03/17/16 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, next up is our friend Will Grigg, William Norman Grigg, author of Liberty in Eclipse and the great blog Pro Libertate.
That's freedominourtime.blogspot.com, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Will?
Scott, I'm doing well.
It's great to be with you.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
And of course, I mean, if anyone had asked me, with my eyes closed, I could have told them you want the definitive account to what happened at the end of the Lavoie-Thinnecombe highway chase and all of that.
Well, the whole dang story, I'd have sent them to you anyway.
And this is, you have a piece here about, see, I'm screwing up because I can't remember if I'm supposed to say Idaho or what state this was in.
Was it in Washington State?
It was in Oregon.
In Oregon.
It was in Oregon, yes.
See, this is why I'm botching the introduction here.
I didn't pay close enough attention to this story at the time when it happened.
Sorry about that.
But I got you on the most important part of it.
And that is, well, I guess, different police agencies now pitted against each other and a little bit of truth coming out.
Is that it?
I think that there is reason to believe that's happening here.
The definitive account has yet to be written because many of the key details have been redacted from the 360-page incident report, which I've been reading over the last couple of days.
And also because the FBI is protected by privilege and by operational security protocols that the Oregon State Police weren't able to penetrate.
One of the really interesting details in that incident report about the January 26th shooting of a Boyd Finnegan there on U.S. Highway 395 in Oregon is the fact that they had two separate communication systems.
You had seven SWAT team members from the Oregon State Police on the site.
And they were under the operational command and control of the so-called hostage rescue team, which is a somewhat ironic title for a group that is consistently involved in killing people rather than saving them.
And that's the FBI, the HRT.
Exactly.
Yes, the HRT is the FBI's proprietary SWAT team.
And they had both tactical and operational control of the operation.
They were there for the purpose of arresting Ammon Bundy and a handful of others who had been involved in the protest occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
And I thought that was fascinating that they were on two separate communication circuits.
The Oregon State Police had their own police band radio that they were communicating through, but they couldn't communicate with the FBI.
And my theory at this point is that they were actually operating on two separate sets of rules of engagement.
The HRT was there for the nominal purpose of arresting Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finnegan and Ryan Palmer and a handful of others who had been traveling to a town about 100 miles away called John Day for the purpose of holding a town hall meeting.
But the way that they set up this encounter anticipated that they were going to be dealing with non-cooperation on the part of Mr. Finnegan.
They knew who would be part of this two-vehicle convoy.
One was a Jeep Wrangler.
Mr. Finnegan was driving a Dodge Ram pickup.
And they knew that the driver of the Jeep Wrangler was most likely going to be cooperating because there's very strong evidence that Mark McConnell, who's been identified as one of the organizers of the protest and is a bodyguard for Ammon Bundy, there's very strong evidence that he was actually a cooperating informant with the FBI.
Witness the fact that in any operation of this kind where there is a CI, who is the first to get arrested and the first to be let go?
It's the CI.
That's what happened with Mr. McConnell.
He was arrested at the roadblock because he cooperated.
And in the report that has been issued in the investigations, it's pretty clear that they anticipated cooperation from the driver of the Jeep Wrangler.
And his name is redacted from the report.
That's another very important piece of evidence.
So he was cooperative.
He was taken into custody and immediately released.
And within a day, what did he do?
He created and disseminated a video in which he accused Finnegan of precipitating his own demise by charging at the OSP officers who shot him.
And that's something that is not validated by the video that's subsequently been released after the inevitable finding that the shooting was justified.
But what seems to have happened here is that they had anticipated that that vehicle, which was following Mr. Finnegan's vehicle, was going to stop at the first section of this encounter.
There were two different roadblocks.
Actually, it wasn't a roadblock.
There was a traffic stop that was arranged at one point.
Then a certain fraction of a mile down the road, there was a roadblock where you had two vehicles forming a V and a third vehicle behind them.
It was anticipated, I think, that the Wrangler would stop and that Finnegan would not cooperate.
And after Finnegan, at the first traffic stop, said he was going to John Day, he was going to go meet with Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Grant County, and that if they were going to stop him, they were going to have to shoot him.
At that point, Officer No.
2, whose testimony composes about the first 60 pages of this report, said he got on the radio and is not cooperating.
We're going to have to shoot him.
And that seems to me to have been the anticipated outcome, because the FBI had detailed intelligence as to who was going to be in those vehicles, what their disposition was in terms of submitting to law enforcement, what arms they would be carrying to the destination, and so forth.
They've been given detailed intelligence, most likely by Mr. McConnell.
So Finnegan proceeded up the road, Highway 395, being pursued by two vehicles, one of which was a SWAT vehicle operated by the HRT.
And when he got to the roadblock, he was traveling an estimated speed varying from 50 to 70 miles an hour, according to the police witnesses.
And there were gunshots being flung at the driver's side of this vehicle as he approached the roadblock.
And that reminds me a little bit of what was called the Escalation of Force Protocol in occupied Iraq, where people who didn't stop at military roadblocks or military checkpoints were treated as hostiles and engaged for the purpose of taking them out as a threat.
That's a different protocol from what domestic law enforcement agencies are supposed to operate under when they're maintaining a roadblock.
The objective of a roadblock that a law enforcement agency sets up is to take somebody into custody so that he or she can be made subject to the criminal justice system.
That wasn't what was going on there at that roadblock.
According to the investigation, there were three shots that were fired at the vehicle before it encountered the roadblock.
Mr. Finnegan veered to the left, missing a series of spike strips that had been deployed on the highway for the purpose of slowing him down and forcing him to stop.
He plowed into a snowbank, and he emerged from the vehicle with his hands in the air.
And it was at this point that a, as yet, unidentified HRT operator took two shots at him.
And this is now according to the state police report you're saying?
Yes, it is.
The state police, after several weeks, not several weeks, but after several iterations of questioning with the HRT, finally was able to verify that there had been two shots that they couldn't account for in terms of the type of ammo that was used and the trajectories of the shot.
They finally decided by process of elimination, it must have been an FBI HRT operator who flung those shots at Mr. Finnegan as he emerged from the vehicle and attempted to kill him.
Once again, that's not a law enforcement protocol.
He was no longer an active threat.
He emerged with his hands in the air, and yet there was an attempt to kill him.
What's really interesting here, Scott, is that in the incident report, this is something that's been reported in the press, the Oregonian newspaper yesterday, there's mention of the fact that the shell casings were never found and that the extended video of this encounter, the video is actually over an hour long that the FBI had compiled using what was most likely a remote piloted drone aircraft.
About an hour and a half of footage was taken.
About 26 minutes of it was released to the public after the shooting and a couple of days immediately after that event.
But in the extended video, there's actually a sequence in which the five HRT operators are shown huddling and then one of them reaches down and collects the shell casings and leaves the scene.
The covering of the evidence of unlawful shots taken in an attempt to kill Mr. Finnegan.
All right, we've got to stop right there to take this break.
It's the great Will Grigg, William Norman Grigg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Finnegan's wake is the peace, and we'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Grigg.
Thank goodness, man.
It's been way too long.
Kind of a sorry occasion to speak.
I know.
The killing of this guy, LaVoy Finnicum.
And so there's new footage that's been released.
There's footage that you're talking about we ended with.
There they are apparently conspiring, and then one of them actually picks up the shell casings from the ground.
This is the Ruby Ridge and, well, half of the Ruby Ridge killers and the Waco killers from not the ATF but the FBI side from April 19th.
The FBI's hostage rescue team, a new generation of them, I guess.
It probably wasn't Lon Horiyuchi taking the pot shots this time like he did in both of those cases.
But anyway, so the deal is this.
Real quick, the new news is that when this guy got out of his truck, according to the state police you're instructing us here, Will, when he got out of his truck with his hands up, the hostage rescue team then took two shots at him.
Yes.
And then what happened, Will?
He was approached by two OSP troopers, one of whom emerged from the tree line with a firearm trained on Finnicum.
The other one came up from behind him with a taser.
According to the incident report, the second OSP trooper was not carrying a firearm.
He had a so-called less lethal munition, a taser.
It's not known for certain whether he was actually hit with a taser, but there was at some point in this encounter a gesture that was seen as a classic furtive movement in the direction of a 9mm handgun that was later found, allegedly, in the left-hand coat pocket of Mr. Finnicum.
And as he looked at the officer who was holding the taser and made that gesture, he was shot three times in the back by the other OSP trooper, and those shots were ruled justified by attorney Dan Norris.
He's the district attorney from Malheur County who was brought on as a special prosecutor there in Deschutes County.
I'm very well familiar with Mr. Norris, and he's an immensely corrupt person, and I'm saying that on the record.
He, interestingly enough, is not running for re-election in Malheur County.
I'm wondering if he's going to be given some kind of a federal sinecure before the end of the year.
The thing that I find most provocative about this, Scott, is that there were several less lethal options that are listed among the arsenal of the OSP troopers who were involved in this operation.
I still think they were operating on a different set of instructions than the FBI's HRT.
And as I mentioned, the HRT was communicating over a different frequency.
There were a commingling of FBI and HRT operators in each of the different units that were put together.
There were seven OSP troopers, and then there were five members of the FBI's SWAT team.
And you had different little teams where they intermingled people from the two agencies, but in order to communicate with the FBI, the OSP had to go through an FBI operator on the scene.
And so after the shooting takes place, and bear in mind Finnegan has been shot at twice from what would have been his right at the time he emerged from the driver's side of his truck, and his natural reaction upon being shot at is to assume that they're not trying to arrest him, they're trying to kill him.
And if you're a law enforcement officer at this point, if you're a certified peace officer, your objective is to take the guy into custody, not to kill him on the scene, if that's at all possible.
But at this point, it probably became pretty clear to Mr. Finnegan that they were simply going to kill him where he stood, which is one of the reasons why he died on his feet saying, you're going to have to shoot me, you're going to have to shoot me.
That apparently had been the default assumption all along.
After this took place, there were a number of gas rounds fired into the truck, and a number of other flashbangs, so-called less lethal munitions, fired into the truck, and you had two women in the truck, one of whom was 18 years old.
They were panicked, they were terrified, and they were being painted by laser sights.
Those laser sights were emanating from rifles in the hands of HRT operators, according to the incident report.
So you had the OSP trying to flush these people out of the truck, but at the same time, they couldn't move, because they realized that they were being targeted by people who were holding assault rifles.
And that reminded me a little bit of what happened at Mount Carmel, where these people were being driven out of their sanctuary after a six-hour-long toxic gas attack, and as they ran out, they were gunned down by hostage rescue team operators and trigger pullers from Delta, the Delta Force, so-called Delta Force, which, of course, is the federal special operations group from which the HRT was cabbed off a couple of decades ago.
And the other thing I find interesting about this, Scott, is the penitent was not attended to.
He was seen as dead, and one of the officers who witnessed this said, at this point, it was clear he wasn't a danger.
They didn't do anything about attending to him or rendering medical aid.
There was one medic on the scene.
He was a member of the HRT.
But after they had arranged the arrest of the occupants of the truck, the HRT took control of the scene where Finnegan had fallen, and their first priority was not to render aid but to handcuff him.
He either died before they arrived at the scene, or he died with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
And you're saying the medic just stood there and did not render aid.
He stood there and did nothing, exactly.
I know.
Oh, go ahead.
One last very important point here is that, at this point, the HRT is in control of the scene.
They had operational control of it for over 90 minutes before detectives showed up to start investigating the shooting.
One of the officers, Officer No.
5, said that he actually took a look at Finnegan, and he said that when they were providing first aid, quote-unquote, a bullet that had mushroomed as we were lifting, not me, as they were lifting his shirt up kind of fell out onto the snow.
And I remember thinking it looked like a .556 round.
It was perfectly mushroomed.
It was on the snow underneath Mr. Finnegan and was pointed out to other guys there.
And the questioner said, you don't know who may have collected that?
And the officer said, I do not.
So there is a missing spent round not accounted for here, in addition to the two copper-colored rounds that were seen by another officer but disappeared in the 90-minute interval before the detectives and the OSP showed up to investigate the crime scene.
So the HRT went and sanitized the scene, and that's obstructing an investigation.
That's a felony in any state and any county.
And just to make sure I understand what you're saying here, that would have been a round from one of their rifles as opposed to one of the handguns used by the state police on the scene.
If it had been an OSP round, it would have been accounted for.
They would have been able to say, oh, that's a round that was fired by the officer who shot him in the back, but that round disappeared.
It was never accounted for.
It disappeared.
The only people who could have taken that round from the scene would have been the HRT because otherwise it would have been accounted for by the OSP team that showed up about an hour later.
All right.
Now let's go back a little bit here about a couple of things.
It seems like from the footage, and I guess if you could remark if there's anything in the new footage that you think taken on the phone from inside the truck that you think is relevatory, I'd like to hear it, but I couldn't really make out anything important in there.
Maybe the gunshot hitting the truck is in there if I had paid better attention.
I want to go from the aerial footage.
Hey, waistband, Your Honor.
He reached for his waistband.
It's pretty clear from far away high in the sky that his hands sure do drop towards his side.
It seems like if I was to play the devil's advocate, at least on the part of the state police, it seems like perhaps maybe they didn't think they did have a choice but to shoot him if he was reaching for a gun.
I mean, he should actually have a chance to begin to draw it or something, I think, before they kill him, but that isn't up to me.
But close enough for government work.
But anyway, the real point being that it seems that the hostage rescue team had put those state police, even if you take that much for granted, the HRT had put the state police in that position by firing on this guy when he was surrendering.
As you said, he got out with his hands up.
Then they fired on him.
Is that right in the chronology?
Do we know that for a fact?
And then he reached for his waistband, for his gun, and then they killed him.
Yes, and it's possible that he was hit with something and he was reacting to being hit as well.
The perception of the people in the car was that he had been hit and that he had been injured and that he was instinctively reacting or reflexively reacting to being hit.
And that very well could be the round that you're just talking about that's missing, the one fired from further away by the HRT at that point.
Exactly.
It could have been a ricochet round that hit him and that caused that reaction.
But I agree with your overall perception of this.
My working theory is that the HRT arranged things to where the OSP is going to be taking the fall for what happens here, assuming that misconduct would be found.
They're being investigated by the Justice Department for whatever solace that might provide people who are interested in actual justice.
But the thing that I find interesting about the circumstances of these revelations, Scott, I've not seen the footage, nobody else has seen the footage, but the descriptions of it was leaked to Les Zates of the Oregonian newspaper by unnamed law enforcement sources.
What that suggests to me, something that I am, is that the OSP, having seen this evidence, is trying to make sure that they're controlling the narrative here rather than taking the full blame for what the HRT did.
They recognize that they have been used as a cat's paw here.
They're being used as what Nietzsche called the stolen teeth, and they don't like that role.
Yeah.
Well, it's the only hope we got by design, I guess.
You get these government agencies fighting among each other, and then supposedly they're to leave us alone a little bit more than they otherwise would.
Although in this case we're talking about a dead man laying in the snow, so guess not.
One other thing about this story that really infuriates me, Scott, they were headed to John Day where they're going to meet with the sheriff of Grant County.
In other words, they were going to be meeting with a certified peace officer in the state of Oregon who is considered politically unreliable.
They kept him completely out of the loop because he's regarded as a security leak.
And that's actually something that I did learn from that footage from inside the truck, was he's yelling out the door, hey, we're going to meet with cops down the street.
Exactly.
And, Scott, just an hour and a half ago, the Oregon Public Broadcasting Network announced that the Justice Department is investigating Sheriff Palmer now.
It's much more likely that he's going to be hit with criminal charges, most likely some kind of an exotic conspiracy charge, than that these HRT operators are going to be prosecuted for felonious obstruction of an official investigation.
You know, I wonder if the fact that there was no accountability whatsoever after Ruby Ridge and Waco and God knows who else these goons have killed since then, has anything to do with them thinking they can get away with this now, Will?
They've been staging operations of this sort in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and in Somalia and in Yemen.
They use exactly the same model.
They use exactly the same protocols overseas that they used in Deschutes County, Oregon.
It won't be long before it's Reaper drones and Hellfire missiles.
I think that's a logical surmise, yes.
You give up your empire or you live under it.
And so we chose to live under it.
I don't know who's we, but apparently it includes you and me, no matter how bad we protest, Will.
It would appear so.
All right, so now listen, at least now, I'm sorry I'm keeping you over just a minute here, if now the cops are fighting about this, is that, I mean, that could increase our chances a little bit, right?
If the HRT is hanging out the state police to dry so bad on this issue that they're already fighting back, then, I mean, obviously it's too late for him.
But, you know, might there actually be some prosecutions of the guilty or some kind of liability for the survivors or anything, you know?
Well, sometimes the friction that occurs in conflicts between bureaucracies is the only thing that will light a spark that will eventually illuminate the secrets that are being kept.
I think that's something that we can count on, that there are going to be other disclosures dislodged here that will at least let us know in fuller scope what happened there on Highway 395, as to whether there are prosecutions that should be prosecutions.
As a matter of fact, Shane Johnson, the sheriff of Deschutes County, really should file a criminal complaint against the HRT operators who committed, allegedly, felonious obstruction within his county.
He's not going to do this.
This is a guy who's dealing with his own huge forfeiture scandal related to his involvement as a duly deputized drug warrior on the order of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that went missing from their forfeiture plunder fund.
And then I mentioned DA Dan Norris from Malheur County.
Malheur County is facing literally millions of dollars in civil liability from similar misconduct arising in several cases.
So these people are corrupted and hence compromised.
And I think that the actual hope here is that there's going to be enough ambient frustration and outrage over what was done here, and a lot of that outrage is going to be emerging from within the ranks of the OSP, and you'll start getting defectors in place, speaking with people like the Oregonian newspaper and other media outlets, and hopefully that'll propagate itself.
That's a slender read upon which to repose our hopes, but perhaps it's the strongest we have available.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, there's one of these every single day, and especially at your blog, but it's another great lesson of just how insidious all this corruption is.
You let this guy and this guy get away with this and this.
When it comes down to it, now they're the only ones you can count on to hold these others accountable for the horrible things that they did, and so good luck with that.
And the whole damn thing is rotten, man.
At what point is the whole damn thing rotten, you know?
I'm sorry, I always curse when I'm talking with you.
I don't know why.
It's understandable.
As Nietzsche said, it's rotten down to its bowels.
Oh, that's why.
It's because we're always talking about the cops.
There you go.
All right.
Listen, I love you, man.
It's great to talk with you again, Will.
I really appreciate your efforts along these lines, of course, as always.
That means so much to me, Scott.
Thank you so much.
Talk to you soon.
All right, y'all, that is the great Will Grigg, William Norman Grigg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com for his great blog, Pro Libertate.
And this is so far a definitive take on Finnecum's murder at the hands, well, killing at the hands of the state police at the provocation of the FBI.
Finnecum's wake.
Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
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