On the fourth day of testimony in the weapons and conspiracy trial of Alaska militia leader Schaeffer Cox and two of his followers, jurors got to hear Cox espousing his beliefs in his own words, and got a crash course in how grenades are made.
At a federal courthouse in Anchorage, prosecutors are still in the beginning stages of building their case -- methodically calling law enforcement agents to the stand to go over what they found when they raided the men's homes, cars and trailers. Long guns, hand guns, shotgun powder and homemade "booby traps" were among the items discovered, along with uniforms, handbooks, paperwork and handwritten notes relating to Cox's Alaska Peacemakers Militia and other groups he'd founded or become involved in.
RELATED: Read more about the Alaska Peacemakers Militia and the federal investigation
At the heart of the case is whether Cox, along with his followers Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon, were plotting to murder members of law enforcement and others. The murder-conspiracy charges expose the men to potential life sentences. Alaska Peacemakers Militia leader Schaeffer Cox is also accused with soliciting two of his followers, Coleman Barney and Lonnie Vernon, to kidnap and kill government officials -- state troopers, a judge, U.S. Marshals, TSA officials, and personnel with the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security -- as retaliation in the event any of them attempted to apprehend Cox.
All three members of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia deny the charges.
In addition to his militia, Cox was active with citizen groups that were self-appointed government watchdogs and offered an alternate, "common law" court system in which to try grievances and render judgments. The willingness to reject established laws in favor of one's own system of justice falls into the belief system of the sovereign citizens movement, an anti-government disposition found in pockets across the nation.
Believing in the movement is not a crime. But taking action that harms others is a crime. It is the latter that has caught the heightened attention of the FBI, which is monitoring radicalized extremists with increased intensity across the nation.
Cox is a talker, a man with a gift for oration who took his method for sovereignty and the rebirth of man on the road in more than one speech made beyond Alaska's borders to fellow patriots. On Thursday, a reporter from Montana who attended one such gathering took the stand.
Cox's Montana days
Prosecutors needed Ed Moreth -- who was at the meeting on assignment for his newspaper The Sanders County Ledger in Thompson Falls, Mont. -- in November 2009 to validate that a recording they had of Cox was the same speech that Moreth attended that night at a VFW hall in the city of Plains, Mont. Moreth confirmed. During that evening 2 1/2 years ago, Cox talked about the government, the role of women, God, militias and the value of the dollar, Moreth testified before brief audio clips of Cox's presentation were played for the jury.
"Everybody's worried about gun control," Cox could be heard saying to the crowd. He suggested that Congress will ultimately get elected officials to turn on the gun-loving public by holding them hostage to policy matters by offering public safety money to struggling cities or states, but only if those communities agreed to tighter gun control. Cox then made a joke about how the government should just ban all guns and then see what happens when law enforcement tries to come seize firearms from people's homes.
Cox also bragged about the size of his Alaska Peacemakers Militia, boasting that it was 3,500 men strong, with surgeons and engineers, bomb-makers and laser-equipped airplanes at the ready. After the speech in Plains, Cox headed to the Montana town of Hamilton for another gathering.
Barney and Vernon's attorneys were quick to distance their clients from Cox's Montana days.
Had Moreth, the reporter, seen them at the meeting, or ever heard their names? No, he told the lawyers on cross examination after explaining that he'd only been contacted a few weeks ago by the FBI to help with the federal case.
Prosecutors must prove that Cox's musings were something more than a zealous talker using violence as mere metaphor. To win their case, they'll have to show he meant it as a call to action, and that he and others took action themselves to start getting the job done.
After two days of testimony, prosecutors have started giving jurors a lot to think about, coupling the militia's mindset with a laundry list of weapons seized and strongly worded declarations of how to conduct and defend one's life.
"Defend all, aggress none," states the cover page of the "no-fluff training manual" for the Alaska Peacemakers Militia, copies of which were taken into evidence at Barney and Vernon's homes. The manuals cover the use of paramilitary tactics to control a tactical outing: hand signs, voice control, formation maneuvers, position responsibilities (including who pins the enemy down and who kills them), gun use and speed loading of ammunition.
Notebooks taken into evidence also show the group had a flair for maintaining their image. They encouraged members to show up in a state court in Fairbanks and make disruptive noises to display shock at a statement or ruling. They rehearsed "one liners" to say to the media about how "court is a fraud." And they contemplated manning an aid station at a local marathon to raise their visibility in the community of Fairbanks. Other notes were more in line with the Montana speech, and urged people to do more than whine about their lives.
"Complaining about your life without action is like going duck hunting with blanks: a lot of noise but no action," one author wrote in cursive on a yellow legal pad seized from the men's property.
Displayed on another document taken during the searches: "Live free or die / for death is not / the worst of evils."
Grenades 101
Jurors on Thursday also heard from a bomb technician with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Phillip Whitley has made a lifelong career out of things that blow up, first as a bomb technician with the military for 24 years, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently as a specialized ATF agent. The Seattle-based explosives expert was brought to Alaska to aid in the searches the day Cox and his associates were arrested in the Fairbanks area in March 2011.
On the stand, Whitley dealt a blow to the defense, explaining why, although no live grenades were found, the objects and items discovered could still be considered destructive devices. Put more bluntly, even though no live grenades were found, the men could still be charged with having unregistered grenades, which is a crime.
The law that enumerates what is and isn't a destructive device allows for discretionary interpretation. Some items obviously fall within its scope, like automatic machine guns, rockets, missiles and poison gas.
But "there is no exact list. It falls to us to look at the statute and say. 'Does this fit within the statute on a case by case basis? Is this similar to or would it be used like these items?' A pipe bomb is still a grenade," Whitley testified.
In deciding whether to categorize something as a destructive device, context is everything, Whitley said. "Is it designed for use as a weapon? That's critical," he said, explaining that some explosives are used legitimately in mining, and some weapons, like shotguns, are used in hunting. It's also not illegal to have a destructive device, but because such explosives are more dangerous than other weapons, they are regulated and must be registered with the ATF.
Inside a utility trailer owned by co-defendant Coleman Barney, Whitley found grenade bodies, a squeeze tube welding kit, shotgun powder, and grenade fuses. Separately, the items are not illegal. They each have a legitimate purpose. The replica grenade bodies, empty and with a hole on the bottom, are collector's items. The welding kit has numerous utilitarian uses. The shotgun powder can be used for reloading weapons and hunting. And the fuses, designed for smoke grenades, also have a legitimate use, not unlike the kind somebody might use to signal when in distress in the wild.
But because they were found together, that changes how investigators allege the militia members intended to use them.
When asked by prosecutor Yvonne Lameroux if all of these items could be combined to "go boom," Whitley answered yes. "We see this quite often," he said, adding that in the past five years, 950 improvised grenades have been found in the United States.
Using a four-step process, it would take only minutes to convert the stash of supplies found inside Barney's trailer into "a completely functional hand grenade": mix the putty, pack in the powder, seal the hole at the bottom, screw the fuse into the top.
And therein lies a problem for the defendants: Under the law, grenades do not have to be operational to be considered destructive devices. They need only be readily assembled, Whitley testified.
In Whitley's estimation, there was only one viable explanation to have all of these ingredients sitting in trailer: to make a weapon that could injure or kill, an "explosive grenade" like those used during World War II. Enough material to manufacture four grenades was found, a count based on the number of live fuses discovered in the trailer.
Defense attorneys, as they have throughout much of the testimony this week, reiterated with Whitley that all of the items were individually legal to own and purchase, and that they posed no danger on their own.
Whitley also explained why what he found in the trailer was different than going to somebody's garage and finding a spare piece of plumbing pipe, a box of fireworks with fuses, and some shotgun powder. While those items could be used to make some kind of bomb, as long as they are all stored sensibly and being used for their intended use -- fixing a pipe, lighting fireworks on the Fourth of July, and preparing for a hunting trip -- there isn't a problem.
But they might be interpreted differently if the items were sitting together on a workbench. That could suggest somebody plotting to build a bomb, Whitley said.
The trial, which runs four days a week, will resume Monday and is expected to last more than a month.
Contact Jill Burke at jill(a)alaskadispatch.com