You’ve gotta be smart to work at the FBI and the Department of Justice, right? To be a federal law enforcement officer, a federal prosecutor, or a federal judge, you’d have to demonstrate at least some common sense and the ability to think logically – not to mention discharging your duties with honesty and integrity - wouldn't you think? Wouldn’t you hope?
Then why do they keep making the same mistake, over and over again, utilizing every resource available to the government of The United States of America to pursue murderous grudges against people they don’t like, simply because they can?
I remember growing up watching television shows like Dragnet and Adam-12, and movies depicting Elliot Ness and his “Untouchables,” and my parents and teachers always told me that the police were the good guys. I believed that, I really did. Before I joined the Marine Corps I even took a year of criminal justice at the local community college because I wanted to be one of those heroes.
But the murders of Randy Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son at Ruby Ridge by an FBI sniper shocked me, and they shocked a nation. It was the first time I can remember thinking that federal law enforcement could be heavy-handed, corrupt, and unfair. It was also the first time I remember hearing about militias, because those events caused people to swell their ranks in record numbers.
Along with the rest of the nation, I witnessed more unnecessary violence by the US government which eventually led to the massacre of 76 men, women, and children at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas. The murders of those innocents by federal agents at Waco led to another massacre of 168 innocents in Oklahoma City as retaliation by Timothy McVeigh.
In both cases, the deliberate escalation of violence by the government was totally avoidable. Randy Weaver was sitting on top of his mountain and wasn’t going anywhere. David Koresh went into town regularly, and could have been arrested at any time. Peacefully. But the government wasn’t interested in peace.
As we witnessed most recently at the Bundy Ranch in 2014, federal law enforcement wanted to conduct the most “militaristic” operation possible.
 |
| Tragedy in Oklahoma City |
What could possibly make someone so angry that they would purposely park a truck bomb directly below the Alfred P. Murrah building’s day care center, or murder completely innocent police officers as they sat down to eat lunch? I’ll tell you what: Elements of the federal government felt that the law did not apply to them, they killed innocent people, and the murderers got away with it.
For example, Hostage Rescue Team sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Vicki Weaver in the face at Ruby Ridge. Armed only with her baby, Horiuchi snuffed out Mrs. Weaver’s life for no apparent reason. The federal government was eventually forced to pay her family One Million dollars after that illegal shooting.
 |
| FBI HRT Sniper Lon Horiuchi |
But was Horiuchi charged with a crime for illegally killing Vickie Weaver? No, he wasn’t. Instead, as congressional testimony revealed, he was deployed to Waco Texas where he fired at unarmed Branch Davidians as they tried to escape their burning compound.
And that is what set McVeigh on his murderous path.
By thinking themselves above the law, by acting like unaccountable bullies with badges, out-of-control elements of the federal government created monsters like Timothy McVeigh, and Amanda and Jerad Miller, who were kicked out of the Bundy Ranch for being too “extreme” weeks before they killed two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian.
McVeigh and the Millers felt the only way they could get justice, to restore the rule of law and hold the government accountable for the outrageous, deadly, and unnecessary tactics they used, was through violence. Terrible, murderous, violence.
 |
| Navarro & Myhre by Stewart Freshwater |
As much as I deplore the reality of the situation, the unconstitutional, shamefully unethical, and illegal, actions of prosecutor Steven Myhre and the tyrannical dictates of "judge" Gloria Navarro are going to have the same effect on some deluded soul, or a group of real extremists, and they will have the blood of innocents on their hands.
By their blatant persecution, not prosecution, of the Bundys, they are creating new monsters. I fervently pray that everyone who sees this will heed my words and join me in decrying offensive violence against anyone, but reality must be faced if we are to be honest with ourselves.
 |
| Timothy McVeigh |
There are really bad people out there that call themselves, "Patriots," when they are anything but; people who, like Timothy McVeigh, are willing to kill innocents in order to realize their own brand of, "justice," and the persecution of the Bundys being led by Myhre and Navarro is feeding their hatred of the federal government at this very moment.
It would be a horrific if a federal building were targeted and innocents were slaughtered as McVeigh did when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, or if some psycho decided that assassinating individual federal employees would be a good idea. Those scenarios are evil, plain and simple, and if I read the Bundys correctly they would rather sit in prison for the rest of their lives than have anything like that perpetrated in their name.
But it's not up to the Bundys, is it? They literally have no say in the way their prosecution unfolds. No, it is the responsibility of the federal government to give the Bundys a fair trial, so that no extremist can use their actions as an excuse to seek justice through violence. If they don't, any innocent blood shed in the future will also be their responsibility, and that blood may be their own if some psycho wannabe “Patriot” decided that assassinating individual federal employees would be a good idea.
I’m not alone in recognizing the prosecutorial misconduct of AUSA Steven Myhre, who took his most recent defeat personally, and put his own grudges against the defendants on the record, when he called Eric Parker a “slithering coward with a gun,” or the judicial tyranny of Judge Gloria Navarro.
Throughout all of the Bundy trials, Judge Navarro has twisted and perverted the law and the rules of evidence, suppressed the testimony of multiple defense witnesses, official records, and radio communications, and videos of the BLM’s deployment of heavily armed agents assaulting the Bundys and their supporters. She suppressed any reference to the Constitution or disgraced BLM special agent Dan Love - who led the assault on the Bundys despite a direct order from his chain of command to, “stand down” the day before the cattle were released – in order to give the government every conceivable advantage.
Just recently, acting in his capacity as the Bureau of Land Management lead investigator into what really went down at the Bundy Ranch in 2014, Special Agent Larry Wooten “routinely observed… a wide-spread pattern of bad judgment, lack of discipline, incredible bias, unprofessionalism and misconduct, as well as likely policy, ethical, and legal violations among senior and supervisory staff at the BLM’s Office of Law Enforcement and Security.”
Wooten further observed that those supervisors, “…made a mockery of our positions of special trust and confidence, displaying extreme unprofessional bias which adversely affected our agency’s mission and likely the trial regarding Cliven Bundy and his alleged co-conspirators, and ignored the letter and intent of the law. These issues also likely put our agency and specific law enforcement supervisors in potential legal, civil, and administrative jeopardy.”
He stated that Love indicated who was to be killed first at the Bundy Ranch on an “Arrest Tracking Wall,” which had the pictures of Erick Parker and Cliven Bundy with “X’s” marked through them. Love also kept a gruesome, trophy “Kill Book,” in which he kept mementos from people who had killed themselves as a result of Love’s thuggish tactics during, and in the aftermath of, “Operation Cerberus Action.”
When Wooten tried to submit his 17 page report to his superiors, the documents and electronic evidence he had gathered to go with it were seized from his office and he was removed from the case at the “furious” insistence of AUSA Steven Myhre. I believe that is obstruction of justice, Mr. Myhre.
It’s been proven that the prosecution in the Bundy case “willfully” withheld exculpatory evidence on at least six occasions. And this isn’t the first time that lead prosecutor Myhre has withheld evidence favorable to the defense. Myhre was also found to be guilty of Brady violations in the 2003 case US v. Chapman, when he withheld 650 pages of evidence from the defense. A mistrial with prejudice was the result.
When prosecutor Myhre appealed the decision, the appellate court commented, “This is prosecutorial misconduct in its highest form; conduct in flagrant disregard of the United States Constitution; and conduct which should be deterred by the strongest sanction available.”
I don’t know if Myhre ever was sanctioned for his misconduct, but if he was, the punishment obviously did not deter him from offending again.
In the Bundy case, over 5,000 documents and electronic records were withheld from the defense. Some of them of them show how Myhre lied in the charging documents when the Bundys were originally indicted, others prove that he has continued lying – to the defense and to the judge – since the trials began last year. Still others confirm the deployment of snipers in the hills around the Bundy Ranch well before the “standoff” occurred, even though Myhre had denied their existence.
Finally, even Judge Navarro had enough of the prosecution’s lies and declared a mistrial in the case of the Tier One Bundy defendants. She will decide whether to try the Bundys again, or dismiss the case with prejudice on January 8th.
The government has spent millions of dollars trying to put the Bundys in jail at the urging of former Nevada Senator “Dirty Harry” Reid, who stood to profit financially from the destruction of the Bundy Ranch. Its agents have shamed themselves, and their respective agencies, with their unethical, immoral, and illegal conduct. The prosecution has repeatedly lied to the defense, and to the court, with “willful” intent and malice aforethought, and then threw petulant temper tantrums like a three-year-old child after convictions were not obtained.
They have disgraced our Article III courts from which Americans expect integrity and the concept of, “Equal Treatment Before The Law,” and that can not be allowed. Lady Justice must not be swayed by biased, religiously bigoted, and ethically-challenged agents looking for any excuse to play, “operator,” and get into a gunfight. She must not be swayed by prosecutors who will do anything to win a case – Justice be damned - and she must not be swayed by tyrannical judges who twist the law so as to allow such abuses to remain hidden from a jury.
Now that exculpatory evidence has been properly disclosed, and the unethical, unconstitutional, and illegal antics of those who conducted the government’s roundup of Bundy’s cattle has been exposed, and now that an investigation into the conduct of federal officials in charge of the Bundy case has been ordered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, it is high time for Assistant US Attorney Steven Myhre and Judge Gloria Navarro to stop persecuting the Bundys, and drop the charges against all of the remaining defendants. Based on the new evidence that has come to light, those already convicted and serving time must be freed.
Even the juries approved by the prosecution have taken note of the third grade grudge the federal government is taking out on the Bundys and their supporters, and they have acted accordingly by refusing to convict them. There is no reason to believe that the government will be any more successful against the Bundys should a new trial be ordered by Judge Navarro on January 8th, especially now that the defense has access to the exculpatory evidence previously withheld by the prosecution.
To Judge Navarro and (now, former) AUSA Myhre, I can say only this: I don’t know what Harry Reid has on you that has made you throw away every last bit of Honor and Integrity you ever had, or what you think you owe him, but destroying your own careers with your blatant disregard for the Rule of Law is simply foolish, not to mention illegal and sanctionable.
If any blood is shed in response to the persecution of the Bundys and their supporters, the responsibility is going to rest directly on your shoulders. Just stop it, already. Admit to your mistakes, honor your oaths to the Constitution, and let Justice prevail, before somebody gets hurt.
IMPORTANT!
