Thread by @egavactip

Today's Saturday, so let's explore one of the strangest domestic terrorism cases I've followed over the years, and also a relatively rare one in which I thought at the time that the government went rather too far. I'm referring to the Republic of Texas 'cactus needle' case.

The Republic of Texas (ROT) was a large & dangerous sovereign citizen group (today's "Texas Nationalist Movement" is its descendant) that emerged in the 1990s resurgence of the sovereign citizen movement. By the late 1990s, it had already developed an extensive criminal history.

The cactus case began in the spring of 1998 in the far southern town of Harlingen, Texas, when a concerned citizen reached out to the FBI to let them know about a man he had been doing some computer work for, John Roberts, owner of a local "Bargain Barn" store. The citizen, John

Cain, had become disturbed to learn that Roberts was an ROT member. However, what he related to the FBI did not seem to be criminal in nature, so the FBI didn't do anything. However, a month later, Cain met with the FBI again and had a lot more to say, having had attended several

meetings in the interim. Cain told them that two other ROT members, Johnie Wise and Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., had gotten the idea of sending threatening messages to the heads of the IRS, the FBI, and a number of other prominent US or Texas officials.

Moreover, if their demands were not met, the ROT members wanted to launch attack against them. Wise even had an idea how: he wanted to modify a Bic lighter into a dart gun that would shoot a cactus thorn covered with a biological toxin (like botulism or rabies) at the target.

They even gave Cain a handwritten letter that laid out the entire plan. Based on all this information, the FBI got a lot more interested and became much more involved. At the direction of the ROT members, Cain sent the initial "Declaration of War" threat e-mail to a variety of

federal agencies. The ROT members then turned to following up on the threat with some poison cactus thorn action. They concentrated first on a Texas state judge, a woman, who had irritated them by not allowing them to represent themselves pro se in court, as sovereign citizens

typically seek to do. They planned to follow her and learn her movements. Wise suggested putting rabies or botulism on the (as yet only hypothetical) cactus thorn device. He said he had already bought the parts to convert Bic lighters into thorn shooters. Meanwhile, they

decided to send follow-up threat letters. Here's the text of one of them, sent to the head of the IRS:

At this point, in July 1998, the FBI obtained arrest warrants against Wise, Grebe and another ROT member, Oliver Dean Emigh. They were basically charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), and 7 counts of threatening to use a WMD.

The arrests got a fair amount of publicity at the time, primarily because President Bill Clinton was one of the targets discussed. At the time, I felt that this was a very aggressive prosecution, primarily because of the first charge.

There was a tremendous amount of evidence to back up all the threat charges--the cell did deliberately compose and send those threats--but was there enough evidence to say that they had truly planned the assassinations, versus merely shooting off their mouths?

The problem, for me, was the means by which these killings were proposed--using the notional Texas Ranger version of a James Bond device--those Bic lighters that would be turned into dart throwing devices. When the FBI searched Wise's residence, they found some chemicals, but

no biological agents (they did find some reading materials dealing with meat and chemicals). Nor did they find anything in the residences of the other two. It just seemed to me that one needs a high standard of proof to charge someone w/conspiracy via such an unlikely mechanism.

In the end, the jury largely seems to have agreed with me. It acquitted Emigh of all charges, and convicted Wise and Grebe only of two threat counts, not the WMD conspiracy count.

Even though acquitted of most of the charges, Wise and Grebe got very severe sentences: 292 months each (i.e., more than 24 years in prison!). This seemed a harsh sentence to me, considering the convictions.

I should note an appeals court later held up the long sentences.