Put Not Your Trust In Federalized Sheriffs

He sold his soul at a steep discount: Richard Rich (l.) displays the badge he earned through collaboration.

“You look depressed.”

“I was lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence.”

“You lost that some time ago. If you've only just noticed, it can't have been very important to you.”

Exchange between Thomas Cromwell -- the Machiavellian Lord Chancellor of England -- and Richard Rich, an ambitious functionary who had sold his soul in a buyer’s market, from A Man for All Seasons.

“I will not enforce an unconstitutional law against any citizen of Smith County,” insisted Sheriff Larry Smith. The sheriff wants his constituents to believe that he would refuse to participate in a federally mandated gun grab, or permit one to be carried out by federal officials within his jurisdiction. Yet ten days before Smith offered that assurance, his office had taken part in an early-morning SWAT rampage throughout East Texas in which 73 warrants were served as part of the federal government’s patently unconstitutional war on drugs.

During a December 2011 campaign debate, Smith said that he wanted to “invest more resources” – that is, redirect wealth plundered from the productive – into a “Drug Task Force,” and insisted that under his administration the Sheriff’s Office would embrace a “Task Force mentality” in dealing with law enforcement issues. 

The problem with the mindset Sheriff Smith was extoling should become obvious once it’s understood that the German term for “task force” is einsatzgruppe. By their actions many multi-jurisdictional task forces in contemporary America are increasingly faithful to their historic pedigree. 

Smith’s devotion to narcotics task forces might be the residue of his early law enforcement career, which included two years as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration – an agency that could be considered the mentally deficient stepchild of the CIA, which is the world’s largest narcotics syndicate. 

Twenty years ago, an ATF einsatzgruppe launched a murderous raid against an isolated religious group at Mt. Carmel outside Waco. The warrant they were enforcing was clotted with falsehoods. The investigation that produced it was haphazard. Its target, Vernon Howell -- aka David Koresh -- was suspected of trivial violations of federal firearms regulations, and had indicated his eagerness to cooperate with ATF investigators to clear the record. 

If an arrest were to be carried out – and one was neither necessary, nor justified – it could have been performed during one of Koresh’s frequent solitary jogging expeditions, or one of his routine visits to town. Instead, the ATF – seeking a dramatic, high-profile enforcement action to generate headlines for the scandal-plagued agency – staged a paramilitary assault on the religious sanctuary. They did so even though the raiders had lost the element of surprise, and when they arrived at Mt. Carmel they opened fire on the building despite the fact that an unarmed Koresh had confronted the stormtroopers with his hands up, pleading for them not to shoot.

Four ATF agents were killed during that Sunday morning raid. Their deaths were utterly unnecessary, and entirely well-deserved: They were attempting to murder innocent people, and the would-be victims acted within their rights in using deadly force to defend their homes against that assault. The criminal clique that had sent the ATF to attack the Davidians sent a larger contingent to lay siege to their residence, and eventually arranged for the holocaust that annihilated 76 people, including seventeen small children.

Like most gun owners in Eastern Texas, Smith can remember where he was the morning of April 19, 1993, when the Mt. Carmel refuge went up in flames. He was on the scene as an agent of the ATF, which he had joined in 1989. Smith believes that the initial ATF raid on the Davidians was justified, and that the entire operation was at least a partial success. It’s doubtful that his assessment is shared by many gun owners in his jurisdiction.

Larry Smith is among dozens of sheriffs who have gone on record in opposition to the Obama administration’s impending firearms restrictions. All of them have promised to intervene to protect their counties from federal tyranny. And all of them are active collaborators in the same.

Kieran Donahue was sworn in as the new Sheriff of Canyon County, Idaho    on January 14. Three days later he joined the ranks of “refusenik sheriffs” by promising not to implement any federal gun policy at odds with his responsibility to “uphold the Constitution.”

Unfortunately, that resolute statement of principled defiance was fatally undermined when Donahue – in the same press conference -- expressed his willingness to continue his office’s collaboration in the federal “war on drugs” and displayed his indecent eagerness to accept new federal subsidies to deploy deputies to guard public schools as soon as the funds are available.

Wendy Olson, the official assigned by the regime to act as the federal regime’s legal sub-commissarina for Idaho, has said that her office will fully comply with new federal firearms mandates. She pointedly noted that the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office – like most others in the country – has officers who are cross-deputized to serve on federal einsatzgruppen. During last year’s campaign the future sheriff proudly boasted of his work as an “undercover officer” with the FBI-supervised METRO Violent Crime and Gang Task Force.

“In these changing and difficult economic times it is a great benefit to have all law enforcement agencies working together in order to share costs and resources,” insisted Donahue. Those words will almost certainly come back to haunt Canyon County gun owners when – not “if” – the Feds make it clear that they are willing to “share resources” only with sheriff’s offices who are on board with the gun grab.

Donahue insisted on playing coy about the fact that he’s for sale. Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims was shameless. She told the local ABC affiliate that while she will not enforce unconstitutional gun laws, she also “backs the added funding for local law enforcement, especially in schools.” 

Her office has a huge budget, a small but significant portion of which is derived from proceeds seized through a federally supervised “asset forfeiture” program.

In 2009, Mims was the “local” face that was pasted onto the Obama administration’s “Operation Save Our Sierra” marijuana crack-down, which was personally supervised by federal Drug War Commissar Gil Kerlikowske. This campaign involved 300 personnel from local, state, and federal agencies – including military pilots that flew Black Hawk helicopters over targeted areas. The manpower and hardware were deployed in a mission best described as militarized horticulture. It’s quite easy to see how the personnel and assets used against “illegal” plants could be employed to confiscate “illegal” firearms in the future. 

Sheriff Mims heroically subdues a violent plant.

A few years ago, when Mims and her department faced a $4 million budget deficit, the Fresno County commission had to scrounge up $10.6 million in plundered funds to prevent layoffs in the Sheriff’s Office. That money most likely won’t be available next time Sheriff Mims wants to avoid handing pink slips to her deputies. It’s quite easy to imagine a scenario in which her federal supervisors will introduce her to a new variety of alchemy -- converting confiscated “illegal” firearms into federal subsidies. 

Four sheriffs in Oregon have announced their opposition to the renewed campaign to disarm citizens. Among them is Sheriff Brian Wolfe of Malheur County (who, in the interests of full disclosure, is a childhood friend). In a letter to Vice President Biden, Sheriff Wolfe declared: “I believe that the Constitution stands above all laws and executive orders of this Country. I want to be very clear that no one employed on our team at the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office will enforce or support any laws or executive orders that are not consistent with the Constitution of this great land.” 

If only those inspiring words were consonant with Sheriff Wolfe’s actions. Like every other sheriff in the country, Brian Wolfe violates the Constitution on a routine basis. 

Last August, the Malheur County Sheriff’s Department casually announced that it had found several small marijuana gardens during a two-week aerial surveillance operation conducted with the help of the National Guard.

Acting as the department’s official stenographer, the Argus Observer newspaper reported that Sheriff Brian Wolfe will now “contact property owners and acquire search warrants if needed.” Warrants would not be necessary, Wolfe observed, if the property owners consented to the searches. The Sheriff pointed out that the plants may be part of legal medicinal marijuana operations, or could have been planted without the owner’s knowledge or consent.

At this point an actual journalist would have asked Wolfe why his office was conducting warrantless aerial searches of private property without probable cause. After all, the Sheriff has admitted that none of the property owners was a criminal suspect.

The Malheur County Sheriff’s Department spends part of each summer arresting marijuana plants – that is, dispatching its SWAT team to barren locations in rural Oregon to clear out patches of marijuana.

Sheriff Wolfe insists this is necessary to “protect the public,” which is more acutely threatened by the unconstitutional, paramilitary operations of his own department. Wolfe’s department spends a great deal of time seizing contraband and prosecuting people who possess it. That experience will prove quite useful when – once again, not “if” – the Feds decide to treat legally owned firearms as illicit contraband. 

There isn’t a single county sheriff’s office in the country that hasn’t compromised itself by accepting federal funds, and collaborating in unconstitutional federal enforcement operations.  They’ve long since lost their innocence, but are pretending that they’ve just noticed that fact.

Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the Feds to prohibit the consumption of narcotics or any other substance. Indeed, last time the Feds undertook a campaign of national prohibition, they had to change the Constitution in order to do so. Unless they’re investigating charges of treason or counterfeiting, sheriffs should not collaborate with the Feds – and in such circumstances the Feds themselves should be treated as the primary suspects.

If you take the nickel, you take the noose. If a sheriff’s office receives so much as a farthing of federal funding, it will be subject to federal mandates. That principle was underscored about seven years ago in the case of Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old video blogger imprisoned for refusing to turn over a portion of footage he shot of tumultuous street protests during the G-8 summit in San Francisco. 

The Feds claim that Wolf, who spent two-thirds of a year in prison on civil contempt charges, possessed footage of a police car being set on fire. Wolf maintained that he didn’t have the material the Feds were after, and that under California's very liberal journalist shield law, he wasn’t required to turn over his confidential, unpublished material. A Federal District Court Judge ignored Wolf's argument and incarcerated him in a detention center in Dublin, California for contempt.

The alleged assault on a San Francisco police car would be a municipal matter, and the California shield law is obviously a question of state law. Why was this dealt with in a federal court?

As Time magazine pointed out: "The Feds say they have jurisdiction over the case because the police car is partly U.S. government property since the SFPD receives federal anti-terrorism money."

Note well that the Feds didn’t claim that the regime paid for the specific cars that were reportedly destroyed, only that the police department had been subsumed into the federal law enforcement apparatus because it had received some quantity of Homeland Security funding.

What this means, in principle, is that any police agency that receives a dime of federal Homeland Security money is effectively an appendage of the Department of Homeland Security (or, to use the appropriate German expression, the Heimatsicherheitsdienst).

This is obviously true of municipal police departments, which are innately illegitimate paramilitary bodies in no way accountable to the public they supposedly serve. We’re invited to believe that local elected sheriffs are different – at least where the incipient gun grab is concerned. 

The ranks of the refuseniks will continue to expand, and they will feed gun owners a steady diet of bold talk about their willingness to interpose on behalf of their constituents if the Feds come for their guns. Some of them may be sincerely committed to do so. But until they stop actively collaborating in existing federal abuses, why should we assume they would be willing to take the side of the public against the Feds when the Regime decides to come for our guns?

(My thanks to reader  Chris Sullivan, who caught the original error in the epigram at the beginning of this essay.)

By way of illustration... 

... we see the following act of felonious assault and kidnapping by Citrus County, Florida Deputy Sheriff Andy Cox, who threatens to murder innocent, law-abiding gun owner. It took less than two seconds for this this cretinous, foul-mouthed tax-feeder to drop the pose of superficial geniality. His first instinct, on learning that this harmless man was armed, was to threaten to murder him, because he had been indoctrinated in the belief that Mundanes simply cannot be permitted to bear arms.

When assessing the credibility of "constitutional sheriffs" as protectors of the right to bear arms, bear in mind that sheriffs are politicians and administrators; the patrol officers in their departments are people like Andy Cox. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

From Undercover Narco-Creeper to Police Chief

Craig Kingsbury, the veteran bureaucrat who was recently appointed to head the Nampa, Idaho Police Department, began his law enforcement career by hanging out near schools and buying drugs in what should be seen as an attempt to stimulate the local narco-economy.

As a 23-year-old who “looked about 15,” Kingsbury would change into “school-type clothes” and “hang out at the Maverick across from Nampa High School and attempt to purchase narcotics from kids,” the chief proudly recalls in a recent front-page profile published by the local statist stenography sheet.

Kingsbury’s assignment as a government-licensed Narco-Creeper only lasted a couple of weeks, and yielded very little in terms of arrests. Obviously, it did nothing to protect the persons and property of Nampa residents. However, it offered the future chief a suitable initiation into a municipal police department that – like practically every other in the country – is a predatory armed clique disguised as a public service agency. 

Nampa has a population of roughly 81,000 and a slightly higher-than-average crime rate. The city takes its name from a physically imposing man of mixed Cherokee and African ancestry called Nampuh, who came to be known as “Chief Bigfoot.” Indifferently sourced but plausible legend informs us that Nampuh – a man who stood more than 6’8” tall -- joined an Oregon-bound wagon train in 1856 and fell in love with a young woman who later jilted him in favor of young artist named Hart. 

When Nampuh confronted his romantic rival, Hart taunted him by saying that the object of their mutual desires would never “marry a big-footed n*gger like you.” Infuriated, Nampuh charged at the young man, who drew a pistol and shot him in the side. This proved to be little more than an annoyance to the huge Indian, who grabbed Hart by the neck, crushed his windpipe, and threw him into the Snake River. 

Nampuh helped himself to Hart’s weapons and headed to the hills, where – in the company of a French trapper-turned-criminal named Joe Louis – he formed a gang that spent the next decade staging raids on settlers, miners, and wagon trains. Since they were in the business of extracting money from travelers at gunpoint, it’s tempting to think that the outlaw band created by Nampuh and Louis was the Treasure Valley’s first police department.

"Nampa -- This is the instrument of your liberation!"

 Craig Kingsbury’s new appointment as police chief follows a career in which he has distinguished himself only by his sycophancy. He displayed that trait to greatest effect by joining in the official persecution of a small group of whistle-blowers in the department who protested official corruption and criminal behavior therein. 

A little less than a year ago, Nampa tax victims were handed a bill of $189,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by three police officers against the Nampa Police Department. The plaintiffs claimed that former Chief William Augsburger  engaged in “retaliatory conduct … because of Plaintiffs’ protected speech and whistleblowing activities,” in the words of the civil complaint.  

In 2009, the officers were assigned to the department’s internal affairs division, where they discovered that waste and fraud were widespread, and criminal misconduct by officers who used excessive force went unpunished. They were not the first investigators to discover financial improprieties in the department. 

Between 1995 and 2002, the Nampa PD received more than $2 million from the “Justice” Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program to hire 23 full-time police officers and purchase new equipment. A federal audit in 2004 found that the department couldn’t properly account for the funds. The amounts mentioned in that report – which was based on a less-than-rigorous review of the department – were trivial. The 2009 probe conducted by the internal affairs division learned that the problems were deep and systemic. 

The investigating officers – Leonard Claunts, Joseph Huff, and Curtis Shankel – learned that “the Chief of Police and other command staff (including a Deputy Chief) golfed during working hours,” recounts the lawsuit. “And they learned that certain supervisors (Lieutenants and Deputy Chiefs) were performing school related tasks (homework and studying) while on duty.”

While the brass was golfing at public expense, one officer was running a personal business while on duty, using his police vehicle to make deliveries and run errands. Another would routinely disconnect the GPS unit on his patrol car and spend his shift time at home, where he would either sleep or beat his wife: The internal affairs investigators noted that the officer “had been involved in multiple domestic violence reports and 911 calls.”

“Another officer, who had use-of-force issues in the past, used excessive force when dealing with a suspect, which was witnessed and reported by a fellow officer,” according to the investigators. Another was in the habit of “showing up for work under the influence of alcohol yet the safety officer and trainer failed to take action.” 

The pervasive “waste of taxpayer dollars” greatly concerned the officers, but the more urgent problem was the fact that “police officers were left either unsupervised and without proper supervisory support” and no effort was made “to take appropriate disciplinary action against police officers who had misused their authority on repeated occasions.” As a result of that dereliction, “dangerous police officers were being allowed to continue to do police work even though they posed a threat to the public and to other officers.” (Emphasis added.) 

 Chief Augsberger, who ordered the officers to conduct the investigation, pointedly ignored their report. This prompted Sgt. Shankel to write an unsigned letter to the Mayor and City Council in November 2010 describing what the inquiry had uncovered. At about the same time, Investigator Claunts’s wife, Ginger Claunts, independently sent an e-mail to Nampa Director of Human Resources Ed Simmerman that expressed the same concerns. Simmerman replied that he and the mayor would “look into matters … in a very discrete [sic] manner.”

Simmerman’s spelling error suggests that he is a stranger to the concept of discretion, and that impression was fortified by his subsequent actions. Rather than looking into the merit of the complaints lodged by the officers, he simply forwarded Mrs. Claunts’s e-mail to Chief Augsburger, with predictable results.

“I was slandered this weekend and I’m going to fire two people today,” Augsburger groused to the dispatch supervisor following his discussions with Simmerman. “People are going to get fired over this one.”

A few days later, Chief Augsburger strode angrily into a staff meeting and demanded that everybody leave except Shankel and Claunts. After the other employees had left the room, the Chief informed the internal affairs investigators that he was planning on suing them for defamation – and “that their home owners insurance would have to kick in and pay $100,000.” 

Soon thereafter, Claunts and his wife received a letter from an attorney representing Chief Augsburger and then-Deputy Chief Kingsbury threatening them with a lawsuit if they didn’t retract the complaints made in her letter to the Human Resources Department. The letter also demanded that the Claunts reimburse the fees of the attorney who had composed the extortion note.

Within a few weeks, all three of the officers had been subjected to punitive demotions and negative performance reviews. Chief Augsburger dropped several pregnant hints that in the event of cutbacks, the whistleblowers would be the first to lose their jobs – and that three others who had expressed support for them might be the next to go. The chief and his allies began to refer to that group of principled non-conformists as the “Satan Six.”

When the officers sought help from Simmerman, the Human Resources Director shrugged his shoulders, said that his “hands are tied,” and that “everything is in the Chief’s hands per the Mayor.” For his part, Chief Augsburger ignored the investigators’ report and hired an outside consulting firm called Weaver & Associates to conduct an internal audit. 

That report, which was compiled without any input from the internal affairs investigators, validated their most important findings. Yet it concluded with a non-sequitur that could easily have been ghost-written by the chief himself: The consulting firm concluded that the Nampa PD’s most urgent problem was “the disruption” caused by the earlier investigation, and recommended that the whistleblowers be “moved and/or terminated or disciplined.” 

The chief commissioned a second “independent” review to determine if a “hostile work environment” existed in the department. Since the investigation consisted of interviews with the command and supervisory personnel who had been criticized in the original internal affairs inquiry, its findings were never in doubt.

“Most [of those] interviewed thought that the complaints were a distraction and caused upheaval in the NPD,” observed a section of the report entitled “Comments on What to Do With Those Causing the `Tension.’” “One said: `I’m angry that these allegations were raised. They have been a distraction.’… A number of people said, `Fire the complainers. Let them go to Boise if they want.’ Another: `There will always be whiners. Let the whiners go; get rid of them.’”

The “whiners” in question, recall, were internal affairs investigators who had documented widespread abuse of money extracted from tax victims, and a culture of impunity in which officers who had committed criminal offenses were free to continue preying on the public. The department’s highest priority was to preserve its profitable “public service” façade.

While Augusburger and his henchmen – including future Chief Kingsbury – were seeking to be rid of the whistleblowers in their ranks, the Nampa PD was one of several cities selected for a federally subsidized pilot program involving forced blood tests for people accused of DUI. Officer Darryll Dowell, who was part of a “select cadre” of Nampa police assigned to act as “officer phlebotomists,” described to the New York Times how he would find himself “looking at people’s arms and hands, thinking, `I could draw from that….’”

The prospect of being pinned down and jabbed with a syringe by a policeman is intended to extort cooperation with breath tests, a less invasive (and less infection-prone) method of forcing a citizen to submit to a warrantless search of his person and provide potentially self-incriminating evidence. This kind of thing is explicitly forbidden by the Bill of Rights – as if that fact matters anymore. 

Vampire cops aren’t the only tax-subsidized predators at large in Nampa. The Nampa Police Department has also provided cover for sexual predators who are exploiting child detainees at the state Juvenile Corrections Center located in that city.

Last June, seven employees at the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections facility in Nampa filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that their supervisors had permitted female staffers to engage in sexual misconduct with male detainees. The suit also complained that the IDJC’s “cronyist, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive administration” had permitted widespread “fraud and waste of public resources,” promoted unqualified personnel and made them exempt from scrutiny, and retaliated against employees who expressed concerns to supervisors. 

To those aware of the Nampa PD whistleblower case, some of the complaints made in that lawsuit will have a familiar flavor.

“People have been playing golf while clocked in,” relates attorney Andrew Schoppe, who filed the suit on behalf of the dissident staffers. “Juveniles are having sex with each other” and staffers are having sex with their prisoners. They are also grooming successors from within the inmate population, according to one IDJC employee.

“One staff member was [sexually] involved with a juvenile,” Shane Penrod told the Boise Weekly. “That juvenile became a staff member and now they are involved with another juvenile.”

The allegations weren’t limited to a tiny knot of malcontents: A total of 47 current and former employees eventually lodged complaints against the agency. The lawsuit claims that the Nampa Police Department was made aware of the widespread problems – including sexual misconduct – at the jail, but did nothing about it.

The IDJC filed an official response denying all of the allegations. Sharon Harrigfeld, director of the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections, issued a statement reassuring the public “that our facilities are safe” and thanking “all staff for the public service provided each day to community safety.”

That statement was issued on July 31. At that time, the group Harrigfeld described as “all staff” included 31-year-old IDJC employee Julie McCormick, who was arrested several months later and charged with sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy. 

 IDJC staffer Rhonda Ledford, one of the original plaintiffs in the whistleblower suit, recalls that employees who saw evidence of McCormick's criminal conduct expressed concerns to supervisors the previous April, but were required to sign confidentiality statements about the situation.” 

At exactly the same time the IDJC was trying to tamp down its scandal, the Nampa PD was successfully burying its own: On April 27, U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale authorized the $189,000 settlement and dismissed the whistleblower suit so that the department could begin the “healing process.”

By that time, Chief Augsburger -- who joined the Nampa PD at age 19 and never spent a subsequent hour earning an honest living – was certainly feeling no pain. In May 2011, he was able to retire and begin collecting his pension at age 50. His retirement ceremony included “presentations from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as stories from friends,” according to a notice from the Mayor’s office. 

None of those "stories" dealt with issues that were raised in the whistleblowers' lawsuit, which was still active at the time of Augsburger's retirement. Time-server LeRoy Forsman was appointed to keep Augsburger’s chair warm until his dutiful apprentice, Craig Kingsbury, could be sworn in. 

This crowns the resume of a public functionary who began his career trying to lure children into committing acts that would send them to the local juvenile jail – where they were likely to be sexually exploited by staffers protected by the same police department that had arrested them. 

While it’s unlikely that anybody who lives outside of Nampa would be concerned about the squalid condition of its municipal police department, consider this: It’s quite likely, dear reader, that your local police department is just as bad, if not significantly worse.

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 Dum spiro, pugno!