Alaska News

Militia co-defendant: We were set up

FAIRBANKS -- There's no way to know what U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan thinks about the federal weapons case the government has brought against Coleman Barney, a command major in the Alaska Peacemakers Militia. But statements he made at the beginning and end of Barney's nearly four-hour bail hearing Thursday in Fairbanks may offer a clue.

"There was a lot of stuff seized that is not illegal," Judge Bryan noted as the defense prepared to deliver its opening statement. He wanted to know which of the seized items -- machine guns, silencers, grenades and grenade launchers -- were directly tied to Barney, and of those, which were illegal.

Hours later, after Barney had taken the stand and prosecutors had called an FBI agent as their witness, Bryan commented that he knew a federal judge who owned a larger weapon collection than Barney.

Barney and four other militia members stand accused of plotting to kill state and federal officials. The investigation was carried out jointly between the FBI and Alaska State Troopers who also depended on two paid informants.

Bryan said he'll file his written decision Monday about whether it's safe to let Barney out of jail.

Until then, he has a lot to mull over.

Barney spoke at length about how another militia member, Gerald "J.R." Olson, now known to be a government informant, manipulated him and Alaska Peacemakers Militia leader Schaeffer Cox. He spoke of how he didn't necessarily subscribe to or fully understand Cox's "common law" court and Cox's sovereign citizen notions of law and justice. He explained why a trailer the government describes as a "weapons cache" was dropped off at a public park with children nearby.

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And Barney swore there will be not be one scintilla of evidence showing him talking about or planning to kill people.

"It's of course a dangerous thing to have a defendant testify, but I think it's necessary," said Tim Dooley, Barney's attorney, prior to Barney taking the stand.

Yet if Judge Bryan chooses instead to view the situation through the eyes of prosecutors, Barney's chances of getting out of jail may not be so good.

It's not about what weapons are legal, but what they were used for, argued assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Skrocki. "When you intend to kill people it's a real problem," he said.

'Major Barney' takes the stand

On the stand Barney was straightforward, polite and calm. At times he was also surprisingly naive, or so he claimed, to the belief systems espoused by Cox. During his testimony, Barney offered new details about how the government orchestrated his and Cox's arrests on March 10.

According to Barney, Olson -- the informant -- was tasked with arranging Cox's flight from Alaska via a fictitious truck driver known only as "Han Solo." On the day of the arrests, Olson drove Cox and Barney straight into the arms of the FBI, under the guise that the trio was actually on their way to meet the truck driver.

Before they made that ill-fated, final drive, Barney had had a busy day. He was finalizing a contract for an electric job his company was pursuing. He was a designated field trip helper for a visit by his 7-year-old son and his classmates to the Fairbanks ice park; and, according to investigators, also managed to find time to squeeze in an illegal arms deal.

Since he had such a jam-packed morning, Barney tried to get Cox and Olson to themselves handle the arrangements with the mythical driver, but Olson kept putting it off until Barney could join them. When, after the school field trip, Barney had to make a trip to his house, Olson and Cox agreed to go check out the size of the fictitious driver's trailer. They also made plans to return and pick up Barney so the three of them could meet with the driver together.

As they departed on their respective errands, the group left behind a trailer owned by Barney. Half of it was filled with equipment for Barney's electrical business. The other half, according to Barney, was filled with household goods, Cox's boxed-and-wrapped belongings: a piano, kitchen supplies, camping gear, guns and grenade bodies. The goods were packed-up for Cox's clandestine relocation to Montana.

This is the same trailer that prosecutors would later describe in their indictment against Barney as a "weapons cache." But according to Barney's testimony Thursday, Cox was borrowing the truck for a short while, and the trailer had simply been detached because the roads were icy.

The arrest

As Barney and Cox made their way to "Han Solo" that day as the informant Olson's passengers, Olson brought up that he had finally gotten his hands on pistol-silencer combos he thought the men had expressed interest in, Barney said. When they got to the meeting place, where "Hans Solo" was supposedly asleep in a diesel trailer, Olson jumped out of his truck and returned with two pelican cases, handing one each to Barney and Coleman. They opened the cases up and inside discovered the gun-silencer sets.

As they looked the items over, Barney said Olson handed him another item: a grenade.

It's at this very moment that a fourth man approached the truck, asked what the men were doing and told them to get off his property. But before the group could pull away, the Feds swooped in, Barney said in the hearing.

They would find $6,000 cash on Barney -- money they insinuated was intended for the weapons buy, but which Barney contends was nothing more than a bank deposit he had yet to make to ensure a paycheck written to one of his employees would clear.

"I had never brought up wanting or needing grenades," Barney said. "You'll never hear any mention of me wanting grenades."

Barney went to on to tell Judge Bryan that he never made any hit lists, never had plans to kill and that he had instead tried to persuade the militia against such retaliation.

Barney said he believed such retaliation would only leave militia members dead, their wives husbandless, their children fatherless, and their characters ruined in newspaper accounts.

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In short, they'd be left looking like nothing more than "a bunch of crazies," Barney said.

Tea Party sympathies and sovereign citizen confusion

Barney admitted that -- like many Americans involved in the tea party movement -- he's worried about the direction of the country. But Barney said he advocated change through nonviolence. He said he believed that change could be achieved through education, through holding law enforcement accountable to the Alaska and U.S. constitutions, and through the legislative process.

"Everything I have been pushing for has been of peaceful means," he said.

He helped set up the Second Amendment Task Force, aimed at protecting gun rights, and the Liberty Bell Network, designed to provide citizens a witness network to unlawful search and seizure. And the efforts, he said, have already paid off, citing a new state law (A.S. 44.99.500) that legalizes silencers and other weapons.

If such items are made in Alaska, they are none of the federal government's business, Barney said.

When it came to alleged murder plots and anti-government loyalties, the Feds, Barney would have the court believe, simply got it wrong.

But on cross examination, prosecutor Steven Skrocki was able to get Barney to admit that he was, in fact, a command major in Cox's Alaska Peacemakers Militia. And Barney also said that, if necessary, he was also prepared to kill, though he said only as last resort. That revelation came as Skrocki asked Barney to explain the security plan designed to protect Cox, his wife and an associate during a television interview.

Cox feared federal agents were out to kill him, and in service to that paranoia the group, led by Barney, developed a safety plan.

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Flood lights were positioned to eliminate shadows in the parking lot, while men wearing body armor patrolled the perimeter, one of them on an ATV. Barney's role was to watch from underneath a tree in the woods. He carried with him a rifle affixed with a launcher capable of propelling "hornet's nest" -- a type of riot-control device that sprays large-sized rubber bullets into a crowd.

A trailer blocked one of the entrances to the property, funneling anyone who entered to an area where militia members turned them away. At least one woman who was trying to get home and crossed the militia's path was turned away and told to find another route.

The scenario is one that should give the court pause, Skrocki reasoned. It's not about gun ownership, he said.

"I've got guns, everybody's got guns," Skrocki told the judge, "but when you use those guns to influence members of the public late at night … you're acting as a police authority."

Skrocki also tried to get Judge Bryan to see that Barney belongs to a group -- nationally known as the sovereign citizens -- which reject the authority of local, state and federal governments. As evidence, Skrocki cited Barney's participation in a common law trial held to acquit Cox on pending state weapons charges.

Barney not only organized the jury, Skrocki said: he and his parents served as jurors.

When pressed to declare his loyalty to Cox's common law cause, Barney hedged. "I don't understand a whole lot of this thing," he told Skrocki. "I didn't fully understand it at the time but I participated as a juror."

Related: Straw Man: America's sovereign citizen movement

Barney explained he joined in the trial not because he believed in the common law system, but because he believed what Cox told him about the system. Barney testified that at the time he felt he needed to learn more about common law -- and that he'd intended to come himself to a decision about it, at a later time.

Did Barney, like Cox, reject the law of the U.S. government?

On the contrary, Barney claimed at the hearing that he'd always been a law-abiding citizen, and had "followed the law and stayed within the law" his whole life. "So I must believe that there is something there," he added.

A failure to act and searching for what it all means

Even if Barney hadn't been actively conspiring to murder anyone -- despite what prosecutors say -- he certainly didn't do anything to intervene once he learned of Schaeffer Cox's alleged "2-4-1" plan.

That plan allegedly called for Cox and other militia members to retaliate with twice the force for any actions taken against Cox. That plan included going so far as kidnapping and murder, Skrocki said.

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"You never told anybody in law enforcement of the potential threats to those people's lives, did you?" Skrocki asked Barney.

Barney answered with one word: "No."

If convicted on the federal weapons charges -- conspiracy to possess unregistered silencers and destructive devices and possession of unregistered destructive devices -- Barney faces five to 10 years in prison.

Barney is accused of having a silencer on two weapons, hand grenades, a grenade launcher and a fully automatic machine gun.

Barney denies the grenades or launchers were his. Barney claims the so-called silencers are merely hoses from a washing machine, and has said the machine gun isn't his.

Yet according to Skrocki, the washing machine hoses fit the style of homemade silencer described in a how-to video discovered during the searches, and when tested by the ATF, was shown to work.

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Dooley told Judge Bryan that everyone should be able to agree that Cox's common law court was "silly stuff." But Cox's federal government "paranoia," shared by many others, was rooted in precedent set in firefights between federal agents and militiamen at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. That paranoia evolved from the tanks and guns and subsequent Waco, Tex., bloodbath in 1993 between the Feds and the Branch Davidians, Dooley said.

He also went on to label the charges against his client, Coleman Barney, as "outrageous."

"If [Barney's] actually guilty of it we should hang him by the highest tree we can find up here," he said. But "we think we have a winnable case."

Predictably, prosecutors disagree and are convinced Barney was far more entrenched in the alleged plots than he's portraying, citing the day of the arrests when he chaperoned a school field trip as an example.

"He takes off the dad outfit, puts on the body armor and heads to an illegal weapons sale," Skrocki said.

Barney will have to wait until Monday to find out whether he'll be headed home anytime soon.

"I don't want to shoot from the hip. I think I need to analyze the evidence," Judge Bryan said in explaining why he would not make an immediate ruling.

With that, the nearly four-hour hearing came to an end, Barney handcuffed, trading a few "I love yous" with his family and friends before disappearing behind a doorway.

Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com

Jill Burke

Jill Burke is a former writer and columnist for Alaska Dispatch News.

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