Sovereign Citizen Targets Supreme Court Chief Justice and FBI Director

Anti-government sovereign citizens will file frivolous paperwork against anyone – even mailing their bogus legal documents to the home of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the director of the FBI.

Those allegations are contained in a 17-page criminal complaint just filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle accusing Kenneth Wayne Leaming of three counts of “retaliating against a federal judge or law enforcement officer by false claim.”

Leaming -- or as he prefers to call himself “Kenneth Wayne, sovereign man” -- is affiliated with an anti-government group in Washington state calling itself “Assemblies of the County,” charging documents say.  He also was a “county ranger,” part of the so-called law enforcement arm of the “assemblies.” Other members of that sovereign citizens group held a pseudo-legal “common law” jury trial a few months ago and acquitted of Alaska militia leader Francis Schaeffer Cox of federal weapons violations. He remains in custody, awaiting federal trial in Anchorage.

Leaming, a felon, was arrested last week by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force at his home in western Washington. He was ordered held without bond at a detention hearing where testimony revealed seven firearms were found in his home, which likely will result in additional federal charges.

Leaming, a self-described international lawyer and “attorney-in-fact,” once partnered with David Carroll Stephensen in forming the “Civil Rights Task Force,” a sovereign citizens group which offered “business planning seminars.” That was before Stephensen was convicted in the Western District of Washington in 2005 of multiple counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States and failing to file tax returns.

Since then, while Stephensen has been in various federal prisons, Leaming has communicated with him regularly by telephone, mail and e-mail and assisted in filing fraudulent liens on his behalf, court documents alleges.  Some of that correspondence has come from American-International Business Law Inc., a business Leaming operated in Spanaway, Wash., where he lives.

Two of the “commercial liens” filed on Stephensen’s behalf in Pierce County, Wash., are for $10 million against Harley Lapin, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and $20 million against Dennis R. Smith, the current warden of the Federal Correctional Institution, Phoenix, the court documents say.

Six additional liens were filed with the Pierce County Auditor against U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collier; former Assistant U.S. Attorneys William R. Cowden and Vasu B. Muthyala; former U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor; Secret Service Agent Roy Dotson; Cutler Dawson, former executive officer of the Navy Federal Credit Union, and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, the documents allege. The filing fees for those liens were traced to a bank account controlled by Leaming, the document says.

While under FBI surveillance on Sept. 28, Leaming mailed letters at a U.S. Post Office in Spanaway, Wash., to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, and two federal judges in Arkansas, the federal criminal complaint says.

In an e-mail sent to Stephensen in prison last May, Leaming promised to “flood” the U.S. Supreme Court with habeas corpus petitions, “one to each justice and re-send the one to the Chief Justice (John G. Roberts Jr.) and maybe one to his kids.” “One way or another he is going to get it in his hands and I’ll start working on off duty locations for the remaining justices as well.”

Leaming claimed in the e-mail that he also had mailed legal correspondence to Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Later, in a monitored prison telephone conversation, Stephensen said he had been placed in segregation, and he blamed that on the paperwork he sent to the Supreme Court justices.

Stephensen also said the petitions to the Supreme Court would “put the judges” on the spot to provide proof of their authority. He then warned if “they don’t straighten up soon,” Leaming would “have a little liability correspondence” with Attorney General Eric Holder, later adding that “someone has suggested we go after body odor in the White House.”

Later, the court documents say, Stephensen remarked that he “doesn’t like the business of politicians sending their soldiers to war for their own profit and gain.” To that, Leaming said not to blame politicians, but the Rothschilds, a reference to a powerful Jewish family that’s often the target of anti-Semitic tirades by racists.