Fitzpatrick Meets with Police Detective on Local, State and Federal Government Corruption

“NOW THE GLOVES COME OFF”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 4, 2014) — On Monday morning, February 3, 2014, CDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III (Ret.) went to the Athens, TN Police Department to report crimes committed against him by McMinn County Sheriff Joe Guy and McMinn County grand jury foreman Jeff Cunningham.

For at least the last three years, Fitzpatrick has been characterized in a law enforcement training program as a “Sovereign Citizen,” people who the FBI and state “fusion centers” describe as potentially dangerous, “anti-government” “extremists” who may be mentally ill or become involved in bank fraud and other schemes.

The FBI currently includes those who make “references to the Bible, The Constitution of the United States, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, or treaties with foreign governments” as possible “Sovereign Citizens.”

Located in McMinn County, Athens is the site of the “Battle of Athens” which took place in 1946 between a small group of World War II veterans and a corrupt sheriff and his deputies who routinely engaged in voter fraud and intimidation, bribery, and false ticketing for personal gain, among other vices.  Southeastern Tennessee is well-known for its systemic, top-to-bottom public corruption which has terrorized its citizens by means of rigged juries and false imprisonments; racketeering, money laundering, shake-downs, police brutality and intimidation; and even murder.

Local media tell half-truths and do not challenge longstanding government practices or specific individuals, including Joe Guy.

Fitzpatrick had previously exposed that grand juries in Tennessee’s Tenth Judicial District operate illegally because the foreman, and in some cases, jurors, serve for multiple terms at the pleasure of the presiding judge.  His discovery of grand jury corruption in adjacent Monroe County in late 20o9 was the subject of the PANDA radio show on Sunday, February 2, hosted by Chuck Smith and Lorri Anderson, on which grand jury experts Dr. Roger Roots and Kelly Mordecai appeared as guests and specifically discussed Fitzpatrick’s revelations.  While acknowledging widespread government control over modern grand juries, Roots commented that he had never observed the same level of judicial corruption as exists in the state of Tennessee.

On Sunday evening, Fitzpatrick had given Athens Police Chief Charles Ziegler advance notice by email that he would be arriving on Monday morning to file a complaint, to which Ziegler responded that he would make one of his detectives available when Fitzpatrick arrived.   Det. Heith Willis met with Fitzpatrick for three hours, wherein Fitzpatrick showed Willis documentation of the Sovereign Citizen campaign naming him as a potential criminal and the current grand jury foreman, Jeff Cunningham, who is an attorney and active member of the Tennessee Bar Association.

Fitzpatrick has attempted to bring criminal evidence on the parts of Cunningham and Reedy to the McMinn County grand jury, but Cunningham, acting as gateguard, did not allow the grand jury to review Fitzpatrick’s documentation.

Willis is a former Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army who Fitzpatrick described as “a really good guy.”  Of the meeting, Fitzpatrick told The Post & Email:

We started at 10:30 and talked until 1:30 straight. He doesn’t know what to do.  He is as frustrated in what the next step looks like as I am.  He said, “We don’t have jurisdiction within the courthouse,” and I said, “I know that.”  He said that other agencies have jurisdictions that are senior to ours, and normally speaking, when cases like this come in, we have to turn them over to other agencies.

Fitzpatrick said he concentrated on a complaint naming Guy and Cunningham as criminals which he attempted to take to the McMinn County grand jury on January 21.  However, Cunningham himself, knowing that he had been named in at least one other of Fitzpatrick’s criminal complaints, obstructed the submission from reaching the grand jurors and demanded that police escort Fitzpatrick out of the courthouse, despite his having committed no crime.

Guy is running for re-election in November.  Cunningham is serving his third consecutive year as grand jury foreman, appointed by Judge Amy Reedy, who Fitzpatrick observed hand-picking grand jury members on December 7, 2011.

Fitzpatrick’s complaint against Guy is based on Guy’s enlisting of his deputies in the “Sovereign Citizen” training program in which Fitzpatrick is pictured along with Darren Wesley Huff and George Raudenbush.  Huff is currently serving a four-year federal prison term for a crime that “never happened,” while Raudenbush was released last month on bond after his convictions were reversed by a Tennessee appeals court and have been remanded back to Monroe County for a new trial.

Fitzpatrick asked Willis for any assistance he might be able to provide in speaking with others “within his circle of influence” about the training program naming Fitzpatrick as a “sovereign.”  On Friday, Fitzpatrick had called the Internal Affairs Officer in the McMinn County Sheriff’s Department to request a meeting but received no response.  Last year, Fitzpatrick had visited the sheriff’s department on multiple occasions to file a complaint about the training program, but his objections were brushed aside.

Fitzpatrick was intimidated as a ringleader of “eight or nine militia groups” as described by FBI Special Agent Mark Van Balen, who has not yet been called to account for his false report which ultimately landed Huff in federal prison.

On Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Luke A. McLaurin falsely stated to three judges at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that Fitzpatrick and Huff had exchanged “text messages” prior to and on the morning of April 20, 2010 in order to “plan” a “takeover” of the Monroe County courthouse. Dubbed “the Madisonville Hoax” by Fitzpatrick, between 100 and 200 law enforcement officers were deployed into Monroe County’s central town of Madisonville to diffuse reported threats from alleged “extremists” and “militia” groups, all of which proved to be false reports called in to the mayor’s office by members of The Fogbow, a group of Obama sycophants who may now be under observation by law enforcers themselves.

Although no one was seen carrying a firearm that day, false reports made by law enforcers were repeated in the media without proof.  No arrests were made that day.  However, ten days later, Huff was arrested and charged with two federal firearms violations and convicted on one in October 2011.

At Huff’s trial, there was no mention of “text messages,” and Fitzpatrick was never charged with participating in a conspiracy to commit violence. While McLaurin admitted that Huff was not charged with “conspiracy,” he then fabricated statements to the appeals panel by stating that Huff and Fitzpatrick had worked together to “plan” a violent convergence upon the Madisonville courthouse on April 20, 2010.

“It’s all lies,” Fitzpatrick said.  “I had no contact whatsoever with Darren Huff by phone, email or text messaging.  I do not text,” he said.

Fitzpatrick further detailed his conversation with Willis:

I told him, “This, for me, is a last resort.  I don’t know who else to go to.  I told him about my interactions with the TBI, the sheriff’s department and FBI…the guy was amazed.  He knows that I have my ducks in a row and why I’m concerned about the Sovereign Citizen program. I told him how I tried to get my name off of it again and again.

We talked about Jim Miller’s murder.

We have the report about what the U.S. attorney did last Thursday.  I can’t make the complaint to the DOJ because they’re the culprit.  I can’t get into a grand jury setting because the U.S. attorney’s office is the one obstructing me.

I showed him the picture that’s hanging someplace in the Tennessee Highway Patrol offices in the state, and I said, “I’m tired of this; I want this to stop.”  He understood and said, “I’ll do what I can, but my jurisdiction has lines around it.  I’m limited.”  He understood why I was there yesterday and that it was a last resort.  He knows all the other steps I have taken.

Joe Guy is running for re-election. His photo was at the top of The Jaghunter on Monday morning with a caption underneath it that he is still using the Sovereign Citizen training program with his deputies.

Joe Guy can be held accountable.  People can go into the grand jury; they can do a letter-writing campaign, or Tim Smith, who is running against Guy, can take it up as a campaign issue.  He knows that if he wants to talk with me, he can.  If he gets in touch with me, we’ll move forward from there.  Joe Guy will have to deal with it; he’s answerable to it.

The training program continues to put me in harm’s way, and the detective sergeant agreed.

I’ve talked to a lot of people in law enforcement.  I told Det. Willis that I know what happens if I get stopped by anybody at this point, and I’m not interested in having that happen for an officer and certainly not for me.  Everybody I’ve talked to about this is in complete agreement that I’ve got to stop being described in this way.  He asked me about a civil suit, and I said, “I don’t have that kind of money.”

Fitzpatrick explained that the Sovereign Citizen training program is not given by the McMinn County Sheriff’s Department, but rather, by the Tennessee Department of Safety under the state’s Department of Homeland Security in various locations.  However, “What Joe Guy could do is to stop sending his deputies to the training program,” Fitzpatrick said.  “It’s not his training program, so he doesn’t have control over what’s in it, but he has to understand that he’s accountable for using it.”

Fitzpatrick said that he first made Guy aware of the training program two years ago, to which Guy had responded, “It is what it is.  Deal with it.”

The Post & Email had previously requested documentation on the program through an Open Records request to the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and was quoted a fee of approximately $750.

Fitzpatrick said that he took with him three boxes of information to his meeting with Willis.  “I needed a hand truck to take them into the conference room.  I told him I had three more boxes at home,” Fitzpatrick said.  Of the remainder of the meeting, he continued:

We talked about The Fogbow.

He was very interested in the Van Balen affidavit and how Darren got arrested at all, and why he wasn’t arrested that day.  He was very interested about the workings of April 20, 2010.  I showed him the matrices I have for the 30 people who were there.  These statements that were made last week in open court are lies, and I’m trying to get this information into a grand jury setting, and I can’t.

He kept telling me all through the course of the meeting, “I’m a detective, and I deal with facts.”  And I gave him facts.  If nothing else, this is another foray into the world of law enforcement.

At the beginning, he had a patrolman in the room, and the patrolman left. So it was him and me for the last three-quarters of the meeting.  I gave the patrolman and Willis a copy of the Advocate & Democrat article which published four years ago today.  I said, “This is what we thought back in the day about Pettway and term limits, and now we’ve been told differently.”  I showed him the paragraph from the Hixson brief and put it next to the felony indictment which named Mr. Pettway as a juror.

[Editor’s Note:  In September, Tennessee Deputy Attorney General Kyle Hixson wrote in an appellate court brief in a pending case of Fitzpatrick’s that the grand jury foreman has never been considered “a juror,” as he is selected by a judge using a different process than that which is used for grand jurors.  However, in June 2010, both Huff and Fitzpatrick were indicted by the Monroe County grand jury for “intimidating a juror” in a reference to the grand jury foreman.  The contradiction between the attorney general’s office and the legislative branch, which wrote the laws on grand juries, has not been reconciled, although members of the legislature have been informed of it.]

The detective told me that he has been called into the room when the grand jury deliberates.  He said that once he presents his case, he is asked to leave, and whatever happens next is a secret; we don’t know.  I can’t remember if he said that the prosecutor stays in the room or leaves, but it makes no difference.  Whether the prosecutor stays or leaves, Jeff Cunningham is the guy who’s left behind, and he is the leader of the band.  He has complete control, and the grand jury members don’t know any different.

I told Willis that this isn’t about me; “you have an innocent man in a federal prison right now as a Navy veteran being targeted as a sovereign citizen.  He’s not.”  I read the relevant part of Van Balen’s affidavit where it said that Darren was in a specific place with guns, and I said, “This is a lie.”  He said, “Well, this is interesting because I deal with facts,” and he understands it’s wrong.  I was able to back up everything that he had a question about.

It’s washing over a detective now just exactly how a big a deal this is.  He was absorbed with what I told him, as were the panelists on Sunday’s radio show.

I impressed upon the detective that the Madisonville Hoax is the first government-manufactured domestic terrorism event in the country.  And I said, going back to the facts:  “Fact:  Darren wasn’t there.  Fact:  Darren didn’t have a gun.”  I showed him the list of people who were there:  “None of these people had a gun.”  I went through fact after fact, and he gets it.

I think the word is spreading in the community, and Joe Guy isn’t going to be happy when he comes to the internet and sees his smiling face there, being named as a sheriff who’s attacking a Navy commander as he is.  Joe Guy can’t deny it.  And the deputies aren’t happy with the fact that they’re going to this training…which is how the CD was released.  It came from the McMinn County Sheriff’s Department.

I’ve given Joe Guy plenty of room; I’ve approached him on a number of occasions.

Now the gloves come off.  I’m spreading the word in the community, and he’s not going to like what’s being said.  But he cannot deny it.