richard mack const sheriff
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see main const sheriffs page
nsa is generic
merri ok
see cows org acronym COWS
bundy
finchem
GUANDOLO
see bak 11 22
provided info ON COPS in several standoffs?!
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AN 10 26
A private investigator hired by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to handle sensitive internal investigations had previously worked for an organization designated as an anti-Muslim hate group and participated in the controversial Cyber Ninjas review of Arizona’s 2020 election, according to a newly unsealed report.
Phoenix New Times reported that the court-appointed monitor's 226-page report on the sheriff's office looked at the way AZ Truthfinder, a company founded by former Gilbert police officer Stephanie Ameiss, obtained a county contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It was discovered that the résumé Ameiss had submitted as part of the bidding process omitted important aspects of her background, such as her six years of experience as lead investigator for Understanding the Threat, an organization founded by the former FBI agent John Guandolo.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Understanding the Threat as a hate group, stating that it was an organization that promoted anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and offered training programs to law enforcement agencies. The group ceased operations in 2023.
The report from the monitor stated that Understanding the Threat had published material that attacked Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Democrats and others.
The report states that Ameiss did not include her participation in the Cyber Ninjas-led investigation into Maricopa County's 2020 election results on her resume. After Donald Trump had lost in the state, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate engaged Cyber Ninjas to carry out the highly criticized review.
AZ Truthfinder was one of the three companies bidding for the contract to carry out investigations in the situation where conflicts had prevented the sheriff's Professional Standards Bureau from dealing with the cases itself, and the leadership of the sheriff's office had chosen the company less than 24 hours after having looked at the bids.
Axios states that the company has obtained approximately $270,000 from Maricopa County since June 2025. The monitor doubted if the sheriff's office had carried out a meaningful background check before giving the contract.
The report stated that either the 'vetting process' was a sham or the vetting that had in fact been carried out had shown some of the same material that we had uncovered, but they had chosen to ignore it.
The results occur while Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and Maricopa County have been attempting to put an end to the years of federal court supervision which followed a racial-profiling lawsuit brought against the sheriff's office.
Chris Hegstrom, a spokesperson for the Sheriff's department, said to Axios that the agency was going over the report and was still committed to "full and effective compliance" with the court's orders.
The monitor suggested that the circumstances relating to the contract should be referred to a possible misconduct investigation.
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mma
Leader of constitutional sheriffs group: “I don't blame Trump for not following the Constitution to the letter because he has no Congress that he can rely on or trust”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 04/03/26
As Media Matters previously reported last October about Richard Mack, leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association:
Mack is a former Arizona county sheriff and the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization which subscribes to the ideology that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.” The organization claims that sheriffs have the “Constitutional authority to check and balance all levels of government,” superseding “any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.” Constitutional scholars and other experts dispute this assertion, with some noting that the Constitution doesn’t mention sheriffs at all.
Mack and CSPOA have pushed for sheriffs to get involved with mass deportation efforts, even holding the organization’s November national conference in Washington state in part because its attorney general is suing a sheriff for aiding the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. Mack also said he has been talking to Homan about “getting sheriffs involved in deportation.”
:{Video
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From the March 30, 2026, edition of FreedomTalk, streamed on YouTube
RICHARD MACK (FOUNDER, CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS AND PEACE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION): I think he’s always having to play defense, except maybe with the Iran war. Obviously, he took that offensive approach. And even on that, the Democrats and some Republicans have gone after him. And I don't blame Trump for not following the Constitution to the letter because he has no Congress that he can rely on or trust.
KELLY JOHN WALKER (HOST): Yeah.
MACK: He cannot. And so if he had gone to them before he invaded Iran, there's lots of Democrats in there that would have informed Iran.
WALKER: Yeah.
MACK: And it would have cost the lives of a lot of people and maybe even cost the entire operation. And when you have an enemy Congress like that, that obviously are traitors to America. And I'm not talking about, not, oh if they don't go along with Trump, then they're traitors. No. That's not what I'm talking about. This is far beyond just not going along, or going against the president. It's far beyond that. They will do anything, including compromise the safety and security of Americans.
...
This is obvious that they are enemy and they bring in enemy combatants so they're the same as. They're the ones who brought in terrorists. They're the ones that brought in the cartels and that's the most dangerous situation in American history right now what they have done.
//
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09/27/24
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MMA
Leader of far-right sheriffs organization says ICE's social media surveillance plan is “completely unconstitutional”
Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founder Richard Mack: Trump’s border czar Tom Homan “has been kind of rendered impotent when it comes to doing his job right now because he's been under that criminal investigation”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 10/17/25
According to Wired:
United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation raids and arrests.
Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show that the agency is seeking private vendors to run a multiyear surveillance program out of two of its little-known targeting centers. The program envisions stationing nearly 30 private analysts at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Vermont and Southern California. Their job: Scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, converting posts and profiles into fresh leads for enforcement raids.
The initiative is still at the request-for-information stage, a step agencies use to gauge interest from contractors before an official bidding process. But draft planning documents show the scheme is ambitious: ICE wants a contractor capable of staffing the centers around the clock, constantly processing cases on tight deadlines, and supplying the agency with the latest and greatest subscription-based surveillance software.
More information on Richard Mack and the constitutional sheriffs movement can be found here.
Video
Citation
From the October 16, 2025, edition of Liberty RoundTable, streamed on YouTube
SAM BUSHMAN (HOST): Alright sheriff, ICE is in the news, and I'm really concerned. I like a lot of what ICE has done, but I'm concerned now.
There's an article in Wired Magazine. Dell Cameron put the article together and here's the headline. “ICE wants to build out a 24/7 social media surveillance team.” Now I'm very concerned about that. “Documents show ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.”
Now, it sounds great on the surface sheriff, and I get that we want to use all we can to stop illegal aliens from abusing American citizens.
RICHARD MACK (FOUNDER, CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS AND PEACE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION): Yeah.
BUSHMAN: I get it and agree. But when you crank this up, pretty soon you're going to have ICE built 24/7 media-monitoring network that'll be taken over by the Democrats. And, buddy, they will use that thing like a — I don't even know what word to use. A samurai sword that's double bladed, double sided. I don't know. It'll be crazy if we're not careful. So we think we're doing things that are right, but it'll backfire, sheriff.
MACK: No. That's — yeah. That's completely unconstitutional. And, I can't — I can't support it, Sam.
...
MACK: Government isn't who has the best ideas. Government is successful when we follow the rules, when we follow the Constitution, when we enforce it, when we keep our oath, when we see the foundational principles in action, and that now they're being destroyed by our own government officials because they have a — ”Oh, we got a great idea here.” There's sheriffs that go along with some of this stuff. “If it helps us get criminals, then we're going to do it, the Constitution be damned or the Constitution notwithstanding.”
And this is the problem. We've all been brainwashed, including Republicans, that if we have a good idea, well, of course, we just do it. And it's so wrong, and this is so indicative of the corruption within our own government that thinks it can do anything it wants. And that's why we had the Patriot Act from the the George W [Bush] presidency and administration. So, no Sam. I'm not going to support that.
And I will call somebody in Washington, D.C. who you and I both know is working with ICE a great deal. And I'm going to make that call. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] We cannot sacrifice the Constitution —
BUSHMAN: And ask about that because the question is, when we say ICE is for this, who is ICE? Does that mean Trump? Does that mean Tom Homan? Does that mean, you know, Kash Patel and people? Does it mean Pam Bondi? Does it mean Kristi Noem? Who is wanting this to be the case? I get their point. The problem is they're very misguided. Is the right idea the wrong for remedy, sheriff?
MACK: Yeah. Again, I guess what you're alluding to there is make — don't let the cure be worse than the disease.
BUSHMAN: Amen to that.
MACK: And that's kind of — that's what they're kind of doing here. And, you know — and Tom Homan has been kind of rendered impotent when it comes to doing his job right now because he's been under that criminal investigation.
...
MACK: Please tell me, Sam, that Tom Homan is smarter than to take a bag full of money from somebody walking up to him on the street or, you know, looking like a —
BUSHMAN: He didn't take a bag full of money from walking up to him on the street, folks.
//
10/02/25 12:57 PM EDT
09/27/24 9:00 AM EDT
12/12/2
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MMA
far-right sheriffs organization says Trump “border czar” Tom Homan is sending a representative to its upcoming conference
The group has been pushing for sheriffs to get involved with ICE’s deportation efforts
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 10/02/25
Richard Mack, the leader of a far-right sheriffs organization, told multiple podcasts in late September that President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said he would send at least a member of his staff to the organization’s upcoming national conference.
Mack is a former Arizona county sheriff and the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization which subscribes to the ideology that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.” The organization claims that sheriffs have the “Constitutional authority to check and balance all levels of government,” superseding “any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.” Constitutional scholars and other experts dispute this assertion, with some noting that the Constitution doesn’t mention sheriffs at all.
Mack and CSPOA have pushed for sheriffs to get involved with mass deportation efforts, even holding the organization’s November national conference in Washington state in part because its attorney general is suing a sheriff for aiding the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. Mack also said he has been talking to Homan about “getting sheriffs involved in deportation.”
In a September 20 podcast appearance, Mack said that he met with Homan just days earlier and had invited him to CSPOA’s upcoming conference.
According to Mack, Homan told him he was “going to run it past President Trump,” and either Homan or his aide would attend. “I hope Tom comes, and quite honestly, I hope he brings Trump,” Mack added.
Video
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From the September 20, 2025, edition of His Glory TV's Take Five, streamed on YouTube
During podcast appearances on September 23 and 26, Mack again mentioned meeting with and inviting Homan to the conference, claiming that Homan said he would at least send his “liaison with local law enforcement” or “his chief of staff” to the conference.
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RWW
08/21/2025
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Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is cheering on President Donald Trump's takeover of Washington, DC, and urging sheriffs all around the country to follow suit.
Mack, a former Oath Keepers board member who teaches sheriffs that they are the highest law enforcement authority in their counties and have a duty to resist state and federal “tyranny," appeared on Matt Shea's "Patriot Radio" program recently where he said that local sheriffs have to power to step in and completely take over "major cities that are run by Democrats."
"I have never wanted to politicize crime," Mack said. "But if you look at all the horrible statistics in all the major cities that are run by Democrats, it's irrefutable, it's inescapable. The conclusion is thus inescapable that Democrat Party and Democrat leadership have completely failed the American people."
"What is the main responsibility of the government?" he continued. "It is to protect life, liberty and property. And so if we keep the goal on those three [in mind], then when [Los Angels Mayor Karen] Bass and [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom fail and summarily ignore the problem and willingly help the criminal element within their state and the Greater Los Angeles area, the sheriff of Los Angeles County should be getting going and telling the mayor he's taking over."
"The sheriff of Los Angeles County, he has concurrent jurisdiction and he has jurisdiction citywide and county wide," Mack declared. "So, he should be going in there and showing them how you do this and he should tell Trump, 'Let me try first. If I need you, I'll call you.'"
Shea agreed, saying that "the real solution" is for country sheriffs to start taking over large, Democratic-run cities and then "request help from the federal government if he needs it."
"Cook County in Chicago, that sheriff should be taking over," Mack replied. "I think Baltimore, same thing; they do have a sheriff right there. They need to get in there and start taking care of this. What are the sheriffs waiting for?"
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RWW
04/28/2025
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Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is making the rounds of right-wing podcasts demanding that President Donald Trump pardon a sheriff who was convicted in December on federal charges of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery.
Mack recently appeared on the show hosted by intensely antisemitic far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters as part of his campaign to win a pardon for Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, who was convicted by a jury and sentenced last month to 10 years in prison. Peters introduced Mack as “a longtime friend of the Stew Peters show.”
Mack portrays Jenkins as the victim of political persecution. Here’s how the Justice Department described the evidence against Jenkins:
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Jenkins accepted cash bribes and bribes in the form of campaign contributions…
In return for the bribes, Jenkins appointed each of the bribe payors as auxiliary deputy sheriffs, a sworn law-enforcement position, and issued them official Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office badges and credentials. The bribe payors were not trained or vetted and did not render any legitimate services to the Sheriff’s Office or the citizens of Culpeper County.
Some of the money Jenkins received was reportedly in the form of $15,000 cash in a bag. More details from NBC channel 4 in Washington, D.C.:
Each of the bribe payors was sworn in as an auxiliary deputy and given a badge allowing them enhanced gun rights and, as some testified, the hope they could get out of speeding tickets. Others used the badges in attempts to get a COVID test, drive in highway emergency lanes or get around a TSA line.
Jenkins’ lawyer suggested that the scheme was a “creative” effort by the sheriff to get around Virginia legal limits on gun ownership. Mack, who made a name for himself as a plaintiff in a successful challenge to part of the Clinton-era Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, praised Jenkins’ oppositionto gun regulation:
…this guy, this Sheriff Jenkins, was the first sheriff in the country to respond to Joe Biden and say, there will be no gun confiscation, not on AR-15s or AK-47s—nothing. Nothing will be confiscated in my county by your federal government. Don't allow them to come in here. If they do start to come in here, I will deputize every single person in my county, and they will be required to keep their guns and be armed with high-powered rifles. Don't try it.
On Peters’ show and a recent appearance on Michael Jaco’s podcast, Mack complained that he, former Trump aide Michael Flynn, and MAGA rocker Ted Nugent had all tried to get Trump’s attention to promote a pardon for Jenkins, but that they had run into “blockers” in the White House. Flynn has also raised money for Jenkins' defense. On Jaco's show, Mack compared Jenkins’ badge-selling to the badges Mack offers in return for membership in CSPOA’s posse for a $760 fee. Mack and Jaco also commiserated about federal judges who have ruled against Trump actions and about what Mack called “some real evil RINO Republicans” in Congress.
Before introducing Mack, Peters delivered a rant denouncing immigrants as “parasitic criminals” and “savages.” He slammed the Trump administration for not delivering sufficiently on its promise of mass deportations. “Sheriffs have the power to enforce federal immigration laws in their jurisdiction,” Peters said, “and they also have the power to arrest treasonous government officials who allow this country to be invaded.”
Mack didn’t disagree with anything Peters said, though Mack said he was “really thrilled” that Trump was elected, and that the president has made a “good start” in securing the border in his first 90 days. He said there's "no way" that mass deportation will be successful without sheriffs' participation.
Mack and the CSPOA train law enforcement officers in Mack’s views about the Constitution and his belief that sheriffs are the “only legitimate law enforcement officers in this country,” as he told Peters. Mack partners with far-right figures like neo-Confederate Michael Peroutka and participated in the ReAwaken America tour, which brought together conspiracy theorists, MAGA insiders, and far-right activists. The often-unaccountable power of local sheriffs and the impact of Mack’s “constitutional sheriff” movement are exploredin a recent book, “The Highest Law in the Land: How The Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy,” by journalist Jessica Pishko.
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an 12 24
Trump's advisors have been hoping county sheriffs in border states will assist with the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign. But several sheriffs are already publicly promising to not lift a finger.
According to a Tuesday report in WIRED magazine, Trump's top Trump immigration advisors like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have been having conversations with several far-right sheriffs who have expressed an interest in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remove immigrants from the United States. But that effort is unlikely to pick up traction, both for legal reasons and because other sheriffs have said they already have their hands full and don't want to take on more work.
Currently, ICE's 287(g) program allows for state and local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE in its efforts "to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens." However, this does not include sheriffs themselves rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants. Additionally, no federal funding has been appropriated to any sheriffs' offices that help ICE, meaning just 125 out of 3,081 sheriff's offices in the U.S. have signed up. And Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told WIRED that the Supreme Court has already established that enforcing immigration law is outside the jurisdiction of local police departments and sheriffs' offices.
READ MORE:'Quickly get into problems': These 3 obstacles could slow down Trump's mass deportations
"[T]hat's not our realm of responsibility," Wilmot said. "If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol."
The push for sheriffs to assist the incoming administration has been led by retired sheriff Tom Mack, who is the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Mack told WIRED he's been exchanging voice and text messages with Homan about getting more sheriffs involved with deportations. Homan has previously promised to build "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." But Wilmot said "no one listens to" Mack, that he "hasn't been a sheriff in a long time" and that he "pushes his own agenda."
Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who is a Democrat, told WIRED that he wasn't invited to an event Homan hosted in his state last month, even though Hathaway's jurisdiction includes some of the nation's biggest ports of entry. He added that he would refuse any calls to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, as it would hurt his standing in his county.
"I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway said. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community."
READ MORE: 'Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference
The sheriffs bucking calls to assist with mass deportations even include some of Trump's biggest supporters in the law enforcement community. Livingston County, Michigan Sheriff Mike Murphy — who hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff's office — told the outlet that he isn't interested in using county resources to help with federal immigration law enforcement.
"I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy said. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”
Other border state sheriffs who have come out against calls to help the Trump administration round up migrants include Val Verde County, Texas Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez and Brewster County, Texas Sheriff Ronny Dodson. According to Dodson, the incoming Trump administration giving sheriffs the authority to jail migrants could "break" county law enforcement.
"I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job," Dodson said.
READ MORE: 'Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference
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mma
December 5, 2024, edition of Steel News with Ann Vandersteel, streamed on Rumble
RICHARD MACK (FOUNDER OF CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS AND PEACE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION): And, I have made this proposal on Steve Bannon's show, I've made it on Roger Stone's show, numerous other shows all across the country, and I'll do it again right now on your show. We need the sheriffs involved in that deportation if it's going to be fair and effective.
ANN VANDERSTEEL (HOST): Right.
MACK: First, we don't want to round up people who are Americans, who are American citizens.
VANDERSTEEL: Right.
MACK: And who are here legally. We don't want to round them up. The best way to do that is with the sheriff. No one knows the county better than the sheriff does. He lives there. He's from there, usually, and he's been there for, usually, a decade or more. And he knows people that knows — that can give him the intel where these people are. Most of the sheriffs already know where the gangs are. They already know where the international terrorists are hold up, and let's be real here. Biden —
VANDERSTEEL: So, let me — sorry.
MACK: Well, go ahead.
VANDERSTEEL: No, I'll — let me just interject here. When it comes to, you know, the collaboration between what Tom Homan is planning on doing and, you know, Tom has been talking about this for some time since I know him.
MACK: Yes.
VANDERSTEEL: And he's said, "I can't wait to get back in. Trump's already told me I'm coming back," and, frankly, I've seen Tom lately. He's lost about 30 pounds. He looks fit as a fiddle, and he's in fighting shape right now to go and get this job done. And he has been very clear to me in private conversations that it is going to take a network of law enforcement. So, what I'm hearing you say dovetails right into what Tom has said.
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rww
10/24/2024
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- David Gilbert @ Wired: ‘Take Back the States’: The Far-Right Sheriffs Ready to Disrupt the Election
Constitutional Sheriffs are duly elected lawmen who believe they answer only to God. They’ve spent the last six months preparing to stop a “stolen” election—by any means necessary.
- Ken Bensinger and David A. Fahrenthold @ The New York Times: The Group at the Center of Trump’s Planning for a Second Term Is One You Haven’t Heard of
America First Policy Institute didn’t even exist four years ago. But it is poised to be more influential than Project 2025.
- Nicholas Liu @ Salon: Tucker Carlson shares Trump fantasy, likening Republican to a "dad" who spanks his "bad little girl"
The former Fox News anchor likened the Republican nominee to an angry dad coming home to beat his children.
- Janna Brancolini @ The Daily Beast: Charlie Kirk Raves That Dems Believe ‘Everything God Hates’ at Trump Rally
Conservative activist and Donald Trump surrogate Charlie Kirk added a new notch to his white Christian nationalist belt on Wednesday when he called on pastors to take to the pulpit and preach against Democrats as “everything God hates.”
- Michael Luciano @ Mediaite: Heritage-Funded Group Publishes ‘Target’ List of ‘Subversive’ Bureaucrats
A group funded by the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank published a list of federal officials it referred to as “targets.” Targets for what? The site, titled “DHS Watchlist,” does not specify.
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rww 9 24
- Paul Rosenberg @ Salon: Who created the “constitutional sheriff” myth? Hint: It’s not in the Constitution
Author Jessica Pishko on how two Arizona sheriffs created an entire mythology — and a dangerous movement.
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an 9 24
alternet-Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push
Jordan GreenandRaw StorySeptember 23, 2024
During a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this month — his first since debating Vice President Kamala Harris — former President Donald Trump doubled down on his false claims that Haitians are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Then, he tossed another small Rust Belt community into the national spotlight.
“Likewise, a small 4,000-person town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “Have you ever heard of it? Charleroi. What a beautiful name. But it’s not beautiful now. It’s experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.
“So, Pennsylvania: Remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump added.
The sudden burst of attention by Trump and his allies on the borough of Charleroi in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley is yet more evidence that the campaign is leaning into racial scapegoating as an electoral strategy to win critical swing states, even as critics warn the rhetoric could spill into vigilante violence.
ALSO READ: Let's call Springfield what it is: Republican-made terrorism
Trump and his MAGA allies' focus on Charleroi appears to have begun on Sept. 11, when a shadowy nonprofit linked to a former speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign posted an interview with a pro-Trump member of the Charleroi borough council.
The language in the X post by the nonprofit America 2100 is markedly similar to what Trump would say at his campaign rally the following day.
“It isn’t just Springfield; it’s happening everywhere,” the post reads. “In Charleroi, Pennsylvania — a low-income town of just 4,000 — the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. It’s almost all Haitians.”
The America 2100 post was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. re-posted it only 10 minutes later.
Nate Hochman, a senior adviser to America 2100 and the only person publicly identified with the nonprofit, was fired from the DeSantis campaign in June 2023 after reportedly making a video featuring the Sonnenrad — a symbol also known as the Black Sun that is associated with Nazis — and tweeting it from a pro-DeSantis account.
Previously, Hochman had praised Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has denied the Holocaust and made numerous antisemitic statements. Hochman said on a December 2021 Twitter Space chat that Fuentes had “gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure.” He added: “But the fact that you’ve said super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can accomplish in politics.”
Hochman, a former intern at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind magazine and now a contributor at the American Spectator, announced on X on Monday that he was making a road trip to Charleroi “to report on the Haitian immigration crisis.”
Over the course of the week, Hochman posted video after video on the America 2100 X account, featuring interviews with local white residents who were unhappy about their new Haitian neighbors.
In one interview, a white man identified as “Tom” complains that the Haitians “have no interest in our culture” and that they open their own groceries “at the main drag of town.” The X post identifies Tom as “a lifelong native,” although the video shows Tom saying he moved to Charleroi in 2017.
In a video posted on Thursday, a man identified as “Ernie” laments that Charleroi “used to be a nice, middle-of-nowhere blue-collar town.”
“I think they’ve just destroyed the town, and they’ve bought all these properties,” Ernie says. “Okay, you might be able to buy a house cheap, but what kind of people are you gonna get in?”
“Yeah, what kind of neighbors you have?” Hochman says.
“Well, that’s it,” Ernie says. “And right now I’m surrounded by the immigrants.”
Some of the America 2100 X posts echo Great Replacement, a white supremacist conspiracy theory that, taken to an extreme, falsely claims that white people face genocide because of demographic changes.
“One thing that can’t be overstated is the degree to which mass migration wreaks havoc on the social cohesion of the already-existing community,” reads one post from a Sept. 7 thread about Springfield. “Local landlords, for example, have been making a killing. But they’re replacing their fellow citizens — and locals hate them for it.”
The post includes screengrabs from the “Haitian Community in Springfield, Ohio” Facebook page. One commenter replies to a post by a local realtor offering her services to the immigrant community by writing, “Wouldn’t plan on staying too long.”
Another X post by the America 2100 account refers to immigrants as “invaders,” using verbiage that turned up in the manifesto of 21-year-old white supremacists who massacred 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in August 2019.
Hochman could not be reached for comment for this story.
NOW READ: Notorious conspiracy theorist rolled out by RNC to train election overseers in Michigan
Trump himself has repeatedly used the term, including during his recent campaign rally in Tucson.
“Under Kamala Harris, our country is under a thing called invasion,” he said. “Did you ever hear the word invasion? Just like a military. It’s like a military invasion. We’re being conquered and we’re being occupied by a foreign element.”
Swing state strategy of attacking immigrants
While the racist rhetoric against Haitian immigrants in Springfield focused on false claims that they are stealing and eating people’s pet, the attacks in Charleroi have zeroed in on another object of fear in white grievance politics: jobs.
An X post by the Libs of TikTok account run by Chaya Raichik, one of more than a dozen social-media influencers enlisted by the Trump campaign for a “war room” that amplified his attacks on Harris during the recent debate, shared a video on Tuesday that featured a man ruefully describing an arrangement to transport Haitian immigrants by bus to and from a processed food packaging plant in Charleroi.
“Incredible footage revealing an operation in Charleroi, PA where Haitians are being bussed to and from food factories operated by Fourth Street Foods,” the post reads. “Kamala imported 2,000 Haitians into this town of 4,000 people, and now they’re taking American jobs.”
State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican who represents Charleroi, said in a reply that she had re-posted from the Libs of TikTok account in the past, but the post about her constituents was not true.
“There was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed them,” Bartolotta told Raichik. “He advertised and looked for workers for a long time. Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and legal to work in his facility.”
David Barbe, the CEO of Fourth Street Foods, confirmed to KDKA News of Pittsburgh on Wednesday that his immigrant employees haven’t displaced any native-born workers.
“If I had 300 Americans come in today and they wanted to work, we would make room for them,” Barbe told investigative journalist Andy Sheehan.
Contrasting with the claims by the locals interviewed by Hochman suggesting that the Haitian immigrants are bankrupting Charleroi, Borough Manager Joe Manning told Sheehan that the new arrivals have made a net positive contribution to the area economy.
“They come here, they buy property,” Manning said. “They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So, for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”
Some of Trump’s supporters believe that his false claims about Haitian immigrants, far from alienating voters, will instead give him the edge in critical swing states.
Jeremy Carl, a former deputy assistant secretary of the interior and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, praised Trump for bringing up “the cats” during the debate.
“You know, that’s just going to be a winning issue for us because it really is the linchpin of kind of every other crazy thing the left has done particularly on immigration,” Carl said during a podcast appearance on Monday.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who previously served as mayor of Braddock — a borough only 30 miles away from Charleroi — predicted to Raw Story that Pennsylvania voters will ultimately reject Trump’s electoral strategy of demonizing immigrants.
“Blame the immigrants, whether it’s that my dog’s gone — blame the immigrant,” Fetterman said. “That’s very anti-immigration. And now they’re proud of that. They’re not even trying to veil that. And western Pennsylvania has a really long history of immigration, and sometimes people blaming all of the ills on immigrants too. And I strongly reject that. And western Pennsylvania I think will as well, too.”
‘A total explosion of media’: Enter CSPOA
The Trump campaign did not respond to a question from Raw Story about how the candidate became aware of the Haitian immigrant community in Charleroi.
However, during an interview with the Liberty RoundTable podcast, Borough Councilman Larry Celaschi alluded to the America 100 X post published on the eve of Trump’s rally in Tucson.
“I know I did an interview with another news source out there that happened to go viral, and the next thing you know we’re hearing the same language that they had as their headlines was released from President Trump’s own mouth at his rally,” Celaschi said. “Since that time, it’s just been a total explosion of media here in the borough of Charleroi. It’s just overwhelming. I didn’t know that there were that many media sources out there.”
The two men who interviewed Celaschi, along with Borough Mayor Gregg Doerfler, are themselves representative of the far-right media personalities who have gravitated to the drama that Trump generated surrounding Charleroi.
Sam Bushman, the podcast host, is the CEO of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA, an organization that promotes the controversial idea that sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are not legally bound to uphold state and federal laws that they unilaterally deem to be unconstitutional.
As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bushman has a long history of promoting racist ideas and providing a forum for hardcore white nationalists. In July 2023, he interviewed a member of the white supremacist group Identity Dixie. In a Facebook post, the pseudonymous guest known as “Padraig Martin” advised those who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that the next time they should be “prepared to kill them all.” He urged: “Do not leave a single police officer, congressman, judge or any other functionary.”
The other host who interviewed the Charleroi borough mayor and councilman on Tuesday was Richard Mack, the founder of CSPOA and current president of its advisory board.
Ignoring the fact that the Haitians living and working in Charleroi are there under temporary protected status, Mack suggested that an unspecified group of “supposed leaders” should be investigated for “aiding and abetting illegal immigration.” He added, “It might rise to the level of treason.”
Bushman and Mack prodded Doerfler and Celaschi to tell them about crime committed by Haitians.
Pressed for specific examples, Doerfler said, “The people, they’re just afraid to walk the streets, or whatever. I’ve heard a lot of that.”
Doerfler did not return a phone message left by Raw Story.
Celaschi told Bushman and Mack about a business owner who ran into her establishment and dialed 911 after a Haitian immigrant allegedly pursued her, demanding money he believed she owed him.
“To me, your police chief, if there’s illegals in your community, need to take action on the illegal activity, doesn’t he?” Bushman said. “I mean, I’m not here to try to divide your community, but I’m saying, look, if you got illegal people committing illegal acts, are they in jail, or they just allowed to run around free? Where’s your law enforcement locally?”
Doerfler and Celaschi confirmed that the police do arrest people in Charleroi, including Haitians, who break the law.
“The racist intervention of far-right groups like CSPOA in places like Charleroi makes the entire community significantly less safe and makes it more challenging to deal with real issues facing rural America,” Devin Burgart, who monitors the far right as director of the Seattle-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, told Raw Story. “This type of rhetoric puts the Haitian community and Black residents of Charleroi in grave danger, as the bomb threats and violent racist rhetoric leveled at Springfield proved.”
Echoing Trump’s false charge in Tucson last week that “not only is Comrade Kamala allowing illegal immigrants to stampede across our border, but she’s flying them here from other countries,” Bushman asked the two borough leaders if they believe the federal government is complicit in a crime.
“Did the federal government and your state government in some way literally aid and abet illegal activity in America?” Bushman asked.
“Yes, they did aid and abet,” Celaschi responded. “Absolutely. I will stand by your statement 1,000 percent.”
Bushman was exultant.
“And they’re literally saying the federal government has partnered in promoting illegal activity, all the way down to their city,” he said, “to the point of literal virtual mayhem where citizens are in fear in their community.”
---
===
no lnx many pix 4 24 ref rww
Inside the bizarre Las Vegas conference where Trump-loving sheriffs, felons and conspiracy theorists vowed to form militias to patrol polling places and seize voting machines to stop Biden
A recent CSPOA conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs
The event aimed to address extremism allegations within the group and outline plans for upcoming elections, such as investigating alleged voter fraud
Critics raised concerns about potential election interference and misinformation
By JAMES GORDON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 19:46 EDT, 21 April 2024 | UPDATED: 21:00 EDT, 21 April 2024
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A right-wing sheriffs' group that challenges federal law held a bizarre rally in Las Vegas last week featuring felons and conspiracy theorists as the country's presidential election is just months away.
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, held its annual conference in Las Vegas last week at the Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel conference center.
The group, known as CSPOA, teaches that elected sheriffs must 'protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government' by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or 'unjust.'
The right-wing 'constitutional sheriffs,' claim legal power in their jurisdictions that exceeds U.S. federal government and state authorities.
In particular, this time around, the organization is urging its members to seize voting machines while investigating claims of 'rampant voter fraud' that during the 2020 election proved to be baseless.
Last week's Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs. It's founder Richard Mack is seen speaking on the stand
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Last week's Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference in Las Vegas drew attention for its controversial mix of attendees, including felons, disgraced politicians and sheriffs. It's founder Richard Mack is seen speaking on the stand
Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and retired three-star general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump, was a speaker at the conference
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Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and retired three-star general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI but was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump, was a speaker at the conference
Trump's friend and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell also spoke as he pushed his election denial theories
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Trump's friend and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell also spoke as he pushed his election denial theories
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This time around, the group want to form a group that will patrol polling places and have the power to seize voting machines while investigating Democrats and other countries that are sending immigrants to the the U.S. in order to vote illegally, they claim and reported by NBC News.
In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run - and also have virtually unchecked power in their counties.
Voting-rights advocates and election experts said any attempts by law enforcement to interfere in elections would be alarming and an extension of the threat posed by the continued circulation of Trump's claims about the 2020 election.
'The safest way to actually achieve that is to have local law enforcement understand that they have no obligation to enforce such laws,' Mack said during a recent interview. 'They're not laws at all anyway. If they're unjust laws, they are laws of tyranny.'
Mike Gannuscio (left) is running to be a sheriff in Mohave County, Nevada
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Mike Gannuscio (left) is running to be a sheriff in Mohave County, Nevada
In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run. Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem
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In 2022, the group continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump are have recently been pushing a dubious theory that county sheriffs can access voting machines and intervene in how elections are run. Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem
'The sheriff is supposed to be protecting the public from evil,' Dar Leaf, the chief law enforcement officer for Barry County, Michigan, said during last year's conference. 'When your government is evil or out of line, that's what the sheriff is there for, protecting them from that.'
The sheriffs' group has railed against gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as the alleged election fraud.
It has also quietly spread its ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training.
The public-facing image of the sheriffs group, prominently features the American flag and the experiences of black civil rights icons who pushed back against unjust laws.
But details of its operations are closely held, and its finances are shielded from public scrutiny.
It was briefly registered as a nonprofit in Arizona, but internal records indicate it is now a private company.
The group does not release its list of dues-paying members, nor does it publicize information about where or how it conducts trainings.
The sympathies of the group's leaders for right-wing, white-nationalist extremist causes, however, are well documented.
The CSPOA is also unequivocal about gun rights and supports the right of criminals and the mentally ill to carry firearms, opposing gun registration or background checks.
About 100 people attended the day-long conference in Las Vegas last Wednesday
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About 100 people attended the day-long conference in Las Vegas last Wednesday
Attendees of the conference milled around and mingled with one another in the lobby
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Attendees of the conference milled around and mingled with one another in the lobby
Various speakers from the 'law enforcement' community were on the stand and able to speak
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Various speakers from the 'law enforcement' community were on the stand and able to speak
Mack was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Although he said he split with the group several years ago when it became a militia, Mack still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies.
Leaf was investigated, but not charged, in connection with the Michigan attorney general's investigation into the alleged illegal seizure and breach of vote-counting machines in 2020.
He also appeared at an election-denier rally with two men later charged in the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Over the last six years, the group has hosted trainings, rallies, speeches and meetings in at least 30 states for law enforcement officers, political figures, private organizations and members of the public.
The group has held formal trainings on its 'constitutional' curriculum for law enforcement officers in at least 13 of those states. In six states, the training was approved for officers´ continuing education credits.
The group also has supporters who sit on three state boards in charge of law enforcement training standards.
Legal experts warn that such training - especially when it's approved for state credit - can undermine the democratic processes enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and is part of what Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University, called a 'broader insurrectionist ideology' that has gripped the nation since the 2020 presidential election.
'They have no authority, not under their state constitutions or implementing statutes to decide what's constitutional and what's not constitutional. That's what courts have the authority to do, not sheriffs,' McCord said.
'There's another sort of evil lurking there,' McCord added, 'because CSPOA is now essentially part of a broader movement in the United States to think it's OK to use political violence if we disagree with some sort of government policy.'
Mach, who founded was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, pictured above
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Mach, who founded was an early board member of the Oath Keepers, the group involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, pictured above
Mack, seen here, said he split with the Oath Keepers group several years ago when it became a militia, although he still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies
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Mack, seen here, said he split with the Oath Keepers group several years ago when it became a militia, although he still speaks at Oath Keeper-affiliated rallies
At least one state, Texas, canceled credit for the sheriffs´ training after determining the course content - which it said included a reference to 'this is a war' - was more political than educational. But other states, such as Tennessee, have approved the training, in part because it was hosted by a local law enforcement agency.
Unlike other law enforcement continuing education, such as firearms training, the sheriffs' curriculum is largely focused on the alleged constitutional underpinnings of sheriffs' absolute authority to both interpret and refuse to enforce certain laws.
One brochure advertising the group's seminars states: 'The County Sheriff is the one who can say to the feds, `Beyond these bounds you shall not pass.´'
Nationwide, there are some 3,000 sheriffs, whose salaries are funded by taxpayers. Mack has claimed about 10 per cent of those are members of CSPOA together with a further 10,000 regular citizens. About 100 people attended the Vegas conference.
They sheriffs serve as the chief law enforcement officers in their counties and are the only elected peace officers in the country.
They appoint deputy sheriffs and jailers and service the courts in their jurisdictions.
Especially in rural areas, sheriffs hold immense sway over what happens in their county.
Amy Cooter, research director at the Middlebury Institute Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, said many sheriffs join the group from 'a misinformed but well-meaning perspective.' But, she added, it also allows some sheriffs to 'potentially engage in extremism by not enforcing legal, lawful, legitimate orders.'
Some states have pushed back against the group's training efforts, and not all sheriffs subscribe to the group´s ideology.
Many at the National Sheriffs' Association conference distanced themselves from the constitutional sheriffs or claimed not to know what they were about.
'When I took an oath 17 years ago as sheriff, I took the oath to uphold the Constitution, not overstep it,' said Troy Wellman, sheriff of Moody County, South Dakota, and a vice president of the National Sheriffs' Association.
And there has been public pushback in some counties led by 'constitutional sheriffs.' In Klickitat County, Washington, residents alleged Sheriff Bob Songer, a board member of the sheriffs group, engaged in fearmongering and intimidation.
He was the target of a formal complaint in 2022 that the state's law enforcement standards agency ultimately dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.
Michael Peroutka, another sheriffs group board member and former candidate for Maryland's attorney general, was once affiliated with the League of the South, which supports 'a free and independent Southern republic.'
At a 2019 sheriffs´ training event, he said, 'There is a creator God. Our rights come from him. The purpose of civil government is to secure and defend God-given rights.'
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, described the sheriffs group as 'insidious' and said it had become 'mainstream standard-bearers for entrance into more violent forms of extremism.'
'Just because it's not as overt in their subversion of the democratic system, just because it's quieter about how it does it and what it's calling for, doesn't make the ideas any less dangerous,' said Lewis.
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rww 4 23
mark Lamb, the sheriff of Arizona’s Pinal County and a right-wing activist, has officially launched his campaign for U.S. Senate.
Right Wing Watch reported in February that Lamb told activists at a pro-gun rally that he was seriously considering a run for the Arizona Senate seat that will be on the ballot in 2024. He filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission Monday, the Washington Post reported. Among Lamb’s potential Republican primary opponents for the seat now held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are last year’s failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and failed Senate candidate Blake Masters.
“We need leaders in this country that aren’t too politically correct to protect us,” Lamb says in a campaign video released Tuesday in which he vows to “stand up to the woke left.” The video focuses on border security, with Lamb saying, “It’s time to declare the drug cartels terrorist organizations and use military force to wipe them out just like we did to ISIS.”
Lamb built a fan base as a reality TV personality and has taken hard-right positions on immigration, COVID-19 vaccines, and public health measures, while promoting bogus stolen election claims and QAnon conspiracy theories. At a 2021 anti-vaccine rally, he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.”
Lamb has also trafficked in far-right smears against drag performers, saying on a far-right streaming show in January that drag shows are “designed to break the moral compass that exists in each and every one of us” to make it easier “for them to really push that evil and corrupt agenda.” Media Matters noted this week that Lamb appeared on the viciously antisemitic TruNews network in 2021.
A month after supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Lamb started a “law and order” group called Protect America Now, whose website claims, “We support Sheriffs and law enforcement members that believe in God, Family and Freedom.” The group asks for a monthly donation of $17.76 to “help us win this battle for the soul of America.”
That figure, of course, is not random. The date of the American colonists’ Declaration of Independence became a chant and veiled threat of “revolution” used by so-called “Stop the Steal” activists trying to keep Trump in power after his defeat. Lamb had kind words for the angry Trump supporters who descended on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away,” Lamb said, calling the insurrectionists “very loving, Christian people” who “just happen to support President Trump a lot.”
In 2022, Lamb and his group entered into a partnership with True the Vote, a so-called “election integrity” group that promotes false claims about election fraud and whose bogus claims provided the fuel for propagandist Dinesh D’Souza’s widely debunked “2000 Mules” film. “We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb said at a Trump rally last July, “We will not let happen what happened in 2020.” Lamb has apparently toned down his stolen election rhetoric this year, telling a local Fox affiliate last month, “I’ve never been provided any evidence of significant material fraud.”
Lamb is also an admirer of so-called “constitutional sheriff” Richard Mack and his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches sheriffs and other local law enforcement officials a far-right interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.
Last year, Lamb appeared in a TV ad for Arizona Senate candidate Jim Lamon in which Lamon was portrayed as a lawman in an “old West”-style shootout with Sen. Mark Kelly, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and President Joe Biden. Lamon was defeated in the Republican primary.
Lamb and his sheriff department were highlighted in a 2021 American Civil Liberties Union report, which called on the U.S. Justice Department to end its 287(g) agreements with a number of sheriff departments, including Pinal County. These agreements allow the departments like Lamb’s to jail noncitizens with pending criminal charges and to serve and execute warrants on noncitizens held in jail. The report cited a history of racial profiling and other civil rights violationsat the department, including some during Lamb’s tenure.
Tags: Mark Lamb Election 2022 Election 2024 Immigration Protect America Now True the Vote
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https://www.alternet.org/texas-sheriff/
see bak for anno
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an 1 23
Last summer, the sheriff of Coryell County in Central Texas took to an elevated platform in a small Las Vegas ballroom and made an unusual announcement: He was a “born-again sheriff,” he said, having “realized that I wasn’t doing my job 100%.”
Sheriff Scott Williams runs a 92-bed jail and provides security for the courthouse in Gatesville. He oversees around two dozen employees. The county is known for its six state prison facilities, and Williams has struggled to keep his overcrowded jail in compliance with state standards. He cannot keep his department adequately staffed because his deputies are “tired of working like Hebrew slaves for very little money,” Williams told a local news source.
In Vegas, he told the audience that he wanted to protect America from “globalists that are coming to destroy our nation,” saying “the moment we start acting like we are Americans, we are going to take our country back.”
First elected in 2016, Williams is part of the growing “constitutional sheriff” movement, which claims that sheriffs have the power to override federal and state authority on matters from border enforcement to gun control to election security.
Legal scholars say the movement has no grounding in law, yet it is gaining steam: A study last year by scholars at Texas Christian University and Tulane University on behalf of The Marshall Project found that as many as 1 in 10 of America’s 3,000-plus sheriffs believe they have the authority to stand between their constituents and higher government entities, a tactic they call “interposition.”
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the key organization fueling the movement, led around a dozen training sessions in Texas in 2020 and 2021. A February 2021 session in The Woodlands drew at least 27 sheriffs or deputies. At an October 2021 session in Mesquite, the keynote speaker was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and attendees included state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, and former state Sen. Don Huffines, who unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary for governor. Other attendees have included justices of the peace, police captains and members of the Texas Farm Bureau.
The seminars count for six to eight hours of continuing training credit required by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which certifies peace officers. Last summer, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks far-right organizations, raised concerns that the agency was effectively blessing the training.
In response to that complaint plus an email from the Anti-Defamation League, TCOLE sent a field agent to attend a July 2021 training session in Houston County, which he recorded. In a one-paragraph report, the agent wrote that “the class was a study of the law and making sure law enforcement, particularly Sheriffs, were following their oath, standing up for, and protecting the individual rights of every citizen they swore to protect … some officers [said] that they had not covered this material as in depth before and thought it was a good class.”
Another agent attended a session in Burnet County in July 2021 and noted, “I heard no negative or derogatory comment made, or provided, about any segment of society.”
TCOLE’s director of government relations, Gretchen Grigsby, said in a phone interview for this story that the trainings remain under investigation by her department.
Richard Mack, a former sheriff in southeastern Arizona, founded the CSPOA and has become well known for opposing COVID-related business closures and health measures, holding absolutist views on the Second Amendment and arguing that the federal government is an unwanted intrusion into people’s lives. Most recently, the association and Mack have taken to fueling rumors about widespread voter fraud and encouraging sheriffs, in particular, to investigate complaints of voter fraud, which scholars say falls outside their authority.
Mack is a former board member of the Oath Keepers, two of whose leaders were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County in Arizona and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, speaks during a news conference in Las Vegas on July 12, 2022.]
At the event in Las Vegas, Williams acknowledged the controversies around Mack. He explained that he was initially reluctant to attend a training session sponsored by the CSPOA, then looked up Mack on the internet at the suggestion of a community member.
“According to the internet, Sheriff Mack is the antichrist, so don’t believe none of that crap,” he said with a chuckle, adding that Mack had converted him to the movement. Mack explained the conversion was “not to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but to the Constitution. Some people think they are one and the same, and I’m one of them."
Violent roots
The constitutional sheriff movement has its roots in the Posse Comitatus (“power of the county”) movement of the 1970s and ’80s.
Posse Comitatus founder William Potter Gale was a self-ordained minister who called on sheriffs to supersede federal agencies and serve as quasi-vigilantes, primarily to resist school desegregation.
His ideas went on to influence sovereign citizens and militia movements. Many Posse Comitatus adherents were violent; in one incident, an acolyte of Gale’s instigated a shootout that left two U.S. Marshals dead. Later, the same man was killed in another shootout, in addition to a local sheriff. Gale himself was convicted of mailing death threats to a judge and IRS agents.
Mack, who leads the modern-day sheriffs’ movement, counts as an inspiration W. Cleon Skousen, a member of the John Birch Society who proposed that the Constitution was divinely inspired and under attack from communists and liberals.
After attending a seminar by Skousen, Mack has said in various speeches and books, he was inspired to run for sheriff in his home county of Graham County, Arizona. He won in 1988 and was reelected in 1992. During his second term, Mack was one of a handful of sheriffs recruited by the National Rifle Association to challenge the gun-sale restrictions of the Brady Bill in court. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal government could not require state and local governments to conduct background checks, he became a far-right hero.
After losing his bid for a third term, Mack began going around the country talking to far-right groups and moved to Fredericksburg, Texas, around 2011 to start the CSPOA. He described a far-right group geared toward recruiting law enforcement officers, although anyone is allowed to join.
A group called the Patriots of Gillespie County was instrumental in persuading Mack to move, advertising on its website that he would “bring government back to its proper role in these United States.” (In an email, Mack said he lived in Texas for 20 months “under contract” with the group. He did not agree to a phone interview.)
In 2012, he ran as an far-right, libertarian Republican primary candidate for Congress from Texas’ 21st Congressional District, which includes parts of Travis and Bexar counties. (He lost, receiving only 15% of the vote.)
Mack stepped down as the formal head of the CSPOA in November, but a CSPOA announcement in November 2022 has said he will retain a leadership role.
Mack asserts that elected sheriffs are accountable only to their voters, not judges or legislators, even when other branches of government make or interpet the law. In effect, sheriffs can nullify a law by refusing to enforce it. “The federal government, the White House, or Congress do not hire us, they cannot fire us, and they cannot tell us what to do,” he wrote in his 2009 book “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope.”
Mainstream legal scholars say the theory is quackery. “Mack has history wrong, and dangerously so,” says Robert Tsai, a Boston University law professor. James Madison explicitly repudiated nullification as a doctrine, Tsai said, noting that politicians used the theory to justify the expansion of slavery in the 1850s and to resist desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.
The COVID-19 pandemic gave Mack and his movement a burst of new attention, as did the unrest in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black civilian, by a Minneapolis police officer. He argued in August 2020 that sheriffs could call upon posses to deal with protesters.
According to Mack, 27 Texas sheriffs or deputies attended a CSPOA event in February 2021 in The Woodlands. The speakers included:
Rev. Mark Collins, a former pastor in Sutherland Springs, where a gunman killed 26 churchgoers in 2017. Collins dressed as George Washington for the training.
KrisAnne Hall, an ex-prosecutor who describes herself as a constitutional lawyer and who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “travels the country preaching that U.S. citizens do not need to comply with the government.”
Michael Peroutka, previously the Maryland leader for the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated as a white supremacist organization. Its new project is the Institute of the Constitution, which promotes a form of Christian nationalism.
Gary Heavin, a former women’s fitness entrepreneur from Waco who has donated to the Oath Keepers.
Pamela Elliott, a controversial former Texas sheriff who is featured on the cover of Mack’s book “Are You a David?”
Speaking early in the conference, Sheriff Randy Hargrove of Houston County, in East Texas, said that Mack had endorsed both his runs for sheriff and spoke about his struggles enforcing pandemic-related business closures and mask mandates. “I took a step back and went back to what I had been taught by Sheriff Mack … look to the Constitution first,” he said. He explained it was a learning process for him: “Thank God that we got someone like Sheriff Mack who is out there helping us with that.”
Then Mack took to the stage. “We have never and we will never advocate violence of any kind,” he said, mentioning Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “The backdrop of this entire conference is, what is government’s role?”
“We have sheriffs who will interpose. Stand in the way. And make sure we are not victimizing our citizens all in the name of ‘it’s for your own good,’” he said.
Later, Hargrove wrote, “What this CSPOA training is, in reality, is a good old-fashioned Constitutional Revival!”
According to documents obtained through public records requests from Williams’ office, the CSPOA had a list of 50 Texas sheriffs who attended its trainings and at least 50 more it sought to recruit. Some sheriffs sent multiple employees. Williams went to one training with 12 other sworn officers from his office, which cost the office and taxpayers just under $700.
Along with sheriffs, several elected officials and county judges have attended, according to a CSPOA 2021 year-end report.
A bare-bones syllabus appears to be the only documentation submitted to TCOLE to qualify the CSPOA conferences as training, alongside a letter in which Mack claimed that the syllabus and all his information was proprietary. There are no assessments or other tests at the end of the training sessions, nor is there a textbook or manual.
After each event, sheriffs were given a “Statement of Constitutional Sheriff” to “use as a guide in all law enforcement endeavors.”
In July 2021, as part of the so-called “Texas Tour,” Mack held a training session in Burnet County, in the Hill Country, that offered six hours of TCOLE continuing education credit. Burnet County Sheriff Calvin Boyd provided an introduction, explaining that what people want from a “constitutional sheriff” is someone who “will protect you from a government that attempts to overreach.”
“And this thing’s grown,” he continued. “One of the things we need to change is that this is not radical. It’s not radical to follow the rules. It’s not radical to follow the Constitution. The other side is pretty good at turning that around.”
According to a recording provided by TCOLE, the law-enforcement-only portion of the training that counts as continuing education credit does not include legal analysis or legislative history. Mack says nullification doctrine “has nothing to do with racism,” and merely leaves it to states “to judge the constitutionality of laws and decrees.”
Interposition, he has told attendees, is like playing defense in basketball. “The bureaucrat is here trying to get to the innocent citizens and your job is to stay in the way. You make it messy for them. You make it difficult for them.”
Other sections of Mack’s training are plainly in opposition to the federal government. He told sheriffs and deputies that the IRS “is violating the constitution” when it conducts audits. “If your legislature can legislate anything in your life, they own you,” he said, saying the government makes people “slaves” through laws and excessive government spending.
Not all sheriffs who attend CSPOA training fully buy into the dogma. Sheriff Brad Norman of Ellis County, south of Dallas, said he attended a training but did not remember very much about it. He said he identifies as a “constitutional sheriff” but isn’t “part of any card-carrying organization or anything like that.”
Sheriff Trace Hendricks of Bosque County, in Central Texas, said he’s gone to three CSPOA trainings over the past two years. He was reluctant to speak about them, he said, because the media was “trying to make sheriffs look like fools.”
Hendricks said he didn’t “understand the hype” and certainly doesn’t think a sheriff can overrule federal law enforcement. While Hendricks said he identified as a “constitutional sheriff,” he added that Mack has “a couple of points that I disagree with. I didn’t go and join any cult.”
Sheriffs on the border
Experts in extremism argue that the CSPOA training events introduce fringe ideas into political discourse that gradually push the Republican Party further to the right.
“Law enforcement officers and other attendees who took part in trainings or events hosted by constitutional sheriffs have used what they see as their newfound knowledge to speak out or lobby for new policies that are often aligned with a far-right agenda, one that has been developed and promoted by constitutional sheriff’s organizations, conspiracy theorists and an anti-immigrant hate group,” said Rachel Goldwasser of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where Abbott has poured around $2 billion into Operation Lone Star, benefiting sheriffs who can militarize their departments in the name of “border security.” (Mack said in an email that the “disaster at the border” was a reason Texas sheriffs were interested in his trainings.)
[The Kinney County Courthouse in Brackettville on May 9, 2022. The county’s sheriff — on a CSPOA member list — and the county attorney planned to patrol the border by hiring private citizens as an official posse, using state funds. The plans were later dropped after some objections.
Some far-right sheriffs willingly partnered — informally at least — with border militias. In Kinney County, for example, the sheriff — who is on a CSPOA member list — and the county attorney wanted to use state funding to hire private citizens, many of whom were members of a local militia called Patriots for America, to conduct patrols of the border: an official posse. Community members and civil rights groups like the ACLU objected, so the plans were dropped. But the sheriff continued to communicate with these militia groups.
The Operation Lone Star task force is also primarily composed of sheriffs who have attended at least one of Mack’s trainings. Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque of Zapata County has repeatedly praised Operation Lone Star, and his county has received substantial funding from the state.
“Good always prevails against evil,” he said at the July 2022 Las Vegas conference. He claimed Operation Lone Star was curbing “Biden’s open-border policies.”
“We are holding the front line together,” he said. “We need to join the fight and protect the front line.”
Four Texas sheriffs in leadership positions with the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, which represents sheriffs all over the state, are listed as having attended at least one CSPOA training: Greg Capers of San Jacinto County, Del Bosque of Zapata County, Rand Henderson of Montgomery County and Mark Reynolds of Comal County, according to a list from the CSPOA. None returned calls for comment.
Zapata County Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem at an event held by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 12, 2022]
Part of the reason CSPOA trainings are popular in rural Texas might be linked to the role of the sheriff in Texas life. Texas has 254 counties, and many are lightly populated. Most of the sheriffs who participated in CSPOA trainings run departments with fewer than 50 employees. The Deason Center report on rural Texas sheriffs, the result of a focus group conducted by the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU's Dedman School of Law, points out that sheriffs, unlike other law enforcement offices, are elected and maintain connections with their voters in a hands-on, personal way.
Many sheriffs cited community as a reason for joining the CSPOA. Sheriff Cutter Clinton — who joined the CSPOA before he became sheriff of Panola County — shared his experience after Mack at one Texas conference. “We’re blessed that we haven’t been troubled with a lot of the troubles that have plagued the country. … The year 2020, though, we saw things like that. Things we haven’t seen … the different executive orders, the mandates. I began to question a lot of things I believed in for a long time.” He said a friend referred him to the CSPOA.
“You got a lot of reading material,” he said, explaining that such reading helped him make sense of the role of sheriff. He praised the trainings as a chance to be “among my people.”
Williams, the sheriff of Coryell County, has said that after the CSPOA training his “relationship with the community blossomed.” All of his deputies, he says, now carry one of Skousen’s pocket constitutions.
Chasing voting fraud
In recent months, CSPOA-affiliated sheriffs have aligned with election-denier groups to form coalitions that appear ready to promote “the big lie” and pounce on any chance to highlight potential fraud in their communities. At a July event in Las Vegas, at least three Texas sheriffs appeared onstage with Mack to promote a new partnership with True the Vote, a Houston-based organization that peddles election conspiracies. (Mack claimed more Texas sheriffs were in attendance, but that could not be confirmed.)
These sheriffs have also been influential in the far-right push for more election policing, including concerns that people are voting illegally, worries about the accuracy of voting machines and the desire to appear willing and ready to investigate and arrest individuals, even members of their own county government. In rural Michigan, for example, Sheriff Dar Leaf, who works closely with Mack to steer CSPOA policies, has spent nearly two years investigating what he alleges are local election fraud claims. Despite limited resources, he has a full-time detective focused only on election investigations and has targeted local election officials, making them the target of threats of violence from radicalized community members.
Coryell County Sheriff Scott Williams (second from left) and True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht (third from right) onstage during a Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association event in Las Vegas on July 12, 2022.]
While it’s not clear that all of the Texas sheriffs who attended CSPOA trainings are election-deniers, some expressed those views in interviews. Hendricks, the Bosque County sheriff who did not agree with Mack entirely, said he believes there was election fraud: “I don’t have evidence one way or the other. I follow the news pretty closely, and I’m not comfortable with the way the outcome was.” In an interview after the press conference in Las Vegas, Williams confirmed: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” when asked about election fraud.
In November of last year, Mack announced that he would be stepping back from the day-to-day operations of the CSPOA. He said he plans to remain active but has taken a formal position with America’s Frontline Doctors, an anti-vaccination group whose founder, Simone Gold, was sentenced to 60 days of incarceration for her role in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. Sam Bushman, a long-time collaborator with Mack, is now the CEO of CSPOA. Bushman is best known for his daily far-right podcast “Liberty Roundtable,” which has hosted guests like Eric Trump, son of the former president; he said in November 2022, “I don’t believe that (convicted Oath Keepers founder) Stewart Rhodes was guilty.”
Shortly after Mack’s announcement, Williams appeared as a guest on “Liberty Roundtable” with Mack, who discussed the change in command at the CSPOA. Mack said that he hopes other sheriffs will get more involved with CSPOA events and trainings.
“We are just growing so quickly, and we need sitting sheriffs like Sheriff Williams to help shoulder that load,” Mack said. Williams is a member of the new CSPOA Advisory Board, alongside Leaf and other well-known far-right sheriffs.
Kirk Launius, a one-time candidate for Dallas County sheriff, is the Texas State Director for the CSPOA. He recently said that the CSPOA plans to expand its presence in Texas, using local connections and county groups like the True Texas Project as “leverage” and a way to “grease the skids.” In another recent podcast, Bushman cited the success of TCOLE certification in Texas as inspiration to expand to other states like Nevada and Utah.
Williams agreed and added, “What the CSPOA has done is taken like-minded, liberty-, God-loving sheriffs and brought us together.”
Jessica Pishko is a New America fellow working on a forthcoming book about sheriffs, to be published by Dutton.
Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center, Texas Christian University and Texas Farm Bureau have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/13/constitutional-sheriffs-texas/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
badish code
https://newrepublic.com/article/168567/constitutional-sheriffs-midterms-arizona
the “Constitutional Sheriffs” Movement Is Planning to Disrupt Election Day
:{:{A group of law enforcement officers who think their authority supersedes the federal government’s are running for elections across the country—and monitoring voters at the polls Given the numerous election deniers running right now—for the U.S. House and Senate, for governor and for secretary of state—the 2022 midterm elections’ consequences for the state of democracy are hard to overstate. But beyond the likes of Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano, who are garnering loads of national attention, there are hundreds of local officials whose races will shape the fate of future elections: county sheriffs. Just as a smaller-scale series of local acts of intimidation and violence led us to the violent attempt to overthrow the election on January 6, 2021, there’s a growing nationwide movement of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” who are preparing for their own slow-motion insurrection.}:
Adherents believe that county sheriffs are empowered to enforce the law in accordance with their personal interpretation of the Constitution, that their law enforcement authority supersedes that of states and the federal government. There is “no valid basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution” for this, as Georgetown University Law Center and the States United Democracy Center have outlined in depth. However, fueled by this political ideology, one rooted in white supremacism, these “constitutional sheriffs” and their supporters in far-right and paramilitary groups are gearing up for the first national election after the insurrection. https://revealnews.org/article/big-lie-sheriffs-target-us-elections
investigation by Jessica Pishko, published at Reveal, exposes the alliances and ties between far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and a national network of sheriffs who have embraced election denial and have “appointed themselves election police.” Election deniers have also encouraged constitutional sheriffs to run in 2022. You can hear constitutional sheriff rhetoric in a number of incumbent candidates in states such as Washington, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. Though constitutional sheriffs’ groups had been on the wane in recent years, Pishko reports, the pandemic and the “Stop the Steal” movement has given them new life, infusing them with new members and granting them a bigger platform with anti-vaxxers and election deniers.
more than half of Arizona’s current sheriffs, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, “are at least partially aligned” with the constitutional sheriff movement. Some have also joined the election denial effort, such as Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, who spoke to the Yavapai County Preparedness Team in Arizona, an organization that has some association with the Oath Keepers, as it was planning surveillance of ballot drop boxes in Arizona—“Operation Drop Box.” As the head of the Preparedness Team said at its meeting ahead of the midterms, “Everybody is worried about civil war.” Richard Mack, a former board member of the Oath Keepers and founder of the influential Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, has also visited Arizona to speak to the group. Democrats are “getting away with murder,” he told a gathering of the Preparedness Team, and “all we are asking for is that every county sheriff look at what happened in his county and make sure that we don’t fall prey.”
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Elsewhere in Arizona, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is working with True the Vote, who were behind the debunked election-denying 2000 Mules film and who have collaborated with QAnon influencers. Lamb is “promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement,” as Media Matters reported. In addition to supporting “Stop the Steal” and blaming the January 6 insurrection on Hillary Clinton, among others, Lamb led a “posse” in response to Black Lives Matter protests, recruiting civilians, though his county saw no protests.
the campaign Lamb has joined, called Protect America Now, encourages sheriffs to “be ready to enforce the law and protect our constituents from any form of illegal activity,” according to documents Pishko obtained. It also offers the sheriffs “much needed grant resources to help you secure the voting procedures in your county with equipment, personnel, and increased citizen communication.” Among its recommendations are increased “patrol” at ballot drop boxes and reporting any suspicious activity to a national hotline run by True the Vote. “When other areas of government breakdown,” their letter to sheriffs says, “our local Sheriffs step in to make sure the law is enforced.”
Through such outreach, invoking election “security,” other sheriffs have enlisted in their efforts, pledging to carry out “investigations” into alleged election fraud across the United States. In Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden failed to identify any election fraud. His investigation, The Kansas City Star reported, “hasn’t led to any charges or arrests but has helped build his profile among election deniers.” As he told supporters at an August meeting, “We’ve got to find somebody” who can say definitively that fraud is happening. At the same meeting, Hayden also told supporters, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing, ‘You’re hurting our democracy. You’re hurting our democracy.’ We don’t have a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic,” a far-right trope.
Those behind “Operation Drop Box,” the ballot box surveillance effort, stood down after they faced legal action for their desire to monitor voting locations while carrying guns. But that was just one part of the larger effort pushed by True the Vote and others, who have been coordinating to monitor ballot boxes on a much larger scale, as Pishko uncovered. As of October 27, Jen Fifield at Votebeat reported, more than 4,500 people signed up with True the Vote to monitor ballot boxes nationwide. “Their list of volunteers is growing by dozens a day,” Fifield noted, “especially since the news of voter intimidation at the sites began to spread.” That is, as the media has tracked these groups, as voters have lodged complaints, their numbers are growing.
Melissa Gira Grant@melissagira
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.
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https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/elections-law-enforcement-conspiracy-theories-invs/index.html
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- christopher Mathias @ HuffPost: Doug Mastriano’s Prophets In Pennsylvania.
- Jessica Pishko @ Slate: Angry Right-Wing Moms Are Trying to Have Librarians Arrested by “Constitutional Sheriffs”.
- Bob Ortega, Isabelle Chapman and Curt Devine @ CNN: Law enforcement ratchets up presence in voting process as some sheriffs push election conspiracy theories.
- Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker @ The Washington Post: How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy.
- Yonat Shimron @ Religion News Service: The American Renewal Project wants to mobilize pastors for the Republican Party.
Tags: David Lane Doug Mastriano Round-Up American Renewal Project Turning Point USA
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Angry Right-Wing Moms Are Trying to Have Librarians Arrested by “Constitutional Sheriffs”
BY JESSICA PISHKO
NOV 04, 2022
Pippin wearing a "Moms for Liberty" shirt and placing her hands over stacks of books.
Jennifer Pippin, president of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty, helped launch a criminal investigation of her local school library, seeking to criminalize Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, among other books. Giorgio Viera/Getty Images
In March, special counsel to the sheriff of Hamilton County, Tennessee, Coty Wamp, was campaigning for district attorney when she met with a group of parents calling themselves Moms for Liberty. Wamp said afterwards that she had facilitated a meeting between the “parents’ rights” group and the sheriff’s office because she thought law enforcement could help the group in its goal of banning books. “I think that there’s going to come a time with some of these books where it crosses a criminal line,” Wamp said. “It’s called contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Wamp won that promotion to district attorney and was one of the earliest law enforcement figures to begin to establish a frightening new alliance between far-right sheriff’s offices and the radical right-wing parent’s group seeking to upend America’s educational system.
After Wamp’s meeting, she did not shy away from the possibility of filing charges for “criminal” books, although she later told Jezebel that she did not intend to suggest she was going to go about arresting librarians. Whatever her actual intentions, the alliance Wamp sought to foster is a dangerous one and one that is spreading.
Across the country, members of Mothers for Liberty, a far-right group focused on banning library books and whitewashing school curricula, have appealed to sheriffs as allies in these goals. Much like the partnerships between sheriffs and militia members, or sheriffs and election deniers, this alliance is another example of how sheriffs have become the arm of the law willing to enforce the radical agenda of the far-right. It also shows how determined groups like M4L are to be seen as having legal legitimacy—and how willing sheriffs are to provide it.
I have spent the past few years reporting on far-right sheriffs and their allies and confidants. One notable change since 2020 has been the increasing number of women who identify with the politics of far-right groups like the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. While most people associate groups like CSPOA with hyper-masculine-fueled violence, women are often key facilitators between these groups and voters.
Much of this alliance emerged during the pandemic, when far-right parent groups opposed masking in schools. On forums like Facebook, these parents, mostly mothers, passed around information about the so-called constitutional sheriff movement, citing its members as potential allies. This blossomed into an anti-public-school movement focused on altering classroom curricula to eliminate material about racism, sex, or LGBTQ people; policing classrooms and libraries; eliminating requirements for all forms of vaccines as well as masking for COVID; and pushing parents to embrace home-schooling as an ideal way to escape federal and state government indoctrination.
While many anti-mask and election conspiracy rallies were filled with men clad in military-style apparel and carrying long guns, women presented a softer side and turned out in equal—if not stronger—numbers, in my observation. During the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s “Arise USA Resurrection Tour” last year, the two women founders of Freedom Angels appeared onstage to talk not just about resisting mask and vaccine orders but also about establishing entire communities free from government regulation, like food co-ops and alternative home-schooling. Large public events sponsored by CSPOA drew crowds approaching gender parity.
Moms 4 Liberty—their slogan is “Parents’ Rights”—is just one of these influential women-led groups. It was formed in Florida by Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice after both lost their reelection campaigns for their respective local school boards. Their latest conference theme was “Joyful Warriors,” another example of how far-right women mitigate the toxic masculinity associated with groups like the Oath Keepers, border militias, and the Proud Boys. According to recent reporting by Mother Jones, the group now claims 100,000 members across 38 states.
While M4L has been accused of various direct actions like harassing local school board officials with emails, calls, and threats, it has lately begun to approach county sheriffs as a way to legitimize its grievances and gain actual traction in criminal courts. Granted, it hasn’t been too successful yet. But these alliances suggest that should it not achieve its goals via democratic means, M4L is perfectly willing to find its own firepower.
One strategy has been to bring criminal complaints to sympathetic sheriffs, which become “sex crime” investigations, further spreading the QAnon-influenced anxieties that children are being recruited or brainwashed by sex predators presenting as progressives. In the spring, Jennifer Pippin, who is an M4L chapter chair, filed a criminal complaint against a school library in Indian River County, Florida, for failing to remove dozens of books flagged by the members as inappropriate. The original list of books for examination included more than 150 titles, and while some were removed, not all of them were. In an email, Pippin told a member of the school board that she was focused on “ALL of the books currently in the libraries that have sex, rape, drugs etc etc in them that need to be removed immediately so they don’t get into the hands of anymore students in our district.” She threatened, “I’m holding all of you accountable.”
Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers—who last year was aSheriff Fellow at the far-right think tank Claremont Institute—assigned a sergeant to investigate the issue, reviewing emails between an M4L representative and various local officials. There were even annotated pages of the books in question, including sections of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer about a 9-year-old boy whose father is killed in the 9/11 attacks. (The book has been the subject of previous attacks by some parents since it was published.) The pages are annotated with handwritten notes like “sexual encounter” and “masterbation.”
The six-week investigation resulted in a 74-page report, which concluded that “no crime occurred.” Whether patently unconstitutional charges are ultimately filed in cases like these, though, is not the issue. The chilling effect of the threat is.
That threat is real. In a letter to the school superintendent, Flowers wrote that “the totality of the circumstances do not allow us to make an arrest in this case,” but added, “We do not feel that this content is appropriate for young children even though it does not rise to the level of a crime.” Flowers then recommended “stricter oversight” for children’s books.
Other sheriffs—especially those in Florida, where M4L began and has garnered support from Gov. Ron DeSantis—have conducted similar investigations into so-called dirty books, and while no criminal charges have resulted thus far, they indicate that going to the sheriff is an accepted strategy. In Flagler County, Florida, another M4L member filed an almost identical complaint to Pippin’s. And in Polk County, Florida, a dark money group called County Citizens Defending Freedom funded a series of complaints about books (under the guise of citizen complaints) to Sheriff Grady Judd, who deemed the material “vile and nasty and inappropriate” but not pornographic. Judd added that the matter was “under review to determine if there will be a criminal investigation” based on additional complaints, which all appear to have stemmed from the same dark money group that produced the initial complaints.
Sheriff candidates in many counties are also courting M4L members as political allies, appearing alongside them at events, providing legal legitimacy to their fears, and contributing to the spread of misinformation. Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, who was recently exposed for potentially trying to bribe political candidates he did not like to exit races and endorse his preferred candidates, has embraced M4L-allied members for school board.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sheriff Vic Regalado did an April speaking event with an M4L county chair in which he supplied background on “applicable laws,” explaining that many criminal laws do not apply to book banning, even things that would “make a normal person puke.” He noted, however, regarding a book of poetry, “If an individual on the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were showing this to a child, they would be in cuffs like that”—snapping his fingers—“and they would be prosecuted, but I don’t know that they would be convicted in today’s world.”
“This is now accepted,” he continued, waving a page around, arguing that a jury would be unlikely to convict because “a lot of parents are apathetic,” and blaming in particular single mothers. He ended by promising to consult with the district attorney about “how we can insert law enforcement into this thing.”
It might seem unusual to have elected law enforcement—especially in a time of much-hyped fears of violent crime and alleged understaffing—insert themselves into whether a book should be in a school library. Sheriffs, as politicians, need not justify the use of their resources, though, whether they are used to solve murders, investigate non-existent election fraud, or thoroughly report out whether Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about 9/11 is too sexy for the youths.
The alliance between sheriffs and M4L makes further levels of political sense as well. Local police chiefs are unlikely to be allies, as their budgets are scrutinized by city leadership and they tend to be in larger cities. Sheriffs serve longer terms than police chiefs and are politicians at heart, having the ability to deploy time and personnel however they see fit, with little if any oversight. And even if there were oversight, in most states where M4L is active, it has the support of state actors and other powerful politicians. Investigating a school book is both safe, easy, and popular in these jurisdictions, especially compared with solving actual crime.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/conspiracy-theorists-with-badges-and-guns-pro-trump-sheriffs-vow-to-police-elections/
An Unholy Alliance of Election Deniers, ‘Constitutional Sheriffs,’ and Profiteering Propagandists Threatens Elections
Two years after former President Donald Trump began aggressively attacking the integrity of the 2020 election to justify his efforts to stay in power, an unholy alliance threatens the fair conduct of elections this fall and again in 2024. A national network of conspiracy theorists and right-wing political operatives have been joined by far-right sheriffs, whose determination has been fortified by lies about election fraud and fueled by a belief that they are waging a holy war against the forces of evil.
Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and former board member of the anti-government extremist organization Oath Keepers, summoned members and supporters of his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association to a July gathering in Las Vegas, where he delivered an urgent message: The country’s county sheriffs, Mack said, must launch investigations into voting fraud in the 2020 election—investigations that he thought could put Trump back in power.
“I would love for the investigations to prove that he indeed won the election, and I think at the time the Supreme Court would have to rule that he gets put back in because it was based on criminal activity,” Mack said. Though he wasn’t sure enough sheriffs would step up and “do their duty” to make investigations into the 2020 election happen, Mack urged sheriffs to take an active role in policing this year’s elections.
Mack is the founder and leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches local sheriffs that they are the supreme law enforcement officer in their counties, and that it is their duty to resist state and federal “tyranny.”
Mack and other MAGA-minded sheriffs like Mark Lamb turned their focus to policing elections after seeing “2000 Mules,” a film produced by right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote leaders Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips, longtime promoters of election fraud conspiracy theories. Experts from across the political spectrum debunked the movie’s claims about voter fraud, but Trump and many of his supporters have embraced and promoted its inflammatory claims.
The Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol and evidence gathered by the House select committee investigating the insurrection have provided clear evidence that lies about election fraud can drive people to violence. In the weeks before Election Day, the embrace of “2000 Mules” and its inflammatory claims by public officials and far-right activists has already led to multiple reports of armed voter intimidation by vigilantes at ballot drop boxes. It could also increase the potential for violence at the polls.
“The involvement of ‘people with guns and badges’ to intimidate voters, and attempts to access voting equipment, could become ‘go-to-tactics,’” Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes told Reuters. “It doesn’t feel hyperbolic to say this is extremely dangerous.”
Armed Enforcers for the Anti-Democracy Coalition?
Mack founded CSPOA in 2009, a period of far-right ferment after the election of former President Barack Obama. As a leader of the self-described “constitutional sheriffs” movement, he has painted the federal government as authoritarian, referring to federal agencies as “the gestapo” and suggesting there were “some startling and irrefutable comparisons between Barack Obama and Adolph Hitler.”
Mack became a right-wing folk hero when he successfully challenged a Clinton-era federal gun law in the mid-90s. In 2014, Mack was back in the spotlight when he joined Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff with federal officials promoted a public relations strategy of putting women up front if shooting started.
Political scientists Emily Farris and Mirya Hollman recently conducted a survey of sheriffs’ attitudes and concluded that “Mack’s group has successfully radicalized a generation of sheriffs to believe that the office has seemingly unlimited power and autonomy.” That attitude is particularly dangerous among sheriffs, who compared to other law enforcement officials often have little structural oversight and accountability.
“We can and must take America back county by county and state by state,” Mack wrote in his 2014 book, “Are You a David?” That message is central to his current organizing efforts and one that he delivers to sheriffs and other law enforcement officials, often in state-sanctioned training sessions.
After the release of “2000 Mules” in May, Mack began shifting CSPOA’s focus from training sheriffs about his view of their constitutional superpowers to urging them to mobilize against “voter fraud.” He has described the movie’s oft-debunked claims as “overwhelming” and “compelling” evidence and said that “every sheriff and every chief of police in this country should be following up with a criminal investigation on the claims made in ‘2000 Mules.’”
Richard Mack speaks at CSPOA press conference on election fraud.
While Mack claims that his “2000 Mules”-inspired “election integrity” efforts are nonpartisan— he declared in a July press release that he simply wanted to know whether the claims made in “2000 Mules” are true and called for “honest, professional, and independent investigations”—it’s clear where his support lies when speaking to right-wing audiences. On a right-wing radio show in July, he called Trump’s defeat “a horrible, heinous crime” and “one of if not the worst crime committed against the American people in the last 100 years.”
“This is a coup against the American people,” Mack declared during a September appearance on another radio show. He recently told listeners of the right-wing Liberty Monks podcast that they “must vote for any Republican that we possibly can” to “punish the Democratic Party” and “stand against the destruction of America.”
Other sheriffs have taken up Mack’s call to investigate the 2020 presidential election and police future elections. One of Mack’s allies, Sheriff Calvin Hayden of Johnson County, Kansas, has “promoted unsubstantiated suspicions of election fraud,” according to the Kansas City Star. Hayden also offered to have his staff collect ballots from drop boxes, a move rejected by local officials as an attempt to interfere with the election.
Mack has also backed Dar Leaf, a sheriff in Berry County, Michigan, who is under investigation by the state’s attorney general over the conduct of his investigation of election equipment. Leaf has been represented by an attorney who was sanctioned by a federal judge for her role in Sidney Powell’s legal efforts to overturn the election results. Turning the system of governance on its head, Mack has said Leaf has the right to arrest state officials who interfered with his investigation.
From Insurrection to Elections: Sheriff Mark Lamb and Protect America Now
Mack isn’t the only far-right law enforcement official who was fired up by “2000 Mules.” Mark Lamb, sheriff of Arizona’s Pima County, was also drawn in by True the Vote’s conspiracy fraud claims. After viewing an interview that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk did with Engelbrecht—an interview that has been viewed more than 2 million times—Lamb contacted Englebrecht and brought his Protect America Now organization into a formal partnership with True the Vote. In October, Mack met with the Arizona Oathkeepers to talk about “election integrity” and the partnership being between Lamb and True the Vote, the Arizona Mirror reported.
An admirer of Mack and the CSPOA, Lamb built a national following through reality TV shows before turning energy toward Trumpian politics and the promotion of false voter fraud claims with the launch of his own organization in 2021.
Lamb founded Protect America Now in the month following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The insurrection, Lamb said, was not Trump’s fault, adding, “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.”
Describing Lamb as “charismatic and ambitious” in a 2021 profile, Politico reported that at an anti-vaccine rally that year, Lamb told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.”
Protect America Now’s website declares, “We support Sheriffs and law enforcement members that believe in God, Family and Freedom.” The group asks for a monthly donation of $17.76 to “help us win this battle for the soul of America.” It promotes a hard-right line on immigration and other issues. In videos on Protect America Now’s YouTube channel, Lamb
that crime is running rampant and “liberals want to take our guns.” In another, Lamb
, “together, we are fighting back against the liberal takeover.”
In June, True the Vote and Protect America Now announced ProtectAmerica.Vote, a partnership that it said would “empower sheriffs” to “support election integrity” and would bridge the gap between voters and law enforcement to “ensure we have secure elections in this country.”
Engelbrecht has said she embraced the sheriffs after the FBI dismissed True the Vote’s allegations of voter fraud. “It’s like the lights went on,” she saidat a CSPOA event this July. “It’s the sheriffs. That’s who can do these investigations; that’s who we can trust; that’s who we can turn over information to.” True the Vote says its partnership with the constitutional sheriffs will include raising grant money and providing equipment to sheriffs to expand ballot drop box surveillance and investigate fraud claims.
Lamb claims his partnership with True the Vote is a nonpartisan effort, but he makes no secret of his support for Trump and Trump’s stolen election claims. Trump “loves the rule of law,” Lamb said at a Trump rally in Arizona this July. “We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb pledged. “We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”
Local critics say Lamb has politicized law enforcement. Pinal County, where Lamb is sheriff, experienced ballot shortages during the August primary, and Lamb, true to character,
that there might be something more at play than incompetence by election officials and vowed to investigate.
Inspired by Lies: ‘2000 Mules’ as Political Warfare
Right-wing filmmaker and author D’Souza describes his propaganda movies as weapons of political and spiritual warfare. By that measure, the “2000 Mules” movie has proven itself effective in mobilizing Trump’s troops.
Far-right wing media have boosted Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” even though its claims have been widely debunked.
In “2000 Mules,” D’Souza dramatized claims made by Engelbrecht and Phillips that liberal nonprofits had mobilized “ballot harvesting” operations to stuff drop boxes with illegal votes. But for all the wild hype about their use of mobile device geolocation data and security camera footage from ballot drop boxes, election experts have repeatedly said that there’s essentially no there there. Even former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr dismissed the movie’s claims as laughable in testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The movie’s claims have also been declared bogus by experts in cell phone tracking technology and by election officials. As critics have pointed out, despite all the data, footage, and money available to the producers, the film does not show a single documented instance of the kind of fraud it claims to expose. Georgia election officials tracked down one person the movie accused of being a “mule” and determined that the person was depositing his own ballot and his family members’ ballots, as permitted by law. On Oct. 26, a Georgia voter sued D’Souza, Englebrecht, Phillips, and True the Vote for wrongly accusing him of casting illegal votes.
Among the other demonstrably false claims in the movie was that True the Vote’s geolocation data was so accurate that it helped solve a murder case.
But MAGA world activists primed to believe Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories ate it up. Trump himself hosted a premiere for the film at Mar-a Lago in May. Many Republican officials and proponents of election conspiracies like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have joined Trump in promoting the film and its claims.
As the film took MAGA world by storm, it came to the attention of far-right militias, too. It was cited by Lions of Liberty, an Arizona “preparedness” group connected to the far-right Oath Keepers that is organizing armed surveillance of ballot boxes, and by Matt Shea, a far-right former state legislator known for his handbook on “biblical warfare,” who is organizing similar efforts in his state.
The release of the book version of “2000 Mules” was delayed at the last minute by the publisher after it had been printed and sent to bookstores containing potentially libelous accusations against several nonprofit groups it accused of mobilizing voter fraud. Before a toned-down version was released, Engelbrecht and Phillips distanced themselves from the book, saying they were looking ahead to future elections and their work with sheriffs.
Before ‘2000 Mules’: True the Vote’s History of Election Fraud Conspiracies
True the Vote is well known among voting rights experts for its long history of promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and supporting actions to restrict voting.
“True the Vote and groups like it are well-documented voter intimidation scams,” former Harris County Clerk and current Houston mayoral candidate Chris Hollins told Texas Monthly this summer. “They’re created to amplify conspiracy theories, funded by wealthy right-wing activists, to tie the hands of election administrators and embolden partisan poll watchers.”
Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center points to True the Vote’s “long history of anti-voter conduct, including orchestrating mass challenges to voters,” some as recent as the 2021 Georgia runoff elections.
True the Vote leaders Engelbrecht and Phillips—business and reportedly romantic partners—have profited from unproven claims of voter fraud. The organization has been the subject of multiple investigations and exposés revealing their repeated failure to make good on outlandish claims while funneling money raised by their nonprofit group into their own pockets via loans and payments to for-profit companies they run.
True the Vote was founded after the 2008 election and grew out of a local Tea Party organization in Houston, Texas, called the King Street Patriots, which was accused of conducting “1960s style” voter intimidation during the 2010 election cycle.
For the past decade, True the Vote has promoted alarmism about voter fraud and resisted voting rights protections. It falsely claimed, for example, that the Obama administration was intentionally registering noncitizens to vote and charged that renewing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would encourage “race-based segregation.” As “voter fraud” and “election integrity” became right-wing justifications for voter suppression, True the Vote pulled in money from right-wing funders and activist groups, including the Bradley Foundation, Donors Trust, the Judicial Confirmation Network, and State Policy Network.
True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht railed against a bill she said would “blow up our elections” in a March 2020 YouTube video.
When Trump was elected in 2016 while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Phillips stroked Trump’s ego by claiming that Phillips could verify that 3 million noncitizens cast votes in the election. While Trump touted the baselessand repeatedly debunked claim that he was the actual popular vote winner, True the Vote never released any evidence to back him up.
Though True the Vote claims that its so-called “election integrity” work is nonpartisan, the group aggressively promotes the interests of right-wing Republican candidates. In 2018, a New Jersey judge decided not to renew a 1981 ban on the Republican Party recruiting soldiers and cops as poll watchers to intimidate Black voters. True the Vote saw this as an opportunity. At a 2020 gathering of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of influential right-wing and far-right leaders, Englebrecht touted True the Vote’s “Continue to Serve” initiative, which she said would recruit retired military and law enforcement as poll watchers. One participant suggested it would be especially useful in “inner city” and Native American precincts.
True the Vote’s credibility has been challenged by some on the right, even by other Big Lie and voter suppression advocates. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, True the Vote officials took $2.5 million from Fred Eshelman, a Trump-supporting billionaire who believed that the group was going to use state-level election data to prove Trump’s fraud claims in court. When they seemingly did little more to overturn the election than pay piles of cash to their companies and their lawyer, right-wing movement consigliere James Bopp, for a few short-lived lawsuits, Eshelman sued in an unsuccessful effort to get his money back.
Conspiracy Theories as Spiritual Warfare
Just as Christian nationalist ideology and the belief that keeping Trump in office was a sacred cause energized the Jan. 6 insurrection and suffused much of the MAGA movement, True the Vote’s leaders and their far-right sheriff allies rely on spiritual warfare rhetoric to justify their actions and motivate their followers.
Before the 2020 election, True the Vote partnered with Intercessors for America, a group of pro-Trump “prayer warriors,” to spread right-wing talking points about the threat of voter fraud. On an online prayer call in May 2020, Englebrecht called the struggle over expanded voting by mail a “spiritual battle” for “control of the free world.”
After the release of “2000 Mules,” Intercessors for America claimed that the movie documented “an indisputable and alarming gravy train for fraudulent votes.” Intercessors for America defended Engelbrecht and Phillips from critics, portraying them as victims of persecution.
This August, True the Vote held a gathering focused on voter fraud that it called “The Pit,” a name taken from a biblical passage that says God will grant his disciples relief from days of trouble “until a pit is dug for the wicked.” On a “prayer call” promoting the event,Intercessors for America’s Kris Kubalsaid that election fraud is “demonic” and an “evil from Satan.” True the Vote, she declared, was involved in a “supernatural battle.” Phillips agreed that “there is so much evil around all of this right now.”
“God wants us to expose that pit and shut it down, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Engelbrecht said. True the Vote leaders did not release compelling new evidence of voter fraud at “The Pit,” but they did announce the creation of a “fusion center” that would gather “actionable intelligence” for local sheriffs to act on.
Like Engelbrecht and Phillips, Mack portrays his “constitutional sheriff” movement and its involvement in election issues in spiritual terms. In his 2014 book, “Are You a David?” Mack argued that “modern-day Davids”—by which he meant sheriffs and other local public servants—are “the only viable solution for the restoration of our God-given rights, in conjunction with our willingness to repent and return to God’s law as a people.” At a July press conference Mack organized during the right-wing “Freedom Fest” held in Las Vegas, he urged sheriffs to “join us in this holy cause.”
Sheriffs: The Law or a Threat to the Law?
There is a long history in this country of corrupt local sheriffs abusing their power, from Jim Clark leading attacks on civil rights marchers in Alabama in the 1960s to Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva overseeing a department notorious for violent deputy gangs threatening public safety today.
In 2020, the research group Political Research Associates identified 136 sheriffs aligned with the far-right “patriot” and militia movement in which Political Research Associates situates Mack’s CSPOA. The research group noted that at the time, 90 percent of the 3,081 county sheriffs in the United States were white men, and that “there has been a concerted effort in the last decade to mobilize sheriffs toward further supporting and expanding systems of racialized social control and expulsion.” The Reflective Democracy Campaign, a project of the Women’s Donor Network, noted that “The alarmingly skewed demographics of sheriffs suggest a system hard-wired for abuse, and their track record of mistreating women and people of color confirms it.”
Some sheriff’s offices have connections to, or have been infiltrated by, other far-right extremist groups. The Brennan Center found that sheriff’s deputies in Washington state and Louisiana had publicly supported and joined the Proud Boys—whose leaders have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the attack on the Capitol—and noted that a sheriff’s deputy in Orange County, California, was photographed wearing a patch that included the word “Oath Keeper” and the logo of the Three Percenters on his bulletproof vest. The Washington state and Louisiana deputies were fired; the California deputy was not.
Added to this already toxic mix are messages from the likes of Mack and Lamb that sheriffs must investigate electoral fraud. Such declarations are a “significant overreach of authority,” David Mahoney, a former president of the National Sheriffs Association, told The Guardian.
So what role, if any, should sheriffs play in our elections?
“There is a critical role for law enforcement to play in protecting our election: they should be offering protection to election officials and election workers that have come under attack as a result of lies being spread by groups like True the Vote,” the Brennan Center’s Sean Morales-Doyletold The Guardian in August.
It is not difficult to imagine the chilling effect of being accused of voter fraud by a person with a badge and gun, what Jessica Pishko called “part of an escalating campaign to police the vote” in a recent story for Bolts magazine. “The prospect of increased involvement of armed officers recalls the days of voter intimidation in the Jim Crow South (and beyond), and could also help encourage extremist vigilante violence by perpetuating baseless rumors of fraud, often against Black and Latinx communities,” Pishko wrote.
Recent reports of armed bands gathering at ballot drop boxes and challenging voters suggests that Pishko was right. (This week a federal court ordered a group in Arizona to stop intimidating voters with their armed and body-armored presence at ballot drop boxes.) [check]
The multi-faceted campaign to corrupt elections by convincing millions of Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by Black and Brown voters is a threat to democracy. It has created and inflamed a large group of enraged Trump supporters and sparked harassment and threats against election officials. It has led to a wave of state laws designed to restrict registration and voting. It has led to Trumpist partisans and conspiracy theorists becoming poll workers and running for political offices where they will have the power to interfere with the administration of elections. And it has led some armed vigilantes to set up intimidating “security” operations at voting locations.
Added to this volatile mix are groups of sheriffs riled up by falsehoods and propaganda, pumped up an ideology of virtually unchecked power, and spurred on by the belief that they are engaged in a holy war to save America from destruction. Voters and other public officials must be alert to the abuses that could flow from these new partnerships and be prepared to hold individuals accountable for any actions to intimidate or interfere with people exercising their right to vote.
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7wvj/lions-of-liberty-oath-keepers-midterm-ballot-boxes
Armed Fringe Groups Are Gearing Up to ‘Protect’ Midterm Ballot Dropboxes
The groups, inspired by conspiracy theories and the Big Lie about the 2020 election, could deter some voters, experts warn.
TO
By Tess Owen
October 6, 2022Screenshot of a YCPT meeting in August led by Jim Arroyo
A “patriot group” in Arizona called Lions of Liberty—which is closely tied to the Oath Keepers—is organizing their supporters to go out and conduct round-the-clock surveillance of ballot dropboxes during the midterm elections. It’s the latest sign that groups with clear ties to extremists, galvanized by conspiracy theories, are seeking to take matters into their own hands this election season.
Ballot dropboxes have become the central focus of election fraud conspiracy theorists, thanks to the debunked documentary 2,000 Mules, by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza.
That film claims that a shadowy network of hired “mules” in contested states were hired by nonprofits as part of a giant ballot trafficking operation to stuff dropboxes with fake absentee ballots, all with the goal of stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The film was released in May, six months before the midterms, reinvigorated the “Stop the Steal” movement and inspired vigilante efforts around the country—in some cases spearheaded by innocuous-sounding groups that obscure the known ideologues and extremists behind them.
Lions of Liberty is the “political arm” of a newly-formed nonprofit called Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT), led by the former vice president of Arizona’s Oath Keeper chapter, Jim Arroyo. At a meeting in August that was posted to YouTube, Arroyo explained that they had turned the Oath Keeper chapter into a corporate nonprofit under the name of YCPT, which in turn gave them the ability to get a bank account.
In an email to VICE News, Arroyo said that the Arizona chapter officially broke ties with the national leadership of the notorious militia group after it was implicated in the violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Five members are currently standing trial for seditious conspiracy charges, including the group’s leader Stewart Rhodes. Prosecutors allege that Rhodes and his cohort plotted an “armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy.”) However, they had been operating more or less independently from the national organization for about four years, said Arroyo; Rhodes broke ties with the Arizona contingent after they declined to assist in armed vigilante activities at the border, out of respect for Border Patrol.
News
The Oath Keepers’ Jan. 6 Texts Sure Do Look Damning
GREG WALTERS
10.05.22
Arroyo, who insists YCPT is not a militia, led that August meeting in an Oath Keepers hat and T-shirt. He explained to the crowd that he would need volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes, and that he was particularly concerned about the period between midnight and 6 a.m. “If you saw the movie 2,000 Mules” he said, that timeframe was “when the bulk of the problems happen, that’s when we will be on scene with a camera and flashlight.” Arroyo told VICE News that some volunteers might be armed. “This is Arizona; almost everyone is armed, all the time,” he said. “That's not a big deal here.”
Arroyo said he will likely pick up a couple of shifts to monitor dropboxes.
In the August meeting, Arroyo assured members of the crowd that they’d be welcome to continue wearing their Oath Keepers merch, even while conducting ballot dropbox surveillance. “Your shirts and hats are what tell the world you’re not ashamed to be an Oath Keeper, or afraid of the government just because of that crap that happened on January the 6th, which was completely staged. It was a setup,” Arroyo said, before acknowledging, “Yeah, they did something stupid beyond all belief.”
During the meeting, Arroyo also stoked fears of an imminent civil war. “This is not the same as (Black Lives Matter) and George Floyd or antifa. This is a direct confrontation with the federal government,” he said. “This is now the federal government of the United States of America in direct conflict with its own citizenry.”
The Lions of Liberty describe themselves as a “resolute nucleus of concerned, passionate conservative patriots who are determined to correct the course for our country which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats, and fake news.” Their goal? “To bring God back to our leadership and win this spiritual battle for the soul of our nation.”
The Lions of Liberty aren’t the only ones calling for and coordinating vigilante activity around the midterm elections.
Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a Seattle-based nonprofit, has been closely tracking this trend.
“The threat of groups of far-right vigilantes, some potentially armed, fueled by Big Lie misinformation, lurking near ballot dropboxes, could potentially deter some from casting their votes,” warned Burghart. “The possibility of conflict in such a scenario is real.”
Burghart added that “dropbox vigilantism” perpetuates unsubstantiated claims of rampant voter fraud that “keep the Big Lie alive and further erodes confidence in elections and democracy.”
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Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea runs On Fire Ministries, an apocalyptic Christian nationalist church in Spokane, and has been leading “training sessions” for prospective volunteers to monitor dropboxes.
“We are doing something for the community. How many of you watched 2,000 Mules? Raise your hands,” said Shea during a service in September. “I think it would be good if we had some folks who were certified, trained, dropbox observers, in Spokane County.” The training took place on Sept. 30.
Shea is a particularly controversial character; a 2019 investigation by the Washington Legislature concluded that he’d “participated in an act of domestic terrorism” for his involvement in three armed conflicts against the federal government between 2014 and 2016, including the Bundys’ armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon and an armed conflict with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department in Priest River, Idaho.
And a group called True the Vote, which was involved in the 2,000 Mules documentary, is also teaming up with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) to monitor dropboxes nationwide. CSPOA is headed by Richard Mack, who has long-standing ties to the militia movement, including to the Oath Keepers.
“The plan from national Big Lie groups, like True the Vote, is to use those “voter fraud” claims to get sympathetic sheriffs to intervene in elections,” said Burghart.
Dropbox surveillance efforts started getting underway earlier this summer, during the primaries, described then by the New York Times as a “nascent” movement. In some places, like in Arizona, groups were planning dropbox “tailgate parties.” One person with a handle referencing QAnon posted a photo of their party to Trump’s platform Truth Social, and credited Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and conspiracy theorist, for the idea.
[Screenshot from the app TruthSocial showing a "dropbox tailgate party"
Brian Cates, a columnist for the fringe-right publication The Epoch Times, has long been a proponent of the “Big Lie” and has been riling up his more than 120,000 followers on Telegram around the idea of taking matters into their own hands this election season.
“The time for calling for people to just show up to vote is long past. We’re moving into another completely different era,” he wrote. “Citizens will be given the tools to monitor all the dropboxes and engage in massive real-time information operations in order to bring about election integrity.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” he added. “An army of patriots is going to force compliance with the election laws in their states before these next elections are held.”
One of the primary examples of “evidence” of nefarious activity offered by 2,000 Mules was surveillance videos that appeared to show individuals posting multiple ballots into a dropbox, including in Georgia. Submitting multiple ballots on behalf of other people is known as “ballot harvesting,” and it is legal in several states, including Georgia.
However, the fact that submitting multiple ballots has been presented as a telltale sign of election fraud lays the groundwork for possible confrontations between dropbox “monitors” and people who are acting entirely within the law. (Right-wing political commentator Monica Matthews, from Clear Talk Media, even tried to remind her followers of this fact. “Before you all plan Dropbox tailgate parties to monitor the integrity of your elections- MAKE SURE you check your new state laws. Some states allow harvesting,” she wrote on Twitter in August. “Confronting people at dropboxes could land you in jail.”)
Earlier this summer, ahead of Washington’s August 2 primary, some signs began showing up near dropboxes near Seattle saying “This Ballot Dropbox is Under Surveillance” and warned of criminal penalties for ballot harvesting, the Seattle Times reported. However, it’s also legal in Washington to drop off multiple ballots at once on behalf of family members.
The signs also had a QR code that allowed passersby to report “suspicious activity” to the King County Republican Party(whose chair disavowed the vigilante activity). Amber Krabach, a GOP activist, QAnon conspiracy theorist and member of the Kings County Republicans’ “Election integrity Committee”, was behind the signs. The county elections office asked the sheriff’s department to investigate whether Krabach had broken a state law barring civilians from influencing someone’s vote within 25 feet of a ballot dropbox. They didn’t press charges, but they did refer the matter to the FBI.
All these vigilante efforts are taking place against a backdrop of increasingly incendiary rhetoric from GOP figures and far-right forums alike, about what will happen if they get even so much of a whiff of “voter fraud” this election season.
“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed,” said ex-Congressman Madison Cawthorn at a GOP event in North Carolina this summer.
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On Patriots.win, a pro-Trump forum, some have discussed the need to bring guns to monitor dropboxes. Someone shared an article from the right-wing Gateway Pundit claiming they’d found evidence of massive voter fraud in Detroit during the 2020 election. “We need people waiting for that shit this time and take that shit at gun point,” someone responded. “Use walkie-talkies and don't park anywhere near there or use fake plates and a vehicle wrap.”
Others, like Arroyo from YCPT, have stoked fears of an imminent civil war instigated by the Democrats. “Keep your powder dry until after the midterms,” one person wrote. “No matter what, they are going to try like hell to provoke a civil war before then.”
“Hold the line till Nov… then do whatever the fuck you gotta do,” another user on patriots.win wrote.
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p. 16 1 occurrence
According to the Sheriff, on the same day within one hour of leaving the meeting withBundy and Payne, Richard Mack,a member of COWS and associate of Representative Shea who Investigators identified as the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association (CSPOA), called the Sheriff and extended an offer in dealing with the government overreach in the Hammond case. Mack spoke very highly of the Bundy family. Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, Nevada, identified as a close associate of Representative Shea and member of COWS also called the Sheriff that same week in support the Sheriff stepping in to prevent the Hammonds from going back to federal prison.
p. 47 1 occurrence
• • Richard Mack , President of the CSPOA called Sheriff Wardand told him he participated in the protest march on January 2, 2016 but not the armed takeover of the refuge and did not condone it.
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8 22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Sheriffs_and_Peace_Officers_Association
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ref
a Washington state lawmaker accused of participating in acts of domestic terrorism by an independent report commissioned by his own legislature has connections to two former elected officials in Arizona.
Matt Shea had been a key figure in multiple armed standoffs that took place between federal authorities in Oregon, Nevada and Idaho from 2014 to 2016.
Shea, a Republican lawyer first elected in 2008, was suspended from Washington’s House Republican Caucus and stripped of his position as the ranking member of the House Environment and Energy Committee after the report was released.
The report claims that Shea gave information on the movements and tactics of law enforcement to groups who were being monitored during incidents such as the high-profile standoff between the FBI and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.
The report details the ways Shea and his group, the Coalition of Western States, often referred to as COWS, worked behind the scenes to provide information, intelligence and logistical support.
COWS also included members who are residents of Arizona, two of whom were elected officials at the time.
Arizona elected officials
Robert Corbell was elected to the Greenlee County Board of Supervisors from 2013-16. He’s also a member of COWS.
Corbell has been vocal in the past about his role in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. However, the report sheds additional light on his and COWS’ roles in the occupation.
On Jan. 2, 2016, armed men seized the wildlife refuge and occupied it until Feb. 11. Ammon Bundy led the occupation to protest what he believed were the wrongful convictions of fellow ranchers.
Ammon Bundy is the son of rancher Cliven Bundy, has been a key figure in the militia movement and was a central figure in the 2014 standoff in Nevada between his father and federal authorities.
Corbell in March told Oregon public radio station OPB that he had met Shea at the Bundy ranch years earlier to discuss “sovereignty” and how to get laws changed.
“So, we went to the casino at the state line, and in the motel room there … we created COWS,” Corbell said about the meeting in April 2014. Corbell also told OPB that he knew that the occupation was likely going to happen, something that investigators noted in the report on Shea.
Another video shows Corbell with Shea, speaking from the Bundy ranch during the 2014 standoff in Nevada.
"The Constitution is being trampled on and people are finally standing up, thank God and God bless,” Corbell says in the video.
Corbell often shares anti-government and conspiracy theory posts on his personal Facebook page, some involving the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a frequent target of COWS, Shea and the Bundys.
[twt hammond land to russia for uranium?!] vid]
corbell is not the only former elected official from Arizona linked to COWS and Shea.
Barry Weller, who was elected to on the Apache County Board of Supervisors from 2013-16, was also in the 2014 video.
“I’m here to support the Bundys and I’m here to support the process,” Weller says in the video. “I’m here to call all those thousands of other supervisors to stand up for their citizens.”
Weller is also mentioned in the report as a member of COWS.
In 2016, Weller made news after speaking in favor of a bill in the Arizona legislature that would split Apache County at Interstate 40. Lawmakers have been debating similar proposals for decades, and Gov. Bruce Babbitt in 1982 vetoed a bill that would have created a predominantly Navajo county, calling it racial legislation.
One of Weller’s fellow supervisors said he believed Weller’s advocacy for the measure was racially motivated. Weller said his support of the measure, which would have divided the predominantly white part Apache County he represented away from the Navajo parts of the county, was economic in nature and not motivated by race.
Corbell and Weller did not respond to requests for comment.
Other notable Arizonans
The report names other Arizona figures who participated in both the Malheur and the Bundy Ranch standoffs.
Former Graham County Sheriff Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is a member of COWS and, according to confidential sources, helped Shea plan the Malheur takeover, the report said.
Mack denied helping to organize the takeover or having any advance knowledge of it.
“That’s a lie,” Mack told Arizona Mirror. He said he was unaware of the armed takeover and later told Ammon Bundy he was opposed to the idea: “I had no idea it was heading towards that sort of escalation.”
Investigators in Washington interviewed Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward in Oregon, whom Mack and others approached prior to the takeover of the Malheur refuge.
In November 2015, Ammon Bundy and others told the sheriff that if he did not intercede on behalf of father-and-son ranchers in Oregon who were charged with arson amid a land dispute with BLM that they would “bring thousands of people here to do your job for you” and that they would create “civil unrest.”
Dwight and Steven Hammond had been convicted of arson on federal land that they say they started to stop an invasive plant from growing further into their cattle grazing fields. President Donald Trump later pardoned them on the arson charges.
Within an hour of Bundy leaving, Mack called Ward and spoke very highly of the Bundy family. Mack later participated in a protest march involving the Hammonds. Some men broke off from that protest to take over the refuge, though Mack was not a part of the actual takeover.
According to the report, Mack told Ward that the sheriff could “get out from under the situation” by taking the Hammonds into his custody and simply charging them with crimes they didn’t commit so “the Feds” couldn’t have them and they would be adjudicated.
Ward said this suggestion was similar to one in a letter he’d received from Cliven Bundy.
Shea was also a featured speaker at one of Mack’s events in 2013.
Mack told the Mirror he hasn’t been active in COWS for at least four years, and said if he ever received one of the intel emails that Shea was sending out during the Malheur standoff, he likely didn’t notice because “it was so innocuous that it had no lasting effect on me,” adding that he “never saw anything that promoted violence or domestic terrorism.”
The former sheriff said he did call Ward and said they’re “on pretty good terms.” Mack said none of the investigators reached out to him and he questioned their motivations.
The report mentions Peoria resident Jon Ritzheimer, who organized an infamous Phoenix mosque protest and used to sell products featuring the slogan “Fuck Islam.” Ritzheimer was a participant in the Malheur takeover. He was arrested and later eventually struck a plea deal to federal conspiracy charges for his role in the standoff. He was not a member of Shea’s group.
Ritzheimer did not respond to a request for comment.
Arizona resident Lyle Rapacki, the vice chairman of COWS and an online columnist who pens articles about alleged satan worship at naval bases and the QAnon conspiracy theory that liberal elites run a global cabal of pedophiles, received email updates from Shea about the Malheur takeover that included military style protocols and information, according to the Washington legislature’s report.
It is unclear if Rapacki had any role in Shea’s intelligence reports that he had been allegedly giving to those involved in the armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon. Rapacki did not respond to a request for comment.
The report also mentions Arizona resident Cope Reynolds as a member of COWS and a recipient of the intelligence emails that Shea was sending out during the standoffs. Reynolds is the owner of a gun shop in Pinetop that disallows anyone who voted for President Barack Obama from entering the store. Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment.
The full report can be read below: [doc] 2019
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https://www.dailykos.com › stories › 2022 › 9 › 1 › 2120294 › --Constitutional-sheriffs-embrace-of-Big-Lie-could-have-consequences-for-elections-in-NovemberExtremist sheriffs double down with their embrace of Trumpist 'election ...
Sep 1, 2022 Leaf harkened to the "constitutionalist" claim that county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, saying: "What that does, it gives you the power—and I don't know if you're gonna appreciate me...
kos
no lnx vid
Extremist sheriffs double down with their embrace of Trumpist ‘election integrity’ campaign
David Neiwert
Daily Kos Staff
ThursdaySeptember 01, 2022 **
Barry County, MI, Sheriff Dar Leaf
Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf sought warrants on voting machines even after coming under investigation for tampering with the devices.
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ConstitutionalSheriffs
cspoa
MarkLamb
BarryCounty
ExtremistSheriffs
It’s a testament to the cult power of Donald Trump’s Big Lie that an elected lawman who himself now faces investigation for tampering with voting machines will not only refuse to apologize, but proceed to double down. Another law enforcement official subscribing to the same authoritarian conspiracy theories is meanwhile threatening everyone within his fiefdom with repercussions if they don’t submit to his similar “investigations,” and setting the stage for his nakedly partisan deputies to patrol at polling places.
These cases, both involving the so-called “constitutional sheriffs” movement’s open embrace of Trump’s election denialism, reflect the challenge that awaits much of the country—particularly the rural areas where these sheriffs rule—when we head to the polls in November. Their well-financed campaign, coordinated with leading Trumpists, to overturn election results and seize voting machines they suspect of skewing the vote could wreak havoc with election results around the country if it continues to gain steam.
Dar Leaf, the sheriff of Michigan’s Barry County, has played a leading role in the unfolding saga. It recently emerged that not only does Leaf insist that his dubious “investigations” of election outcomes in his county—based almost entirely on a fraudulent Dinesh D’Souza pseudodocumentary—are legitimate, but that he has continued to seek warrants to confiscate voting tabulators from election officials in townships throughout his county.
Leaf sought warrants to seize machines and search offices of the Barry County Clerk, as well as in Woodland Township and Irving Township, Bridge Michigan found through a Freedom of Information Act request. His affidavits could not cite any evidence justifying the searches, saying only that Leaf sought "evidence of the crime of election law violations."
The report found that Leaf wanted to seize "components of voting and election equipment"—tabulation machines, poll books, election reporting modules, as well as 2020 election paper ballots. He also demanded keys to unlock the devices.
Leaf’s intentions, the affidavits showed, were to have the voting equipment "forensically examined" by someone "who is certified and trained to conduct data extractions."
His involvement in seizing one such tabulator in 2021—which resulted in its being dismantled and examined, then returned with its seals broken—is part of a state investigation that involves not just Leaf, but the Republican nominee for Michigan’s attorney general, Matthew DePerno.
Last month, the current Democratic attorney general, Dana Nesso, filed a petition for a special prosecutor to handle that investigation since it involves her likely Republican opponent in the fall election. The petition indicated that state police investigators believed that DePerno was “one of the prime instigators,” along with Leaf and a state legislator, of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines.
DePerno’s campaign issued a statement ridiculing Nessel’s petition as “an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies.”
Barry County Prosecutor Julie Nakfoor Pratt's office refused to sign off on the warrant requests because Leaf had not established "probable cause" to conduct the searches.
"There just wasn't anything in there that amounted to any fraud that I could see," she told Bridge Michigan.
Leaf’s efforts on Trump’s behalf began in December 2020, when he filed a lawsuit demanding Barry County’s voting machines be impounded—which was swiftly laughed out of court. He then embarked on an “investigation” of the machines by sending a deputy and a private investigator to grill township officials about their intricacies.
It was during one of these interrogations that the Irving Township clerk surrendered one of the town’s Dominion machines to Leaf’s team. “I’ve been told they took it (to the Detroit area) and tore it apart,” she told a local TV station, noting that when the machine was returned during a meeting in a parking lot, its security seal had been broken.
Dominion’s machineswere the focus of a conspiracy theory popular after the election among the Trumpist right claiming that vote totals had been secretly manipulated to hand the presidency to Joe Biden. The theory was widely circulated on right-wing media such as Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax, all of whom now face multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits from the company.
Leaf was connected through his attorney, Carson Tucker, to a number of the leading Trump-loving conspiracists the former president employed, including ex-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood. “My client Barry County Sheriff and several other county sheriffs in Michigan would like to consider issuing probable cause warrants to sequester Dominion voting machines if there is evidence of criminal manipulation,” Tucker wrote to them in one email.
His claims made little sense in Barry County, where Trump won by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Rutland Charter Township clerk Ruth Hawthorne observed tartly: “They seem to think there was some kind of microchip in our tabulators that was throwing votes to Biden. But Trump won Barry County. He won by 65 percent of the vote, so I don’t know where they’re thinking that any kind of chips were in any of our machines or thinking that something had happened to them. The whole thing is nutty. It is nutty, totally nutty.”
Leaf’s extremism was well established before the 2020 election. He had appeared on stage at an anti-masking rally bashing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer with three of the “Patriots” who were later charged with plotting to kidnap and execute her. He first suggested to reporters that perhaps the plotters were only trying to make a “citizens arrest.” Leaf and other Michigan “constitutional sheriffs” also later refused to enforce a statewide ban on guns in Michigan polling places.
His “election integrity” campaign in Michigan caught the attention of Richard Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Keepers Association (CSPOA), who then announced a nationwide campaign involving all of the country’s “constitutional sheriffs.”
In May, Mack called on sheriffs and police around the U.S. “to come together in pursuit of the truth regarding the 2020 election.” A CSPOA press release made clear that the basis of their “investigations” was D’Souza’s widely debunked pseudodocumentary, 2000 Mules:
Considering the persistent allegations of election fraud since even before the 2020 elections began, and as a response to the perpetual polarizing effect this has had on the American people, the CSPOA would like to put this issue to rest. Our constitutional republic and peaceful future as a free people absolutely depend on it.
In the opinion of the CSPOA, there is very compelling physical evidence presented by truethevote.org in the movie “2000 Mules” produced by Dinesh D'Souza. “Law Enforcement has to step in at this point,” asserts D'Souza, and we absolutely agree with him. Therefore, we are asking for all local law enforcement agencies to work together to pursue investigations to determine the veracity of the “2000 Mules” information.
In fact, D’Souza’s documentary has been repeatedly demonstrated to be utterly groundless garbage. It has been debunked by Reuters, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and NPR, to name only a few of the outlets where its phony “facts” and false premises have been eviscerated.
In short order, the CSPOA had teamed up with Trump’s most fervent election denialists, True the Vote, which receives substantial funding from notorious pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell. “Constitutional sheriffs” in other counties—including one in Kansas and another in Wisconsin—attempted similar “investigations” but came up empty-handed.
At a Las Vegas gathering organized by Mack and True the Vote in July, Leaf called the county prosecutor’s refusal to hand out the search warrants "ridiculous,” adding: “We think we have enough for search warrants and everything else,” Leaf said during the conference, which also featured speeches from Trump loyalists like Lindell. “We're gonna keep moving forward, folks. We’re not done with this.”
Leaf harkened to the “constitutionalist” claim that county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, saying: “What that does, it gives you the power—and I don’t know if you’re gonna appreciate me saying this—if we can’t get anywhere, we’re looking at doing grand juries, at the common law.”
One of True the Vote’s partners in the “election integrity” campaign is another “constitutional sheriffs” organization called Protect America Now, run by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Arizona’s Pinal County.Lamb was a featured speaker at a Trump rally in Prescott in July, where he revved the crowd up with promises that the nation’s sheriffs would intervene on their behalf in future elections.
“We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb declared. “Sheriffs are going to enforce the law. This is about the rule of law. It is against the law to violate elections laws—and that’s a novel idea, we’re going to hold you accountable for that. We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”
Lamb has plenty of local critics in Pinal County. At recent meeting of the county’s Board of Supervisors, he was accused by longtime residents of indulging in baseless fearmongering over election results.
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Roberto Reveles, a longtime Arizona civil rights activist, told commissioners that Lamb was engaging in naked partisan threats: “I recently was subjected to the intimidation referred to by a previous speaker. Sheriff Mark Lamb walked up to me and pointed at me … and said, ‘You and your fellow Democrats are destroying our country.’”
Lamb defended himself shortly afterwards during an appearance on Newsmax. “Last week in the board meeting I had probably 8 to 10 Democrats show up and absolutely blast me because I believe in the ‘Big Lie,’” Lamb said.
“It clearly shows that these folks don’t care about election integrity,” he continued. “They’re happy that their guy is in power, and right now they should care more than ever because this guy in office, Joe Biden and his administration, is absolutely destroying America and freedom and they’re turning this into a country that we just don’t recognize.”
Local Democrats like Ralph Atchue, formerly a candidate for Arizona Senate, state that Lamb and his deputies will begin patrolling polling places. “I hear from everybody that the line is being crossed,” Atchue told Jessica Pishko of Bolts. “Completely blurred.”
Far-right election denialists in Seattle’s King County placed signs during the July primary at ballot drop boxes warning people that their actions were being recorded on camera. Ironically, the King County Sheriff’s Office is now investigating those actions at the behest of the county’s elections office.
“The specter of law enforcement at the polls is already enough to discourage people from going to the polls,” observes Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “Moreover, the threat of surveillance of polling places and drop boxes proposed by groups like True the Vote is meant to intimidate voters, particularly people of color, and deter them from casting ballots.”
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/tpusa-promotes-john-guandolos-call-for-right-wing-activists-to-bully-and-harass-political-opponents/
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a new film produced by the right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA spotlights radical right-wing conspiracy theorist John Guandolo urging sheriffs to take the law into their own hands and resist federal authority.
Guandolo is a former FBI agent who resigned in 2009 “before the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility could question him about his sexual liaisons” with a star witness in a government corruption case as well as “with women FBI agents,” according to a report from The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.
Following his resignation, Guandolo became a radical right-wing conspiracy theorist and anti-Islam activist who now runs an organization called Understanding The Threat through which he trains law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist. Guandolo is so radical that in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he praised insurrectionists for showing restraint by not publicly executing lawmakers, most of whom he claimed are “traitors” who should be “swinging from a rope.”
But in “The Enemy Within: FBI Whistleblower,” Turning Point USA portrays Guandolo as a brave “FBI whistleblower” dedicated to exposing the “undiscussed network of jihadists and communists that have worked together to undermine America at its root for decades.”
During the documentary, Guandolo discussed his efforts to train local right-wing activists take over their towns, throw their mayors in jail, and ruin the lives of anyone who dares to oppose them. As part of this effort, Guandolo said that sheriffs and average citizens must work together to physically prevent the FBI or federal government from operating in their towns and to drive uncooperative companies out of business.
“Just recently in Texas, FBI raids a guy’s house, saying he was somehow involved in Jan. 6 and all this nonsense. The local sheriff does nothing,” Guandolo
. “And in response to citizens asking the sheriff, ‘Why didn’t you intervene?’ He’s like, ‘Well, it’s out of my hands. It’s a federal matter.’ The answer is it’s your frickin’ county, it’s your jurisdiction, it’s your responsibility! The fact that you’re unprofessional—and the fact that you’re too scared or cowardly to do your duty—that’s the problem. Citizens have to hold their local officials culpable.”
“Let’s look at what that looks like in reality,” Guandolo continued. “When the FBI shows up at a citizen’s home, whether they’re given a head’s up or [not]—now, if they’re given a head’s up, the sheriff immediately calls local FBI and says, ‘No, you’re not doing that. Before you do anything in my county, I want to see it. And if you show up without notifying me, I’m going to put 20 deputies in front of this guy’s house, and you’re not going in. And we will physically block you because it’s wrong. And we’ll call citizens that we work with in the community, and we’ll have 100 or 200 of them out there because what you’re doing is wrong, and I’m not going to tolerate it. And by the way, I’m the law in this county, not you.'”
“What you’re doing is unjust, and so we’re not going to allow it in our county,” Guandolo added, “You can do that with the banks that are doing financing of these groups. ‘Hey, you want to finance communist China through [Black Lives Matter]? Then your bank will shut down in our county. We’re shutting this branch down, so if you want to operate, then you need to shut this off. You’ve got two hours.’ And there are a lot of ways to do it, a lot of ways to make people unwelcome. And if that makes people listening or viewing what we’re doing right here uncomfortable, then all I would ask is, that’s fine that you’re uncomfortable, get out of the way because there’s a war on, and we don’t need you in the middle if you’re not sure what’s actually going on." [vid]
guandolo echoes talking points put forth by extremists like Richard Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the president” and urges local law enforcement to resist federal authority. This false idea that the sheriff holds supreme authority has increased in popularity among right-wing activists who would like to see sheriffs conduct more audits of the 2020 presidential election and be more involved in future elections.
This film—and Turning Point USA’s heroic portrayal of the extremist Guandolo—is noteworthy for another reason: It shows just how far to the right the youth organization has become.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/constitutional-sheriff-richard-mack-to-meet-with-illinois-gubernatorial-candidate-gary-rabine/
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constitutional Sheriff’ Richard Mack Endorses Mark Finchem, Oath Keeper, QAnon Promoter, and Stop the Steal Activist, for Arizona Secretary of State
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arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem announced last week that he has been endorsed by ‘Constitutional sheriff’ Richard Mack. Finchem is a state representative, promoter of QAnon and stolen election conspiracy theories, and a member of the Oath Keepers militia group who was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He was previously endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
Mack, a former Oath Keepers board member and a supporter of the Bundy family’s armed standoff with federal officials, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches law enforcement officials that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the president.” He urges county sheriffs to resist “tyranny” from state and federal governments; during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has told sheriffs to refuse to enforce state public health measures like mask requirements. A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism warned that CSPOA’s trainings spread anti-government extremism among law enforcement officers.
Right Wing Watch reported this year that Mack is expanding the CSPOA by having county governments as well as individual law enforcement officers join the organization.
Finchem’s website includes a link to a recent appearance on the far-right One America News network in which he talked about the bogus “audit” of Maricopa County votes and claimed, “When we keep digging, we keep uncovering things that are these anomalies which—they turn into evidence, which become proof, which we refer to the attorney general’s office.”
In January, Finchem described the violence at the Capitol as “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.” A week after the Capitol insurrection, Finchem claimed that social media deplatforming is “something very similar” to what German Nazis, Pol Pot, and Mao did, warning, “When you silence speech, and you silence thought, the next step is eliminating people.”
Shortly before this year’s elections in Virginia, Finchem spoke ata campaign rally for Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.
In 2019, the Phoenix New Times described Finchem as a “fringe lawmaker” who described the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville as “a PSYOP to impugn those of us who stand for the rule of law and civil rights.” During the Obama administration, Finchem claimed that the president was “taking every opportunity to install his ideological, totalitarian dictatorship.”
Arizona’s current secretary of state, Democrat Katie Hobbs, has received death threats and harassment from Trump supporters. She and other election officials targeted by Trump and his allies have told CNN they live in fear of retaliation for not backing Trump’s stolen-election claims. Hobbs is running for governor.
The Associated Press has reported that two other Arizona state legislators running to be the GOP nominee for secretary of state have proposed new restrictions on voting and a bill allowing state legislators to disregard voters and choose their own Electoral College electors.
Some right-wing donors aligned with Trump are focusing on electing Trump allies to oversee future elections. Trump has also endorsed secretary of state candidates in Michigan and Georgia and a proponent of debunked stolen election claims for Michigan attorney general.
Tags: Donald Trump Mark Finchem Richard Mack Arizona audit Election 2020 Election 2022 Election 2024 Misinformation Stop the Steal Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association CSPOA Republican Party
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- Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is ananti-government extremist group whose primary purpose is to recruit sheriffs into the anti-government “patriot” movement.
- CSPOA is led by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who gained celebrity on the right in the 1990s after suing to overturn a prominent gun control measure, the Brady Law, especially after the Supreme Court ruled largely in his favor.
- Thecentral tenet of CSPOA, borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that the county sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county,able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.
- Mack primarily marketed this (false) claim as a way to oppose gun control measures, but in 2020-21, he has also used it to exploit anger and frustration over federal and state measures to combat Covid-19.
- Mack crisscrosses the country for speaking engagements where he promotes himself, CSPOA and his county sheriff thesis.
- Increasingly, he seeks out law enforcement audiences, billing his extremist events as “trainings.”
- In a disturbing development, in 2021, Mack was able to win official state approval for his “trainings” in Montana and Texas, which allows attendees to receive continuing education credit for attending Mack’s events.
Introduction
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a large anti-government extremist group whose primary purpose it is to spread anti-government propaganda to, and recruit from, law enforcement personnel, especially county sheriffs and sheriff’s deputies. The group was founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, who has used CSPOA as a vehicle to gain stature and influence within both the far right and the mainstream right. Although the Oath Keepers, another anti-government extremist group that recruits from law enforcement, have garnered more media attention in recent years, the CSPOA has arguably had more success infiltrating law enforcement, including at the executive level.
Mack and CSPOA’s primary argument is the false claim that the powers of the county sheriff supersede those of any other federal, state or local authorities, as long as the intent is to protect American citizens from enemies foreign or domestic. County sheriffs may therefore refuse to enforce—and can even actively oppose—any federal, state or other governmental measure (law, regulation, tax, court order, etc.) that they deem unconstitutional. This notion—which has no basis in American law—was borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement (CSPOA’s staff has included people with ties to that movement). Mack has also claimed—again, falsely—that the county sheriff has the power to call out the “militia” to support him in his opposition to tyranny.
The Emergence of Richard Mack
Richard Mack is the founder and leader of CSPOA, and the organization would likely not exist long without him. Mack, however, was a “celebrity” within the far-right long before he launched CSPOA.
The Utah native began his law enforcement career as a police officer in Provo, Utah. Mack later moved to Arizona, where he was elected sheriff of sparsely populated Graham County in 1988 (serving two terms, both as a Democrat). His rise to prominence began in early 1994 when he sued the federal government over the constitutionality of the Brady Law, gun control legislation that established a waiting period for people who wished to purchase handguns, among other things. Mack, backed by the NRA (which named him officer of the year in 1994), embarked on a public campaign against the Brady Law, giving seemingly countless interviews in the press and on the air across the country. Several years later, the Supreme Court overturned key portions of the Brady Law, cementing Mack’s status as a defender of gun ownership.
At home, voters were less impressed with Mack, who lost a primary bid for a third term by a 3-1 margin, ending Mack’s law enforcement career by 1997. To make ends meet, Mack worked as a car salesman and, briefly, as a “consultant” for the American Institute for Research, a Utah-based company led by tax protester Albert E. Carter, until Carter was raided by the FBI during a fraud investigation (in 2004, Carter pleaded guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud for operating what was essentially a Ponzi scheme).
As Mack’s celebrity grew, he had more opportunities to express his views, many of which were extremist. One of Mack’s earliest influences was W. Cleon Skousen, the far right-wing conspiracy theorist and promoter of divinely inspired limited government who influenced many anti-government extremists over the decades, primarily in Western states. Mack has even taught at the Heritage Academy charter school in Arizona, a school founded by an acolyte of Skousen.
Mack’s ideological orientation has primarily been far right-wing and anti-government in nature, with many of his views adopted from or influenced by the anti-government “patriot” movement (an umbrella movement that includes the militia movement, the sovereign citizen movement, and the tax protest movement). From the tax protest movement, Mack has claimed that the 16th Amendment (which authorized an income tax) was never lawfully ratified, and he adopted his expansive views on the powers of the county sheriff from the sovereign citizen movement. However, he may have been most influenced by the militia movement’s hostility towards the federal government. In 1994, Mack claimed he took an oath to defend the U.S. from all enemies, foreign and domestic, “and it appears that our own Washington D.C. bureaucracy has become one of the domestic enemies.” In March 1995, Mack urged an audience not to give up their guns because they were the best weapon against government tyranny and the “New World Order."
Mack was an early, vocal supporter of the militia movement, which emerged in the mid-1990s, claiming to have formed a militia of his own in Graham County (at different times, he called it a “militia” and a “posse,”) and urging people not to demonize militia groups. Even the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 failed to sway him. “[The bombing] no more changes my opinion of the militias than the O. J. Simpson trial changes my opinion of retired black professional football players,” he told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter a month after the bombing. A 1996 Christian Science Monitor story quoted Mack, referring to the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, as saying, “I don’t know of any militias that have shot a young boy in the back or a woman in the face who was holding a baby,” After militia members were arrested in Arizona on weapons charges in 1996, Mack told the Inquirer that, “What I see in most militias is the type of courage to stand for freedom as exemplified by the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square.”
Borrowing from militia movement conspiracy theories, Mack has argued that “power-hungry government officials backed by people with hidden agendas” are engaged in a plot to “control and enslave Americans.” In his 2014 book Are You a David?, Mack claimed that the federal government has reached a “zenith of corruption, abuse, greed, deceit and debt” and that “criminals in government parade around as heroes while attacking Americans.” On numerous occasions, Mack has stated that the federal government is the greatest threat to Americans.
After he lost his race for sheriff’s office in 1996, Mack spent a number of years running unsuccessfully for a variety of offices in several states. He moved to Utah in 1998 to run for sheriff in Utah County, but lost the Republican primary. In 2004, he announced his run for the governor of Utah (as a Libertarian) on a militia shortwave radio show. His bid went nowhere, as did a 2006 bid to become a U.S. Senator from Utah. In 2011, Mack announced to an audience at the extremistJohn Birch Society in Texas that he planned to run for Congress. As late as 2018, back in Arizona, Mack ran for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, but came in eighth in the Republican primary with 1.42% of the vote.
Mack’s Public Speaking Crusade - Including White Supremacist Venues
For the past 25-plus years, Richard Mack has been an indefatigable public speaker, constantly crisscrossing the country in search of audiences. Clean-cut, with an appealing speaking voice, Mack has addressed groups small and large, typically using the story of his Brady Law victory as a way to attack the federal government or, more recently, to help introduce his views about county sheriffs.
Initially, many of Mack’s speaking engagements and personal appearances were connected to either the NRA or to the John Birch Society. Soon, Mack was speaking regularly to every imaginable type of conservative or right-wing audience, mainstream or extreme. Beginning in 2009-2010, Mack became a regular at Tea Party events around the country. At one point in the early 2010s he estimated he had spoken with about 70 Tea Party groups over the previous two years, which was likely no exaggeration.
In 2012, when living in Texas, Mack spoke at local events such as the Tax Day Tea Party Rally in Texarkana, the Boerne (TX) Tea Party Candidate Forum, a Constitutional Study Group in Bergheim, Libertyfest West in Odessa, a 9/12 Meet Greet in Kerrville, and to audiences at the John Birch Society in Houston as well as the North Shore Republicans in Lago Vista. This was in addition to events in Alabama, Nevada and Indiana, among other places.
Mack’s incessant need for an audience means he has spoken to or shared the stage with a variety of other extremists, including people associated with the militia and sovereign citizen movements. His associations have also included white supremacists and antisemites. Though Mack has condemned white supremacy, claiming it has no place in a free society, he does seem to be willing to make exceptions as long as doing so provides him with a microphone. According to the Coalition for Human Dignity, Mack was a keynote speaker at a 1995 conference hosted by the white supremacist America’s Promise Ministries in Prescott, Arizona. In 2012, Mack appeared as a guest on the Political Cesspool radio program hosted by white supremacist James Edwards. In 2015, Mack spoke at an event funded by America’s Foundation, a Mississippi organization created by white supremacist Richard Barrett. Two years later, in April 2017, Mack appeared on another white supremacist radio program, “By Yahweh’s Design,” in an episode titled “Meet Richard Mack.”
Mack’s willingness to overlook racism and antisemitism is evident in his most recent speaking campaign —a planned series of 84 events over 111 days in 2021. “Arise USA! The Resurrection Tour” features a variety of right-wing and conspiratorial speakers, highlighting Mack and fellow organizer Robert David Steele. Steele, who claims to be a former CIA agent, is a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist as well as an outspoken antisemite.
Steele, outed by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights as a “prolific purveyor of antisemitism,” has claimed that “virtually all Jews” are “complicit in the Zionist global plan to use open orders and multiculturalism” to eradicate opposition to “Zionist hegemony” and the subservience of all others. In 2017, Steele chatted with former Klan leader David Duke on the latter’s website about “his [Steele’s] activities in the struggle against Zionist supremacy.” The United States, Steele told an Iranian newspaper in 2019, “must eradicate the Zionist pest from our homeland.”
Although the Arise USA! Tour was announced with great fanfare, attendance (and revenue) from early events was underwhelming, and the tour had to be scaled back significantly.
Richard Mack and Indoctrinating Law Enforcement
Although anti-government extremists tend to be hostile to law enforcement—and have assaulted or even killed a number of law enforcement officers over the years—they have also exhibited a longstanding interest in sharing their ideas with that community, especially local law enforcement, based on the premise that sympathetic law enforcement officers would not enforce unpopular laws, such as income tax laws or gun regulations.
In the 1990s, the most prominent police recruiter within the “patriot” movement was former Phoenix police officer Jack McLamb, founder of the groupPolice Against the New World Order and publisher of the related Aid & Abet magazine. As McLamb became less active with age and infirmity (he died in 2014), a successor arose in 2009, when Stewart Rhodes, an attorney and former Army officer, started The Oath Keepers. This new group had the particular goal of spreading militia ideology to current and former military personnel, first responders and police officers. The Oath Keepers soon became one of the largest groups associated with the militia movement.
Richard Mack was one of the founding members of The Oath Keepers, served on its board and actively promoted the group. For Rhodes—who has no law enforcement background himself—Mack was an ideal spokesperson, and the Oath Keepers featured him as often as they could.
His involvement with the Oath Keepers seems to have reenergized Mack as well. In 2009, Mack published his pamphlet, “County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope,” which promoted his thesis that the county sheriff was the “last line of defense” for the preservation of liberty, that the sheriff had the power to oppose any perceived “tyranny” (including a federal or state law) in their jurisdiction and that the sheriff even has the power to call out the militia to support their efforts.As many people recognized, Mack’s argument was not original but was borrowed wholesale from the Posse Comitatus, a violent anti-government extremist group active in the 1970s-80s that eventually evolved into the sovereign citizen movement.
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From 2009-2011, Mack promoted his county sheriff thesis at Oath Keepers events and anywhere else he could find an audience. Eventually, Mack decided to start his own organization and use his stature as a former sheriff to reach other sheriffs; he founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) in 2011.
Mack and CSPOA
With CSPOA at his disposal, Mack no longer needed Rhodes and the Oath Keepers (he eventually parted ways with them, departing from the board). CSPOA would be very Mack-centric, although Mack did bring on board Rick Dalton as his right-hand man. Dalton, a retired Mesa, Arizona, police officer, previously served as a key figure in Jack McLamb’s Police Against the New World Order.
Like the Oath Keepers, CSPOA would be open to anybody (the cost of yearly membership is currently $99), but unlike the Oath Keepers, it had a narrow focus: the office of the county sheriff. There are around 3100 sheriffs in the United States, and they became Mack’s key audience and target. When a California anti-immigrant group held an early fundraiserfor CSPOA in March 2011, it declared that Mack “is working tirelessly to educate Sheriffs nationwide to understand their Oath of Office and enforce the Constitutionally protected rights of the people they serve.”
Mack reached out to sheriffs via mailers and surveys, as well as individually. When Mack held a speaking event, he invited nearby sheriffs to attend. Mack was also vocal in praising sheriffs who took actions he approved of, calling them “constitutional sheriffs.” Soon, CSPOA began handing out the “Constitutional Sheriff of the Year” award; winners have included controversial Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, Jr., who described Black Lives Matter as a hate group and claimed they would join with the terrorist group ISIS to destroy American society, as well as Nick Finch, a Florida sheriff who unlawfully released a man arrested for a firearms felony and was suspended by the governor. A Washington state sheriff, Bob Songer, received the award for refusing to enforce a state gun control initiative.
It didn’t take long before some sheriffs responded favorably to Mack’s entreaties, joining CSPOA, showing up for or even speaking at his events, or referring to themselves as “constitutional sheriffs” and repeating or paraphrasing Mack’ claims about the powers of the sheriff. A number of sheriffs, especially in Western states, already had a long history of right-wing activism or opposition to the federal government. These included Glenn Palmer, the long-time sheriff of Grant County, Oregon, who vocally supported Ammon Bundy and his band of anti-government extremists who seized control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, meeting with them and calling them “patriots.” (Palmer’s support of the Bundy extremists may have cost him his next election). Another prominent CSPOA supporter was Dar Leaf, sheriff of Barry County, Michigan. In 2020, Leaf appeared onstage at a protest with militia members who later would be charged with plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan. After their arrest, he suggested the plotters might have been trying to make a citizen’s arrest of the governor.
A few Eastern state sheriffs --- where the powers of the sheriff had been significantly curtailed -- also joined Mack’s group.
ADL has identified dozens of sheriffs who have joined CSPOA or otherwise associated themselves with the group (this includes some who joined while sheriff but no longer hold the position), as well as a handful of police officers and a few state and local elected officials. It is remarkable that serving, high-ranking law enforcement officers would so readily link themselves to an extremist group.
The broader influence of the CSPOA is even more notable; a number of sheriffs across the country now refer to themselves as “constitutional sheriffs” even while leaving open the question of whether they have any formal ties to CSPOA. CSPOA has moreover inspired many people across the country—sometimes with no law enforcement experience at all—to run for the office of sheriff. For example, after the sheriff of Idaho’s Ada County resigned in 2021, several candidates stepped forward for consideration by county commissioners who had the responsibility of selecting a replacement sheriff to serve for the remainder of the term. These candidates, included Doug Traubel, author of a book called Red Badge: A Veteran Peace Officer’s Commentary on the Marxist Subversion of American Law Enforcement & Culture. Traubel claimed that “Islam is the culture of death” and that “Jews” were to blame for the creation of the Soviet Union and “led the Bolshevik revolution.” Traubel openly identified himself with the “constitutional sheriffs.” He was not selected.
Several years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center attempted to find out how many sheriffs actually supported Mack, and reached out to 500 or so sheriffs whom Mack had publicly praised. Reportedly, 50-60 were willing to confirm their support. Based on that, as well as other sheriffs who had public ties or who had made statements, the SPLC estimated that “probably…several hundred sheriffs” were supportive of Mack.
Mack has claimed that some of his national CSPOA events have been attended by more than 100 sheriffs and that several hundred sheriffs are members. The organization Political Research Associates has noted that nearly a quarter (7 of 30) of the people who make up the leadership of the National Sheriffs Association Board of Directors and Executive Committee had ties to CSPOA.
What is clear is that over the past 10 years, Richard Mack has succeeded in spreading his extremist ideas to a substantial minority of sheriff’s offices in the United States. This has been possible in large part because Mack has successfully framed his sheriff concepts as an antidote to gun control measures. Many of the people who have adopted the “constitutional sheriff” position have done so because of their views on firearms.
Mack has also exhibited considerable ability to exploit any current situation to promote his views. In 2020-2021, Mack helped engineer a considerable—and successful— CSPOA pivot from guns to the coronavirus, promoting the idea of “constitutional sheriffs” protecting citizens from the tyranny of lockdowns, mask-wearing and other virus containment measures. Numerous sheriffs have come forward to oppose stay-at-home orders or similar decrees, and right-wing media, including Fox News, have given many of them prominent platforms. Many (though not all) of these sheriffs have ties to CSPOA, but even those who do not help spread the notion of “sheriff’s resistance,” which indirectly but substantially benefits CSPOA.
County Membership
The general growth of “sheriff’s resistance” may have played a role in one of the latest CSPOA developments: the rise of “memberships” linked not to individuals (sheriffs or otherwise) – but rather to entire counties.
In May 2021, Mack announced that Nevada’s Lander County was the first “CSPOA County.” According to Mack, Lander county manager Bert Ramos reached out to CSPOA and asked to be listed as a member county, marking the first time that an entire governmental entity had aligned itself with CSPOA. According to Ramos, the county commissioners voted 4-1 to join CSPOA. A local official confirmed to ADL that the county—or, rather, its taxpayers—had paid CSPOA a $2,500 membership fee.
In June 2021, county commissioners in Elko County, Nevada, approved a measure linking their county to CSPOA. This was celebrated by an “Arise USA” tour event at which Mack was the main speaker and Robert David Steele provided his own thoughts on “Traitors, Wall Street criminals and satanic pedophiles.”
The Arise USA! website reported in July that Lyon County, Nevada, had similarly become a “constitutional county” and that “in Washington [state] the sheriff [Brad Rogers] has declared Klickitat County to be a Constitutional County against the opposition of the Commissioners loyal to the deep state.”
Most recently, in August 2021, Clay County, Nebraska, Board member L. Wayne Johnson received a proposed resolution from CSPOA that would have Clay County join the group. Johnson allegedly “considered, but ultimately rejected” the resolution to join. However, he did say he would introduce a different resolution that “includes many of the beliefs of [CSPOA],” including its contention that sheriffs can reject enforcement of federal and state laws.
'Training' Law Enforcement
The most disturbing tactic used by Mack (and CSPOA) are efforts to use “trainings” as a way to indoctrinate law enforcement officers into the ideology of anti-government extremist movement. This ploy plays into Mack’s strengths as a speaker and exploits his background in law enforcement, as well as his role in overturning the Brady Law. Mack’s trainings are often described as teaching “Constitutional principles.”
Mack’s efforts to secure law enforcement audiences predate CSPOA itself. In 2010, for example, Mack circulated an online petition to convince the Sheriff’s Association of Texas to let him present at their 132nd Annual Training Conference. That same year, he issued an “open invitation” to all law enforcement officers to attend his “Sheriff Mack Seminar” in Maine, where he divided his presentation into two sessions, one for law enforcement only and the other for the general public.
Mack intended from the beginning that a big part of CSPOA’s agenda would be training law enforcement. He fundraised on the idea of sponsoring a “National Training Program” and covering the travel costs for sheriffs around the country to attend his seminars. CSPOA’s first big event was its first national convention, held in Las Vegas in January 2012 and dubbed “No Sheriff Left Behind.” Mack subsequently claimed that between 115-120 sheriffs appeared at the event, a figure that is impossible to confirm.
Over the years, Mack continued CSPOA’s outreach efforts to law enforcement, alerting local sheriffs whenever he was presenting in their area and typically offering them free access to his events. In 2016, Mack toyed with the idea of offering “certification training,” in which law enforcement officers would come to a two-day seminar, get “certified,” then return to their states and offer that training locally. That same year, he claimed to have trained more than 400 sheriffs.
A typical CSPOA training might be like one held at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia,in September 2020. Dubbed a “Free Constitutional Training Seminar for all Sheriffs, Peace Officers and Public Servants,” it featured Mack, former Indiana sheriff Brad Rogers, and “constitutional attorney” Michael Peroutka (best known for running for president in 2004 on the far right Constitution Party ticket, and for having been a member of the racist neo-Confederate group League of the South).
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In a video advertising the training, Mack asked, “How many of you have been sick and tired of this mask stuff? And how many of you are tired of being pushed around and victimized by our own government officials? Can you believe this is all happening?” Mack urged viewers to ask their own sheriffs to attend, and to offer them financial assistance to do so.
In 2021, Mack and CSPOA organized three trainings—one in Montana and two in Texas—that were actually officially certified by POST (“Peace Officer Standards and Training”) officials in those states, thus qualifying law enforcement attendees at these extremist events for continuing education credits. The idea behind POST certification of law enforcement trainings is to maintain minimum standards of quality, objectivity and relevance for programs designed for law enforcement.
In late February 2021, CSPOA held a two-day training in The Woodlands north of Houston. CSPOA billed “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope” as an official training event of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Training (TCOLE, the Texas equivalent of POST), for which attendees could get educational credit. The event was cohosted by CSPOA and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. During the event, “constitutional attorney” KrisAnne Hall, a frequent Mack collaborator, reportedly told law enforcement attendees that state and county laws are superior to federal law and that the county sheriff is the most powerful elected official in the country. According to a reporter with the New American, the publication of the right-wing extremist John Birch Society, which covered the event, Hall also explained to the audience that it is a sheriff’s duty to ignore federal gun laws. It is not clear how many sheriffs or other law enforcement officers attended, but nearly 40 people posed for photographs afterwards.
In June 2021, the Montana Department of Justice announced a four-hour POST-certified “Constitutional Training” event by Mack in Flathead County later that month. The announcement openly proclaimed that Mack asserts sheriffs can refuse to enforce federal laws they claim are unconstitutional. After news got out, the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office—which had sponsored the event—cancelled it because of alleged staffing limitations. However, the course remains POST-certified, and theoretically Mack could offer it again. An ADL inquiry subsequently revealed that state officials had not been provided with lesson plans before they certified it. Mack told a local newspaper that he had hosted state-approved law enforcement trainings in 10 different states.
Advertisement for Richard Mack’s “Constitutional Training” course in Kalispell, Montana, June 2021.
CSPOA returned to Texas in July 2021 for two additional “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope” training events for “sheriffs, peace officers and elected officials.” Held back-to-back in Burnet and Crockett, Texas, with the assistance of the Burnet County Sheriff’s Department and the Houston County Sheriff’s Department, these events were billed as official TCOLE training opportunities. A flier for the trainings informed attendees that they would, among other things, learn “Why sheriffs should not enforce Covid-19 lockdowns, restrictions and mask wearing decrees & legislation,” and why “Sheriffs should also prevent others from forcing citizens to submit to unlawful Covid-19 restrictions.”
As was the case in Montana, it is not clear that TCOLE took any precautions to ensure that Mack’s “trainings” were suitable for law enforcement, that they taught accurate law and policy, were taught by people with appropriate qualifications and credentials or were in any way different from Mack’s typical extremist events.
Collectively, these events represent one of the most successful attempts in recent decades by anti-government extremists to infiltrate law enforcement, even securing the official imprimaturs and approvals of the states of Montana and Texas. It is almost a certainty that Mack will continue his efforts to acquire official approvals from more states for his “trainings” of law enforcement officers—events that are not professional trainings at all but rather delivery platforms for potentially dangerous anti-government propaganda.
Policy Recommendations
The tactics used by Richard Mack and CSPOA to spread anti-government extremist propaganda to law enforcement officials and to recruit them into that cause are troubling, especially because Mack can boast of some success.
Particularly problematic are his attempts to pass off extremist propaganda presentations as trainings for law enforcement and to get official sanction for them from state-level Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) agencies. His successes in Texas and Montana raise concerns for agencies around the country.
ADL recommends that states:
Review training procedures for law enforcement. States should review training curricula to ensure that trainings serve a legitimate and specific law enforcement purpose, teach principles that are in accord with current federal and state law and judicial rulings, and do not attempt to spread partisan or ideological viewpoints. Agencies should also consider vetting outside entities offering such trainings to ensure they are not connected to or part of an extremist-related group and specifically to ensure they are not connected to an extremist group seeking to infiltrate or propagandize law enforcement. Agencies should establish a process for external review to verify training complies with these values. Agencies should keep careful records of training and be responsive to concerns about trainings. Training methods that do not comply with these principles must be immediately halted.
Review policies and procedures for addressing law enforcement affiliations with extremist movements. State and local law enforcement agencies should ensure that officers do not promote (including via tattoos, vehicle decals, and clothing patches) extremist groups or movements that jeopardize community security. Agencies should consider implementing policies and procedures to better prevent extremists from being hired as law enforcement officers. This may include additional background evaluation to ensure potential recruits are not engaging in extremist activity, promoting extremist ideologies or are members of an extremist group or cause. Implementation of these recommendations should be conducted in a manner that is consistent with the U.S. Constitution and applicable laws.
ADL urges federal officials to:
Ensure adequate budgets to assist states with needed training.Throughout the appropriations process, Members of Congress should provide resources for training opportunities for law enforcement to recognize and combat extremism.
All officials must:
Speak out against hate and raise awareness of extremist propaganda.Americans nationwide must be better aware of extremist indicators and propaganda, some of which may not be obviously extremist in nature for people with no background knowledge. Further, hearing officials echo the need for hope over hate, and justice and fair treatment over discrimination, can help build momentum in communities to reject hateful rhetoric.
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Mack leads the Oath Keepers, one of the militias that turned the January 6 protest violent. He used to be a sheriff in Arizona before voters ousted him in 1997
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