about a lot more than just the corrupt government in Monroe County, Tennessee.
He shared his concerns about the Affordable Care Act, which had just been signed into law a few weeks earlier.
Of course, he was upset that this was communism, obviously.
But more importantly, he was very worried because this law requires that all Americans be implanted with the mark of the beast, as foretold in Revelations.
Luke 10.18, Jesus says, And I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
The Greek translation for lightning is Barak.
Now, Jesus didn't speak Greek.
He spoke Hebrew.
So you can look it up in the Hebrew.
It's still Barak.
And from heaven translates from Hebrew, O or O, Obama.
So Jesus said out of his own list, I saw Satan as Barack Obama.
He went on to explain that he was opposed to the war in the Middle East, though he notes that he does think, quote, but also 9-11 was an inside job.
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 re-establishment of Israel in 1776.
Remember last week when we touched briefly on Christian identity?
That's what this is.
Darren Huff is a self-proclaimed pastor in the Christian identity movement.
He's standing there on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops, preaching Christian identity and...
Trying to recruit them to the Oath Keepers.
It remains very unclear to me why the trooper gave Huff his gun back.
But he did.
At 8.13am, he handed Darren Huff a written warning, returned his Colt.45, and told him he was free to go.
The men shook hands, and Huff thanked the officer, and he took a few steps back toward his truck before he stopped, turned around, And said, let me pre-warn you.
If enough of us show up today, we are going to proceed forward in this citizen's arrest.
That's why I have my 45. Ain't no government official going peacefully.
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.
you you you you I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood, She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
The police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him.
Civil rights lawyer, Dovey Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math& Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
The word on the street then was, he's too country for pop.
But then once I got to country, it was, he's too pop for country.
So I kind of never really had a place to fit in, but that's exactly how and why I fit.
I just embraced that.
Like, yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math& Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when we come face to face with death?
My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.
My parachute did not deploy.
I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
I just remember everything getting dark.
I'm dying.
When we step beyond the edge of what we know.
To open our consciousness to something more than just what's in that western box.
And we turn.
I clinically died.
The heart stopped beating.
Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes.
My name is Dan Bush.
My mission is simple.
To find.
Explore.
I'm not a victim.
I'm a survivor.
You're strongest when you're the most vulnerable.
To remind us what it means to be alive.
Not just that I was the guy that cut his arm off, but I'm the guy who was smiling when he cut his arm off.
Alive Again.
A podcast about the fragility of life, the strength of the human spirit, and what it means to truly live.
Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.
Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding.
But the price has gone up, so now I only buy two cups of banana pudding.
The demand curve in action.
And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on everybody's business from Bloomberg Businessweek.
I'm Max Chavkin.
And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives.
But guests like Business Week editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick.
Hey, I want to learn about VeChain.
I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is.
So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music.
Music.
At 5 o 'clock that morning, more than 50 police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around Monroe County, Tennessee, gathered for a briefing.
There were FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and at least one representative from the Department of Homeland Security.
They'd been monitoring the online chatter about Walter Fitzpatrick's hearing at the courthouse at 9 a.m., and they were worried.
The intelligence they had was that as many as 600 people might be on their way to Madisonville, Tennessee.
They had undercovers stationed in nearby businesses and snipers on rooftops.
One of those undercover officers was Mike Hall, the director of a regional violent crime task force in Tennessee.
In 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.
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.
But that's neither here nor there.
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.
Carl Swenson's dead website isn't exactly easy to navigate, so maybe the whole speech was there at some point.
But I was only able to dig up an audio file of the first six minutes or so.
And it's pretty inspiring stuff.
So as a Christian, as Lieutenant Commander said, I'm chaplain for the Georgia militia, so I look at things a little bit differently, and I look at them basically.
And I told these guys, and I tell everybody, I'm not a very smart guy.
In fact, the only thing that I know about the Constitution are the first few amendments, those leave-me-the-hell-alone ones.
That's what I know, and I know them well enough to say, you're wrong.
You can't do this.
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.
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.
Yes, 13. 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. And I know that because he mentions Joseph's sons specifically.
Because otherwise I might have assumed he was talking about something different.
We don't need to get into the specifics here, but adherents of Christian identity believe that they are the real Israelites.
So they have to explain the existence of actual Jews some other way.
And that usually boils down to a theory that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descended from a Turkic race called the Khazars.
Christian identity guys really love this book from the 70s called The 13th Tribe, which makes the case for this theory.
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.
But what Darren was saying might actually be weirder.
Jacob went like this.
And he blessed them the way God intended him to bless them.
That crossing of the arms is on that flag.
That's where that cross comes from.
It has nothing to do with rednecks.
It has nothing to do with the Confederacy.
It has everything to do with God's chosen people.
Now this was a new one for me.
I've never heard this one before.
What he's saying here is that the Confederate flag symbolizes Jacob's blessing of Joseph's sons.
I don't know what the A to B to C here is, 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.
So after his big speech, Darren Hough steps outside.
Mike Hall, our undercover officer, testified that he overheard Hough's conversation with a man that he doesn't name.
But who, like Huff, was visibly armed.
And Huff laments to this man that he wishes they had more people, saying, quote, today would be a good day to do it, because it's raining and the police wouldn't expect them to make a move in the rain.
And Darren Huff wasn't the only one who excused himself from the table after this speech.
Carl Swenson, our sovereign citizen and the primary instigator of the online uproar calling people to Madisonville, had a phone call to make.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here with my special guest, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin and his attorney, Paul Jensen.
Colonel Lakin is the Army officer who has challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama to act as commander in chief.
Also with me is Dr. Jerome Corsi.
And going to Tennessee and Carl.
Carl, you're on the air.
you That's right.
It's Carl in Tennessee.
And he was live on air with G. Gordon Liddy and Jerome Corsi.
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.
On April 12, 2010, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin did not report for duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Instead, he drove to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he was read his rights by his commanding officer, Colonel Gordon Ray Roberts.
Lakin's unit deployed to Afghanistan that week without him.
The 18-year veteran wasn't afraid to return to Afghanistan.
This deployment would have been the seventh of his career and his second to Afghanistan.
In 2004, he was the Army's Flight Surgeon of the Year.
He'd been awarded a Meritorious Service Medal and a Bronze Star.
He was on track to be promoted to full colonel within the next year.
But he had come to realize that his deployment orders were unlawful.
Not on ideological grounds.
He wasn't protesting the war.
He hadn't suddenly become a peace activist after seeing the horrors of war firsthand.
No, no.
The doctor was refusing to deploy unless he could see the president's birth certificate.
I will disobey my orders to deploy because I, and I believe all service men and women, A week after disobeying his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Aiken appeared as a guest on the G. Gordon Liddy show.
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, who regularly encouraged listeners to do things like shoot federal agents in the head, Robert Evans put out a staggering six-part series of episodes on G. Gordon Liddy on Behind the Bastards last year.
So if you're interested in hearing some outrageously racist clips of Liddy's radio show, I believe those are in part six.
But today we're just talking about...
One episode of the G. Gordon Liddy Show.
The one that aired on April 20, 2010.
Because that's the episode Carl Swenson called into during the second hour.
In the first hour of the show, Liddy interviewed Colonel Lakin and Lakin's attorney, a California personal injury lawyer named Paul Jensen.
You might be wondering why an Army officer facing a court-martial would hire a civilian personal injury lawyer.
And that's a great question.
The answer is unclear.
In my experience, conspiracy theorists and extremists tend to hire attorneys who share their beliefs rather than ones who have, say, relevant experience in a particular area of law.
But in this case, it seems very worth mentioning that Paul Jensen was a longtime associate of friend to and occasional attorney for Roger Stone.
In 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.
And Jensen represented Stone in 2016 when he was sued.
Over allegations that he'd been involved in a coordinated campaign of voter intimidation.
It was Jensen who drafted the paperwork to incorporate Stop the Steal in 2016.
So after this interview, G. Gordon Liddy opened the phones to hear from listeners on the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Caller after caller thanked Colonel Lakin for his courage and shared their own theories about how they could finally get to the truth of Barack Obama's birth.
And then, after an advertisement for gold coins, another birther called into the show.
But this one wasn't just sitting idly by while Barack Obama pretended to be the president.
Lieutenant Colonel, I want to thank you for everything you're doing and I want to give you some encouragement here.
I'm in the city of Madisonville, Tennessee, right now in Monroe County, where they've had this area on lockdown.
With FBI, TBI, local police, and troopers, all because of Lieutenant Commander Walter Fitzpatrick and his attempts to affect arrest using a criminal complaint against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and in this case the grand jury members here in the town of Madison, Tennessee.
People are gathering now, but it is a tenuous situation at best.
Carl closed the call by saying things were getting pretty heated out there in Tennessee, and everything they were doing was, quote, in direct support of the message being pushed by Colonel Lakin and Liddy himself.
G. 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.
The next caller, Julie in Texas, was very worried about her sons.
They were active-duty soldiers deployed overseas.
She wasn't worried about them being in the war.
She was worried that because their deployment orders had been issued by a false president that they could ultimately be liable for war crimes.
I didn't listen to the rest of the episode.
I don't know if they resolved that.
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.
Their little crowd of 20 was outnumbered 3 to 1 by a very visible police presence.
And according to Walter Fitzpatrick's blog, a fair number of those supporters who turned up were middle-aged women, one of whom brought several minor children with her.
Darren had a truck full of guns and was bragging about how he had 400 rounds for his AK-47, but they just didn't have the numbers to do anything that day.
The only time anybody actually got close to the courthouse was when Darren Huff took a bag of biscuits over to a detective on the courthouse steps.
By the time Fitzpatrick's hearing was over, Darren was bored, he was tired, and he was ready to go home.
So everybody just left.
Nothing happened.
Nobody got arrested.
That night, Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes...
saw the video Carl Swenson posted online of Darren getting pulled over on his way to Madisonville.
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.
And Rhodes called Swenson immediately and demanded he take the video down.
It was embarrassing.
And within days, Rhodes himself showed up to speak with Darren Huff in person.
He was furious.
He demanded to know why Huff was so intent on making Madisonville the flashpoint.
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.
But this wasn't the one he wanted.
Because he thought Darren's ideas were foolish and embarrassing.
And he revoked Darren's Oath Keeper's membership.
Undeterred, though, Darren Huff returned to Tennessee a week later.
He had a paper map of the state of Tennessee, and he'd circled the location of the sheriff's offices in every county within a two-hour drive of Madisonville.
It's not clear how many sheriffs he actually managed to speak with, but when he pulled into a parking lot at a county office building in Lenore City, Tennessee, He happened to come across Loudoun County Sheriff Tim Guider and Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess as they were getting out of their cars.
They were late for a meeting, so this conversation was short.
But Huff asked Sheriff Guider if he'd be willing to arrest a fellow sheriff.
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.
But yes, hypothetically, he did have the authority to arrest another sheriff.
Darren Huff was trying to recruit law enforcement officers to assist with the plan.
He wasn't giving up.
But he was running out of time.
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.
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.
He was up near Knoxville when he got pulled over.
This time around, There's no debate about whether or not he ran a stop sign.
This wasn't a traffic stop.
There was a federal warrant for his arrest.
Darren Hough was charged with violating Title 18, Section 231, Subsection A-2.
And that's interesting.
You probably don't believe me, but hang on a second.
Section 231 is Civil Disorders, and it covers three separate crimes that don't really go together.
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.
A-2, 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.
And A-3 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.
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.
But 18 U.S.C.
231A2 is uncommon.
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.
And then maybe they'll attack on some kind of gun crime.
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.
And that one has a harsher penalty than this.
So I don't know why we need this one at all.
So I was confused by this choice of statute.
And I couldn't think of any place I'd ever seen this statute before.
And it turns out that's because I hadn't seen it before.
And I still haven't, even after looking pretty hard.
When Darren Huff appealed his conviction, it was noted in the appellate record that this particular statute had actually never been construed by an appellate court before, so this was the first time a court of appeals was examining this statute.
But just because people don't get charged with this very often doesn't make it any less of a real law.
It does pretty well describe what he did.
Because he didn't really do anything, did he?
But they were really worried that he might.
Or at least they were worried that he would continue to create situations where someone else might.
Because if you get enough anxious people with guns together enough times...
Eventually something is going to go wrong in a way that escalates pretty quickly.
So some federal agent or prosecutor got creative and they found a crime.
Because technically, yeah, he put guns in his truck and he drove to another state.
And when he was doing it, the plan that he had in his mind was that he was going to have that gun around.
In case the county judge didn't appreciate him barging into her courtroom.
So the intent is pretty clear.
He told anyone with an earshot for two weeks what he was going to do.
He wanted to lead an armed mom onto the courthouse.
He made videos about it.
He told his bank teller.
He told a bunch of state troopers.
He gave a speech.
And you don't actually have to end up carrying out the plan.
To be guilty of showing up to the plan with a gun.
And in the end, a jury agreed.
They found Darren Huff guilty of interstate transportation of a firearm with the intention to use it unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, and Darren had already completed his four-year sentence by the time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2016.
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.
And I just told you how the trial ended.
He was convicted by a jury, appealed unsuccessfully, and served a sentence.
But this trial is really just so special.
I mean, first of all, it went to trial.
That's pretty rare.
In 2022, Just 2.3% of people charged with federal crimes actually went to trial.
But it's so much more than that.
Darren Huff really, really wanted to be in the driver's seat when it came to his criminal defense.
One thing you have to remember about Darren Huff is that he's got a little sovereign citizen in him.
He seems, at times, to take issue with that label.
But when he was asked how he felt about the gold fringe on the flag at his trial, he was very evasive.
And in the year and a half between his arrest and his trial, he kept insisting that his public defenders file motions based on legal arguments that he had invented.
And when they refused to file some of the more bizarre ones, he fired them.
Or at least he tried to.
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.
And they really seem to be trying to explain to him that you can't just file how you feel.
There has to be case law.
It has to be based in something.
And after months of bitter emails back and forth about, you know, we can't file stuff that you made up, and Darren's accusing them of working against him, and the original public defenders file a motion to withdraw, saying that the relationship has soured irreparably and they can't continue.
And during this brief period of time before a new public defender could be appointed, Darren files some of those motions he wanted.
The ones he wrote, including one that just reads, And when his second public defender was assigned, a man named Scott Green, there were just three months to go before trial.
And in those three months, he did his job.
He filed motions to suppress the statements Darren made during the traffic stop, motions to prevent the prosecution from bringing up his extremist beliefs, the kinds of things you'd expect to see.
And he seemed to be humoring his client when it came to some of his unique ideas about the law.
But like the attorneys before him, he wasn't willing to put his name on nonsense.
And after another round of these emails back and forth, where this exasperated attorney is trying to explain to him that motions have to be based on the law, Darren threatened to fire him, writing, If you do not have the courage or kahunas necessary to represent me, then please let me know.
I think that's supposed to say kahunas, but it says K-A-H-U-N-A-S.
Kahunas.
Maybe that's a regional variation.
He means balls.
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.
But he ends the document by saying, quote, Is the Second Amendment part of the Constitution, yes or no?
Wherefore, Darren Wesley Huff moves this court to dismiss the indictment against him.
I don't really know where to start with that.
That's really not how it works.
And this lawyer tried to withdraw from the case, saying, you know, he doesn't want me to be his lawyer anymore.
This is not working out.
I can't do this.
And the judge said, no.
They were too close to trial.
They would just have to work it out because they're going to trial together.
And Green really does seem to have done his best here.
On the eve of the trial, he filed five separate documents, each one called Mr. Huff's Special Request, and they were sort of fanciful jury instructions.
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.
One email he sent his new lawyer, Mr. Gully, during the appeal, Starts off by accusing Gully of withholding the trial transcripts, but they just hadn't been made yet.
It takes a long time to produce those.
But he writes to his lawyer, I am thus left to wonder whether you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or if you possibly received your degree from a remedial online school, or that you simply take me for a fool.
You, sir, have made a mockery of the system that purports to provide me with effective assistance of counsel.
Later in the same email, he explains to his lawyer that the government can't charge him with a gun crime because he exists outside of the federal government's jurisdiction on such matters.
And then he threatens to have his attorney indicted, disbarred, and institutionalized.
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.
We'd be doing episodes about Walter Fitzpatrick and his 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.
When Fitzpatrick finally did get arraigned in Monroe County for that original April 1st attempt to arrest the grand jury foreman, it did not go well.
The judge that he'd accused of treason was presiding.
And as she's flipping through the exhibit, sort of glancing over the paperwork and the citizen's arrest warrants, she noted that the court clerk, Miss Cook, was accused by Fitzpatrick of some pretty serious crimes.
And so the judge turns to the clerk, who's there in the courtroom, and says, Miss Cook, have you been levying war against the United States?
And the clerk says, I don't think so, Your Honor.
And I wish that I had an audio recording of this.
I just have the transcript.
But Fitzpatrick is having a lot of outbursts during this hearing.
And at this point, he says, Are you making fun of me?
Is that what's going on here?
Am I being mocked?
And they just ignore him and continue the proceeding.
I would have loved to have seen it.
And I wish the officer who testified at Huff's trial had been...
More specific about exactly who it was that he overheard Darren Huff talking to in the morning of April 20th outside Donna's Cafe.
Huff had a quiet conversation with someone about calling off the operation that day.
The officer did mention that Huff was speaking to a man with a revolver on his hip and that the man had gotten out of a PT cruiser with Georgia license plates.
Carl Swenson's from Georgia, but...
I know Carl Swenson was driving a 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid that day.
Trust me, I checked.
I've got a state trooper on tape calling in his plates when they saw him on the highway.
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.
But we do know for sure that Bill Lumen...
A Marine Corps veteran and crane operator from Waco, Georgia, was there that day.
And you'd be a fool to believe Bill Lohman would walk as far as his own mailbox without a gun.
So if I had to put money on it, I think the person Darren Huff was making tactical decisions with was the same man who'd accompanied him to Walter's house two weeks earlier when they put this whole plan together.
A fellow member of the Georgia Militia and the Oath Keepers.
Now, my main wheelhouse is not the militia movement.
So I can't say I'm surprised I'd never heard of Bill Luman before, and I didn't have any real prior knowledge about the Georgia Militia.
But in some old blog posts, Luman is referred to as a leader in the Georgia Militia.
That may have just been his local chapter.
There were at least a dozen units around the state of this larger group calling itself the Georgia Militia.
And his name does not appear in the court record for the four members of the Georgia Militia who were arrested in 2011 for a plot that included plans to blow up the federal building in Atlanta and maybe murder government officials with ricin.
And just a side note, if you do try to Google Georgia white supremacist ricin attack, the more recent result you'll get is for an unrelated white supremacist plot to carry out a biological terrorist attack.
In that case, in 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.
But this is not that one.
This is the one from 2011.
But again, Bill Luman, nothing to do with the ricin attacks.
Just the same militia.
And I found an old event for a tea party picnic in North Carolina in 2013 that lists Luman as a speaker, and his title in the program is Constitutionalist Icon from Georgia.
And he appeared on stage with such heroes of the Patriot movement as James Renwick Manship.
That name is not familiar to you, I'm sure, but you might remember the photo of the guy in the George Washington costume wading into the reflecting pool at the Capitol during the January 6th riot as a sort of symbolic crossing the Delaware moment.
But my favorite Manship moment is the time he showed up at my local library dressed as Thomas Jefferson and refused to break character as he ranted in the first person about how he never had sexual relations with enslaved women.
And Bill Luman is very much still around and active in the same kinds of conspiracy spaces.
He posts...
Give or take a hundred times a day, every day, on Trump's Truth Social platform.
And all of his posts are in all caps.
He starts every day by posting this message.
Good morning, patriots and grassroots warriors that are standing up for our constitution and precious way of life.
Good morning to all veterans that serve honorably.
Semper Fi, my fellow Marines.
May America bless God again into our nation, our homes, and our hearts.
Heart emoji.
Seriously, he posts that every morning.
He's very committed.
And he still thinks Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim.
He still posts a lot about hanging people for treason.
But the reasons have shifted.
You know, COVID, Ukraine, election fraud, whatever.
As I'm writing this, right now, he's still posting.
He posted a picture of a Marine shaking hands with a dog, and there was a post this evening that was a screenshot from Braveheart with the text, Confirm Matt Gaetz or Else, written over Mel Gibson's face.
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.
He's pretty popular over there on Truth Social.
He was even re-truthed last year by Donald Trump himself after posting some incoherent theory about stolen votes from the 2020 election.
Well, he wasn't re-truthed.
He was quote-truthed?
Whatever the Truth Social equivalent of a quote-tweet is.
Luman had suggested that the people responsible for the Dominion voting machines should be tried for treason.
And Trump quoted the post, adding, A lot has been made of this lately.
What do you think?
And that must have been a huge day for Bill.
The post went pretty viral.
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.
And Walter Fitzpatrick went on to try his whole citizen's arrest thing in neighboring McMinn County, too.
He was eventually convicted of perjury and extortion there, as well as getting some more charges in Monroe County after he stole the grand jury rolls.
Those stolen documents were located by the FBI in the Connecticut home of Sharon Rondeau, the conspiracy theory blogger whose commitment to questioning the citizenship of politicians has remained strong over the years.
She is still...
Asking questions about Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris.
Fitzpatrick published a memoir last year about his quest for justice in his 1990 court martial.
I didn't read it.
It's like 400 pages long.
He's in his 70s now, and he still occasionally updates his blog, Jag Hunters.
The most recent post is just a link to someone else's video, and it's just like a...
Mind-numbing 30-minute mashup of clips.
I can't even really explain it.
It's actual footage of Trump rallies mixed in with MyPillow commercials, a TikTok video of someone doing the Macarena, but the lyrics have been changed to be about Donald Trump.
I don't know.
I tapped out when it got to a clip of Russell Brand praying with Tucker Carlson.
I guess what I'm getting at here is...
These guys don't go away.
The cause of the day changes, whether it's 9-11 truth, birtherism, COVID denial, QAnon, Stop the Steal.
But it's a lot of the same core ideas.
And honestly, it's a lot of the same individual guys.
In one newspaper photo of Walter Fitzpatrick outside of the courthouse after a hearing in McMinn County in 2014, the man standing next to him is Field McConnell.
And Field McConnell is a former commercial airline pilot who retired in 2006 after refusing to submit to a neurological exam.
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.
In 2019, he got really into QAnon.
An attorney in Florida who represents the family of a missing child had to get a restraining order against him after he made a series of YouTube videos threatening to kill her and accusing her of having trafficked the missing child.
The day I'm recording this, he was a guest on a podcast hosted by a small-scale QAnon influencer.
I would tell you what they talked about, but it kind of sounded like he was calling in from the bottom of the ocean.
This episode took me days longer to 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.
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.
And with each passing week, as I immerse myself in the archives, piecing together one weird little guy's story at a time, the clearer the connective tissue between them becomes.
But for all the weird twists and turns in this strange tale of the birther militia trying to take over a small town in Tennessee, the best thing I found buried in all of these documents was this moment from the trial.
When Darren Hough took the stand himself, the prosecutor had asked him about some business cards that he made after his arrest.
On the front, it said, Darren Hough, right-wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist.
And on the back, there was a picture of a gun.
So on cross-examination, Hough'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.
So he asked Darren about some shirts.
And Darren gave the following answer.
I had a friend who had a t-shirt shop, and I said, can you make me a couple of shirts?
Because apparently this government wants to label me.
The first one that he had made me said, I am the God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving, right-wing extremist the government warned you about.
And the other one said, I finally made Homeland Security's potential domestic terrorist wash list, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
Obviously, the point behind them was for humor, and they have been received as such.
Another one that was one of my initial shirts said, Patriotism is not a spectator sport.
And then there's something that I have never seen in an official federal court transcript before.
As this big-bearded militia man is describing his funny terrorism shirts, the court reporter types in parentheses, Witness crying.
She put it on the record that he cried.
Music Weird 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 Gagin.
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.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Tow Path, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I think it's a sign of great mental health to acknowledge the dark wolf inside you.
It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and on a recent episode of The One You Feed, Josh Radner from How I Met Your Mother joins us to talk about fame, self-acceptance, aging, and finding peace in discomfort.
That is the mercy of time.
That time, it is a healer.
To hear this and more on healing, identity, and the wisdom of slowing down, open your free iHeartRadio app.
Search One You Feed.
And listen now.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
On this week's episode of Math& Magic, I'm sitting down with the one and only Bobby Bones.
We're exploring the power of audio.
Yeah, I don't fit into one specific hole.
I think that is what endeared me to listeners.
That's why I'm here now, because I talk to people that grew up like me, have sensibilities like me, and have loyalties like me.
Listen to Math& Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways.
Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding.
But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one.
Small but important ways.
From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding.
If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it.
I'm Max Chastain.
And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
