Even a left leaning Mother Jones magazine, reporter Stephanie Mencemer, have written about secret service targeting birthers. See excerpts below
Posted on | May 14, 2010 | No Comments
At least a half-dozen prominent anti-Obama activists who’ve petitioned various federal agencies or courts to investigate the president’s citizenship or publicly questioned his eligibility to serve say they’ve been visited by Secret Service or Homeland Security agents. Dr. Orly Taitz, the “Queen Bee” of the Birther movement, says, “A number of my supporters had visits from Secret Service, from different agencies, INS, Homeland Security. There are a whole number of people who got these visits to intimidate and harrass them.” She says federal agents visited her home once; however, she was not there to be interviewed.*
Of particular concern to the Secret Service, it seems, are the individuals who are trying to interest federal prosecutors in bringing criminal charges against the president for fraud and treason, a movement spearheaded by a retired Navy lieutenant commander, Walter Fitzpatrick III. Last March, Fitzpatrick sent an “indictment” for treason to the US attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, asking the prosecutors to act on it. Two days later, he noted on his blog, two Secret Service agents showed up at his house along with a couple of local cops, to see what sort of threat he might pose to the president. “I’m still here,” Fitzpatrick reported afterward. Fitzpatrick was contacted by the Secret Service again in July after he sent his complaint to the US attorney in Washington, DC.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick has encouraged others to take the indictment to prosecutors around the country in the hopes that one will bite. Georgia computer-store owner Carl Swensson is a fan of Fitzpatrick’s and a member of the American Grand Jury movement, which seeks to hold “citizen grand juries” that bring indictments against the president. In an interview, he said that last spring, he took Fitzpatrick’s treason complaint to the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. Shortly afterward, two Secret Service agents showed up at his office.
“They said they had to make sure anyone who put forward this information wasn’t a physical threat to the president,” says Swensson. He says he engaged them in a polite debate about the 14th Amendment and showed them “proof” that Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate was a fake. He also said that he intended to keep bringing the treason charges to federal prosecutors all around the country. They left, and he hasn’t heard from them since. Swensson doesn’t have any hard feelings about the visit, which did little to dampen his enthusiasm for his project. “They were doing their job. They were professional. They tried to dissuade me from what I was doing, but I wasn’t going to have anything to do with that,” he says.
Indeed, far from discouraging the Birther movement, the law enforcement visits have become something of a badge of honor for anti-Obama activists, an event proudly reported to supporters. In November, Dale Laudenslager, another Fitzpatrick follower, who sent his criminal complaint to the FBI, got a visit from a Secret Service agent and some local cops shortly before Obama was supposed to appear in nearby Allentown. Laudenslager posted the name and phone number of the agent on Fitzpatrick’s website. I called the number, which did indeed connect me to the Secret Service special agent, who admitted that he “may have” visited Laudenslager.
Comments
Leave a Reply