RETIRED NAVAL COMMANDER WHO FOUND AND EXPOSED CORRUPTION LABELED A “SOVEREIGN CITIZEN” BY THE FBI
by Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III
(Mar. 25, 2012) — [Editor’s Note: The following interview with Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III reveals his observations on the part of local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to stigmatize him with the label of “sovereign citizen” and member of a militia group, which he has denied.
Fitzpatrick relocated to Monroe County, TN in 2007 from the West Coast to assist a member of the U.S. Army who had been court-martialed. On March 17, 2009, he named Barack Hussein Obama II in the commission of treason against the United States for allowing Army troops from Ft. Rucker to deploy into the small town of Samson, AL, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which an Army investigation later confirmed. Fitzpatrick never received a response from Obama, Eric Holder, or anyone in the military regarding his complaint, which has been renewed several times.
An agent at the Knoxville, TN FBI office told Fitzpatrick that he “wouldn’t know where to start” in pursuing corruption charges against public officials, including judges, in Monroe County. “We could claim distress,” Special Agent Whitehouse told Fitzpatrick during a face-to-face interview more than two years ago.
In speaking with an FBI agent last month, The Post & Email was told that a “sovereign citizen” is described as “someone who wants to overthrow the U.S. government.” Fitzpatrick has stated that agents at the Knoxville FBI have told him that he is considered a “sovereign,” and Capt. Pat Wilson of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department told Fitzpatrick on November 17, 2011 that he is held up as an example of a “sovereign citizen” at FBI training sessions.
The Knoxville FBI has rejected Fitzpatrick’s requests to investigate corrupt judges in Monroe County, although the FBI has conducted investigations of public corruption in eastern Tennessee in the recent past.
Fitzpatrick has had threats made against his life and been harassed, beaten, arrested and jailed by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department over the last two years. He has spent considerable time in the Monroe County jail, which, due to its run-down condition, will have to be closed and replaced. While incarcerated in the fall of 2010, Fitzpatrick was provided with information which he believed would assist in solving the murder of Mr. Jim Miller in July of that year. However, after sending his documentation to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, he has never been contacted. Sheriff’s deputies have stated that they are “not afraid of the FBI,” and Fitzpatrick believes that the FBI is working to his detriment in concert with the sheriff’s department. The question is: why?
On April 20, 2010, an assignment hearing was scheduled in the Monroe County courthouse for Fitzpatrick following his attempt to conduct a citizen’s arrest on Gary Pettway, the acting grand jury foreman at the time. Pettway had been serving as foreman, without any evidence of having been sworn in, for approximately 27 years at the time. He continued to serve through 2010, after which he was not named to a new term. Several other long-serving grand jury foremen in Tennessee have also not been reappointed since Fitzpatrick raised the question of foremen having lost their objectivity by virtue of occupying “a patronage position” within the court rather than serving the public.
Fitzpatrick has also identified numerous occasions on which members of a grand jury or trial jury had served too recently to have been randomly-chosen to serve again, according to state law. On December 7, 2011, he observed the grand jury selection process for the 2012 grand juries and was told by the person sitting next to him that the man had been summoned but not appointed to the grand jury last year and told to “come back next year.” The man did so and was placed on one of the grand juries for 2012. State law mandates that all jurors be selected “by automated means.”
Fitzpatrick has a hearing on Monday, March 26, at 9:00 a.m. in Madisonville regarding a charge of tampering with government records. Fitzpatrick claims that he picked up documents which were left out publicly with other materials and that the arrest warrant contains forged signatures, while the court, which has made itself Fitzpatrick’s accuser, has stated that he committed a crime in taking them off the table. There is reportedly video of the event of December 7, 2011 following the selection of the grand juries.
Monday morning’s hearing is not a trial, but rather, Fitzpatrick will be advised as to the findings of a special grand jury following the assertion of Judge J. Reed Dixon at the probable cause hearing that “the judge selects the members of the grand jury.”]
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All of the things we’ve discovered over the past three years Mr. Miller knew. There are connections everyplace, and there are a lot of people working on the theory that Mr. Miller was going to come out with reports of corruption in Monroe County because they were beginning to come out with the exposure of Mr. Pettway and the rest, and there were a lot of people interested in seeing Mr. Miller silenced.
I want to give you a sense of what we know and how these things all tie together. If you go up to 10,000 feet and take a global view of this, it all takes on a different aspect. We have witnesses, hard-copy documents, and sufficient information to talk about the extraordinary corruption here in East Tennessee. This all started to evolve because of the complaint of treason against Mr. Obama.
The government is very much behind this, and we know that, trying to destroy Darren and me and other people who have come to this thing, and there can be no question but what we see here at work. There are several government officials who have done things, but no one has pressed upon them to explain themselves and their conduct over the course of the last three years. They can’t answer the question, so they’re not even being approached. An example is my interview with Pat Wilson on November 17, 2011: “Everyone knows what’s going on.”
Here are the things that we’ve seen. This is government corruption writ large. For example, Carroll Ross accused me of “riot” in response to a citizen’s arrest. He’s never been called to account for that. Carroll Ross accused the other two misdemeanor charges: disrupting a meeting and disorderly conduct, which is not evidenced in anything that was recorded that day. These charges have no grounding. The resisting arrest charge was the fourth misdemeanor charge, and we don’t know who the accusers are. I went through the records, and there are no records of it; there was no investigation; it was just an accusation that was made, and they advanced it through. It had no substance to it. It’s not sustainable. Because they’ve rigged the process, they can do whatever they want. Ross named me in participation in a riot for conducting a citizen’s arrest. We know he did that, and a citizen’s arrest in the state of Tennessee has just been destroyed as a protection that a citizen can use to protect himself against any kind of criminal conduct or to protect somebody else.
You may recall that J. Reed Dixon ordered me to a psychological examination back in April 2010. They sent me to a place that doesn’t exist. I was under court order. Dr. Demick was the person I was supposed to go in and see on April 16, 2010. When you set up a particular timeline of the events that took place back in April 2010, and certainly as they revolve around Darren Huff’s arrest on April 20, everything starts falling into place.
On the 6th of April, the day that I was released from jail the first time that I was arrested, J. Reed Dixon ordered me, as a condition of my bond, to appear for a psychological examination on Friday, April 16, 2010. When I went in to see Dr. Demick, I refused to submit myself to a psychological examination. This is recorded. I handed Demick a piece of paper, and essentially, he was reading me my rights. I wrote the statement out for him. He came out into the lobby of his office; I didn’t go in. I have the documents behind this; there’s enough to show that I refused to be evaluated by this guy. Demick came out and we sat down in the lobby and I handed him the piece of paper, which was a rights statement. I recognized Dr. Demick as a police officer who was about to interrogate me, and he agreed that he was being placed in a position just as a police officer would be, and I told Dr. Demick that he had to read me my constitutional Miranda protections, and and he read it to me, and I left.
It illustrates that J. Reed Dixon was part of trying to make me out to be some kind of a nut as early as April 6, 2010, and J. Reed Dixon can be directly connected to everything that’s happened since. This has been nothing more than a theater act all along the way.
This happened four days before I was supposed to appear before J. Reed Dixon on April 20, 2010. There was a government plan to set me up or anyone else who might be appearing to support me as early as 6 April 2010 when Judge J. Reed Dixon, for no reason in the world, ordered me to a psychological examination. They were trying to make me out to be crazy, and I had to go. I refused, and I walked away from that cleanly. They were trying to set me up as a “sovereign” before I ever walked in for the assignment hearing. The letter that they gave me had the wrong address; they sent me to a place that doesn’t exist. I found it by sheer luck. That’s a very big deal. The 16th was just 14 days before Darren Huff was arrested.
In that day, if anybody thought that I was dangerous, they would have had to do something about it. But there was nothing that suggested to anybody that I was dangerous. There was not a tremendous police presence when I walked in to Dr. Demick’s office. So if there was intelligence that the police and FBI and the Sheriff’s Department were looking at as far as my being a dangerous person planning on walking in to buildings with guns and bombs, there should have been more security at Dr. Demick’s office, and there was not. There was no evidence at all that I was a danger to anybody in that day. Dixon tried to have me give a statement to a policeman against my will; he ordered it as a court order. Who knows what this Dr. Demick was told to do to try to get me to say something or do something that would have supported their position that I was a “sovereign?” That was an attempted ambush so that Demick could write a report that would be consistent with the campaign to name me as a “sovereign,” including anybody who planned to attend on the 20th of April. This was at the same time when William L. Bryan and others, perhaps Barton Gellman, were sounding the alarm that I was some kind of crazy person. J. Reed Dixon is part of this.
Take a look at all the things that people did to name me as some kind of militia leader leading a group of cohorts. You may remember that there was a guy named Rick who contacted me on May 15, 2010 and asked me, “Why did you choose Monroe County to start all this trouble? Is it because you thought all of us here in Monroe County were stupid and you and your militia cohorts could just come in here and take over? You call out people like Gary Pettway, Reed Dixon, Greg Breeden, Bill Bivens, Tommy Milsaps, Eddie Byrum, Jim Stutts….All GOOD men that have lived and worked here all of their lives…then you come in here from God knows where and tell us all how evil these men are. I am 44 years old, sir, and I have known most of these guys since birth, and what a fine group of men they are.” The word was out in the community as I was going in to a trial sequence that I was a militia man.. This could have been written by Barton Gellman. But it wasn’t; it was written by a man named Rick. The word was being put out into the community by people like J. Reed Dixon, Carroll Ross and others who were part of a local and national campaign characterizing me, and later, Darren Huff, as part of a militia. That’s a very big deal.
Then we have Jim Stutts, working with to an illicit grand jury and the illicit June 3, 2010 grand jury foreman, Angela Davis, in advancing two false felony charges. The two felony charges that came out of the grand jury that sat on June 3, 2010 were never explained. And they were made up. And this is part of this campaign. Jim Stutts, working with Angela Davis, made up the felony charges. Everything is an invention, and there’s been no accuser. These things really happened, and we have documented them. The fact that these events have a date, a place and a time is physical evidence. There was a grand jury which met on the third of June which created two felony charges which we have documented, and then I was arrested on June 8 without any warning because of them. Where did they come from? They came from nowhere. Jim Stutts, working with Angela Davis and the fake grand jury, did this.
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Editor’s Note: Fitzpatrick’s interview will continue in a subsequent article.