As “patriots” rejoice over the acquittals of the leaders of a 41-day armed occupation at a national wildlife refuge in Oregon, the mood among those who monitor extremist groups is anything but gleeful.
Thursday’s jaw-dropping jury verdict in the federal Oregon standoff trail, they said, could embolden anti-government extremists and lead to an uptick in violence across the country.
“The government took them to court, they played the government’s game and they won,” said Bob Harris, a former Federal Bureau of Prisons case manager who teaches law enforcement officers how to identify and handle militant extremists.
“I think it’s a spark that could lead to some real potential problems. And it’s going to spread not only through the West but all throughout the anti-government groups across the country.”
Federal prosecutors had charged brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five others with conspiring to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs through intimidation, threat or force during the occupation earlier this year of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. On Thursday, a federal jury in Portland found all seven defendants not guilty.
“I’m kind of at a loss for words,” said Daryl Johnson, a former senior analyst for the Department of Homeland Security. “Obviously, the prosecution’s strategy and case wasn’t convincing enough — or else you had a sympathetic jury.”
Johnson said the charge of impeding federal workers from doing their jobs was weak.
“They should have focused more on the vandalism, the property destruction, the threats and intimidation toward the BLM (Bureau of Land Management),” he said.
The government charged 26 people in the case, which began Jan. 2 when a group of armed protesters led by the Bundys took over the refuge. Tensions escalated on Jan. 26 when one of the leaders, Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum, ran a roadblock and was shot and killed by Oregon State Police. Eleven of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and seven others who elected not to be tried with the Bundys are scheduled to go to trial next year.
The Bundys still have more court dates ahead. The brothers, along with their father, Cliven, are to go to trial in Nevada next year for their involvement in a 2014 standoff with federal authorities over $1 million the government said Cliven Bundy owed for grazing his cattle on federal land.
Ammon Bundy said after Thursday’s verdict that “it was the Lord who gave us the advantage.
“He always gives us the advantage if we stay true to him, and we believe in him and we are obedient to him,” he said in a recording posted on Facebook. “He gives us the advantage so that we can be free. And that’s what will keep us free in this country and that’s what we must rely upon. We must not be afraid to act when we’re told to act by the Lord. We must act and not be afraid, and then he will sustain us and he will give us the advantage.”
Talk like that worries Johnson and others who monitor anti-government groups.
“The thing you have to be concerned about is the militia members thinking that they can get away with this again and again and again,” he said. “It could potentially embolden them and increase the chances and likelihood of another incident. But on the other hand, in the near term it may appease them because they feel justice has been served on their side.”
An incident in which U.S. Marshals deputies tackled Ammon Bundy’s attorney and used a stun gun on him Thursday when he demanded that his client be released will only add fuel to the fire, Johnson said.
“That’s playing to the extremist narrative that the government is overzealous and interpreting the laws the way they want them to be enforced and not the right way,” he said. “It may also play into these common law grand juries that are starting to issue their own indictments.”
Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said acquittals in major cases against anti-government extremists are rare.
“There’s no doubt that it’s a significant loss for the federal government, and it’s a big disappointment,” he said. “It’s not like there was a lone juror or two jurors holding out for the defense. This was an acquittal, which meant that the jury, for whatever reason, just simply was not willing to buy the prosecution’s argument.”
The fact that numerous defendants opted for plea deals in the case indicated that even their own attorneys believed the government had a strong case against them, he said.
Pitcavage and others said they didn’t believe the Oregon outcome would have any impact on a case filed this month in Kansas in which federal authorities charged three men with plotting a bombing attack on Somali immigrants in Garden City, Kan. The men were allegedly part of a small militia cell.
“That’s a very different kind of case,” Pitcavage said. “The case in Kansas is a sting operation. With sting operations, typically the only way they can go bad, assuming that there’s no technical issue like evidence handling, is if the defense can successfully raise an entrapment argument. And so far, nothing has come out that suggests that’s a viable defense strategy.”
Harris said federal prosecutors in Kansas appear to have a strong case.
“They found explosives and enough hard evidence to say these guys were definitely plotting something,” he said, “and they had a government informant whose testimony is going to be heard.”
Government losses
The Oregon trial is only the third case involving right-wing extremists in recent years that has ended in a substantial loss for the prosecution, Pitcavage said.
The most well-known, he said, was the Hutaree Militia case, in which seven members of a militia group in Michigan were charged with plotting a revolt that included killing a police officer and bombing a funeral. The case fell apart in 2012 when a federal judge threw out all charges against five defendants and the most serious charges against two others, saying the government didn’t have enough evidence to prove its claims.
“It didn’t even go to trial,” Pitcavage said. “It was problematic because they were charged with seditious conspiracy. And sedition cases over the past 100 years have a very poor history. Most have ended in acquittals or mistrials or are overturned on appeal.”
The other case involved a racist skinhead group in Florida called the American Front, he said. In 2012, authorities arrested 14 people who they said were participating in paramilitary training with the group in preparation for a race war in which they planned to kill Jews, immigrants and other minorities. But the case fell apart, and nearly all charges against most of the defendants were dropped.
Pitcavage said the Oregon case seemed clear-cut.
“I assumed that the prosecutors would get convictions,” he said. “To the public, they saw these militants on TV with weapons. They absolutely did interfere with the federal government in the performance of its duties. So this is one of the things that is so perplexing about the verdict — that the jury could decide that was not the case.”
The fallout, Pitcavage said, could be significant.
“The acquittals allow the ringleaders of the Oregon standoff to continue to rally people around those causes because they won’t be in prison, they can have meetings, they can travel around the country, they can bring people to their cause,” he said.
Harris wonders whether jury nullification — finding defendants not guilty because of a belief that the law they are charged with violating is wrong — came into play in the Oregon trial.
“Despite the damage and everything that they did, they had a lot of grass-roots support,” he said. “Maybe not quite so much in the local community because of the disruption it caused, but I can’t help but think there was a little jury nullification in there in that the jury was kind of thinking these guys were just trying to do something and the government is coming down awful heavy on them.”
He said anti-government sentiment runs deep throughout the region.
“It is a huge issue for people in all the Western states,” he said, “and even though they may not have come out and said it, I think there were a lot of people who not so much supported what they did but supported their cause in knocking the government on the issue of federal lands.”
And that, he said, could affect the Bundys’ case in Nevada.
“It’s certainly going to have a bearing on that case, because there’s nobody who’s going to sit on that jury in Nevada who hasn’t heard that they’ve been acquitted out in Oregon,” he said.
The Sharp family reacts
One high-profile figure in the “patriot” movement who was noticeably absent from the celebration in Portland was Victoria Sharp, the outspoken, Kansas-raised teen who was riding with Finicum and other occupiers when Finicum was killed. She quickly became a rising star in the “patriot” movement after the incident, accusing authorities of murdering Finicum.
Tim Sharp, her father, said she was with him in Colorado on Friday.
“She’s lying low with me,” he told The Star. “We’re getting a breath of fresh air, trying to reset focus.”
He said his daughter, now 19, is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder over Finicum’s death.
“She’s had to change her vocation,” he said. “She had her EMT from Montana, but now sirens set her off, trigger her, so she can’t even go back to doing what she was doing because of this.
“She’s staying with me, and we’re moving forward.”
He said he and Victoria Sharp were appalled at what the marshals did to Ammon Bundy’s attorney.
“My gosh, you talk about over-reaching government,” he said. “Tasing a lawyer simply for asking where the paperwork was to keep a man in custody. That’s absolute, utter bull ... and more abuse of power.”
Tim Sharp added, however, that some players in the “patriot” movement also need to tone things down.
“The patriot movement, certainly characters in the patriot movement, make the whole patriot movement look like a bunch of crazies and wackos,” he said. “Victoria’s never been a crazy or a wacko. I’m not a crazy or a wacko. I believe in the patriot movement, but I don’t believe in the far-right radicals that are trying to take it over.”
Judy L. Thomas: 816-234-4334, @judylthomas
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