AND IF SO, WILL IT STAND?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Mar. 22, 2012) — On March 17, 2009, a retired Naval officer, LCDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III, filed a criminal complaint for treason against Barack Hussein Obama II with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, he received a visit from the Secret Service accompanied by a local police officer, at the end of which one of the Secret Service officers said, “We can’t arrest him [Obama], you know.” Fitzpatrick replied that he was aware that the role of the Secret Service was not that of law enforcement.
Fitzpatrick’s complaint has been renewed on numerous occasions since March 2009, and there has never been a response from the Obama regime. Fitzpatrick had said that as a retired military officer, either he was wrong and should be jailed for possible mutiny, or Obama was admitting his guilt.
The Obama regime responded similarly to a March 1, 2012 press conference in Maricopa County, AZ, during which the results of the six months of research of the Cold Case Posse was made public. The investigators had concluded that there was probable cause to believe that Obama’s Selective Service registration card and purported long-form birth certificate were computer-generated forgeries. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has continued the investigation to request that the director of the Selective Service System release Obama’s original registration form, and a second press conference will be held on March 31 to update the public on his progress. Major media have been largely silent on the issue, and many have openly ridiculed Arpaio and his team, accusing them of trying to “remove the president.”
Because Fitzpatrick was not able to have his criminal complaint acted upon at the federal level, in September 2009, he submitted it to his local grand jury in Monroe County, TN, where he had resided for approximately two years. After several attempts to have the complaint reviewed by the grand jury, Fitzpatrick was told that treason was a federal crime and could not be reviewed at the local level.
In the course of his dealings with the grand jury foreman, Gary Pettway, to act on his complaint, Fitzpatrick discovered that Pettway had held his position for more than 20 consecutive years. Last fall, after making an open records request of the Monroe County court clerk’s office for Pettway’s official appointing orders, he was told in writing that they could not be located, which led Fitzpatrick to believe that Pettway had never been properly appointed nor sworn in to act as foreman. Pettway himself had stated that he had acted as foreman for 27 consecutive years.
Having spoken with the public information officer at the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts, who will not longer respond to us, The Post & Email has gleaned that the reappointment of the same foreperson to a grand jury is done routinely in Tennessee, sometimes for decades, even though the Criminal Court Rules state that a foreman must possess all the qualifications of a juror, and state law mandates that a juror cannot serve consecutive terms. Fitzpatrick has called the arrangement “a patronage position” which necessarily compromises the foreman’s ability to function objectively in regard to criminal claims against citizens of the county.
Very recently, Fitzpatrick reported that several longstanding grand jury foremen in Tennessee have been relieved of their “positions.” Both Pettway and the former Hamilton County grand jury forewoman have described what they did as a “job” in which the employer is the court or judge. Fitzpatrick has described Monroe County judges as “monarchs” and the ensconced foreperson as an “advocate” to the judge.
Grand juries are referenced in the Fifth Amendment and historically, were independent of government prosecutors with their own investigative abilities. Prior to 1946, the year in which the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure were altered by Congress, grand juries often met without anyone from the government being present, afterward taking their conclusions to a law enforcement entity if necessary. In 1946, “presentments” which emanated from grand juries functioning without a prosecutor were labeled “obsolete,” although a constitutional amendment was never passed to override the provision contained in the Fifth Amendment. However, grand juries gradually came to operate only under the supervision of a prosecutor, who often would decide which cases to allow them to review. Therefore, if a prosecutor had political affiliations or prejudices, the grand jury might have been deprived of investigating certain crimes which they otherwise would have reviewed.
Today’s grand juries are generally almost totally controlled by prosecutors, and prosecutors and judges in Monroe County, TN have proven to be corrupt. The oath of office of a grand juror does not require the individual serving to promise to uphold the state or U.S. Constitutions, but rather, it invokes their individual “skill and understanding.”
Fitzpatrick attempted to raise awareness of the problem of a compromised grand jury foreman with the people of Monroe County by placing an ad in a local newspaper. He met with county and state officials, including the local Sweetwater Police Department, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Knoxville FBI and the mayor. No one at any public agency accepted responsibility for changing the status quo in which the foreman continued to serve at the behest of the judges in charge.
On April 1, 2010, Fitzpatrick conducted a citizen’s arrest of Pettway inside the Monroe County courthouse. Someone within the court system ordered Fitzpatrick placed under arrest, and he was handcuffed and taken to jail, where he fasted until his release five days later.
Fitzpatrick has drawn parallels between the grand jury system utilized in Monroe County and throughout the state of Tennessee to the military court-martial process, which is trial without the benefit of a jury, or attainder. In 1991 Fitzpatrick was court-martialed, and he has reported to Navy officers, members of the U.S. Congress, and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that his file contains a document with his forged signature.
Following the April 1 incident for which Fitzpatrick was charged with “riot,” “intimidation” and other transgressions, an assignment hearing was scheduled for April 20 which Fitzpatrick told The Post & Email “should have taken five minutes.”
Instead, the small town of Madisonville was filled that day with more than 100 police officers, SWAT team members, Tennessee Highway Patrol, FBI, and TBI agents and snipers on the roof of the courthouse as Fitzpatrick made his way to the assignment hearing. A man named Darren Huff arrived as an observer. Other first-hand accounts have stated that sheriff’s deputies had automatic weapons inside the courthouse as they screened people to enter, and some were not allowed to the courtroom at all.
Local newspapers stated that Fitzpatrick and Huff had drawn up a plan to “take over the courthouse” and effect citizens’ arrests of several public officials, and “force President Barack Obama out of office.” Huff has denied the press statements that he had planned any violence, and he had told The Post & Email that the Obama eligibility question “was not my issue” in a recorded interview in 2010.
When Fitzpatrick asked Capt. Pat Wilson of the Monroe County, TN Sheriff’s Department where they received the information that there was going to be a “takeover” of the courthouse that day, Wilson told Fitzpatrick that he “got it [the information] from The Jaghunter (Walt’s website) and The Post & Email. The Post & Email had no prior knowledge of anything planned in Madisonville before or after that day and had done little reporting on the Fitzpatrick case at the time. If The Post & Email had published anything of the kind, we would have expected to have been contacted by the FBI. We were not.
Darren Huff was also brought up on charges by Monroe County for videotaping the citizen’s arrest, eventually pleading “no contest.” He was not fined. However, the federal government pursued firearms charges against him, and he was convicted on October 25, 2011 on one count of “carrying a firearm in interstate commerce.” Although Huff maintained his innocence, stated that “nothing happened,” and eyewitnesses at the trial said that federal prosecutors lied on the witness stand, Green had described his client as “a loudmouth” but innocuous. Huff is now in federal prison awaiting sentencing. The Post & Email has sent documentation from its archive on Huff’s case to Atty. Green.
Huff’s attorney, G. Scott Green, met with Walter Fitzpatrick while Fitzpatrick was in the Monroe County jail on October 7, 2011. Fitzpatrick told Green about the claim made on the internet by a man going by the name of “William L. Bryan” of being responsible for the heavy police presence in Madisonville on April 20, 2010. However, it appears that Green never investigated Bryan, and the Knoxville FBI interviewed several individuals who attended the assignment hearing who had done nothing wrong. No arrests were made that day; however, ten days later, Huff was arrested and charged with two firearms violations even though he reportedly did not brandish his weapons in Madisonville.
District Attorney General R. Steve Bebb was quoted as having said, “It was the tensest day we ever had” and that he was “expecting a turnout of extremists.” Why would that have been the case? What was Bebb’s source for the information?
Fitzpatrick has stated that the heavy police presence on April 20, 2010 was “a government construction.” Where did the orders to have snipers on the courthouse roof and a SWAT team, FBI agents, TBI agents, highway patrolmen and local police in place in Madisonville for something that “never happened” emanate? For whom was William L. Bryan working when he became “responsible” for the heavy turnout of police and federal agents?
Was the warning real or manufactured?
In September 2010, Barton Gellman of TIME Magazine wrote a piece about “right-wing militias,” mentioning Huff and Fitzpatrick by name as “extremists” without having interviewed either of them. Gellman wrote:
A small but growing number of these extremist groups, according to the FBI, ATF and state investigators, are subjects of active criminal investigations. They include militias and other promoters of armed confrontation with government, among them “common-law jurors,” who try to make their own arrests and convene their own trials, and “sovereign citizens,” who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law. In April, for example, Navy veteran Walter Fitzpatrick, acting on behalf of a group called American Grand Jury, barged into a Tennessee courthouse and tried to arrest the real grand-jury foreman on the grounds that he refused to indict Obama for treason. In May, Georgia militia member Darren Huff was arrested by Tennessee state troopers after telling them that he and other armed men intended to “take over the Monroe County courthouse,” free Fitzpatrick and “conduct arrests” of other officials, according to Huff’s indictment and his own account in an interview posted online. Investigators are keeping a wary eye on a related trend, which has yet to progress beyond words, in which law officers and military service members vow to refuse or resist orders they deem unconstitutional. About a dozen county sheriffs and several candidates for sheriff in the midterm elections have threatened to arrest federal agents in their jurisdictions.
Where did Gellman obtain the information that Fitzpatrick and Huff intended to ‘take over the courthouse?” And how did he know that Pettway was “real?” Without having spoken to Fitzpatrick or Huff, he represented the grand jury foreman as “real,” which the lack of court records, admitted to by the court clerk, reveals he was not. Pettway was not reappointed in 2011 after having served, possibly illegally, for 27 consecutive years.
Why was Gellman taking aim at “county sheriffs and several candidates for sheriff” who “have threatened to arrest federal agents in their jurisdictions?” Where is the sheriffs’ side of the story?
Where did The Huffington Post, The Chattanooga Times Free Press, and The Boston Herald obtain their information? Why would a Boston newspaper care about an alleged incident in a small town in eastern Tennessee? Contrary to The Boston Herald’s report, Fitzpatrick has never said that “Obama is not a U.S. citizen.”
The disappearing of articles which could be considered harmful to Obama during the last week will be covered in another article in the near future.
It is possible that “William L. Bryan” is a pseudonym, as apparently he has never been questioned about his role in the costly event, although observers were questioned. Following Huff’s conviction, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, William C. Killian, announced that a “militia extremist” was “convicted of attempting to cause a civil disturbance while armed.” Killian was appointed by Obama and was been the recipient of Fitzpatrick’s treason complaints after assuming the position from Russell Dedrick.
The Knoxville FBI has also failed to investigate judicial corruption in Monroe County despite numerous reports and proof provided of judicial misconduct. During a probable cause hearing on January 17, 2012, Judge J. Reed Dixon stated that a special grand jury would be convened to review the charge of tampering with government records against Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick asked the judge how the grand jury would be empaneled, and the judge replied, “The judge is the one who decides who goes on the grand jury” three times. DM420191
Agent Roxane West had told Fitzpatrick that a recording on which a judge admitted to hand-selecting jurors would be “the smoking gun” needed for them to act against the judiciary in Monroe County. A copy of the recording was hand-delivered to the Knoxville FBI in early February, but no action has been taken to date. On June 28, 2011, West had told Fitzpatrick that he was considered a “sovereign,” which, as West described it, is someone who belongs to a movement desiring to “overthrow the U.S. government.” Fitzpatrick told The Post & Email that he is attempting to uphold the Constitution and our form of government, not destroy it.
The FBI reports directly to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is headed by putative Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder is currently suing Sheriff Joe Arpaio for allegedly failing to prosecute certain cases and allegedly “discriminating against Hispanics.” The Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the DOJ reportedly praised Arpaio’s office for its professionalism and conduct just six months before the lawsuit was filed.
Has the FBI been working under orders to intimidate innocent people? If so, who would have given such an order?