Historically High - Ruby Ridge

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

The Weaver family moved to Boundary County in Idaho after a number of visions. The end times that were supposed to follow, never came. The Weaver's found their way into the White Nationalist movement that had infiltrated Northern Idaho. Randy would find himself involved with an ATF informant which got him jammed up. When he refused to work with them, they charged him. After he missed his court date, the U.S. Marshals came down on the Weaver family in a way that is hard to understand. The standoff at Ruby Ridge is the ultimate example of government overreach. There are no good guys in this story, but it needs to be told. Join us as we get Historically High on. Ruby Ridge. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back. Or if this is your first time, welcome. Professor Chris, I'm Professor Adam. We're getting it earlier. Three for three. Yes. Three for three. Actually, now that we say that, because again, we stagger these so we don't know how they're going to be released. It's probably going to be, we say it. It's this episode. Two weeks later, we get it. And it's going to be an episode that we recorded two weeks ago. So who knows. We're either going to be three for three or three for six. Either way, 50 percent is still pretty good. what they're doing. That's what today's episode is all about. Um, Ruby Ridge is not a situation or not a,

what am I trying to say? A historical event that has the same type of recognition as things like Waco or the Oklahoma City bombing. And I think the reason also for that is because Ruby Ridge was the first. Ruby Ridge, then Waco happens. Then the Oklahoma City bombing. so had nothing happened after Waco to distract and to like be the next big thing. I think Waco is more, or sorry, Ruby Ridge is more well known. I also think that that's a large part played in the circles that we spend our time in. I think that the story of Ruby Ridge in certain circles is told as a hero's tale. And there are no heroes in this.

Randy Weaver is not a hero. he was a victim, but he wasn't a hero. No. There are no heroes in this story. Yeah, this is a, this is a situation where you're just kind of walking down the middle, and there's just shit going wrong on your left and you're right. And you're just trying to kind of like stay in the middle and get the fuck through it. It's just, this is a story of just government overreach.

to the level of regardless of how bad Randy messed this up, there's no reason that this had to happen to the Weavers. There were so many other ways that this could have been handled. It's this weird thing because like listening to how Randy Weaver was painted. There's going to be times during this episode where you're just going to have to kind of sound sympathetic for the events that actually occur and everything. but a lot of it from Randy Weaver's perspective is all self-inflicted. And with this, when you heard people on the government side describing Randy Weaver, it made him out to be like the Grand Wizard of the KKK. He was a huge arms dealer.

At one point, I think they said he may have robbed some banks or something. but the truth is somewhere still within that realm, but nothing to that degree, I guess, is what you want to say. Not a good person, also not the Grand Wizard. So this almost also serves as like a, this was like a statement game, I think, for the government. You're going to, you know, once we get into the episode, you're going to kind of walk us through a situation that occurred in Philadelphia before this.

and this, that situation in Philadelphia, this, Waco, Oklahoma City bombing, a lot of these situations are like the first time that things like this have occurred in the states. And so the assumption is just like the government has a contingency for everything, right? Like they're prepared for anything and everything. This shows you that they would come into situations and be like, so what the fuck do we do? Yeah. And there were other standoffs. We talked about it with the SLA and Patty Hurst, but that was a shootout. There had been plenty of shootouts that had happened before because the engagement happens as such

that a shootout's just going to occur. And it was almost like they were used to doing it in more, not such rural environments. It was a completely different environment, but it was just like in that situation, like you said, with Patty Hurst, they were all trapped in a house that was in like a suburb. The cops that surrounded them, the house burned down.

But at the same time, they're just like, oh, we're familiar with these shootouts. And this is LA where a shootout like this isn't necessarily the most uncommon occurrence. These things have happened before. It's the reason why these groups are involved. With Randy Weaver, they had to fly in SRT teams and U.S. Marshals and ATF agents. They threw the book at this guy. It's funny, because you're like, well, who would have jurisdiction in this?

You're like, at some point somebody does, but that shows you what a hodgepodge message. was, it's just like, we're going to send you an FBI hostage rescue team from Quantico. We're going to have the U.S. Marshals there. We're going to have the ATF there. We're going to have the sheriff's department there. And you're just looking at it's like, so are you guys just like pulling all these people together? So you have a broader like variety of someone having an idea of how to how to do this?

Because Randy has an army, right? That's the only reason you would need all of these people up there. Not just Randy, his son, a family friend. They would have to have a completely fortified like a hilltop. fortress, machine guns. I mean, this guy is ready for a protracted siege. Yeah, like you said, that's the only reason you could

need this much law enforcement. But he wasn't. He was on the homestead on top of Mountain. There couldn't have been a more out in the sticks area for this all to play out. And unfortunately, it does play out in an area where white supremacy was

pretty ingrained because of the last decade or so, before this ends up happening. And so there's going to be points when we're going to point to Randy Weaver's sympathetic figures. There's going to be points that we point to the government as, you know, maybe being, punching above their weight while getting bad information. Nobody comes up good in this.

So they're punching down. They're punching down. I do think that we're having a tough time explaining this just because it is a very hard topic to talk about. But at the end of the day, this is just a story of excessive force. Randy's past be damned and all of Randy's mistakes be damned there's no mistake that Randy made

that called for this kind of a response Yes it was it seems like it should have been something very routine especially taking place where it did that's something that law enforcement and again we're kind of being vague about that because we're getting to it once we get into the episode but insane overreaction

insane and I think that's because it was they were trying to make a statement, basically in the backyard of the Aryan nation. Yeah, and we'll talk about why that was so important. Before we do, let's jump into it. We have our Patreon, patreon. Patreon.com slash historically high. We got a lot of good content out there. Jump on there.

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Burr. Yeah, to get into it, I don't even. even know how. It's just let's saw some barrels. I guess so. All right. So, we want to start with Randy? Yeah. Okay.

Randall. Randall Claude Weaver. Claude's such an Iowa middle name. Rand Claude Weave, damn. Born January 3rd, 1948 in Vasilica, Iowa, to a farming couple, Clarence and Wilma. The Weavers were churchhoppers. They kind of got a little bit of a taste of everything from Evangelical to Presbyterian to Baptist churches.

And there's really not a whole lot of reason to focus on a childhood Randy Weaver. But after he graduates from Jefferson High School in 1966, he begins attending Iowa Central Community College where this is his first time that he meets Vicky. Him and Vicky have some classes together. They're students. They know of each other. Randall doesn't stick around too long. He drops out in 1968 to join the U.S. Army in the height of Vietnam. Yeah.

That's a pretty interesting tie. He didn't get drafted. He went and put his name in. Which is kind of weird because wasn't the draft pretty early on? Again, that's one episode that just is going to be enormous. But with Vietnam, I thought that was pretty quickly that the draft was initiated on that. Maybe he was in a position, not sure if he was an only son or anything like that, if those were conditions.

But yeah, two years into college, he ends up enlisting in the Army. And I think he's stationed at Fort Bragg and ends up becoming a green beret. Yeah. Expert Marksman gets his certifications there. He ends up achieving the rank of sergeant. He doesn't go out of Vietnam, though. And this is a story that I feel like is sort of mirrors the way we talked about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombings, except for Timothy McVeigh was a

in the shit. He was over fighting there. You have Randy that doesn't go over to fight in Vietnam, but what he is a part of for Bragg is he ends up breaking up this drug ring. There were some other soldiers on base that were

bringing in drugs to pass out and sell. And after Randy does this, he's kind of trying to figure out the chain of custody for where the drugs went after that. He's trying to make sure it's wrapped up because he you know, he was part of this.

He wants to kind of see what the end result of it is and goes to, I don't know. I think it was his commanding officer. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Basically goes in as like, hey, you know, what happened to the evidence and everything. And the guy just basically tells him, don't, doesn't give him an answer. Could have just lied. Above your pay grade.

Yeah, could have said, you know, that's, we're not able to discuss those ongoing trials and everything like that. But he's basically like, hey, don't worry about it. It's not, it's not your concern. And it shakes Randy up. Randy believes that he's in a government institution, being in the Army. Yeah. And that they should be seeing all this stuff through.

Which is weird because being in the army, he's working for the government. Yeah. So there obviously isn't a lot of anti-government sentiment at this point. But this event of basically just seeing this corruption in the army is something that just come, really shakes him. Which is, I think, kind of reminiscent. I don't remember if it was Desert Storm, I believe it was, that Timothy McVeigh was in, but he kind of gets the same feelings about, well, the government shouldn't be doing this.

The government's overstepping. So you start to see this anti-government turn out of Randy. He ends up on leave, coming back, rekindling a relationship with Vicky. They go hot and heavy. a month after he's honorably discharged from the Army in October 1971, November 1971, he ends up marrying Vicky. He spent a month after the marriage at Northern Iowa College. Kind of crazy, I was just watching one of their tournament games,

assuming their only tournament game probably, against St. John's. But he ends up scoring a really good job, a good paying job, a high-paying job, at John Deere. And this allows Vicky to become a homemaker. As Vicki's a homemaker, she comes from a family of RLDS, so basically the reorganized

LDS group, not the fundamentalists. We're not talking about Warren Jeff's style of LDS. This is a reform group. Not that anybody gives a shit, but this is the group that ends up following the lineage with Joseph

Smith Jr. They don't believe in polygamy. They reject Brigham Young's push for polygamy. At the same time, they're pretty white nationalistic in their beliefs. I believe they did change their name to like the community of Christ now, so they dropped

the Latter-day Saint part of this. I think she was also a secretary for like an apartment store or something like that as well. I believe that was before she became a homeowner. Or a homemaker. Gotcha. I don't know when they became homeowners. But she was into some pretty deep

religious stuff and the book of revelation has talked about quite a bit in her family these end times apocalyptic feelings are put into her to pretty young age they're ingrained by her father who will come back later and say that he regrets pushing his daughter that far down the biblical road to destruction she's she's a year younger than randy and she kind of serves as the spiritual leader i guess you would say of the family um It's not long after they're married that she starts, like you were kind of alluding to, getting into the real heavy stuff as far as like Old Testament, old covenant laws, referring to God as Yahweh, the belief that her and Randy are part of a group that are the true Israelites.

It's just some of the kind of the literature that she uses as part of kind of her. I'm trying to think of how to like to shape her philosophy or what she believes is going to be happen. Her belief system. Her belief system because they're going to be, she's going to be experiencing some visions. Randy's going to be experiencing some visions. They're going to be close enough together that they think it's prophesized type stuff. So Old Testament, of course, the KJV, King James Version. This book called The Late Great Planet Earth by this guy named Hal Lindsay that was written in 1970.

Bad guy. Bad guy. How Lindsay put a few dates out there for the end times coming and then somehow continued to spin off after those dates came and went and nothing happened. Yeah. Making a small fortune. I'm trying to think of who this was because I make reference of this every time we do a culty type episode. It's the cult from Parks and Rec that believes in the lizard volcano god Zorg. Oh, and Pawnee. And Pawnee.

But it's the book and the guy writes a book and it's called Organize it. And that book is just literally about organizing your office and it's sold really, really well. And then organize it too. He completely goes off the rails and it's where he creates this cult. And it's like, organize it too, like the wrath of Zorg or something like that or organized with Zorg. Organizer one sounds very good. Organized two is really when you start hammering home to beliefs. And Vicki's taking information from kind of different books that she's reading and she's using them to then interpret other messages within like the Bible and everything.

So the late great planeter, she uses that to interpret events and indicators that the end of times was approaching. There was a book called The Gog of Ezekiel. Gog, there's this evil empire. And in the book, it's in the book of Ezekiel, apparently. She believed that the real world, world manifestation of that was the Soviet Union. The beast of Revelation, the ten-horned beast from the book of Revelations, was the ten markets. of the European common market, which I don't, is that where

you're just looking for the number, like that's got to be a stretch to find that number 10, right? Yep. Global instability was one of like the key indicators that was supposed to go along with like the end of days. Increase in famines, which they actually end up leaving Iowa because there's like a drought happening in Iowa. Randy's worried

about his job at the John Deere fixing John Deere engines. There's also another reason they left is because of the crazy visions. It is. It's, the same time, you're talking about a very economically unstable time going into the recession to where there are people

that are defaulting on their loans and they're losing their properties, they're losing their farmlands. And she feels like that's a bit of a government overstep. There was also something, I don't know, I didn't confirm it, but it really kind of feels like it would make sense. Her family ended up losing a very large part of

their farmland due to an imminent domain put in by the government to build a highway. So as this is happening, she's seeing the government, what she feels is overreach. Now when an imminent domain clause is put in,

they pay you for that. But these are still two people with a very, very close set of ideology here. Well, and a lot of it is because as she's going through and reading these books, she's saying, Randy, you need to see this, you need to read this. And she's coming to Randy talking about all these different numbers.

Alan in the hangover running all these numbers to where she's calculating out the exact day when the apocalypse will be coming. She's basically saying, I think to begin with, I think she was the more religious one. Yeah. I think when they got together, he really drank the Kool-Aid regarding that. But I think she was able to take this stuff in such a way, the religious connotations and the prophecies and things like that, and point at the government and say, these are the indicators they're causing it.

This is what's going to end up happening and causing the apocalypse. like all of this sin and all that kind of stuff and the corruption. And in reality, when you can look at the history of the world, have we ever had a stable world? No, but you're also not talking to someone with a completely stable mind. Just as far as this end times, apocalyptic. That's why there's always been, that's why this shit is always sold. There's always been dates. And growing up, Mormon, growing up in a church that believes that the end times are coming and that we're living in the end times,

there's generation after generation. Have we hit the end times? They don't, the mainstream Latter-day Saints don't believe that the end times have happened yet. Everyone's on a different clock. Yeah, they believe that they are coming though. Okay. And they've been coming through the lifetime.

We're always told, or we were always told, that we will see the end times happen in our lifetime. If anything does happen, it's always coming. Yeah. It's like saying, hey, Monday, Monday's always coming. Like, that's just making a really generalized statement. It is. and to say, oh, well, this is violence on a level that we've never seen before.

Definitely not true. We've seen much more violent times. The sin is at an all-time high. Guess what the Greeks used to do to little boys. Sin's been around for a very long time and it has permeated basically every culture in the world. So to say that now is a time when sin is just out in the open, sin used to be much more out in the open. She was recognizing wars, earthquakes as kind of beginning of sorrow as the beginning of sorrow. in Matthew 24. The message was flee to the mountains. Get to a mountain top.

Be safe. You know, protect your family. One of the other books was Atlas shrugged by... Iron Rand. Iron Rand. Basically warned this all-powerful state. It compared the producer and the parasite. Basically, the producer being the people,

the parasite being the government. And then fueled the justification for separation of saying, we no longer want to be part of this society, part of this government. so we're going to move somewhere where we don't have to contribute and you can just leave us alone. Part of not contributing is paying taxes. Correct.

It's a big, big thing with it. Big part of it. I mean, to be honest, like no one fucking likes taxes. No, nobody does. That's the thing that everybody has in common. Nobody likes paying taxes. There are people that understand more of what taxes do than other people. Correct.

At the same time, what you're setting up by talking. That makes people not, the people that understand what their taxes do are the people that don't want to pay their taxes. because they realize what it's being fucking spent on. And they're like, that's fucking ridiculous. Yeah, we're paying for bombs and other shit that's really pretty unnecessary. But what you're setting up with this is so much of a key point and a factor in what happens in the Weaver story. Because if you know that in four years the apocalypse is coming, are you planning for year five or six or seven? It's crazy that, I mean, coincidentally, she found it at a time when she was like five years from now is when it's actually going to happen.

1,300 days. And it was so weird the way that she found it out because she found two numbers that didn't really seem to fit together. And she was able to pull the date out of that. And it wasn't even an exact amount. She's like, this is pretty close. And so they were just like, sounds good. Five years from now or four years from now is when the end of days is going to happen. We need to be on our mountaintop when that occurs.

Going to start selling some shit. You're going to start buying some guns. I'm going to sell all the furniture in our house. And then I'm going to go down to the pawn shop where I sold the furniture. And I'm going to buy the guns with that money. Well, and her parents find out that they're planning on leaving. They have, I think, one daughter or two kids at this point? They have Sarah and...

I don't know if they have Sammy at this point. No. I believe Sammy is a baby before they leave. They have Sarah and Rachel. Sam would end up being a child when they moved because he's 15 at the time of the incident in 92. Yeah, but Rachel's 10. So he would have had to be a little older if they had Rachel's. Well, yes, they did because they only had the one other kid up there, I thought.

Yeah. Yeah. Alice Sheba. Whatever. Yeah. So based on their shared beliefs of what's happening here, they decide they're going to leave. Her parents get wind of it. They come over.

or her dad rolls over and he, Randy's out in the garage, like, taken apart or, like, assembling or cleaning a gun and everything. And he's got a bunch of them laid out on the table. So the dad's like, hey, man, like, how's it going? He's like, oh, good. We just sold the furniture. We're getting ready to move.

And he's like, where are you guys going? Up to the mountains, we might, Dakotas, maybe Montana, you know, find somewhere we can build a place up in the mountains, gives him the whole spiel. He's kind of looking at Randy being like, what you're describing is a lot. even just from a

logistic standpoint of saying, you're going to go build it. Like, I personally actually built the house that Vicky grew up in that me and her mother still lives. And I can tell you, it's not easy.

Like, it's a lot of work. And you're going to be going somewhere. I mean, you got a few months before fall kicks in, before winter kicks in. The places that you're talking about also up in the mountains are going to be very cold.

So he's starting to have these ideas or like, basic premonitions of like, my daughter and these grandkids are going to end up dying up in the mountains because this guy wants to live up there. No, no, no. Because God put Vicky's father in Randy's life. Uh-huh.

So I have somebody that has already built a house that can come up and help me once, me and Vicki, find a piece of property. All he can do is pretty much be like, yeah, I guess. I guess that's what I'll do. Yeah. So Vicky has this vision of this end times

and sitting on this mountain. and top and watching the apocalypse burn before. Randall gets in on the visions as well, and he envisions that they will find this house by the time of the Feast of the Trumpets. September 7th is the Feast of the Trumpet State. Interestingly enough, a lot of the stuff from the Old Testament is pretty Jewish. Yeah. And they are adamantly against something called Zog the Zionist organizational government or the Zionist organized government.

Yeah. So they're pulling premonitions out of a largely Jewish text and then talking about how they don't like Zog in the Jewish powers of the world.

I can't quite swear that one. But you studied this all week. You know none of this makes sense. Yeah, I just, I'm looking for anything. So Randy's vision puts them at this house, September 7th Feast of the Trumpets before this date. They sell all their stuff and they go out looking. As Chris said, they cross through the Dakotas, they go into Montana. They're finding out that land isn't exactly cheap in these areas.

Property prices are still pretty high here. And of course, because Vicky believes that using a credit card or bank accounts or anything like that are all marks that the devil, they're going to be paying for this in cash. I do believe that they end up selling the moving truck that brought their shit out to help finance the payment for the land that they end up finding. Yeah, so they basically, they just keep going west until they find something that kind of matches what their vision is

and the price ends up being right. So they get into Idaho, they find a spot on this place called Ruby Ridge. Now, there's some debate whether the house itself was on Ruby Ridge, or whether it was on Caribou Ridge. Randy Weaver is adamant that it was on Caribou Ridge, but the press, and because maybe Ruby Ridge was the one that it was most known as, like, that whole area, the press kind of lashed onto that, and so it was referred to as Ruby Ridge going forward.

The reason it's referred to that is because between Caribou Ridge and Ruby Ridge, there's the Ruby River that flows in between them. Yeah. And the runoff of water from both of these two ridges is what feeds the Ruby River. It's in Boundary County in Idaho. One of the most beautiful places that you'll ever run across. I think that part of this is really tough because Chris and I are Pacific Northwest guys. We've been to all of these places.

We haven't been to Ruby Ridge. We've been to Corder Lane. We've been to Bonner's Ferry. We've been to Boundary County. We've been to Boise. All of these places along here are all places that we've spent time in, whether long or short, to be able to see this kind of stuff and to be able to feel it. Yes, it is very, very different now than it was back then, but you get a sense of the

Rurality of this area. Well, if you, even in just anywhere within the Pacific Northwest, Washington, Oregon, it is like rural to a degree that I don't think that a lot of people in larger metropolitan areas, maybe like Texans will understand that. But it is like cities, more desert. And then you're driving hours and you're just seeing empty land. and then you're into another city maybe. And forestry everywhere.

And it's like that because it is very mountainous here. There is not a ton of flat land and it's all occupied by cities where there is. So if you're taking a flight and you're flying anywhere over the Pacific Northwest and you look down, it's mountains and trees. So where they end up finding a place is it's how many hours or how many minutes outside Bonner's? It's like 10 miles, right? Yeah. So the fact that it's mountainous terrain, I think they said it's about 30 minutes.

outside of Bonner's Ferry. So they find about 20 acres for sale on Ruby Ridge, Caraboo Ridge, because it's known as Ruby Ridge. That's just what we're going to refer to it as. So there is no power, no water, no plumbing. This is literally a plot of land at the top of a hill where when they go to actually see it, I think they're in Bonner's Ferry. And they see someone either the gas station, hotel, they're talking to somebody. And they learn about this piece of property from these people. They take them out there. They're showing it to them.

They are climbing the mountain in like their truck and they get to a point where there's like a flat part and then going up any further is another what 200 feet or 200 yards to get to the top of this hill.

It's a climb that none of the vehicles are going to be able to make. This is by foot. They have to leave the kids with the guy that they just met's wife to watch them. As he walks them up, it takes them 20 minutes

to walk up. up this thing. And as they're standing on this little, it's kind of forested, but there is a bare spot on top of it. I'm not sure if it was like that before they built. But they're just right on the top of this hill. And he turns around. He's looking at it with Vicki. And he's like, this is it. This is perfect. This is where I'm going to hand build a cabin. Oh, and by the way, we're sitting in like August or September, aren't we? September 6th. Oddly enough, the day before the Feast of the Trumpets. Also, it's a divine

sign. In 30, they're 30 miles from the Canadian border. 30 miles, which means it starts to get cold pretty fucking early. Especially at that elevation. Yeah. And of course, this

first winter there, they spend, would you say $5,000 to buy 20 acres? Yeah, it was $5,000 for 20 acres. They did sell the moving, or it wasn't, they made it sound like a fucking you haul. Yeah, it wasn't a box truck. They bought a truck to move everything out and so they end up

selling them to be able to afford it. Randy builds them when he was first having his vision with Vicky on this. He was like, I see it as clear as anything. It's a two-story cabin on a mountaintop. He's talking about this when they're even back in Iowa. And as he

is taking a look at this spot, he's like, I don't think I can build a two-story here because I don't have the capability of doing this. So he basically builds I'm not going to call it a shack or anything, but it is just a very simple, one-story, rectangular structure, and I believe there was no insulation.

It was plywood. It was plywood on the outside, plywood roof, and the reasoning for it was he basically, it was one of those situations where you know, you take a step back to actually look at your work, and all he's thinking is,

that should last us about five years, right? There was no concern again, There was no concern after that. And they do end up making a few improvements. I believe they put a second story on it. There's going to be outbuildings, including one. If you're doing shit Old Testament style, you've got to do shit old testament style, right? Got to have a birthing shed, right?

Got to have a birthing shed. Burthing shed is not to give birth in. A birthing shed is for any woman who is menstruating has to go in there during the cycle. Get out of the house, you animal. We're in the mountains. If the bears are going to attack, we want to be attacking the shed. How dangerous is it to have a menstruation? shed out there when there's bears everywhere.

Yeah, you've got to reinforce the birthing shed. That's how deep into the Old Testament these people were. And again, that's not an actual issue. I would maybe, listen, I am like 85% sure. That's not a huge issue.

But if you have the option of not tent camping when it's your time of the month, maybe book it around. Like, oh, somewhere not during that time. Wouldn't structure. You're fine in cabins.

You're fine. It's just they're following this to the nth degree that I'm assuming Rachel not there yet, but you have Sarah and Vicky that are going out and living in the shed menstruating, because this is what the Old Testament says. The Old Testament says some pretty wild shit. There's a number of steps that you're allowed to take on the Sabbath day. There's a blending of fibers that you're not allowed to wear. So everything, if it's a cotton wool mix,

You're sinning. If you come into contact and you touch a woman during her menstruation, you're considered unpeer. You're not allowed to live with the family while you were menstruating because you were unpeer. What was the last episode we talked about that? Because this has been talked about before the whole like outside during like their menstrual cycle. It was. Oh, it had to have been another cult, right? It was probably another cult.

No, no, no. It was like an ancient civilization, I'm pretty sure. Egypt? maybe it might have been maybe that's what it was because like we were like yeah for all their advancements and everything they still were just like you're under period go out in the shed pretty weird deal but that's just how deeply they're following these beliefs and this cabin was such a simpson-esque cabin being built but at the same time it's like you said if you have a definite end date what are you doing building for the future yeah there's no reason

to you sold all your shit in iowa you have a certain amount of money that's going to to be able to last you five years, however long it is. But if there's even a small miscalculation, there's going to be some time where you are out of money. Yeah. And it's a pretty bad situation because... But here's the thing, too. I don't know how good their initial calculations, even without the wild cards, are going to be. They have an idea to just close up shop and move out to the top of a mountain.

He has no idea what it's going to take to build this. Yeah. Because a lot of it is scrapwood that he builds this thing out of. I can't imagine taking those sheets of plywood up that last final hill to get there. That would suck. The children are homeschooled. They did chores daily on the land. Yeah.

Well, they're homeschooled because Vicki feels like she knows all. But also, they were kind of, this is, I take a lot of exception with this family. But when they talk about wanting to be left alone, I have a hard time with that because that's part of the reason for the homeschooling besides Vicki knows everything when they say they want to be left alone

there's going to be times in this where they actually do go out and try to find people to hang out with and for Randy to ever say that he wanted to be left alone spoiler alert in 1988 Randy runs for sheriff

oh yeah as the get out of jail free guy so basically he is saying there's a weird thing that it's the difference between like federal law and then state law. Like he's somehow willing to be like okay with certain state laws.

But any federal overreach or any federal laws, he's just like, nah, that's no. States rights, man. States rights. Randy would brag to his neighbors, the ones that he did talk to about this. Which is insane because then you still do believe in the roles of a form of government. It's just the state government. A government that you like. Yeah.

Government that's more beneficial to you. The county government. Yeah, big boundary county. I believe there's like 2,500 people that live in Bonner's Ferry, and this is outside of Bonner's Ferry, so not a whole lot of folks. The city council positions are sweet scores. Randy would brag to his neighbors about this 300-foot kill zone around the cabin. He had an area to where he said that if there was a potential threat on his land, that there were 300 feet, or there's 300 feet all the way around the cabin, that he had these spots placed to be able to just kill anybody that came onto his land. Berlin, Walsaw, baby.

I just, I do not understand why you would be doing that, but also at the same time he was pretty excited. Here's the other thing too. This guy is a green beret, like an expert marksman. This is kind of, and we're going to talk about a guy toward the end of this thing, that is going to have some like Rambo-esque feel to it. But yeah, he knows what he's doing as far as this goes,

and that's also one of the reasons why, when they're is going to be a response from law enforcement. In their heads, they're hearing that there's a green beret up in the woods. He's armed at the teeth and all this. And they don't know what the fuck to do. Not to mention, Randy is trained up everybody in his family. Randy has a 10-year-old daughter that's going to be carrying a gun. He's going to have a 15-year-old son who's going to be carrying a gun.

I believe Sarah was. 16. 16. Okay. Ed, I have no problem with training your kids to respect guns and to be able to fire guns and to give them gun safety. We're going to be talking about an amount of time that these children are seen on video camera walking around with guns.

Yeah. And it's a disturbing. And again, we're talking about being out in the country where there's bears and other shit like that. So carrying a gun is probably going to be semi-important. Well, here's the thing. There is a difference as someone that. that grew up hunting.

Yeah. There is a difference. You don't carry in camp. The only thing that you would maybe is if you were like out on, you know, a four-wheel-or-ride or something and you would be wearing like your pistol

in case something happened. You saw a mountain line or something like that. If you're in camp, you might be carrying that on your hip just simply because it's on your hip. You're not walking around with your rifle. And if you, chances are if you notice

that you're carrying in camp, you're probably taking that off so you could sit down and relax in a chair a little bit easier. there is a difference in teaching your kids because, again, they're in a situation where no running water, no power. They actually, remember, even before they moved up here, they went and lived with the Amish for a little while just so they could figure out how to live without power. Do you think the Amish people thought of these people? Yeah, good luck.

We try not to live where it's too cold if we're being honest. So up in the mountains is a whole different thing. We're flat land people. But there is also this thing where deer are probably coming by. at any and all times. And that's like a full on, legit food source for them. So also think of it this way too.

What are the only times we have any type of like video or photographic evidence of them walking around their property? It's after they're under investigation and after some shit goes down. Who knows if they walked around with guns that often? But what I'm saying is that was not normal period when you would see them do that. There would be no reason.

to just walk around your property between your house and your period shed or your firewood pile or your rainwater catch or something and be holding like a rifle. I do think that it causes a little bit more danger for your children if you know that there's feds watching and you have them armed and carrying around guns. I understand the nature of wanting them to protect themselves. At the same time, anybody with a gun, I think, is kind of a target for the feds. Well, here's the thing, too. the situation when it runs into that first day of the actual standoff,

the reason that they, you know, the dog takes off, they go chase it, they thought initially their first thought was there was an animal, we've run out of food, we're going to go get it? No, not a chance. We're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll talk about that when we get there. Okay. 1984, Randy and neighbor Terry Kinnison, somebody who they had been friends with the forehead,

a little falling out over this $3,000 land deal. They end up going to court. Kinnison's going to be forced to pay Randy this three grand, plus I think it was like another $2,500 in court cost, something like that. Altair puts a call into the FBI about alleged threats that Randy had made towards the president, the pope, and the governor of Idaho. Now, I am shocked that it's got that far up the ladder knowing just how anti-government northern Idaho really is. But the FBI ends up catching wind of this and coming all the way out to Lully Boundary County to come speak to Randy Weaver about this.

And do I think that this guy was angry at Randy? 100%. Do I think that this guy was making the story up about Randy threatening to kill these people? No way. Not a chance. No, this was a, it was, do I think this guy was upset 100%? Do I think Randy said this stuff to him? 100%. Yeah, so this guy just basically drops a dime.

And as the feds come out to investigate. This motherfucker probably responded, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It put the fear of the Weaver family with this FBI force out there speaking to them. And ultimately, they dropped the investigation because, again, how many people threatened to kill Reagan back then? How many people threatened to kill Carter? Someone did try to kill Reagan back then.

That's the reason they took it so seriously is because someone had just tried. They end up realizing that this isn't something that's probably the most credible threat. They do end up linking the weavers to the local Aryan Nations group through friendship with a neighbor that was a white supremacist, white supremacist named Frank Cumnick. So you go out there, you're the Secret Service or the FBI. They go out there to ask about the threats on the president. The guy's like, I didn't say that about the president. but what they're seeing is they are seeing and probably hearing some things that he's describing and saying, this guy kind of sounds like the guys that are about, how far was Hayden Lake?

Like 30 miles? It's like an hour. These guys sound like the guys from down at Hayden Lake that we have been investigating the Aryan Nation. Chances are the way we're looking at this. This guy kind of looks like he might belong to that community that are up there in northern Idaho. Absolutely. So I think that that gave them. kind of a sense of like, that put him on their radar, but for that reason.

Well, Randy and Vicky, even though the investigation has dropped at this point, they have to clear their names with the president, right? Oh, you have to. So Randy and Vicky end up tag teaming this letter to Ronald Reagan to clear their names, stating that there was probably another threat letter that went out to Ronald Reagan, that somebody forged their signature on and it wasn't them. that feels like a pretty big leap to make maybe if you hadn't already written a letter

threatening Ronald Reagan that hadn't gotten there yet No no that wasn't us I think they thought the neighbor wrote one Yeah but do you think there's a chance They might have accidentally or actually written it And then the FBI shows up And they didn't mention anything about the letter They're like shit we got to make sure that

I don't think the timing was that I don't think there's that kind of like Mail in this part of the country As we'll talk about is very hit or miss when it shows up And they also explained to the president that they felt that they were going to be part of like a conspiracy or there was some people conspiring against them? Yeah, the people that forged the letter and sent it to Reagan. Yeah. So I'm sure it was, I'm sure old Ron was pretty pumped to find out that the Weavers didn't actually want to kill him.

It was Reagan had a lot on his plate. We fucking hate you, but we're not going to kill you. It was one less thing on Reagan's plate. We were talking about the Weavers were no strangers to the Aryan Nations compound. I was about an hour away from their house. They regularly attended white supremacist picnics, which sounds so fucking funny to me to think about a bunch of skinheads passing around

homemade potato salad. You know it's not good potato salad. I don't think their picnics were like, I think they had picnics for like the family, but I think their picnic conversations were probably vastly different than most picnic conversations. Probably pretty rough, pretty blue. Mm-hmm.

The food is just bland as fuck too. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Their potato salad for sure had raisins in it. Uh-huh. It just, it wasn't. Everything just has too much mayonnaise. Everything's over-cooked. You're not getting a medium-rere piece of red meat to save your life.

It's all burgers and hot dogs. Good chance everything's processed, yeah. While they're at this compound, they're taking in these services by this Aryan Nations leader. His name is Richard Butler. Richard Butthole Butler. This guy is a very, very bad guy. And the sermons that he's talking about, this white separatist Christian identity.

And that hits home with the family. It's something to where their values are lining up as far as this white Christian belief. And just to go through Christian identity, it's a white supremacist ideology. It claims Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, kindred European peoples. Not modern Jewish people are the true literal descendants of the Israelites and the chosen people of God. Did you see the diagram? Adam and Eve. Eve is knocked up by Satan.

Yeah, so you have Cain. And then you have Able, who should be the second one, but it's Seth. It's the third child that Adam and Eve allegedly had. So the graph is like the devil and then Adam are up top. Then there's the arrows pointing down to Joint Eve, who has a black womb and a white womb. Then that splits. That's where you get, like you just said, everybody that comes out of the black one is all the spawn of Satan. That's where you get all the fun people.

And then the other went down and it's the Israelites. And it was also kind of that same thing we talked about in the Atlanta's episode, weirdly tying that back around. But that whole Germanic people type deal. Aryan nations. That's where they get their title from. And as far as they're being recognized as these chosen people, they're promoting that non-whites and non-ademic. coming non people coming from Adam coming from Satan are this group that has been

marked by the beast with the color of their skin being changed from pure white so that's pretty much everybody that the Aryan nations hates anybody that doesn't look like them and Christian identity is a very real thing that is still taught and believed in different parts of the world they allegedly never joined

the Aryan Nations. Now, I don't think that this is a knock against what the Aryan Nations is putting out there, because I think they were eating that hookline and sinker. Randy had already been a part of an organization that led him down before in the military. He wasn't exactly keen to join up with this group of Aryan nations. And then you have Vicky, who's looking at all of these disgusting things that are being said. She goes, yeah, but you guys aren't really literally following the Bible nearly as well as you need to be. So you're not going far enough for me. I think part of it too was, like you said, this whole thing is predicated on this timeline, this four to five years that this thing's going to be over with.

I do think Randy is looking at the Aryan Nation and also understanding that there is violence being committed by the Aryan Nation and just being to the point like, I can't get involved in this because I got five years. I'm going to be done with this in five years. There didn't have to be a future plan. He wasn't going to do something that would get him caught. Think of how much more high profile he would have been had he been around them all the time, or had he been a known member.

He's trying to keep his nose clean for five years just to get to the apocalypse. So anything that's going to increase his likelihood of being arrested or taken away from his family, he's going to try to avoid. He does actually start doing that post-apocalypse date, now that you say that. It is very interesting that that's when the law starts to be broken. Yeah. So Randy will always downplay. this, well, did always

downplay this. As far as not being a member, he didn't necessarily disagree with him, but at the same time he wasn't planning on joining. We were attended these yearly meetings multiple times. Weird question. Do you think there's

dues? There's probably a collection plate. I would imagine there were probably dues. What's the dude's name, Richard Butler? That's the name of a guy who's charging dudes. They have to have a way to fund this. Randy and them did not have money. They're paying to lay down a blanket at the picnics. That's probably where they're getting their funding from is picnic sales, picnic spot sales, because I'm sure it was a hot ticket item.

So at these yearly meetings, this world Aryan conference or Congress sounds awful. You had people from skinheads, the order, which was like a militaristic offshoot wing of the Aryan nations. you had KKK members, KKK leaders. It was a white fuck face, all-star game is what it was. You had biker gangs. You had all of these different hate groups coming together. I'm not saying that all biker gangs are hate groups, but there certainly are that hate more than others.

It's like the mustache thing. Not all biker gangs are hate groups, but all hate groups. Have a biker gang. Have a biker gang. There was this one occasion in 1986. 1986, post-apocalypse.

The apocalypse didn't come. Oran doesn't have a plan. Randy ends up hooking up with a man named Gus Magizano. And Magizano fancies himself as a gun dealer. He is a biker member.

Surprise, surprise. Yeah. Yeah. Right up his alley. Apparently, Cumbick, the guy that was kind of introduced

Randy and his family to the Aryan nations. Cumbick and Gus were buddies. And Khamnik was a member of the Aryan. Yes, he was. Proudly. I think him and, him and Randy kind of had like some weird little, I don't know, like falling out, but he was already introduced to other people in there.

So Randy, that was still a circle that he had kind of been around. And again, Randy Downplay his workings with the Aryan nations. Turns out he's a pretty connected guy for somebody that's not working that hard. But back to Gus Magizano. Turns out that he was a confidential informant for the ATF. His real name was Kenneth Fadley. Fadley portrayed himself as this, again, gun-running biker, and the two become friends.

They also become business associates. They have multiple meetings where Magisana will go up onto the mountain and he'll spend time around the weavers. He's not somebody that was just kind of like, yeah, I know this guy every once in a while type deal. I don't necessarily think it's a, hey, Gus is coming by every week. but I think there are times when maybe a month or two will go by because Gus doesn't live there.

No, but Gus is also the guy where it's like, let's bounce some ideas off of an armed takeover against Zog. Yes, but Gus is also just acting that way. I think Gus being a CI, he was probably leaning more towards the Aryan nation side that was just more friendly with the ATF and the government. I think that his beliefs were probably pretty right down the line with the people that he was hanging out with

because he was under for a very long time and to not have those beliefs and be able to live that lifestyle for that long and stay undercover as long as he did, he probably blended in pretty well. Yeah, but then how do you determine like if you believe in that stuff, how do you keep your loyalty to both of them?

You think you're making that much money? What comes up in court? What do you mean? About Gus Magisano. He was being paid by the ATF. No, no, no. I understand. that, I get that he's being paid.

That's how you have an informant and get them to give you information or you have something on them. What I'm saying is, if someone shares the beliefs enough in their deep inside, like you're saying, I don't necessarily think you have to be of that belief to be an undercover and for it. No, it depends. Was it someone that was already in there? Was he someone that was in there and got turned?

No, because his name was Kenneth Fadley. He was going by Gus. I just think, again, they might have found. the most racist guy that they could have found. That's what he wasn't. But he wasn't in the group, but he was sympathetic to some of the group's beliefs. But he was still an ATF agent. Yeah.

Well, he was a confidential informant. He was a snitch for the ATF. He wasn't a card carrying member. We'll get into it. I really don't like this. And I think that I'm already kind of showing this confidential informant annoyance that I have. It's very tough for me to talk about this without drawing parallels between how confidential informants work and how they're.

They're compensated. It's very frustrating to me. Regardless of this, Fadley's in a position to basically not prey on Randy, but Randy has a certain set of skills. He's fancied himself as a hell of a mechanic. He tells, it seems like anybody that'll listen that he worked for John Deere. But at the same time, Randy is jobless. The family's running out of money. He's going to do things for money that he wouldn't have before because the apocalypse used to be coming.

and now the apocalypse didn't happen. God damn it, Vicky, we had this thing budgeted to get us to that five-year mark. We're supposed to be, the world's supposed to be on fire, and we're supposed to be, what are they called, raptured? Or whatever it was. The rapture jar is empty, Vicky. What are we going to do now?

So Magisano basically, in less words, talks Randy into cutting down these two shotguns that he had. I believe one of them was a pump action, and I'm not positive what the other one was. cutting down the barrels on shotguns is pretty illegal. Any weapon. And the reason that it is illegal is because the further you cut down a barrel on a shotgun, the easier it is to conceal.

And secondly, the more danger that it happens, because the shorter the barrel, the more unpredictable, the shot coming out of it is. I think it was mostly the conceal thing. I think they just had to sell it the other way. But that's a byproduct of it anyway. Well, if you're the police and you're in close quarters combat and some guy pulls out a sought-off shotgun six feet away from you,

he doesn't have to be pointed at you for you to get hit by it. Yeah. Like, it's a very, very dangerous thing to do. This, uh, it comes over as a result of things like Al Capone, where you have guys that are hiding, you know, Tommy guns and shit like that underneath their jackets. It, weirdly enough, this whole law is created that certain guns can only be of a certain length. So shotguns, you can't make the barrel.

the barrel, I think it was like 16 to 18 inches was the kind of the cutoff. Now, there's also circumstances where you can have a pistol but you can't because you can conceal a pistol but you can't put like a butt or anything on a pistol because it can't

be considered because a pistol never comes with a barrel longer that long. Pistols come with a six inch or whatever you want to say, eight inch barrel. But if you were to put a stock on that, you turn that into what they call a short barrel rifle because I guess it's more accurate at that point.

There's all these weird fucking things. But what law applies here is basically you cannot have a barrel of a gun less than like 16 to 18 inches. And Gus is basically just like, hey man, it's Gus's side of it is that Randy was basically like, hey, I got these two shotguns. I got some guns. If you need me to modify anything for you, I'm totally, you know, game to do that. Just let me know what you need done. The way that Randy tells it is Gus was adamant that he wanted to buy a couple shotguns off me. He needed the modified.

I don't know in that situation. There's holes in both sides of it because you could just say, if Gus really wanted to buy sought-off shotguns, you could have just sold Gus regular shotguns and then had him be like, and here's the hacksaw. There's no specialized tool or really. Yeah, hey Gus, you got an arm and I gave you a hacksaw. turn it into a saw and off. I don't know if it was like, hey, Randy,

I'm going to pay a little bit extra if you provide him to me, Sautoff. Who knows what that interaction was? Fact of the matter is Randy sold Gus to Sondoff shotguns, federal offense. So now,

although Randy doesn't know it at this point, there's plans to kind of try to put Randy in the ATF's pocket to have them start doing the same thing Gus is doing. Well, at the same time, based upon, an interview that I listened to with Randy,

he was pretty proud of his work. It didn't sound like it was really much of an arm twist, and who knows if he was just playing up the story because of the company that he was in. But as far as Randy not being a guy who had a whole lot of connections to the Aryan nations, one of the reasons that Gus wanted him was because Randy had an in with this splinter group

from the Aryan nations that had moved into Montana. And there wasn't a whole lot of governmental information on them, So Gus needed Randy to be able to introduce him to this sect in Montana so they could start surveilling on them. Yeah. Gus wasn't ever going to bring Randy in if he didn't have to. This wasn't something where Gus was going to be like, Tada, I'm a different guy. I work for the ATF. Now you need to take me in there.

If Randy had just walked Gus in to meet these people from Montana, it would have still just been Gus. Exactly. Nothing ever would have changed. Randy wouldn't have been charged with anything. So in my head, like, I'm just trying to do like an A and B, like character A, character B. Yeah. Instead of looking at it for who I know that these people are. If you have Randy who doesn't have a lot of money, because he ends up doing this for like, what, $200?

And I think that's an agreed upon amount between both Gus and Randy. He does it for $450, but Gus only has $300 on him at the time. So he owes in the extra $150. Okay, so he does it for $450. bucks. Randy probably, and he does have a lot of guns because he's stocked up, but I don't know if Randy has the type of arsenal to be a full-on gun runner where he's just able to start selling the shit out of these guns and have enough to keep doing what he wants to be able to do

and protect like his property and all that kind of stuff. He's got an allowable number of guns that he can sell. That's kind of what I'm thinking. And so this other deal comes up after this. I'm not sure how long the period of time was between the sale of the two. But Gus is basically like, hey, I need what three. Was it three or five? I think it was five.

And I think they agreed it was going to be like $800. Yeah. He's like, I need five more sought off shotguns. Now, at that point, is Randy kind of like, man, I don't have a lot of guns. Like, I don't have the money to be going out and getting guns to be modifying them to then sell them to you. I'm not a gun runner. Well, the way that I've heard this conversation described, and there's some audio behind it that I've heard as well, this conversation takes place where Gus is bringing up these other guns. And Randy's saying, yeah, yeah, I'll do that for you, but I need the money up front.

And Gus says, well, I have the extra $150 that I can pay you now from the last sale, but I don't have the money to front you these guns. And part of the reason why this conversation is starting to get a little bit more erratic is because Randy has been tipped off that Gus is a fed. And in these recordings, you can hear Randy say, I heard you were a badge. Yeah. Somebody told me you were a badge. And Gus is scrambling saying, well, who'd you hear that from? Yeah.

And Randy's saying it doesn't matter. Are you a badge? And Gus gets to the point of desperation where he's like, if I was a fed, I would definitely be wearing a wire. Do you want to search me, Randy? Do you want to search me? And he opens up his shirt. He goes, I'm not wearing a wire. You can see it.

While they're sitting in a conversation that's being recorded because the truck is wired. Yeah. So Gus is doing everything he can to try to get Randy on his side. I don't think Randy ever even believes that there's going to be another gun sale because he already knows that. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say is that Randy did those first guns, sought off the barrels of them, just because he simply didn't recognize the rules of the government. now that he knows that these rules might end up coming to, like, him to be arrested.

Yeah. That's why he's not going to do it. I don't think that's it. I think he knows that he's selling to a cop. No, no, no, that's what I'm saying. But I don't think that's the issue. I think the issue is that Gus is a cop. I don't think it's that him being arrested.

I think he is angry at him. No, no, I'm agreeing with you in the sense of saying, like, he's not going to do that because he suspects he's a cop. But at the same time, I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this thought. The threat of being arrested for the crime isn't something that Gary's afraid of. Or Randy's afraid of. Because he knows he's a cop or because he suspects he's a cop. I think he's just angry that he got duped. I don't think he's worried about being arrested.

I think that he's worried about the fact that the government's trying to trap. Let me try to look around on this. I didn't articulate that well. kind of going back to Randy's role in this whole thing with him wanting to be like Randy I want you to do like I'm setting up this deal or I want you to introduce me to this other

other people in Montana what's he really doing for these people in Montana that's why I kind of don't think about the whole I understand he hung out with the Aryan nation a lot he probably could have joined if he had the money to do it or anything but at the same time he's not really like

able to do anything for them because he doesn't have any money. Like what's he doing for these guys in Montana? Strength in numbers, man. It's a fellowship. It's just a member. So he's just a body. Yeah, he's a soldier. He's an ex-green beret.

Okay. In the area nations, collecting these pieces because they have things like the order that are going out and doing these crimes. And we're going to talk about why this charge that Randy takes is so concerning to the government. because if he is indeed tied to the Aryan nations, the Aryan nations were going wild in the West in the 80s.

That's just, it's something that they did. Okay, let's get into that after a bathroom break. Okay. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content.

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So Randy is pretty much at this point. Gus's handler, which is, let me see, where is his name at? Kenneth Fadley. No, no. Gus is Kenneth. Yeah. Herb Byerley. Oh, okay.

Is Gus slash Fadley, Kenneth Fadley's handler, basically tells him, hey, it sounds like, you know, you guys might have parted on terms where he maybe isn't completely sure you're a fed or anything like that or an informant. You might kill you next time. Yeah. You're not going to have any more interactions with him. We're not going to. We'll send you in a different direction.

While your cover is still there, because if something happens and your cover gets blown, he's telling everybody. Weirdly enough. And I don't remember where I saw it. It's certainly a conspiracy theory. They said that the guy who told Randy, that Gus was a shield might have been another

informant. It was an FBI informant, right? Because Gus was a, Kenneth was an ATF informant. Yeah, they said it might have been an FBI informant, which that would be fucking hilarious. Also, Gus is probably pretty angry at the FBI for this. Probably. So it was October of 1989 that Randy sells him, the two sought-off shotguns.

November, that's when it's literally the next month. So doesn't even really give it time. He basically comes back a month later and is just like, hey, hey, those two sawdoffs went over real well and everything so well. In fact, I'm going to need you to make, you know, three or five more. You also have to remember that Randy is probably taking this meeting under the guise of thinking that he is a shield, but also his family needs that extra 150 bucks that this guy owes him. Yeah. But at the same time, that's a month.

So, like, what? that would mean within that month period. I'm probably getting too far into this. During that month period, he would have had to go and speak with somebody because they didn't have a phone up there or anything would have had to go and visit or speak with someone who was with the Aryan Nation

or someone that suspected that he was a Fed in literally that month period. That's what I'm saying, man. He was a little deeper in with the Aryan Nations and he lets on. Okay, that makes a little bit more sense. I get that. And then all of a sudden,

he's hearing this and then surprise surprised guess who calls to have him make some more guns. So, yeah, that's pretty easy to sit, to see through. After Gus ends up bailing out of this, there's two ATF agents that pose as, uh, forest rangers.

I thought they were like, uh, looking for real estate. That was later on. There's so many fucking times when like feds are going up, they're acting like they're somebody else. Yeah. So these two ATF agents end up meeting,

uh, Randy and Vicky in town. Randy and Vickie are leaving this diner. I believe this is in Bonner's Ferry. I don't think it's in Hidden Lake. As they're walking out, the ATF agents dressed up as Forest Rangers get out. They have a conversation with Randy. They let the cat out of the bag, I think probably because they weren't acting like Forest Rangers, but more like feds. That Randy makes him out for what they are. They end up telling Randy, hey, we have these charges that Gus Madisano basically hung on you for selling him these two. I think they told him it was Gus. There's no way that they would tell him who it was.

They would say, we were on the track, two sought off shotguns back to you. Because guess what, man? I think Gus is still in. They're not going to burn that whole operation with Gus because they might still have an in somewhere. I think he was pulled pretty quickly after this happened. At the same time, though, if you get pulled and it's not been proven that you're a cop, what does that do to decrease the chances of retribution against you?

If you don't live in the area. I mean, if you were just brought in, if they can send you back east. I don't see a reason why they would tell him who they had. That information is going to be for a witness in court. They're not just them simply saying, hey, we know you made these two sought off shotguns. His mind is probably already going to Gus, but they're not going to say Gus, you know, rat it on you. Yeah, either way, they tell Randy, we have these charges, these felony gun charges against you, Now, if you want to go ahead and basically be our new confidential informant and get us

into these guys in Montana, we would really appreciate that. And Randy gives them the only response that Randy could basically tells them to shove it up their ass. Randy says no. And in doing so, the ATF agents go back. They end up convening a grand jury. The ATF does, whoever they have as their prosecutor. this is going to be a federal case.

So it's a federal grand jury. Federal grand jury December 1990 indict Randy on making and possessing illegal weapons. So there's been an entire year or a little bit more since this went down between the last contact in November where he confronts Gus about being a cop. It's June of 1990 when this interaction with these other ATF agents. And I think it's actually Herb Byerly. Did he go out there? I think it's Herb is actually. So he was Gus's handler.

He goes out to speak to, because he has, you know, that information came straight to him. Goes out, that's when Randy tells him to eat shit. And then that same month in June, they just turn right around as soon as he says that and file the gun charges. They were holding on to him just in case he would have agreed to it because those would have disappeared. Yeah. I mean, the indictment doesn't fall until December, though. So it wasn't like they were. No, I know.

It warped speed trying to get this. They were dragging their feet. This was basically a card that they could play at any time. Correct. They wanted to give Randy a little bit of time to maybe think about that. That's exactly what I was thinking. It gives him some consideration because what you're doing is you're saying, you said no to us initially.

We're proceeding right with this thing that's going to get you put away. Now, we're going to go ahead and set this out about five to six months and let you just think on this. And as the date gets closer and closer, you might start having a change of heart about giving us some information. I just find it weird that the charge is making and possessing illegal weapons. why would it not be the sale of illegal weapons? Because maybe getting, if you just get someone on the sale of it, let's say, so someone acquires a sought off shotgun,

they didn't make it. They just acquired it and they go to sell it. I bet the penalty is less. So you're trying to get somebody on whatever is going to stick easier or have the longer sentence, I would think. Why not both? That's the weird thing about, that it is they used a confidential informant to get the sale.

Gus never paid him the full amount. What have Gus paid him like $400, instead of $450? He's like technically the sale wasn't completed. Gus is going to have some problems in court. There's going to be some issues that come up with Gus. They do know they need to arrest him though. Yeah.

But they have enough of an experience with Randy to know that this is not a, hey, we're just going to go ahead and drive up to the landing. And then we're going to hike up to your cabin, knock on your front door and you're going to come with us. I hate this. They know he's not that kind of person. This bugs me so much.

So, yeah, the property is way too hot to arrest him there. And since he's had this interaction and this, he's been now made aware of the indictment and everything, he stops coming down. The entire family isolates themselves. They have some friends of the family that will, like, bring them groceries. At some point during this whole thing, another baby is born. So her name is. Alicia. Alishiba.

Alishiba. It's not Alishiba. That's what that one guy on that podcast. that I discussed with you earlier today kept saying it's, I think it's Alishaba. I think Alishiba is probably how it's pronounced in the Bible. Because again, we're talking about Middle Eastern. Alishaba.

Elishaiba. We're just calling her Ellie. It doesn't need to be a thing. She, I don't believe, is born until closer to the siege. Because we still have to go with, huh? She's 10 months. Yeah. So we still have to go with Randy getting arrested in quite possibly the most Bugs Bunny

style arrest. Which is even crazier that he's, okay, so they're getting horny even after he's going through all this legal trouble. They end up driving down the mountain one day and they see a young couple who have a flat tire on the side of the road.

I think they're tone of trailer or something. And supposedly the story goes, Randy says should we stop over and help them? And Vicki says it's a Christian thing to do. Let's get out and do this. They got the hood up because both of them are out by the hood and they're leaning over and I think that's when they had their where they had

their weapons because they were leaned under like into the engine compartment and as he came and approached him he's like hey I used to work for John Deere I can fix anything with an engine he turns and is like get on your he has the gun on him and he's like federal agent and at that point the woman has already moved her way over to the window and has a gun on vicky uh vicky I think is outside the vehicle because I heard it on more than one occasion where she was slammed down against the ground after a little bit of a tussle with the woman. She could have taken her out of the car.

I heard she either was pointing out through the window, but regardless, she has a gun put on her as well. The other thing is, is the trailer that they were hauling was just full of FBI or full of agents that jumped out to spring this trap. So they end up arresting him January of 1991, the old broken down motorist trick. He ends up being released on a personal reconnaissance bail, which is basically we're going to establish a bail number, but we are going to release you under your own personal reconnaissance that you're going to show up to trial again.

So this is a situation in which the ATF has basically performed a sting operation, the old motorist sting. They've arrested him. but it's not so serious that they're not allowing him out on bail. He leverages the house to be able to do that. So if he doesn't show up or the court case doesn't go in his favor, they would essentially, I believe, like, lose the property. If he doesn't show up. Correct.

But that's what I'm saying is that what this devolves into, for that to come out of a situation, an initial situation in which they were like, we can give him, we can let him out on bail. That's just what shows you how big of a gap there is in the just overreaction to this. There is, but at the same time, A, nonviolent crime, and B, is Randy really a flight risk? Is he going to run besides up to the mountain?

No, no, I get that. And what I'm saying is I believe that this is probably the norm for these charges. Well, and that's just it, is we're talking about an area of the country during a point in time when illegal manufacturing of firearms isn't exactly the highest priority on the people that live in this area. Well, two, you're making the firearms for, technically. Yeah, I just, I feel like in this part of the country, any jury that you're going to get in any judge is probably going to be like, you're in here for a nonviolent crime.

Yeah. You were just trying to make some money. Yeah. I like guns, too. Between me, you and the wall, I've actually manufactured a few of these myself, so you're probably going to get probation, something like that out of this deal. Not exactly legal. After he's let out, there's a player in this name Everett Hoffmeister.

Everett Hoffmeister is the court-appointed lawyer for Randy. And Hoffmeister is in a certain situation where Randy actually does go down and check in with the probation officer. Probation officer says, we don't have anybody assigned to you yet. Please leave your name, your number, and your contact information. and we will make sure that your public defender gets a hold of you. Randy doesn't leave his name, his phone number, because he doesn't have a telephone, or his contact information.

So when Hoffmeister takes this case, he's trying to figure out how to get letters to Randy. He doesn't have an address for Randy, so he has to start going up and talking to these other people who are then telling Hoffmeister, you're not going to want to go up there. He's not really going to be pumped to see you. How much do you think Hoffmaster? Hoffmeister, how much effort do you think he was really putting into this? He's a public defender, right? Yeah, well, he tries to contact Randy via mail on January 19th, January 31st, and February 5th.

There's no response from Randy for any of these. And these are letters to where they are being handed off to Randy's friends who promise they're going to get there to him. February 5th, the date of the trial changes to the 20th. I don't know. This had something to do with a federal holiday. I don't know if it was President's Day or what the shit was around February 20th or 19th, that the trial date was going to be moved from February 19th to the 20th to allow for travel. I don't know if it was like a Sunday-Munday deal. What?

The change, Hofmeister tries to send to Randy on the 5th that this has been moved back a day. Randy basically committed everything that he had to memory about this court case because he was, I think, had some intent to go down and try and fight it maybe. But he knew that the court date, he memorized the court date was February 19th. I don't think he ever had any intention. Well, and this is where things get pretty tricky. It's because Hoffmeister is trying to get a hold of Weaver. Weaver's refusing to talk to him or meet with him or anything like this. you have a, I don't remember if he was a bailiff, he was another court person.

I think he might have been a court secretary or something like that that ends up writing directly to Randy about this. And in this letter, he fucks up and he writes down March 30th or March 20th. I thought it was his attorney. It was a letter from his attorney. The one that it comes from. So regardless, he ends up getting a letter from someone within the court, whether a public defender's office, someone assisting him or something like that.

And it says March 20th. So his name is Probation Officer Richens. So that might have been his probity officer then. Yeah. So he sends this letter directly to Weaver saying the trial starts March 20th. So they get this letter. That happens February 7th. Correct.

So we're 13 days away from trial. From the actual trial. So they see this. And Randy is aware, based on when he was bailed out and everything, that the trial was originally said for February 19th. That's the date he's had in his head. He gets this and it says March 20th. So it's not even a month off. It's a month and a day. So him and Vicky are looking at this and the paranoid portion of his brain and Vicki's brain is basically saying, well, you were told this was supposed to be the 19th. They're changing the dates on it. And the idea of this is actually going to be

something where they arrest you. And they're changing this up because they're going to try to move against you and they're going to try to take you away from the family and all of this, they basically make the decision at that point that regardless of when the date of the case was, he wasn't going to be going. So regardless if they, it would have been February 19th and they were aware of it, maybe had it never changed, there was a higher likelihood. Yeah. But once it changed even a little bit and they saw that there was what they considered some fuckery going on with it,

I think that they were already so hesitant about trusting the government with any of this, that it was, you know, they were already maybe 20% likely to go to that. Well, while this is all going on, these people that have a penchant for writing letters for some reason, maybe it was their only form of communication. They don't have a phone. True. On February 7, 1991, the U.S. Attorney's Office that was down in Boisey at the time receives two letters. One of them was dated January 22nd.

The other one was dated February 4th. and the first one that comes is, again, dated January 22nd, the same day that we were called Richens. So called him to speak to him about when this court-appointed date is going to happen. It was addressed to the Queen of Babylon. It also stated in this letter, a man cannot have two masters. Yahweh, Yahshua, Messiah, the anointed one of Saxon Israel. Saxon Israel, shocking, really, we're talking about Aryan Israel at this point in time, is the lawgiver and our king.

We will obey him and know others. A long-forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? It is the awakened Saxon. War is upon the land and tyrant's blood will flow. Now, war is upon the land and tyrant's blood will flow is a direct quote from what the order had written after one of their bombings.

So we have her invoking some highly militarized white supremacist language down to a U.S. attorney. The second letter says, Yahshua, the Messiah of Saxon, Israel is our advocate and our judge. The stink of your lawless government has reached heaven. The abode of Yahweh are

Yahshua, whether we live or whether we die, we will not bow to your evil commandments. What do you think is going through the attorney's mind at this point. When they're trying to build a, when shit goes down here that it's going to be going down pretty, pretty quick, when you're trying to build like a psych profile of somebody like that, when you're trying to make a threat assessment and you're saying, okay, what mental state do we think that these people are in? Stuff like this, probably this in very, very particular,

is going to play heavily in the minds of the people determining what threat level and what the Vicky and Randy are capable of. This moves them beyond rascals into kooks. Cookey people. We've jumped to threat level from rascals are much more dangerous than a rascal.

On the scaling system. It's like hooligans, ruffians, rascals, and then coo- does rap scalliums get in there somewhere? Yeah, it's a subset in there somewhere. So the threat level is moved up. And again,

We're talking about this as a gun charge. And I'm not going to mince words. It's, I would say it's a fairly serious gun charge to be manufacturing your own kind of gun that can cause more problems. But the main thing that's modifying. It's technically it's modifying. He's not making the gun. Guns already made.

He's making a more dangerous product. Correct. So he's, it was modification. Okay. Manufacturing is what they get him on. Yes. But the reason this is so scary is because of Randy's alleged in, Probably pretty true Aryan nation ties.

So just through the 80s, January or April 29th, or you have, 1978 is when the Aryan nations actually moves to Idaho. So this is when they set up their compound. Thank God they end up losing their compound. I want to say it was the late 90s, early 2000s to where they were harassing a Native American family and threatening their lives. And they ended up being brought up on charges. And then a civil suit ended up seeing them having.

to sell the branch or sell the compound to pay for it to move out. So we are in a better place now. Not to say that those sympathies don't kind of ruminate around up there in certain areas. Yeah, but it's not a certain compound. So April 29, 1984, the Avath Israeli synagogue bombing in Boise, Idaho is attributed to white supremacist member of the order Robert J. Matthews. February or September and October 1986 It's a series of bombings in Cordillane Which is very very close to this area

They target this guy named Father Bill Wossmouth Who was Actively working against the Aryan nations And trying to expose them for what they've done They bomb his house They bomb a federal building They bomb a restaurant They bomb a local business

All of these bombings are tied into the Aryan nation 1990 there is a Capitol Hill Nightclub in Seattle where a bombing plot is stopped by just a Patreon or wow Patreon join our Patreon this man was a patron

who was there that ended up putting out a fire and allowed the building to be evacuated they had set this fire at the exit to push everybody in towards where the bomb was so this is maximizing casualties.

We've gone from just random bombings and hoping to kill one or two people to a mass casualty event. So this is what kind of puts so much pressure on this thing where they're looking at Randy, they have the ties to the Aryan Nation that are pretty clear. And you're saying,

we take this guy, we send a message to them that they're not untouchable. I think if a guy is manufacturing guns that he believes are going to be going to the Aryan nations, what does he suspect those guns are going to be used for? Correct. And at the same time, though, if you can get this guy and put him away for that, which we're talking about as related to this thing as a whole, seems like the more minor crime and everything,

then all of those other Arian nation members, you're saying, this is what we can get you on too, not the big stuff. We don't have to get you on the big stuff. We can put you away for the small stuff, the stuff that we know you probably are likely to do. And if we can take guns out of your hands from people that are manufacturing them, it's also a good thing. Just to round that out, the order, they were pretty big on bank robberies. They gave a lot of money to the cause through these bank robberies.

They had three armored car robberies. And during the second armored car robbery, to distract from the armored cars being robbed, they firebomb to Seattle movie theater to try to draw the police in that direction. So there would be less of a response to this armored car robbery. So these dudes are playing for keeps. And the danger level in this area is so high. And the police are on such high alert because all of these things are happening that once Randy misses the court date, they bump this up to Marshall's status to bring this guy in. I think that's what happens when you have a federal case. That's because February 20th rolls around, of course.

Even if Randy wanted to show up, he thinks it's the next month. judge issues a bench warrant. Any of those bench warrants, I believe, in regards to federal cases, automatically go to the U.S. Marshals. There is a point in time that Hoffmeister does eventually get in context with Randy,

and Hoffmeister goes on to tell him a ton of bad information. I doubt that Hoffmeyer would have been disbarred, but he should have been disbarred for this. He ends up telling Randy that if he loses this case, he's going to lose his land, and they're going to take his family. And just basically,

out of sheer frustration to get this guy to show up to this court case, he is telling him every single bad thing that he can think of that's not true to try to scare Randy into doing this. Yeah, he's like, do this or this is going to happen. He's like, well, this can't happen if I stay here. Randy can't be scared at this point because he's already predicted all of this. So instead of scaring him into showing up, he's just reinforcing these beliefs that Randy already has.

They held off a little bit, though, in actually executing, yeah, the warrant because they did find record that there had been something sent to him that showed March 20th. So, and again, this is saying, you know, after the fact, what they would have done. But they had stated in regards to their reaction because this whole thing goes under investigation, the whole Ruby Ridge situation. When they're looking at this, they had stated, well, had he shown up on March 20th like he was informed? We wouldn't have gone ahead and issued the bench warrant. We wouldn't have executed that. We would have just had the trial and did it that way. And these marshals aren't showing up to arrest Randy and throw him in jail.

These marshals are showing up to arrest Randy and make him show up to court. Yeah. Like they're not arresting him on a new charge. This bench warrant is to bring him in before a judge. And as far as he's concerned, I don't really think he's seeing a distinction in regards to the marshals, ATF or anything like that. They're all the government. And there's not a lot of

overlap in regards to communication because no one even tells the U.S. Marshals that the ATF had tried to make him an informant prior to bringing him up on the shock and charges. So far, the overlap did not consist of the ATF

explaining why he had this warrant. They just told him he's dangerous and you guys are going to want to take some precautions in order to get him, but go get him. Not, hey, we tried to use this as basically collateral to flip him, and he told us to go sit on a pine cone, so we decided to arrest him for it.

You guys have any other communications? You guys disgusting? No, I don't think of. Not really. Just don't believe anything he says. We did pull this awesome trick with a broke down vehicle on him to arrest him the first time, but beyond that. Don't try that one.

He's looking out for it. He knows. Well, at this point, too, weaver's not coming down. No, they're isolated. They have all of their neighbors bringing them supplies because a lot of these neighbors are pretty sympathetic to their cause. There are some negotiations going on, but it's basically the marshals who are maybe like in town

are meeting people that know the weavers and are just basically like, hey, if you can get a message to them or anything, tell Randy that we just need to get him to his court case or we need to actually take Randy in. that we don't want it to escalate any further than this. But they're so sporadic that it's not like there's really a huge effort being made. Finally in March on the 27th of 1992. For that.

Okay. You talked about it earlier. March 4th, 1992. Marshall Ron Evans Evans and Jack Clough ended up speaking to Weaver on the mountain as they posed as real estate buyers. Okay. So this is when they show up. I don't know what in the world they were thinking of. I don't know what get up they were dressed in.

If they had bad accents or. what. But real estate buyers in this area that they probably didn't look like they belonged in. Probably not. Like, what do you, you know, we're looking up here for, oh, yes, we are up here to buy a house in the trees. How do you currently like your house in the trees? You guys got wives, right?

You're not dating each other because I don't want that tomfoolery up on my hill. I don't know why you just, you know, like, timber rights or something like that. I don't think Randy is, Randy's, buying it. Probably saw right through it. In that interview that I heard him do, he makes point to this. It says, I knew who they were. I don't recognize you. I only, like,

people don't come up here that I don't recognize that aren't government agents. Nobody's tried to buy land up here since I bought land up here. And that was an apocalypse ago. Desperate. March 27, 1992, you were talking about. We get

the plans laid out for Operation Northern Exposure. Hell of an operation name for them being 30 miles away from the Canadian border. I don't know what they're trying to expose, but this plan is basically formed because everybody else is just throwing shit to the wall and people are trying to nail it up there before it falls off. And finally one guy, I don't remember his name, says, Hey, fellas, I got a plan.

If we go up there and say that we're buying a plot of land and we buy a plot of land, and then we start building. Eventually, Randy's going to get curious about what we're doing, and he's going to leave his property alone. They're coming up with some Wiley Coyotey shit. Yeah. And once Randy comes onto our property up there, then we can arrest him. Before we do that, let's send a bunch of marshals up there.

Let's strap some cameras to some trees that are powered through solar. And let's keep an eye on these guys. Let's see their patterns. Let's see what they're doing. Let's see what the daily happenings on the compound are going on. And the head of the operation looks around. He's waiting for anybody else to say anything. And the guy that brought this up was like, it's probably a bad idea.

I don't think we're going to go with this idea. He hasn't said anything yet. A guy running the organization goes, well, that's the best idea that we've had yet. So let's go with that. And Operation Northern Exposure goes in. The teams are sent up. They strap these cameras to record the Weaver property. They must not have done the best job or the weavers knew about this because they were setting them up at night, of course, trying to be very, very sneaky.

Sam and Harris end up running across one of these cameras and pull it down out of the tree and destroy it. So I don't know how well that one was hidden, but there was probably a lot of, I didn't put that one up there. As soon as you find that, you're going to be on high alert for just that point. going forward. Yep. And these 1991 threat source profiles that Chris was talking about relied on all of this old unconfirmed data that he was talking about at the beginning of this episode.

There were rumors that he was a bank robber and all of this different stuff. Nothing that had been corroborated as far as that goes. Plus you add in all of these neighbor interviews. And these neighbor interviews become a real problem for Weaver's reputation and maybe actually more of a safety thing.

Because during these neighbor interviews, they're asking, do you think we could just go up and have a conversation with Randy. Pretty much every one of these conversation ends with, if you go up there, he's going to shoot you. Yeah. And so... Why do you say that?

Because I almost shot you. And I don't have an outstanding warrant or anything like that. But had I had one and you guys started walking up here, I'd have shot you. The only reason I shot you is because I had a coffee cup in my shooting hand and I couldn't get to my pistol fast enough. So as far as the information that they're gathering for these threat source profiles, it becomes pretty clear and evident that they're not going to be able

to go up there without getting shot at. And they have multiple cameras, so they're still able to watch this. They have some that are stationed pretty far away, and they have different angles that they, there's like a repeated one or two angles that you normally see during the documentaries. They give you a pretty clear area

of like the clearing in front of like the front door and everything. And they're able to see that every time a vehicle comes up that road that comes up to their little landing area and then they have to walk up from there. They come out and take up like armed positions. Like there are certain areas

that they will take up and be ready to like defend. I don't know they're taking up armed positions. They're sending somebody down to the gate and then they have basically backup that's cover fire that's sitting behind a boulder up by the house. And they also have stuff spread out

so they have weapons like placed in little caches and everything. Yeah. So I would say the intelligence wasn't too far off on them getting shot if anybody just tried to walk up onto the property. Then we have April 18th, 1991, the Harado Rivera helicopter incident. Because somehow this hits the news cycle at a time when they must have been desperate for news.

This is pre-dream team and all that stuff. So the Olympics weren't really an issue here. I don't know what else was. going on at the time, but Geraldo Rivera takes a helicopter up to basically scope out this compound. The media has gotten a hold of this story about this homesteader who wanted to be left alone in the forest of Idaho and the federal government is bugging him to try to arrest him and bring him back in. There was a lot of media that tried to get in contact with the Weavers. Randy never did a real interview. He actually only did one interview and it was back in Iowa and it was kind of part of the

reason why they left because he had a pretty doom and gloom Bible study going on that was meeting at a restaurant in their town in Iowa. And just him going, you're all going to die. And after this article comes out, he doesn't want any pictures taken of him because again, graven images is something that the Old Testament frowns upon. So they just put a picture of a Bible with a bunch of bullet holes in it. And apparently this article scares off a lot of the local townsfolk because Randy was very honest about his beliefs in this piece.

Yeah. So he knows that maybe talking to the media is not great. Geraldo does what he can do back when his mustache was bigger than the rest of his face. They're up there in a helicopter looking down. Sorry, I can't let you're on this chopper. You're going to need to shave that mustache. And allegedly, they start hearing gunfire. They believe that there was gunfire that had been directed from the weavers up towards a helicopter.

There's no confirmed reports about this. Now, there's marshals still there. So at this point, it's just the marshals. They're still looking at cameras. they're still taking out. They're like, nah, there were no shots fired. The pilot later came out and said that there weren't shots fired. The problem was that the media knew the story was going to be much better had they fired these gunshots at the helicopter.

And for some reason, instead of the marshals coming out and clearing their air, maybe they thought that they could use it. They thought, well, if we don't say it didn't happen, but we don't confirm it didn't happen, it probably will give us cause later on if we need to cover our asses, right? So they don't ever refute this story. The thing I don't get about that, though, is if they're actively shooting, because that's back in April, they would have gone in and done something way before that. That's why I believe it was just in the media because, again, it's discredited by the marshals that were there. Had they had any reason to call in additional support and everything like that to get this done earlier, I think they would have. They were firing on officials. they were firing on Geraldo.

Buddy, you're firing at an aircraft flying like, that's still a crime. Air right. You can fire it. You can fire it a car. It's not your property. You don't own the airspace. That's like saying that you could fire at a car going down the road

if it was on the public road down below your house. If it's on your property. It's what? If it's on your property. It wasn't. What I'm saying is not the road going up to their house, just the main road going by. It'd be the same thing.

You don't own the main road. Correct. You can't fire at a helicopter. It'd be illegal. That's your airspace, I think. No, it's not. There's not a rights to the airspace, right? If they're flying above the tree line, unless they're hovering right over the house, which I don't think they probably were. You're not in a weaver-type mindset for this. I don't care if I'm in. They don't think anything's illegal, dude. I'm saying legally, had there been shots fired at the helicopter, the standoff would have occurred back in April. Maybe. I also think they didn't have nearly enough information.

And from what I heard that... Okay. I'm not going to let go this. You are telling me that were there to be a helicopter flying over your neighborhood, you went outside and took shots at that, that there would not be police showing up to arrest you. No. I'm not telling you that.

Or I'm telling... Man, I'm real stone for this. Because I don't know if you know what you're saying. I'm not. saying that if I did that I would deem it was legal. I'm saying that Randy probably thought that. Randy did not find it illegal. Randy didn't find anything illegal. Randy does not know the laws. What I'm saying is that had the marshals, when Heralda reported that they had been shot at, had that been factual, the marshals would have confirmed that and the siege or them trying to get Randy out of there would have been much more expedited because he started taking shots. at a helicopter in the air, discharging rounds into the air.

That's what I was saying. The marshals didn't confirm it, but they didn't deny it when the media ran with it either. Okay. So the marshals knew what happened. But I know, but people should have known regardless if they're, okay, people are stupid. I get that. What I'm saying is by the marshals not denying that, people should have been like, well, have you guys moved in to take him?

And the fact that it doesn't happen, that should have told people, well, no, it didn't happen. What's going to pull sympathy away from the weavers? I'm not countering that. I'm just saying that it should have been very evident that they didn't fire at the chopper. Should have been. There's a lot of this that should have been evident. This is also in the early 90s when there wasn't,

and yeah, up in the mountains. So. Yeah. Northern exposure gets set on the back burner until like August 21st of 1992. Part of this is because the prosecutor really didn't care. There was also a changeover in the Marshall's office, too. There was someone getting elected in that might have been like in a leadership position.

There was. But as far as the prosecuting attorney on this, the reason that he said he really only continued to pursue it was because the judge that was presiding over the case kind of kept bringing it up to him. Like this wasn't top of mind for this prosecutor to get this deal done and to put him in jail. This was more of the court leaning on him saying, hey, that wing nut up north that you guys are talking about, that guy that moved past rascal. We need to arrest him. I've got out of their shit, man. I got other stuff on my... I'm a prosecutor.

I have to prosecute all of these other cases. We can't get that guy. Do you have him? Okay. Get him down here and then I'll fucking prosecute him. If he's sitting right in front of me, I can do a pretty good job of prosecuting. Until he gets here, not really my deal. What do you want me to do?

I can't send anything more than the marshals right now. Like the guys that are supposed to be doing this are already doing this. All right, do we have anything before August 21st? Nope. Okay. So this is when shit starts. This is when what kicks off, what is more widely known as the Ruby Ridge standoff. This is probably the part that if you have heard about this, this is the information you've started with.

August 21st, 1992, there are two groups of U.S. Marshals, six total and two teams of three. We can't be clear enough on this. These weren't strike teams that were going to arrest Randy. Correct. There should have never been any interaction with the weavers and with these two teams. This is strictly a information gathering reconnaissance mission. Now, these are guys in full camouflage, night vision goggles with M16s. So they are armed.

They're in camo. They look like military that are currently on an active mission. Yeah. Now, they are moving in early, early in the morning where it's still dark. 4 a.m. Night vision goggles. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Which also, if you see somebody creeping around the woods in night vision goggles, shit's probably pretty serious at that point in time.

So as they're walking on the, and at this point, they're probably on the property. They have last names, Roderick, Cooper, and Deegan that are members of this recon team. They head to about 250 yards away from the cabin. You have Hunt, Thomas, and Norris, the observation post team that are up on the ridge north of the cabin. So there's like a Y in the road. So they all walk together. They get to a Y. The observation post goes up to the left.

The other guys, it kind of goes straight into the right. So as they're getting closer to the cabin, again, they're not looking to start any shit. They're just trying to kind of get an idea of what like a reaction might be if they do have to move up there. Or if they do have to make an operation where they have to sneak in. Now, this to me, from this point on, this is just when the clowns start climbing out of the tiny car. This is when it all, like, bad decisions start this entire thing. So as, and I think it's Roderick that does the rock thing, right? Yep.

They know that they have a dog because they've seen it on camera. And Roderick is like, well, we've seen the dog freak out when someone starts a car like on an adjacent property or something. but we want to see how closer, like what sounds can be made, or if the dog will respond to anything else. So as he's sitting there, he does have the cabin in sight, and he picks up a rock and he throws it like into a dry creek bed. Nothing happens. So he picks up another rock, goes and chucks it into the dry creek bed.

Of course, rocks hit another rocks and everything. It's going to make quite a bit of noise. Dog comes out of the house, and as the dog comes out of the house, of course, it's going to go to the area where the sound was. believe it was a golden retriever named striker. A lab. A lab named striker? Okay. So as the dog comes out, it's not like he's

thrown it down at his feet. He's chucked it a decent distance away. But dogs have good fucking hearing. You even snap, you know, and now it's quiet. So they're just frozen. They didn't plan on getting out of there. They're just trying to watch and observe. Well, because

the dog starts barking, what happens after that? Kevin Harris, Sam Sammy Weaver and Randy Weaver all come out with their guns. And they end up taking off after the dog to find out what's going on. There's multiple tellings of this. And it's because it comes from the recon team and it comes from the Weavers. Some of the stories say that the dog reacted to a rock. Other stories say that there was a car that was fired up near.

It's both. That launch Stryker out. So what ends up happening is they, he comes out of the house with the rock. As the dog's coming out and going to the location where the rock's at, and they see the guys coming out too, they're following the dog. Roderick's like,

we need to go ahead and move back and everything like that. So they start shifting their position. And as they get out toward that, why, a neighbor starts a car. Bad timing. All time, bad timing. In the same direction that they are, but back behind them.

So then the dog turns its attention and starts running that way. And because it's running. to the sound of where the car's at, they're also making a little bit of noise moving through this trail, possibly underbrush, something like that. And a scent. And exactly. And a very foreign scent,

three of them. All of a sudden, as the dog runs out and now Roderick is there, Cooper, I think Deegan might have been hidden or they're trying to kind of lay low, right behind the dog or just a little ways behind the dog, is Sam Weaver, Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris. Andy had actually split up from them and taken kind of like another path that kept him up a little bit higher, but would bring him down kind of near the Y.

And so all of a sudden, you have three U.S. Marshals, full camouflage, M16s, and you have this dog running out and this kid and this other guy behind him armed. And you have this standoff that stuff has to happen in an instant because I think the dog probably, I don't know if. if Roderick gets spooked by the dog because the way the dog was shot, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And we'll get into the deviations of the stories because everybody tells the different side of the story. The recon going into this, we'll get back to that.

I just, I want to drop this recon nugget because I find it fascinating how much these cameras picked up. Judging by the recordings they took, they surmised, Randy carried around, he was armed 70% of the time that he was on film. Vicky was armed about half the time 25 year old Kevin Harris About two thirds of the time

16 year old Sarah was carrying a firearm About 30% of the time 10 year old Rachel was carrying a firearm About 30% of the time 14 year old Sammy About 80% of the time So odds are Sammy and Harris peeling off

We're going to be packing And at this point in time Sammy, I believe, had a sidearm and he had a rifle. Well, they wouldn't have left after hearing the dog barking not armed. That wasn't going to be an option, regardless of who, how often they'd been carrying around the house or around the property. They hear the dog barking. They found a camera earlier.

Like you said, when we were talking about, hey, the way that they tell it, they thought the dog was onto an animal, they thought like a game animal or something like that. At the same time, from the perspective of hearing the dog, they're probably going down to see what it is, but they're preparing to be armed to defend themselves if it is what they think it actually was, or if it turns out not to be an animal. And that's the massive problem that I have with Randy,

is he knows that they're surrounded in a sense by these marshals that have put up these cameras, and he sends his son and Kevin Harris after the dog and goes a different route. I feel like when he says they were going hunting, or they thought that they were tracking a game animal. This is maybe more of him trying to not take any sort of blame for sending his son down to where there was a greater than 50% chance that they were going after marshals or somebody who intended to hurt them. They hadn't been in that situation before, so I don't know what to make the guess on that.

I got to think any time the dog barked after they found that camera, there was a sense in the back of the. head that it could have been. Correct, but how many times did that dog bark every time a car was started up? How many times did that dog bark at an actual game animal that had been there? The more distance and the more time that dog is responding to something other than marshals, I think it's going to lessen that a little bit regardless. It is a possibility in their head. It's not just them saying, hey, that's an animal.

Let's go kill that for food. It's, hey, that's probably an animal. But on the off chance it is, the marshals make sure. sure that you're armed. I just, I feel like Randy should have had a better sense of sending his son

and Kevin Harris after that dog. Who else is he going to send? Him. Randy. Randy himself. He was going around to the site because he got there too

at that time. Well, he was a ways behind them because he took the other part of the wine. Correct, but he still got to where he could take like a shot or was able to... I think he headed back

towards the cabin because he had to fire his guns to try to call Sammy back. Correct. What I'm saying, though, is after it started, that's when he took off running. He didn't stay. I don't think he stayed for the firefight.

He was still far enough away to where he wasn't in vision, a field of view, when the firefight started. I don't know. I just, I feel like... I'm not saying he's father. Dude, this whole thing's fucked up. Of course, the fact that he is Sivian sending his kid period to do any of this, the fact he's doing any of this stuff in the first place is insane.

The game animal story. I guess I don't find it crazy because it's already crazy. Yeah, the game animal. story just doesn't pass the sniff test for me a single bit. You don't think that there's any indication that every time there was made a sound, he knew that that was going to be, there were

situations where it made a sound and there were actual game animals, that they all went out with their guns. It can be both. I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think it's, this can be either or, just be armed and be ready to shoot. And I don't even think, too,

here's the other thing. So, what ends up happening is the dog gets shot. which the dog apparently got shot from the rear and then out through its chest, which I'm trying to figure out as an owner of a yellow lab myself, unless that dog's pointing away from you, how that shot actually happens. And it could be something to where that dog was pointing towards one of the three and the one behind shot at the dog. It depends because I think they were still along at least a little bit of a,

the same kind of line, where they were hiding from the way it sounds with the firefight. Regardless, it could have even been a situation where the dog ran at him and then turned around as soon as it heard Sammy saying something, and the guy could have shot the dog. Well, and this is, I have to say, for as few times as I would take, the Weaver story, I just got done talking about how I didn't believe for a second that Randy Weaver sent them after a game animal.

I think their side of this is a lot more accurate. Probably. Because from the Marshall's telling of this story, they popped up. All three of them, I did. identified themselves as U.S. Marshals. And I just don't think they did. Regardless, even if they said that,

they popped the dog. It's a 14-year-old kid who just saw guys, not in Marshall's uniform, in military uniforms with M-16s that just shot the dog. He has been led to believe, that they're here to take his father. That's what he's seeing in that situation.

He's also just seeing that they killed his dog. That's, I don't think the father thing is played into it. I think a 14-year-old kid just saw somebody shoot his dog because he allegedly says, you son of a bitch. And then starts fired. I think that's on both sides of it. I think that's how Harris saw it. And I think that's how the Marshall saw.

What I'm saying at the same time is before this situation, even with the dogs, occurs, what has he been taught to believe regarding the law enforcement and if he sees them? What are they there for at that point? Anybody that he doesn't know, just any stranger, they don't even have to be wearing camo. They're there to take his dad. Exactly. And so not only that, that's going to make him jumpy as fuck.

But then all of a sudden, he just saw an example of what they're willing to do to his dog. Yeah. What are they going to do to his dad? So I don't think he fires his gun unless they killed his dog first. 100%. So Sammy ends up cracking off a couple of short. shots at these three guys who, regardless if they just identified themselves as U.S. marshals, they don't fucking look like them. It's a 14-year-old kid who's been homeschooled,

and it's probably been homeschooled in a very specific way to paint a very specific vision of who the enemy is. There's some psychological fuckery going on with that. At the same time. We haven't even explained. Kevin Harris being 25 years old was somebody that came from a broken home and was basically in a situation where he was not going to be orphaned because both of his parents died, but just they didn't care about him. He was starting to get into trouble, and the Weaver family brought him in. He was living on the compound kind of part-time, but towards kind of his 22, 23, 24, 25 is when he basically moves in with them full-time. So Kevin Harris is somebody who has a lot of respect for the Weaver family and is willing to die,

for them. I don't know exactly. Nobody could ever know because nobody's ever going to be honest about the series of events and how it all happened. There's just the end result that's very sure of what occurred. And what we do know is that Stryker was shot and killed, as Chris said, through the back and it exited out the front. Kevin shoots Deegan that was proven through ballistics. Roderick was the one that shot the dog. Questions as to who shot Sam are really up for debate. I think they kind of did pin it to Deegan. Cooper. Oh, is it Cooper? So he was shot twice. He got shot in the arm. I want to say like around the elbow. Yep. That one they were able to track because I believe that

they could tell by them from ballistics and everything like that. That one was actually Deegan. That shot I believe of him shooting at Sammy after opening fire is what caused Harris to then turn to him in fire. Harrison's up shooting him in the chest. And then the firefight erupts. Sam, I think they kind of take cover. Sam goes to, Sammy goes to run away. And again, it's hard for me not to feel sympathy about a 14-year-old kid that has been raised like this to probably believe some stuff and thinks that they're here to take his father. He goes to run. Regardless of what he did, they shoot him in the back. He's running away. It doesn't matter that he's a child to me. If you shoot anybody in the back, they're just not a threat. If someone has her back to you, they're not a threat. in that regard. They're going away and the reason that Sammy is running is because after these first shots get squeezed off, Randy starts, he fires a shotgun in the air, he starts screaming

for everybody to come back to the house because hearing the gunshots, he knows what, he knows that's not a game animal shooting back at them. Yeah. He's yelling supposedly Sammy's last words was I'm coming dad. And that is when they believe that Sammy took off to run back towards the house and when the shot that kills him hits him square in the back. Yeah. So that shot's fired by Cooper. Harris ends up getting out of there as well. I don't think Harris gets hit at all during this.

And so at this point, Harris gets back up to where Randy and like the compound is and everything. He's out of breath. They're like where Sammy, he basically tells them that Sammy's been killed, that he killed one of the marshals. Marshals are still down there. the observation team has come down from their area. They have found the other, the recon team. The observation team goes to a neighbor's house who they've been kind of interacting with before

that has a phone. And the lead guy, I can't remember what his name is, he's like, you need to call the sheriff, you need to get people out here right now. I believe that's Hunt. And as this is going on, you now get this story that's kind of flip-flopping between

what's occurring, down kind of where the firefight was and then also up at the cabin where after finding out that his son is killed Randy goes in and gets a bunch of guns, gets a bunch of ammo and starts going out to go in the direction where his son was shot. Vicky comes out to stop him

is basically telling him, you know, you're going to have to shoot me to get through the way that it's told and everything. And then there is a period of time where there is just like a bunch of gunfire coming from the cabin. And the way that it's stated from the Weaver perspective is that in like his grief and anger and everything like that because vicky talked him

out of going down there he basically just holds his gun up in the air and just fires off all of his rounds puts another clip in basically he fires until he's completely out of ammunition now the story down from the marshals which you know how they when you were watching the documentary you know how they had all the ballistic stuff set up with the yeah if he fired off that many additional rounds because they know there was 19 rounds fired fired off during the initial firefight, like 19 to 20 rounds. If the, the marshals are saying it like we were pinned down in that location, even after Sammy was dead and even after Harris was gone by sniper fire, we're pinned down here.

There's gunfire going on, but it's him firing up because had he fired down at the marshals between that line and where the marshals were, there would have been trees getting hit. there would have been things like that. But I can also see from their perspective being that close, they don't know, they just hear a gun going off. And their assumption has got a 100% be, well, the last shots we heard were going straight at us. These have just got to be not hitting close to us, but they're trying. I can't put a lot of fault in any sort of thinking minutes after they were just involved in a firefight. Correct.

Any sort of gunshot is going to hold you down. They weren't pinned down. Obviously, this was just Randy trying to work through his emotions via or letting go of lead. I can't say that I blame for saying pin down. I do wonder the amount of time because before Randy goes full ammunition time rate, or, yeah, tirade. Them not getting Deegan's body out of there feels like a mess.

Yeah. That would be the first thing you would do. Hey, let's get away from the location very close to the cabin. Well, not to mention, all three of those guys are the ones that were in the fight. Yeah. So they're going to be the best source of information to tell exactly what happened to Hunt as he's calling in the reinforcements. And Hunt calls in just about everybody you can. He calls the local sheriff in. He calls the state police in.

the Marshal Service Crisis Center. Damn, that's a tough one. And the Special Operations Group, which ironically is named Saug, and Randy Weaver and the Weaver family are against Zog. Well, Saug is kind of a common because, like, you have, that's what they just call special operations groups

from different. Yeah, it's just, it sounds very convenient. So, did you say, okay, so Idaho State Police, County Sheriff's and the Marshall Special Operations, And then the crisis center. So all of the... Is that the FBI?

The back-in shit that they're bringing in and setting the tents up. Oh, gotcha. That's the mobile crisis center to set up. Gotcha. The FBI ends up sending a hostage rescue team from Quantico. During this time frame, this same day, Ricky and... Sorry, not Ricky. Randy and Vicky are able to bring Sammy's body back up to the house.

They put it in the... Period shed. Yeah, the period shed. I feel horrible saying it. period shit is. I know. Sorry, I couldn't think of another name for it. Um, but put him in there and basically kind of like strip off his clothes and they kind of

like wash him and everything like that. I think they're doing some type of like they're preparing him for burial. They're, they're purifying his body to prepare. Yeah, like more Old Testament type stuff. And so this is day one that this has occurred. What a long day. Yeah, what a long fucking day.

So after everyone is reporting in, you know, the weavers are going through their shit up on the mountains and everything like that. Down below, while all of these law enforcement agencies are trying to kind of get their shit together and figure out what the, what the play is here, there's this, like you said, this whole story has kind of been built up to paint this scenario. And it's kind of like the danger. If we're on a scale of 10 being the absolute most dangerous situation, zero being perfectly safe, the way this is being being.

portrayed is that this is an 8 to a 9. I would say it's a full on 10 because there's a Marshall that's dead. Okay. They killed one of their own. Correct. In actuality, as far as from as as this is or how much a reaction needs to happen here,

this could be handled with a 6 or a 7, I think. Yeah. Or traditional rules of engagement. Correct. It instantly ratchets up to a 10, and when you get to something, before we go any further in this, I want you to talk about the thing we talked about pre-episode that you didn't hit, the Philadelphia thing. Because this is very, very important.

Because what this is, is this touches on something we talked about at the very beginning. A lot of these situations that occur are very unique, and there's not a playbook for them. There's a playbook for other circumstances which may share similarities. But for something exactly like this, it is kind of take your best guess at what we think is going to work based on things that have maybe had similar circumstances that we've been a part of. Yeah, we're not talking about a situation that involved the FBI or the Marshals, but we're talking about a clear-cut example of why you don't ratchet things up. May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police dropped an improvised bomb from a helicopter onto a

row house that was occupied by a Black Liberation group that was called Move. They were in West Philadelphia. Born raised. Yeah, I think this was after the Fresh Prince got out. Most of my days. But they were a liberation group who they had been causing issues before. They were basically pinned down in this row home. And there was a lot of tension that was going on in these different conflicts where city authorities were trying to push back on them because they were just kind of causing some havoc in there.

They get pinned down in this house. They're there for a number of days. they've gone through the motions of firing tear gas into the house and then actually taking water hoses and busting the windows out of these houses, just really trying to cause a lot of chaos within this organization. You didn't mention this part. I forgot to ask. Were these people, like, had these people committed like murder or anything like that? Not murder, but they were, I mean, they were involved in some bombings and some order type. So there had been violent crime. Yeah.

Okay. I was just wondering if this was like a shoplifting overreaction. No, no. And there had been an incident that had happened before where there was a previous standoff where they said that they would basically come out and surrender if one of the members of the organization that had been arrested was able to be shown to them because there were reports that he just got the shit kicked out of him after they arrested him. Gotcha.

And they thought, well, the police would never bring out. somebody that they've incarcerated to show us. And then all of a sudden the police did. Okay. So then they had to change their list of demands. And not only did they need to see him, but he needed to be freed. And the police were like, no, we're not going to do this. So they end up rating that compound eventually and they get a hold of them.

This is after that takes place. But they just come to their wits end. And this was actually something that was greenlighted by the mayor. His name was Wilson Good. and what he told them, or what he greenlighted was a forced eviction is what they called it. They used this helicopter to drop an incendiary bomb on this roof to take out this top bunker. Well, they had already cut the power and water and everything to this row home in Philadelphia. So they're using a gas power generator on the roof to electrify this place.

As the bomb hits, it lights the gasoline on fire. The gasoline fire then spreads all throughout the house. The police hold back the fire department from putting this fire out. The fire all of a sudden gets out of control, and it ends up resulting in killing six adults, five children. It destroys almost four blocks worth with 64 homes that left 250 other residents homeless. It's not like stopping to take a beat and really think the decisions through. And it just continues.

And that's, we're talking about a time years before this happened in the 80s to where you've seen what a 10 looks like. Yes, you've seen what rash decisions and overreactions to something can actually do. But also at the same time, not to pull race into this, but that's a black liberation group that that happens to. And now we're dealing with a white supremacist sitting on top of a mountain. So this is like the one time in history that the governments looked at a situation and they just don't see color. Yeah. Well, they're not firebombing yet because there's also kids inside. And apparently they're, yeah.

So like you were saying, an unprecedented situation calls for unprecedented rules of engagement, right? because the normal ones just won't suffice. Wow. This is so frustrating to me because, again, I'm not a rules of engagement absolutionist, but I feel like rules of engagement are put into place that can be used in every situation because they're just common sense. Correct. And during the flight over, they have this discussion about changing the rules of engagement

before the flight takes off with this HRT, this hostage rescue team. They actually get updated and put into. to play while the hostage rescue team is on the flight, and these are the rules of engagement for them. The rules of engagement that are set state, if any adult in the area around the cabin is observed with a weapon after the surrender announcement has been made, surrender announcement has already been made.

This was a blanket statement used by a bullhorn to let them know that they had to surrender. Deadly force could and, this is nuts, could and should be used to. to neutralize the individual. If any adult male is observed with a weapon prior to the announcement of deadly force, can and should be employed if the shot could be taken without endangering any children. Number three, if compromised by any dog, the dog can be taken out.

They just threw that one in there for shit. They had already had a dog situation, so they had to make sure it applied. Number four, any subjects other than Randy Weaver, Vicki Weaver, Kevin Harris, presenting a threat of death or grievous bodily harm FBI rules of deadly force apply. So number four is just saying if it's a child, we're going to revert back to the original rules of engagement. Don't fire on a target unless there's an imminent threat to you or anybody around. So that's the one thing that they hold on true is the kids that are armed with guns, those we need to use the regular rules of engagement. But any adult, free game basically,

If you see even a glimmer of steel in their hand or in their pocket, shoot them. What's crazy about this is the fact that we know that Harris has already fired. We know that Sammy had already fired, but is no longer a factor in this. It hasn't been shown that aside from the shots into the air that Randy Weaver has fired at, you know, at any type of law enforcement or anything like that. that's what makes these rules so crazy that they were changed in fact enough so to where i think there was also a sniper team or someone that came in from denver that had seen those rules and that had heard them when they had got there to this like base camp area and they were like are you are you fucking serious like this is insane like this is completely

this is so far overstepping what the current you know and well-practice rules of engagement are they they didn't think that they were serious and so we get one day away from Sammy being killed and come to August 22nd. Now, they've been inside the house for the most part the entire time. The hostage rescue team, which involves, and it's not like a hostage negotiation team, it's like a bunch of snipers. Now, they're positioned with eyes on like kind of, I'll just kind of call it like what the courtyard in front of the area.

And basically, from the way I understand the layout, you have the Weaver's Cabin, which is rectangular. You have the shed that Sammy's in which I kind of think is almost kind of across from the front door, like leading out. It kind of seems like you walk across this little courtyard or clearing area, and then it's over there. And the way that the door swings is you have a sniper position and the door swings out toward it swings out of the house and out toward this sniper position. So if the door were to be

opened, it would essentially be blocking the sniper's viewpoint of anything standing in that doorway, which is very important. Turns out Randy was a shit carpenter and forgot that doors are supposed to swing inward when you're building a front door. So Randy tells Vicky, he's like, I want to go out and see Sammy like one last timer or however he wants to phrase it and goes out there. And goes out there, And I believe Kevin Harris goes out with him or is kind of close by. But as Randy Weaver's out there, he basically has the door open. He's... We've got to meet a figure that we've talked about in a previous episode.

Yeah. He's sitting there and he opens up basically the shed and everything. And as he's sitting there, there's a sniper that's trained on him at this point. And rules of engagement have stated, I don't know if Randy was armed at this point. He probably had a side arm or something like that. Yeah, he didn't have got in his hand. But the man that is currently has his sights on Randy is a guy named Lon Hurucci.

Ron Horucci. Horiuchi. And Lon Horiuchi is someone that we had talked about back in the Waco episode. Crazily enough, the time frame between Ruby Ridge and Waco, isn't it like, the Waco siege is going on during Randy Weaver's trial During his trial Long Horiucci was also present as a sniper In the hostage rescue team at Waco

Now that might not be super surprising In the sense of like Well they had hostages at Waco There needs to be a hostage rescue team and everything I guess the question is Did we not have Like many of them Was there only like very very few of these guys

I believe they said in total the hostage rescue team snipers. There were 57 of them. That's a pretty big number. 56 would probably suffice at Waco, right? Correct. Especially if the 57th one did some very stupid shit at Ruby Ridge. Yeah, and you're putting him in a position where they could potentially do some more stuff.

So this guy cited in on Randy and goes to take a shot, but at the last moment, Randy kind of moves because the guy's aiming right for his back. He moves, and I believe he takes one, not. in the hand, but kind of in the shoulder, and then it comes out through his armpit, right? So he's hit, they hear the shot go off, Randy turns to run, and as they're running, of course, the people in the house hear the gunshot and everything. They know that Randy's coming in the house, and as he's running, Harris is kind of like behind him, right? Sarah was out on the porch.

Let's just get the official story out so we can try to start clearing. Law in Horriucci's name that we'll never be able to do. The official report is that there is a helicopter up above, and as the helicopter is hovering up above, Randy's out there, Kevin Harris is out there, there's a latch at the top of the door of the shed that contains Sammy's body. As he reaches up to grab the latch on the door to open it up, Horiuchi said that he believed that Randy was taking aim and getting into a position to fire on the helicopter. above the house.

Yeah, but he wouldn't even have to use that excuse, right? Because of the... But where do we hear about a situation where it was believed that they fired on a helicopter before? Well, yeah. So that was maybe a little bit of cover for this story because it's all very convenient

that there's another helicopter that they think... I know, but why is Randy even going out there while there's a helicopter in the air that is that close? I don't know. This was a story that he actually... that I heard Randy tell during this interview. Okay. So, as you said, the shot enters through his shoulder. It comes out his armpit.

Vicky swings the door open, yells at them to come inside after hearing the gunshot go off. Sarah's outside. Randy gets to the door first. Randy goes through the door first, followed by Sarah, followed quickly by Kevin Harris.

Now, Horiucci's vantage point is cut off going into the cabin by the door that is swung open. He's almost like a 90-d- degrees from the door. He's basically, when the door is open at 90 degrees, he's looking at the door broadside. He's looking at the right-hand side of the house, broadside, but up and level with where the door and, like, little porch are. So as that door is swung open, he has no idea what is behind that door. As he sees Kevin go in, he squeezes off a second shot that travels through the window and

ends up striking Kevin Harris in the shoulder. He doesn't know that he's hit anything. As everybody is finally convened inside, they look back at the door and they see Vicky slumped over holding baby Ellie. Ellie. And they realized that Vicky was the first victim of the shot. The shot had carried through the window of the door, had struck Vicky in the head, traveled through her jaw out the other side of her, or,

throughout the left side of her head. Hits Harris in the shoulder, the bullet then travels through Harris's shoulder, hits him in the ribs, cracking his ribs, and stops inches away from his heart. That was how lethal this round. And I don't know what a typical sniper round is,

but this was able to travel. They're high caliber because I think he was 200 yards away. Yeah. Travels through a door, through Vicki Weaver's head and lodged itself. It was like a screen door, though, or like it would the... It was the glass pane in the door. Oh, was there glass in it?

Yeah. Okay. So immediately they realized that Vicky is dead. Just the weavers. Nobody really knows what happened as far as anyone outside. Cameras aren't capturing anything because they can't see it at that angle. But during the court case, it is brought to the attention of the court and to the jury and everything that after the shot was made, even from the location where Horiuchi was, you could hear about a 30-second

period of just screaming. Yeah, something bad happened. Horiochi knew that that bullet found a home. Yes. The fact that he, for some reason, thought that firing inside of the domicile that held all of the people that he wasn't supposed to shoot, that were under the original rules of engagement besides Vicky, it's insane that that shot would even be thought about taken. At that point, when he fires, you have a baby girl, the Rachel, Sarah, and Vicky.

Four women. You have two men. One of the men is the one you had still had visibility on and is firing, which means that there is a one in, what it would be, one in six, or it would be a five and six chance or whatever you want to say the odds are. that someone that's holding that door open or that can be in range of there is much more likely if there is someone else there to be a woman than to be, you know, Randy. And he had just, and the other thing, too, and you mentioned this and brought this to my attention, when they, because he eventually goes to trial on, uh, for manslaughter, correct? Yeah, that's, I know that's ways down the road.

What I'm saying is what comes up during that time frame. Oh, this comes up during the Weaver trial. or sorry, during the Weaver trial, is when that first shot was made and they started scattering, at that point they were not a threat. They were going for cover. Which requires another order of surrender. Correct. Before you're supposed to take that second shot or further engage, there has to be another presentation of the offer for surrender. And that's not like him being like, do you surrender yet?

They're rattled. if one of them is shot like we believe they are, then without further loss of life or shooting another person to take them out, we're going to ask them to surrender because if they do, and they've been rattled or someone's injured to the point where it's life-threatening

and we can get them to surrender because of that leverage, then we can end this thing without having to have taken that second shot. But he decided because he had missed Randy that he didn't want to go home empty-handed. didn't want to have to go back to camp and say, I took two shots and I missed my targets. Well, I didn't want to say that he took the original shot and didn't kill Randy. Yeah, he had to have something to show for it is what it was.

So you could say maybe driven strictly on bravado, that second shot that ends up killing Vicky and wounding Harris in a pretty mighty way was a shot that wasn't taken out of necessity. And clearly it wasn't. There was no reason for that second shot other than Horiuchi wanted to bag the target. And there was even questions Horiucci said that he couldn't tell the difference. He didn't know if he was firing at Kevin or if he was firing at Randy. I understand that he's 200 yards away. But if you're looking through a scope and you can't tell the difference between an adult and a 25-year-old, you probably should be taking a shot.

He said he was aiming for Randy's spine. If you have enough of a sight to be able to hit somebody in the spine and be aiming there, then you can tell that they're male regardless. Well, it's a grown man and not a 25-year-old. Like, it's Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris don't look that alike. Randy Weaver's not a big guy, but what I'm saying is, regardless, those were both targets he was willing to hit. Yeah. I just feel like Randy's the one you're going after. He still takes the shot at it.

Yeah. Yeah. So he fires in the door hoping to hit the jackpot, and unfortunately he hits Vicky Weaver. After this happens, this is what. and maybe we get some reconciliation coming because after this happens, the change back to the original rules of engagement are thrown back into effect on Wednesday, August 26th. And it takes four days after that for them to look at this situation and say,

okay, back to the original. Agents are not to use deadly force against any person except as necessary and self-defense of the defense of another. When they have a reason to believe that they are another person is in danger of death or grievous bodily harm, whenever feasible verbal warning should be given before deadly force is applied. That's what we go back to.

They still don't know Vicki's dead. No, they go back to this. Two days after there is a memorandum that is written by an FBI deputy assistant on August 24th that's there. His name is Danny Collison. He writes down this memo and it's actually recorded in a report

that they got in 1996 when they were going through these congressional investigations. He writes this down. something to consider. Point one. Charge against Randy Weaver is bullshit. Point two. No one saw Weaver do any shooting. Point three, Vicky has no charges against her. Point four, Weaver's defense. He ran to, and this is Sammy Weaver's defense at this point in time. He ran down the hill to see what a dog was barking at. Some guys in camouflage shot his dog, started shooting at him, killed his son. Harris did the shooting.

He's in pretty strong legal position. So even if we can bring Randy in for a murder charge against a marshal, his son's dead. We can't charge him. Randy has a pretty solid case that we can't pin any murder charges on Rand. So for right now, all we have Randy on is the manufacturer of an illegal weapon. and we just took sniper. We just took sniper shots at a guy who sought off two shotguns.

That's where we're at at this point. Yeah. And that report is written without the knowledge that they had just killed Vicky Weaver while holding her 10-month-old baby. Now, they don't know this for a while because as negotiators come in and they're trying to get them to come. out of the house and everything, they're asking and they come to the determination that Vicky seems like the one that's more maybe kind of the brains of the operation or more likely to get Randy to be able to do something. So they switch up their tactics and on the loudspeakers instead of speaking to Randy and telling him, hey, Randy, come out. We just want to talk. You know,

save your, you know, your family's in danger right now. Just the, you know, hostage negotiation stuff. They started dressing Vicky. Hey, Vicki, we're making pancakes down here. Wouldn't the kids like to come down here and have some pancakes. You guys will be safe down here and everything. We can work this out. And they're continuing to present this kind of stuff. And inside the house, they have no idea. They think it must be obvious that they know that they had killed Vicky.

And they're psychologically just torturing the fuck out of them by being like, we're talking to Vicky. We're talking to Vicki. And she's sitting under the fucking dining room table. sheet over. When she was shot, there's interviews with Sarah. When she was shot, Sarah got hit in the face with pieces

of her mom. Yeah, they were pulling pieces of Vicky off of the baby as well. And not to make light after such a fucking shocking thing. One of the things that they did was they ran an armored carrier up to the front

of the house. Like an APC. They'd gotten from like the Ido National government or something like that. They then release a robot. Now, I'm not sure where technology was on Randy's scale of evil, but this robot had a shotgun attached to it. And this robot rolled up onto their porch and it dropped a telephone off. This telephone was going off and ringing every 15 minutes.

Wired. Everything is wired. So when they first came up there, when they ran that phone... Did they say wireless? No. Oh, it was wired. Yeah. So when they dropped that off, they had to, in the armor personal carrier, had to run a mile-long cable back down the hill with them so that phone could stay there. So they're continually having this thing ring on the loudspeaker.

You know, you have, like you said, the robot with a fucking shotgun makes the delivery. And they're continuing to try to address Vicky to get her to come out and talk to him. That's the ringing mental torture. The Vicky thing's a whole other level. I can't really put the Vicking thing on them. I understand the mental torture and I totally understand the Weaver's side. I don't think anybody had any idea. No, no, I'm not saying.

Yeah. What I'm simply saying is that from the Weaver's perspective, I'm not even saying Randy, Randy's perspective. When I say the Weavers and I'm talking sympathetic like this, again, Randy lost his wife in that situation. Horrible. Nobody should lose her wife. Horrible. Were his actions a contributing factor that put her in that situation?

100%. So that blame does have to be on him. Those kids have no control over that situation. And for them to be part of something, that fucking gruesome, that will fuck you for life. and then to you, that is the most obvious thing that just, how do they not know? They're able to get a fucking robot

with a phone up there. You think they don't know that they just killed her and now they're sitting there mocking you. They're not doing it because they know that they killed Vicky because they're not notified of that for what, about,

like six days. And they're not even notified by the Weavers. They're notified by the asshole night and shining. armor that shows up. Yeah. So to kind of give you a lay of the scene, you have the weavers with two dead sitting on the mountain. You have a base camp that looks like it could be in the jungles of Vietnam. It looks like when you're seeing that opening scene of MASH. Yes. Where it's going over the medical tents and like the fort and everything like that. That's what

it kind of looks like just in the middle of this meadow. And then down on the road, because of all the fire fights and the people rolling through Bonner's Ferry, you have all of these white supremacists that are starting to gather along with neighbors that are sitting down

right near base camp at the bottom of this mountain at this road. And these people are carrying signs, talking about how whites need to protect themselves, and just basically spreading their Aryan beliefs loud and proud.

A lot of anti-government stuff. A lot of signs about because they do know that they had shot and killed Sammy. There are people there talking about, like, you know, child killers, things like that. We don't even technically know that until they go up as they're trying to figure out ways to get inside the house. They decide that they need to start clearing some of the outbuildings. They get to the shed where Sammy's body is, and it's a bigger shed than everywhere else. They're afraid that he rigged this thing to explode.

So as they pull the personnel carrier up, two, uh, She had two, uh, what would they be at this point? Probably the, uh, hostage rescue guys. It's probably not just marshals. End up getting out of the personnel carrier, walking into the shed. They do that at night. Finding the body. That, that's done at night quietly.

That's when two guys are up there trying to figure it out. I don't think that's the first time that they're aware that he died, though. I think they know somebody died. I don't think they knew who exactly it was. No, no, I think they do because they still have surveillance on him. So you got to imagine that in that firefight, they knew who was already there. They knew Sammy. They knew Kevin Harris was there.

They knew Randy was there. They know someone died because those guys, the fucking marshals, were chilling out in that area and could probably see the body. Now, after looking at the surveillance and the only other people they're seeing up there going forward are now Harris and Randy, they're going to make the assumption that it was Sammy that had died. And I think that information got out because there is video during the documentary. where people are running up there and there's a sign that says something about Sammy and they're calling them kid killers. Gotta be a tense time down at base camp.

You are putting the people, what would suck is that that is the county sheriffs that's local law enforcement because all the other guys are distancing themselves from that. So you have the people that live in the area

that are having to sit down there on the road and they're just screaming at you. You're going to kill them. You've already killed the kid and all this kind of stuff. Not to mention all of those local guys that are there probably aren't a real big fan of the feds. Watching your face. Yeah. Knowing what your face looks like.

Even law enforcement's not pumped about what the feds are doing because the local guys, they have no say in what's going on. They just have to sit there and take the shit. They just have to sit there and take. whatever jobs. They're saying, hey, go block the bridge. Hey, go block the road. They also get reports that there was a group, I think it was either four or six skinheads from Portland, had shown up at a

gun store close to the area, it purchased a bunch of guns, and then asked how they would be able to get up to Randy Weaver's cabin if they didn't want to take the road that was blocked. Like, just the fucking Looney Tunes. Again, you're buying the guns close. You couldn't have just fucking bought them somewhere further

away. You're telling me that Portland didn't have gunshots? And then at some point, try to pull out a map or something like that? Yeah, they end up getting caught in the canyon behind Ruby Ridge where the cabin was sitting and they get pulled over and somehow they just all figured that it's okay.

I mean, I'm not advocating for fighting in this situation. I'm glad they got out and did what they did, but everybody got out with their hands up and there was no firefight that happened. I feel like if you're willing to buy all these guns, and then hump them up the hill to Randy's house to then fight the feds. If the feds pull you over, you're probably shooting at them, right? Unless they were just like, hey, we're going to go ahead and drop these guns off,

and then we're out of there. I feel like if you're going to those steps, you're going to see it through. If you're going to those measures. No, I can understand your perspective. My, I guess I look at it like, if you're not willing to fight there, you weren't willing to go up there and hang around to fight the feds. And I look at it from the other side. If you're going to go to all that trouble, you should probably be willing to fight the feds.

And again, I'm not saying fight the feds. The expectation I see it from your side is that you went through all the trouble to buy these guns and you see all these feds around and you're willing to go try to arm this guy. You got to be willing to fight them. Luckily they didn't. Glad they didn't. These attempts through the bullhorn just obviously fail because they're so far away as they're talking to the weavers through the cabin doors. it's just never going to work. These growing crowds at the checkpoint are putting a lot of fear into the police that are down there.

The soldier carrying the phone continues to ring the entire time they're up there. There finally comes a point, I don't know how Randy hears it, but Randy hears through the bullhorn that I believe it's Randy calling down. somehow they get in contact. And again, these stories are told so many different ways where Randy is requesting that his sister Marnas is there to speak to him.

And the feds in every attempt to try to stop this end up flying his sister Marnas in. They let Randy know. There's a communication between Marnas and Randy where Marnas basically says, hey, do you need anything? Do you need us to bring you up anything? And Randy says, no, we're good.

We're fine. And there's no negotiations at all with Marnas beyond that. August 27th is the last time where this bullhorn communication really happens, and it's because there's a man that shows up on the scene. He's a Vietnam vet. He's a presidential candidate. He's an extremist. His name is Bogreitz.

Boggaretz is a, like I say, a Vietnam vet. He did some, I'm doing air quotes when it says, private contracting into liberating prisoners of war in Vietnam. Vietnam from other countries around the area to try to free these people. The validity of the stories I'm not 100% clear on is they just sound really, really badass. And as you pointed out earlier, this is supposedly the guy who the character Rambo was modeled after. Yeah, they said this guy was supposed to have or characters that were created that had partial inspiration would be Rambo, Hannibal Smith, I think is his name from the A-Team. And then there was, oh, Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse now.

We're supposed to have certain qualities. Now, I'm sure maybe some qualities. And I can't, in regards to this specific story, if we were to just do an episode on Bea Grites, we would get down to some very questionable stuff. The fact that the reason why Bo Grites is so successful, I'll litch in on, I can just tell you what his presidential slogan was, and you can understand why Randy Weaver would respond to him.

It was God, Guns, and Grites. So, Triple G Now, because he was a green beret And because Bo Grites Was pretty famous within the Like military sphere And everything like that

Randy Weaver definitely knew who he was He had a poster of him on the wall In the cabin That's nuts, right? Yeah So, but that's also nuts To have a poster Like, it's not fucking Boe Jackson

You got a poster of fucking Bo Grites That's not the boat to have a poster Of fucking Bo Grites Like that's got to be hard to find Well, Pope Wrights isn't even like the first famous person to reach out because apparently they were pretty avid listeners to this guy named Paul Harvey. He's pretty famous, I think, for being a little bit larger than life character as far as for maybe libertarian type people. Okay.

Who went on to his radio show and directly was speaking to, I don't know how they thought that he, they were listening to the radio. Sarah confirms it in the documentary on PBS that was actually pretty good. It's a little sweet, but it was pretty good. Says that they listen to Paul Harvey requesting that they all surrender. And they obviously didn't take this because even though they looked up to Paul Harvey and they liked him a lot, they were in a mindset to where there was nobody that was going to be able to talk to him into surrendering. And Bogrides, begrudgingly, kind of has to become the intermediary, the hostage negotiator. But grudgingly, my fucking ass.

I think begrudingly for the FBI. Oh yes. Okay, 100% yes. For the feds. Correct. Yes. So he just shows up. Yeah. And he's like, hey, can I be of assistance? And at first they're like, no, dude. Like, no. It gets to the point, though, where nothing is progressing with this. And so like you said, begrudgingly, they have to be like, fuck it. Let's try it, I guess.

and so he ends up, I guess, calling, they get a hold of Randy before they even go up there and they're like, Randy, we got someone that wants to talk to you. We got Bo Grites here that wants to talk. And he's like, Bo Grites is there to talk to me. And he's like, Ken, he's like, Bo Grites knows who I am. And he's like, yeah, so he talks. And he's like, hey, Randy, I'd like to come up there and have a chat with you guys.

But I want to be able to talk to you like face to face. I want to be able to see you. You know, I want to hear what you have to say. So they take Grites up there in the, armor personnel carrier and basically get within a distance, not like right up to the front door. They open the top hatch and then just set like a bullhorn or like a loud speaker out. And he's trying to talk from within the armor personnel carrier. They can't hear shit what's going on.

So finally, and again, this is the story that Bogrides tells it. I'm not sure exactly how it occurs. But he basically decides he's like, I can't talk like this. And so he ends up getting out of the armor personnel carrier and tells the guy, the guy's like, you know, he can take a shot at you. And he's like, I've been, I've been shot at before. And so he gets out and out of a window, Randy can see him in their talking. He's like, Bo, is that really you?

And he's like, yeah, and he's like basically telling him, hey, you know, what's going on? Like, you got a lot of people like worried and everything like that. And at this point, Randy just comes out and tells me, he's like, they killed Vicky. And they're trying to cover it up. Yeah, and they're trying to cover it up. Because at this point, again, he's been hearing nothing for the last few days. days, but Vicki, come get the kids pancakes and everything. And I'm not making the pancake shit up, if that sounds really random. It's them basically being like trying to also get through the

kids and have the kids here and be like, we have food down here. Like, you guys can't have a lot of food. Come, come take care of your kids. It sounds like the worst hostage negotiation line that you could give. Like, it's desperation. But at the same time, if you're speaking to somebody that's in a desperate state of mind already, it's enough maybe to swing emotions, not understanding how radicalized everybody in that cabin became as soon as Vicky died. You're banking on the kids being like, Mommy, we're so hungry. Like, we

please go down and get, and have that and that preservation of your children's life overrule your desire to keep resisting. They didn't realize that all the children in the cabin were loading up guns ready to go out there fighting to. Yeah. Had the

10-month-old, had Baby Ali been able to hold a gun, I imagine she might have had one herself. So he finds out about this and as Bo finds out that Vicky is dead, the conversation just kind of ends there. And Bo, you know, I'm so sorry and everything. I didn't know that. He goes back and as they're heading back down the hill, he's like, you guys fucked up. And as he gets back down there and shares the information, it's like, you guys fucking killed Vicky. All of a sudden they're thinking themselves, well, when would we have killed Vicky? And who have we been calling out to the past few days?

No shit. And so all of a sudden it starts, the gears starts to say, What shots have we taken? Well, Horriucci took that shot when he shot tried to shoot through the door. It fucking clicks in and they're like, fuck. Like we literally have just killed an innocent woman. As dark as it sounds, I don't know if Bogreitz was really that sad about the government. I don't necessarily know if Bo Grites was sad about that.

I think Bo Grades had the ulterior. motives of being able to resolve this and kind of increasing his his clout well then his campaign slogan turns into i did what the what the feds couldn't yeah i think of what i could do with like if i was in charge of the government this is just me you know volunteering my time yeah so grites ends up going up there i want to say the next day to talk a little bit more and i don't know if it's kind of what the timeline of the exact days are but August 30th. Do you have anything before the 30th? Yeah. So 27th is when communication breaks down.

28th is when Bogrites goes up the first time. The 29th, they actually go at Bogryt's, a neighbor, her name's Jacket Brown. She goes up there to give them like formula and food and everything like that as she goes in. And I think she goes in first. I don't know if Grites goes in with her the first time. She goes in. Before she goes in, the Fed grabs her by the arm and he goes, hey. Don't spend too much time in there because you either will be considered a hostage or we will be considering you.

Hostile or hostage is basically what it is. So she goes in there. The girls just grab onto her and start crying. She knows at this point, Vicky, and she was good friends with Vicki. She said Vicki was her best friend. She looks over. She sees the body underneath the table covered up with the bloodstained sheet. And she's trying to stay composed.

She drops off the stuff and she has to leave. as she's leaving and Bo is talking to Randy I believe he convinces Randy to let them take Vicky's body correct So Bo comes up there with a body bag And he grabs Jackie on a way out And he says I might need your help don't go too far Bo goes into the house

And says we need to take Vicky The feds had already announced That they when they went up and they were in the shed that they had taken Sammy's body and they were asking them over the bullhorn how would you like us to proceed with his burial. Yeah. And now Bo is coming up

and asking if they can take Vicky. He's saying that she will be okay. We'll take care of her. The most respect we can give her, we will. They're not saying that we're going to perform. They're basically saying we'll go ahead and make sure the body down to morgue refrigerator.

As morbid as that sounds, hey, we will have the bodies ready when you guys are wanting to do a burial. Yep. So they end up, Randy finally says, okay, you can take her. Jackie comes in.

They load the body up into the bag and take it. And then Jackie sticks around and starts cleaning underneath the table where Vicky was. And Bo turns his attention back to Randy,

I guess right before they end up taking the body out, Randy sees her again. He says, Bo, you wouldn't believe how beautiful she was. They walk out, Bo turns back to Randy and he goes,

we need to take Kevin to. And Randy says, you're not taking Kevin unless he wants to go. And at this point in time, multiple interactions between Kevin and Randy where Kevin's like, shoot me. Yeah, Kevin's not doing great. Kevin's been shot.

He's been on the bed. I'm guessing there's been a lot of wailing and screaming from Kevin. And when Bo's in there, he definitely notices, and as he's talking to him he's like he ends up leaving at that point but the next day i want to say it's the 30th he's talking to randy and he's like you really should let us you know i took a look at kev or kevin while i was in there yesterday he doesn't look good and randy is like actually he's ate some food

he drank some fucking apple juice and i don't know if he was talking about actual apple juice or whiskey or something like that and he's like he's got a lot of his color back and bow is basically like I understand that, but I've seen guys, and you've probably seen guys in the Army look like they're fine one minute, but all of a sudden, septus, you know, sepsis kicks in or something like that, and they're dead. So again, Randy's like, I'm not kicking him out. At some point, Kevin Harris is just like, I'll go. Like, I'm getting ready to die here. Well, a big part of it in the one little monocum of credit that I'll give Beau Grites is Boz says, Randy, if he dies up there, I am going to testify that his death is at your hands.

You're just, I think the way he phrases it too, or he says something in addition to, you realize that if you keep him up here and he dies, you're no better than the sniper that pulled the trigger. Which is fucking balzy. Profound, very powerful, enough to sway Randy to be able to allow Kevin to leave. Well, he didn't, that's the thing, is he,

it had to have been Randy not, not so much keeping him there, but also going and convincing him because Kevin is going to listen to Randy. Yeah, depending on the story too, I've heard that through different sources, I don't remember if it was a documentary or not, that Randy ends up saying that he talked to the girls

and the girls don't want Kevin to leave. And that's when Bo has to be like, you're the father. Yeah. They don't make those decisions. This also has to come. back into play the very next day because after they take Kevin they're able to they get him on a helicopter and medevac him i want to say to someplace in washington like spokane or something like that

and then it's it's like a reset so basically bow is like now i got i got Kevin Harris out of there we got one yeah we got two technically exactly so the 31st rolls around and bow heads back up there and is talking to Randy and is like basically in a nutshell, this thing's gone on long enough. You know, Vicky's already gone. As long as you're prolonging this, your girls are in danger. Like, you have to be the one that steps up. And he's like, you know, the girls don't want to leave.

They want to fight. And I think Sarah even actually says, gets in between them and is like, we're not going anywhere. Because as soon as we walk out of this house, they're going to shoot us just like they shot my mom. They're going to kill us all. And Bo is like, I'll put myself in front. of you guys, I will handcuff myself to your dad so he cannot get anywhere away from me. And we will shield you as you guys come down the hill and everything.

And to his credit, him and do you remember the other guy was? I thought there was a second one. No, but it was a neighbor or something like that. Somebody that Randy had trusted. To their credit, they both walk out in front of the family down the hill. So this is another situation where he basically has to look at Randy and say, you're the father here, you're the man, you're the one that needs to make this decision.

And basically he turns around to Sarah who has a fucking gun at this point and is like, put down your gun, go grab your things and your sisters were leaving. One of these things that Grides promises him to was pretty stupid of Grites, I would say. Ah. Yeah, in his position, it was smart.

Yes. But if you're trying to, Randy was probably, pretty angry with Bo after the fact because he promised Randy while they were up in the cabin that this defense attorney Gary Spence was going to personally represent him. Who had never lost.

Never lost the case before. Turns out that the only confirmation that Bo got from Gary Spence, Gary, Jerry, I think it might be Jerry Spence. Spence. Yeah, G-E-R-R-Y. Jerry. Okay. Well, yeah, okay. Jerry Spence.

Like Jeff. It's the Jerry version of Jeff. It's the Jerry version of Jeff. I like that. That makes more sense. At this point in time, Jerry Spence really only told Bo that he would promise him one meeting. Because Jerry Spence wasn't too big of a fan of the whole Aryan vibes that Randy was putting off.

He's like, I got Jewish family. I got black friends. One of the first thing, I think the first thing he says to Randy when he meets him, he's like all that stuff, none of that is set around me. I'm here to defend you. in the sense of the law.

I don't believe in your ideology or anything like that, but I believe that you're innocent within the bounds of what the government is charging you with. But like you just said, Bo was like, hey, I talked to Spence.

He's going to take your case and all this stuff. So he's hyping Randy up enough to get him out of there. And, you know, probably one of the more famous pictures for Ruby Ridge is Randy walking down the trail

holding on to baby Ellie while Bogrites is next to him and then they're kind of surround. The girls are behind him and they're kind of surrounded by like military personnel. As they get down the hill, Randy's taken into custody. The girls are put on a plane and sent to Iowa to be with their maternal, their mom,

or Vicki's parents, right? Nail it. The ones that tried to keep them from going in the first place. And Randy is taken to Boise, right? Yeah. Randy's taken to Boise eventually when Kevin gets out of the hospital, I believe you were right. it's Spokane. He sent out to Boise to face charges as well.

And as you were talking about Jerry Spence, this meeting that they have, Jerry tells him that he wants to hear the story from Randy's point of view. And that's what sways Jerry. Jerry hears the story of a man whose son was murdered, a man whose wife was murdered, and understands that the gravity of a weapons charge didn't, necessitate the kind of force that was used. No.

Uh, Spence, Gary Spence comes into this thing and is basically like, I'll, I'll listen to your story, but you kind of already have a knock against you with this whole Aryan thing. But Gary Spence hears that this is literally a case that, I think when he's hearing this and hearing stuff about the case, all these thing is said,

he's like, I'm going to fucking clean the government up. on this. There's no way that I can lose this. There is so much mishandling of this entire situation. Like it's not even going to be a challenge. I can put this one on the board.

And truly, I mean, he's... Not wrong. No. He has a good sense. It's a pretty crazy trial from the jump because the trial begins April 1993. And again, this is while Waco is happening. Like the tail end of Waco, right?

I believe it started in February, and I think it carried through like April 19th, because it's the day before the holiday. Okay. So it was February, I believe it was like February 22nd to April 19th. This trial goes through the entirety of April. And during this trial, you have the government slow walking all of the evidence.

You have them sending, I believe it was, something to do with Horiuchi his interview after the shooting and some drawings that he had made of what he saw from his vantage point and in the drawings there are two circles behind the door

and everybody jumped to the conclusion that he knew that Vicki Weaver was there when they asked him after the drawing came out he said that he believed that that would have been Randy and Sarah's heads as they were the first two that had ducked into the door first

they sent this information via fourth class mail. Yeah, I think Horyuchi had to testify. This information shows up, and because of this, they call his ass back to testify more. That's the government's playbook the entire time, is any information, not just that the defense is getting, because it has to go through the prosecution for the prosecution to have to declare it so the defense can get a hold of it. The prosecution is even angry because they're saying, why are we getting all of this information?

What's going on? And this just, it's literally a trial of a cover up that's going on because of just how this information is being disseminated. Spencer calls no witnesses. No, well, he doesn't need to. That's the thing. Part of his strategy is not to call his own. own witnesses. His job is not to show that Randy or Randy Weaver did anything right. His job,

as far as his strategy is, is to cross-examine all of the witnesses that are up there to basically show how mishandled through cross-examining these witnesses. The government was at all of this, that it casts so much doubt on the handling that people are going to look at what happened to Randy Weaver and just look at the charges against him and say none of that was warranted for what he was initially charged with. The honest is on the prosecution. They have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a guilty, that the defendant is guilty. And if they don't prove that case, you don't have to call any witnesses.

And on cross, he's a beast. So we're going back to Gus, our confidential informant for the ATF. As he is testifying to all of the gun-related shenanigans that him and Randy had gotten into, Spence gets up on cross and he asks him what he gets in return from the ATF, and he admits that he's being paid from the ATF to get these arrests. It's a massive problem for me. I understand that this is just how policing works. He's being paid for the arrest. Yeah. This is how policing works with confidential informants. It's like a commission.

Some do. Other confidential informants are guys that have already been arrested for something and are trying to work off their case. Correct. But in this situation, what Gus is basically saying is that he's on a commission. He's a bounty hunter. He's a fishing bounty hunter. This is exactly what they do to drug dealers. This is what they do to people that go out and buy drugs as they're buying from them. if you're trying to take down a drug dealer you're going to do controlled buys from him use that evidence to get a hold of him and then flip him to go up the ladder.

That's exactly what they were trying to do with Weaver in order to get a hold of these guys from Montana and try to break into this area in nations a little bit further. It's fishing. It's entrapment to, I think, probably the entire legal definition. It's just, unfortunately, how policing goes. It's not always bad depending on what side of things you're on, but at the same time morally I just don't quite understand because you're,

I don't know, you're being compensated to try to make somebody look as guilty as possible for something. And I use this pretty frequently when we talk about this, but drug dealers aren't always out there to buy a Bentley. They're out there because their means at home are in pretty bad shape and they have to provide for their families. And Randy Weaver is another case where he was trying to provide for his family

by getting money. Regardless if that wasn't the sole intent, it was so easy to put it in that light, especially with the aspect of talking to Gus and being like, he was doing this for like $450 bucks. Yeah. With that type of risk of prison and everything like that. They were his guy.

That obviously has to be, well, what I'm saying is that has to be such a example of like, this is what he was willing to do just to make some money for his family. Like this was the risk. You could tell what dire straits financially he was in. And you could tell that based on his position, how they would feel like in trapping him was a very viable option. If I was a prosecution on recross, I would just have one simple. question for him, why didn't you have any money?

Because then he sits on the stand. He goes, well, my wife had figured out this date when the apocalypse was going to happen. So we didn't really have any plans after that for me to like get a job or anything. So we didn't have any money. And a quick way to make money was to saw off these barrels and sell these to the guy who is sitting on the stand. It's a, it's a situation where regardless of the stupidity of not planning beyond the apocalypse. It's just not the greatest way to try to build the case, especially when you're only getting to one level. If Randy had flipped, if they had gone up the chain a little bit more,

and they had actually gotten a big fish, I can look at this situation, be like, well, the CI kind of did his job and it wasn't too bad. But this is just solely, Randy is where this stops. This spins off from that in such extreme ways that it's like, so because he didn't turn an informant, now his wife and his son are dead. Like that's all you have to kind of like throw up and say, was this worth what this, you know, him not being an informant? It's just too impossible of a burden to overcome for the government. Lawn, as we talked about during this trial, spending time in Waco, he's at the siege. The siege, oh, I was wrong.

February 28th to April 19th is how long the siege is going on during this trial. So not only is Lon coming back to testify on his own behalf for killing Vicky Weaver. He's off looking through a scope at the compound in Waco. He's still on the job. This guy is on the hook for killing Randy Weaver's wife, and he's not just sitting at a desk. Yeah. Like for an internal investigation or anything like that. Just fucking insane.

It's crazy. July, 1993, it took them three weeks in deliberations, and that's actually not the longest time. It does feel pretty long. Typically, the kind of rule of thumb is for every week of a court case being presented. It usually counts for about a day. So three weeks, you're talking about... Three days? Yeah.

No, three weeks. You're going to be talking about a case that's 30 weeks long, something like that. I guess it would be the math? Okay, tell me the math again. I'm too high for this. You said every week the case goes on, that's a day of deliberation. Yes. Three days.

If it's a three week case, it's three days of deliberation. But they had three weeks of deliberation. Correct. It's much more than it usually is. Yeah. So it's something to where they wanted to get right. I don't really know what they were weighing as far as in the prosecution's defense beyond just the character assassinate, not assess.

The correct character assumption. No assassination. I mean, there was assassination. It just wasn't of character. Yeah, but his character wasn't good to begin with. Correct. They had to weigh that against the response. Yeah, that's the whole point is like,

they fucked up. The government fucked up so badly that you have to look at the fucking, the racist white Aryan collaborator and be like, but he, you made him look somehow. I'm not even going to see the good guy, but the guy that you couldn't like do you get what I'm trying to say you pinned a shit charge on a guy and then you killed his son and his wife there's nothing that that guy could have done yeah that you were accusing him of that would be anywhere close to justified of you guys doing that that's why

three weeks feels a bit crazy that they had to deliberate and I mean they got it right I can look at the way that this jury's made up I I can critique the one charge a little bit, but other than that, they nailed everything. Randy's acquitted. Well, first off, Harris is acquitted on all of his charges. He was facing murder for the Deegan incident. And a slew of other charges that he gets acquitted on everything. Randy's acquitted on all, but the failure to appear charge that he got for not showing up. So Harris gets acquitted because they're able to frame it in self-defense, because the first, shots were essentially fired by either

Cooper or Deegan that hit Sammy in which then Harris returned fire. But again, that's again, that's the thing that we never know is what the order of that fight was. And at the same time, it's still

they were on the Weaver property. No, no, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. It's self-defense for him. It's so strong of like being able to prove that it wasn't self- defense in that situation when you're saying the dudes were in camo on their property with guns like yeah uh randy could like i say he gets acquittal on everything but the fair to appear charge uh carried a sentence of 18 months the one thing the very minute detail that i

would pick apart and it was what i was asking about earlier uh the manufacturer of the legal weapon. I mean, they didn't find him not guilty on the sale to the set up controlled sale. They found him innocent on what he kind of actually just did. I think the reason that he didn't get charged with that was because it was determined to be enough of entrapment that they couldn't charge him with the sale because he had been set up for that. But they can definitely set him up with, it was an entrapment to have him not show up at his... No, that was solely on him. I still feel like whether it's entrapment or not,

he still willingly did what he did. 100%. I'm just trying to see it from the point of that's probably why. But again, the reaction to it is so egregious that I'm happy that they acquitted him on that, even though it feels like pretty open and shut. He didn't deserve to spend any more time in prison. He ended up getting 18 months.

He had 14 months time served already, so I believe he only did a total of six. 16 months on good behavior, and then he got a $10,000 fine. So I don't know if he ever made up the $10,000 fine. I have a feeling that he will eventually in the future because he's going to, excuse me, come into some money. But the reaction to this was terrible. And not only is it terrible because of everything they did on Ruby Ridge, they are, they've now built a line. They've built the line of congressional investigations of a Ruby Ridge and then you have Waco running up behind it and tap it on the back beat like, hey, I got to get in there. I got to get in there. I got to get in there. I'm like, shit. Now we got two of these. Do we give it to the same committee or do we need to make a Waco committee now?

Yeah. Do we wait until the first investigation into Ruby Ridge is done before we open the can of worms of Waco or do we somehow try to juggle chainsaws and do this all at the same time? It becomes a situation. where they are going through and looking at all of this information and realizing that this is just egregious. And part of this, the federal investigations, they focused on exactly what we harped on, these rules of engagement. The justification of the second shot without the request of surrender, just like we were talking about. That's what the government is coming out and saying, you didn't do this right. And not to mention you didn't do that part right, the rules of engagement thing is beyond fucked. That should have never been even an option that you guys talked about. Who changed this?

Yeah. There was even an instance. I think there was a government agent or a government official. I don't know what office. It might have been FBI. That guy ends up serving like 18 months in prison for destruction of like documents that somehow. And I don't know exactly what the documents were, but they were extremely pertinent to like the handling of the case that had to deal with the rules of engagement. and he ends up doing about or more time than Randy did.

Good. Yeah. Good. He should have got way more time than Randy was. You're destroying evidence that is super pertinent to this case. There's only one reason why you destroy evidence because it's important. You don't, nobody gives the shit if you destroy evidence. You're not destroying evidence that makes Randy look good.

Yeah. Yeah. Or no, no. You would destroy evidence that makes Randy look good. Yeah. August 1995. Weaver files a $300 million wrongful death civil suit. It ends up being met with a settlement that awarded Weaver $100,000.

And then there was a million each for all three daughters. Pretty good there. I mean. Not even. I three. They said that they settled had he gone and it went to a civil trial that he would have gotten close to the 300. You don't think so? You put a number like 300.

million in order to try to get a higher settlement because you know that if you do go to court, there's no way you're getting $300 million. I mean, it's just... He's not, if he'd he gone, he's not just getting $3 million, though. He's not getting... No, he would have gotten way more than $3 million, but you set that pie in the sky number because you're hoping for a settlement. Yeah.

Because going to court and drawing that all out, that's the tough thing about a civil suit is in 1995, so what, three years after this happens, during the civil. civil suit, you're dragging all, I guess, two of the daughters because the baby's still young, through the mud of this whole entire thing again. So a civil suit, $3 million, I mean, it's not enough. There's not enough money in the world to replace your mother. It's just, it's never going to be enough. $300 million wouldn't have been enough, and that was an insane number.

September 2000, Harrison's up being awarded $380,000 for a civil suit for damages. and, of course, the posturing of the feds, they say, we will never pay a dime to a cop killer or to a martial killer, and then they end up having to pay out the civil suit. So it's just blustering to try to sound tough while they quietly slide Harris a check for $380,000. We will never publicly. Yep. 1997, the Boundary County Prosecutor indicts Lon Horiucci on state manslaughter charges.

and they had a pretty good head of steam going on. As soon as the feds find out about this, like, oh, civil guy or a federal guy, we probably, just because of the coverage and how tough this is going to be, we need to move it up into federal court. So the feds get it bumped up into federal court where they can argue immunity. They can argue federal immunity that he was. Based upon the current rules of engagement, which they wrote specifically for this and changed on the fly. Yep. So it ends up getting squashed.

It only stays squashed until there's an appeal filed to the Ninth Circuit Court. The Ninth Circuit Court looks at what the feds did. They're just like, ah, we're going to reinstate this. This is nuts. Unfortunately, the Boundary kind of prosecutor was primaried. I don't know if she was primaried or just beaten the election. But the new prosecutor drops the case, and he just basically says there's been too much.

time in between the case and being able to put together the evidence is going to be tough. Probably because of the guy that was burning the evidence before, they realized that whatever evidence they were hoping to get from the federal government stays. He took a shot behind. I don't know what you need. Yeah. Put that in front of a jury and say he took a shot without knowing what was behind that door. So it's a situation where Lawn Horriucci is the only one that I believe needed to go to jail

in this whole entire thing. And unfortunately, he didn't go. Now, wasn't Lon Horiuchi also the one that Timothy McVey had put on the business cards and he would hand them out at gun shows? I think so. He would put his address and his information on it. Yeah. And this is a situation we're talking about Ruby Ridge that was kind of the, not a, I would say possibly a catalyst, maybe a late stage catalyst for what Timothy McVeigh was planning on doing for the Oklahoma City bombings. This is something that he mentions by name in his manifesto along with Waco.

He was at Waco, remember, selling stickers and all that shit. Yeah. I'm sure he would have been at Ruby Ridge and it lasted

any longer and he could have gotten up there. It incensed these right wing acts to a way to where they grew. And I'm not saying

right wing as far as political groups and just the actions were done. Eric Rudolph was a far right, I don't want to use word actor.

It's a terrorist. Terrorist. this is the kind of stuff that happens. Whenever you get too far one way or the other and you start to emboldened these people, shit just happens. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't, or that they should have been emboldened by this

because it was horrific what happened. But these are instances where Randy Weaver's, I mean, he, ultimately, what happened to him shouldn't have happened, he did get out alive. Everybody believed that he was going to be killed because of what he did. No matter how much the government fumbled up until the end. He didn't get to become a martyr, but they used him in as much of a way as they could for someone that is still alive.

Yeah. Yeah. He becomes a folk hero for these people. Brandy and Sarah got together and wrote a book, The Federal Siege of Ruby Ridge in 1998. The interview that I saw was the one. kind of adorable thing was, I believe this was like a 70 year old Randy. It might have been mid-60-year-old Randy. They ask him how people can get a hold of his book.

And one of the guy says Amazon. And Randy looks at him, he goes, Amazon? No. If you want to write me a letter to X address, Calispell, Montana, apartment, whatever, tell me what you want. I'm selling these books for 20 bucks a pop plus shipping. believe it's like $24. If you just send me a letter to my house with the money enclosed, I'll then send you a copy

of my book. Is that not the most, I don't have a phone? Yeah. I don't trust technology. Yes. I don't like the government having any hand in this. And explain in three sentences why you want my book. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Just the wildest thing to do. It's, but it's, that's how the guy lived his life. Yeah. In 2022, it was May 11th, Randy Weaver ends up dying of an undisclosed illness. I don't know. He's a flashpoint in the history of the United States

as far as how the government can completely overstep and turn a situation that shouldn't have been that situation into a disaster. It's two things that just like, the government couldn't be prepared for what they were going into and because of that and them not knowing how to handle it they handled it just in the worst way possible

they just fucking fumbled through the whole thing well to look at it today do you know how many people are still out walking the streets with federal warrants right now yeah there's a lot of people and I think that was a big thing is just like when you had to finally boil it down.

You had to say what were you guys after this guy for? What required all of these different agencies, sniper teams, a whole camp borrowing an armored

personnel carrier for the army, what did this guy do that forced you up there? I mean, he had a couple shotguns and he sought off the thing. And then we tried to bust him for it and we said, Hey, you got to go spy on these other guys for us, or we're going to press charges,

or we're going to go and pursue this thing. And he said, no, so we definitely pursued it. And then he didn't come down and show for his court date. So that's why his wife and kid are dead. Well, in a roundabout way, yeah, I get. Like, you can't explain in any way, shape, or form. You could explain that if you said, and Randy is dead, and he's the one that killed his wife and kid.

That's about the only explanation. Well, where's Randy? Now he must be in prison. No. Calispell, Montana, actually. He served about 18 months. So he wasn't guilty. Well, he was guilty about not shown up to court. But his wife and son are still dead, and it was the government that shot him. Yeah. Okay. There's 50 people in the state of Idaho with federal arrest warrants, and 49 of them still have their son and wife alive. Why this guy? Why did you put this much of a resource? How do you somehow make this guy the one that technically you want to come out of the story better? It's so fucking nuts. Yeah, and again, we're not shifting blame away from Randy, but the more egregious problems are. I blame the government from making you feel this way about Randy. It's fucking ridiculous. That's a problem.

The government went so far that we... Did I have to suspend my fucking dislike for all the fucking stuff that Randy stands for? Because it was so fucking bad what the government did. That's why I'm angry. Yeah, it's also kind of the beauty of it is to understand. I don't put a lot of hope in the justice system, but I do put a little bit of hope in humanity that they could look past all of Randy's shortcomings to understand that he's the victim. They had to do that.

Yeah. They had to basically say, this is person A, and group B did this. Is person A, did they deserve that? No. Okay. Now, if we were to add in all this other stuff, do they deserve it? Go back to person A. Go back to person A.

Okay, no, they don't deserve it. That's how we have to judge it. But that's the thing is they didn't have to. How many court cases have we seen in the past and in history where they just side with the government of the police just based on them being the government of the police? think that's how bad it was fucked up is that you could not ignore it.

It gives you a little bit of a glimmer of faith in the system. The judicial system, not the governmental system. The catch system. Yeah. Basically. The release system. Yeah. Yeah, good times. We've been waiting for this one for a little while.

We've definitely gotten requests for it. I hope that all of those requests feel like they were validated with us. It's three hours and 20 minutes in. It should feel... Are you serious? Oh, yeah. Oh, my, I stopped the clock at the bachelor's. I actually just forgot to turn it on.

I'm like, I wonder where he thinks we're at talking right now. Oh, man, I didn't think we hit 3. 320? Yeah. God damn. Okay. Well, thank you for sticking with us for this long. Yeah. We rounded out the trifecta of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City bombing.

So if you haven't gone and listened to those other episodes, listen to this one first, then listen to Waco, then listen to Oklahoma City. And it might actually all stack up. It's a good call. I like that. Anything else? No. All right. Well, everyone, thanks for spending the three hours and 20 minutes with us. Later. Peace.