28 November 2001
Source: Digital files from Court Reporter Julaine V. Ryen, Western District
of Washington, Tacoma, WA. Telephone: (253) 593-6591
This is the opening argument of the trial.
See other testimony: http://cryptome.org/usa-v-jdb-dt.htm
1
1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
WESTERN DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON
2 AT TACOMA
3
4 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Docket No. CR00-5731JET
)
5 Plaintiff, )
)
6 v. )
) Tacoma, Washington
7 JAMES DALTON BELL, ) April 3, 2001
)
8 Defendant. )
)
9
10
TRANSCRIPT OF OPENING STATEMENTS
11 BEFORE THE HONORABLE JACK E. TANNER
SENIOR UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE, and a Jury
12
13 APPEARANCES:
14 For the Plaintiff: ROBB LONDON
Assistant United States Attorney
15 601 Union Street, Suite 5100
Seattle, Washington 98101
16
For the Defendant: ROBERT M. LEEN
17 Attorney At Law
Two Union Square
18 601 Union Street, Suite 4610
Seattle, Washington 98101-3903
19
20
21 Court Reporter: Julaine V. Ryen
Post Office Box 885
22 Tacoma, Washington 98401-0885
(253) 593-6591
23
24
Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography, transcript
25 produced by Reporter on computer.
2
1 I N D E X
2 OPENING STATEMENTS: Page
3 Plaintiff 3
Defendant 25
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1 (Defendant present.)
2 * * * * *
3 MR. LONDON: Members of the jury, good afternoon.
4 Once again, I am Robb London, the assistant U.S. attorney
5 who is in charge of prosecuting this case for the government.
6 As Judge Tanner made clear during jury selection, this is a
7 criminal case and we have the burden of proving beyond a
8 reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the acts that he
9 is charged with here today. He is charged in a five-count
10 indictment, what we call a superseding indictment, that charges
11 him specifically with five counts of interstate stalking
12 committed last October and November.
13 The interstate stalking statute is a federal statute. As
14 you know, you are here in Federal Court today. Stalking can be
15 a state law offense, but it's charged here federally because the
16 defendant is charged with having crossed a state line for the
17 purpose of interstate stalking. And stalking under the statute
18 is defined as conduct that would reasonably place another
19 individual in fear for his or her safety or the safety of his or
20 her immediate family. I'm going to tell you a little bit more
21 about that in a minute. But the crossing of the state line is
22 what gives us federal jurisdiction to be here. It's what we
23 call the interstate nexus requirement, and it's a requirement
24 that enables the federal government to have jurisdiction in many
25 kinds of cases, not just the one that we are here to deal with
4
1 today.
2 I just want to say a few words before I tell you what the
3 evidence is going to be in this case and what we expect to prove
4 through the witnesses and exhibits. I want to say a little bit
5 about the trial process.
6 Some of you, I gathered from jury selection and your
7 answers, have definitely been involved in trials before, either
8 as plaintiffs or witnesses, as jurors sometimes. For those who
9 have not, I just want to say one or two things very briefly.
10 A lot of what we may think we know about trials probably
11 comes from TV or the movies where things kind of move very
12 quickly. Everything gets wrapped up neatly in an hour. You
13 only tend to hear the key testimony that's necessary for the
14 sake of putting on a show.
15 In fact, it's a little more complicated than that. You are
16 going to have to bear with us sometimes. There will be times
17 when patience is required. We have a lot of witnesses, a lot of
18 exhibits. There will be times when we have to spend time with
19 witnesses going over exhibits and getting them admitted before
20 you can see them, and we will appreciate your patience during
21 that endeavor. Whatever exhibits Judge Tanner allows us to
22 offer into evidence and have admitted, you will eventually get
23 to see. But there might be times that you will have to wait a
24 bit, and we appreciate your patience.
25 Some witnesses may seem to be out of chronological order,
5
1 and we have scheduling reasons for that. So bear in mind, at
2 the end of the case I will have a chance to argue the case to
3 you, and that is when I will try to make maybe better sense of
4 some of the evidence that you have heard that might seem
5 fragmentary or somewhat disassociated during the course of the
6 trial.
7 The evidence in this case is going to show the following:
8 In late October and early November of last year, defendant,
9 who is this gentleman over here in the light blue shirt, seated
10 at the counsel table, James Dalton Bell, engaged in a sustained
11 and deliberate effort to stalk, harass, and intimidate two
12 federal law enforcement officers, in particular, and a third
13 individual in Bend, Oregon, not a law enforcement officer, and I
14 will say a little bit more about him shortly. Mr. Bell was
15 living at his parents' home in Vancouver, Washington, which is
16 across the Columbia River from Portland Oregon. These agents
17 are believed to live in the Portland, Oregon, area.
18 He left his home in Vancouver, Washington, crossed the
19 Columbia River into Oregon, and began showing up at these
20 agents' homes, or the homes which he believed were theirs. He
21 didn't always have it right, but you will see from the evidence
22 that he was zeroing in on the home addresses of these two
23 federal agents. In fact, he got one of them right, but it
24 turned out that that agent had just recently moved out.
25 He found these addresses by obtaining publicly available
6
1 databases, like Oregon driver's -- Department of Motor Vehicles
2 records which he had on CD-ROMs and which he had obtained, and
3 he was able to run huge database searches on his personal
4 computer at his parents' home. In fact, he had a couple of
5 computers.
6 Well, you are going to need to understand why Mr. Bell was
7 so fixated on these two law enforcement officers and then later
8 on this third private individual that I will be telling you
9 about.
10 Well, it is an inescapable part of this case that you have
11 to understand and know that Mr. Bell was prosecuted by the
12 federal government before, here in this district, as a matter of
13 fact.
14 MR. LEEN: Objection, Your Honor, to anything prior,
15 prior prosecutions.
16 THE COURT: Continue.
17 MR. LONDON: In 1997 he was prosecuted, and one of the
18 federal agents that he is accused here today of stalking was the
19 lead case agent then, and in fact it is the gentlemen who is
20 seated next to me at the counsel table here, who is Jeffrey
21 Gordon, who also happened to be part of the investigative team
22 of this case.
23 The defendant had originally gotten into a dispute with the
24 IRS over some tax issues. And he became very angry at the IRS
25 back in the early '90s, and he began attending meetings in
7
1 Multnomah County, Oregon, of an organization that called itself
2 the Multnomah County Common Law Court. This was not a real
3 legitimate court such as the one that we're in today or the
4 courts of the Oregon State Court System, but a group of people
5 like himself who were disgruntled or angry at the various
6 government officers or officials, and they decided to convene
7 their own court system and to appoint themselves as judges and
8 jurors and to hold trials of IRS officers and other government
9 agents in absentia, as we say; that is, without those people
10 sometimes even knowing they had been charged, and certainly
11 without those people being present at this court that they had
12 convened. And this court would convict people in their absence,
13 but then it had to decide how to punish these IRS agents and
14 others who had made the lives of these people miserable in some
15 way.
16 So what was the punishment doled out by the Multnomah County
17 Common Law Court to people it had convicted? Well, that's where
18 Mr. Bell decided to offer a solution, and that's where the
19 evidence you are going to hear will make it very clear that he
20 showed up at the meetings of the common law court and offered
21 members of the common law court what he called a solution to
22 their enforcement problem. Enforcement problem meaning that,
23 you know, it was -- it was not enough simply to convict these
24 people in their absence; you had to find a way to make them pay
25 and punish them.
8
1 So he decided to make available to the members of this
2 common law court a little project of his -- or perhaps not such
3 a little project, a big project of his, something that he had
4 undertaken that he called Operation Locate IRS. And the gist of
5 it was this:
6 He invited the members of this court, this group, to give
7 him the names of any IRS officials or other government agents or
8 officers that they might have had run-ins with, and he would use
9 these databases that he had collected and run the names of these
10 people through all of these databases on his computer in an
11 effort to find their home addresses and personal information
12 about them. He made it very clear to the members of the common
13 law court that the purpose of this would be for intimidation.
14 If you let these officers or these government officials know
15 that you know where they live, then you will -- they will be
16 much less likely to take any kind of enforcement action against
17 you, say if you have a tax dispute.
18 Well, you will learn that this Operation Locate IRS was the
19 subject of some chatter on the Internet and that it came to the
20 attention of the Internal Security Division of the Treasury
21 Department. That's the agency that's responsible for protecting
22 the security of the IRS officers and the people in the Internal
23 Revenue Service.
24 So the Treasury Department began an investigation of Mr.
25 Bell, and they assigned to that matter Jeffrey Gordon as the
9
1 case agent. And they also -- they also used the services of one
2 of their agents in an undercover capacity.
3 One of the first witnesses you are going to hear from today
4 is a man named Steve Walsh. He operated as an undercover agent
5 with the Treasury Department Internal Security Division of the
6 IRS, and he started attending meetings of the Multnomah County
7 Common Law Court, pretending to be one of their own and a
8 participant.
9 Mr. Walsh attended a number of meetings. He actually had
10 quite a bit of contact with Mr. Bell. He wore a body wire on
11 some occasions, and that involved a transmitter to others who
12 taped portions of the meetings of the Multnomah County Common
13 Law Court that Mr. Bell was at.
14 He was also there personally when Mr. Bell handed him a
15 computer diskette, which was one of several computer diskettes
16 that Mr. Bell brought that day in 1997 and was making available
17 to members of the court. And Mr. Bell wanted people to see what
18 was on this diskette. It was an essay that he had authored that
19 was called Assassination Politics. And in this essay, Mr. Bell
20 offered a plan that effectively can be described as a scheme to
21 solicit the killing of government officers or officials in an
22 anonymous capacity using encryption, or kind of code, to mask
23 communications by email or over the Internet, and it involved
24 digital tasks, and you will hear more about this later.
25 But the idea of it on Assassination Politics was that it
10
1 offered at least a theoretical framework whereby people in these
2 common law court systems or just anybody who was -- who had a
3 beef with someone in the government could put forward the name
4 of the person he or she wanted to have killed, have it done by
5 an anonymous hit man, and have that hit man then be awarded
6 secretly and privately with cash that could be raised in kind of
7 a kitty or a pot, all done through the use of encryption in a
8 way that would mask the identities of the people doing it. If
9 you didn't have the code, then you couldn't figure out who was
10 doing this stuff over the Internet.
11 Well, this was enough to provide the basis for the issuance
12 of the federal search warrant on Mr. Bell's home in Vancouver,
13 Washington, in 1997. And agents executed the search warrant
14 during that year and they found evidence that he had been
15 carrying out Operation Locate IRS in systematic fashion, running
16 huge database searches for home address information on scores of
17 IRS employees and other government officers. Agents seized
18 computers of his, and on those computers they found emails and
19 other documents in which Mr. Bell -- who, incidentally, was a
20 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a
21 degree in chemistry -- made it clear that he had done such
22 things as made his own version of Sarin gas, which you will hear
23 is a deadly nerve agent, and you may recall that some of it was
24 released into the Tokyo subway system a few years ago by members
25 of a Japanese cult, killing --
11
1 MR. LEEN: Objection, Your Honor.
2 THE COURT: Continue.
3 MR. LONDON: -- killing a number of people and wounding
4 scores more.
5 You will also learn that he acknowledged in a number of
6 emails that he had committed an attack on an IRS office in
7 Vancouver, Washington, using a chemical compound known as
8 mercaptan, which is a fume, sort of a chemical. A number of
9 employees that day had. --- to go to the hospital and sent
10 home. Mr. Bell took responsibility for that in a number of
11 emails that were found on his system during the execution of the
12 search warrant in 1997.
13 Well, he was prosecuted, as I said before. And in a court
14 of this district here in Federal Court in 1997, Mr. Bell did
15 plead guilty to obstruction of the Internal Revenue laws, in
16 part by virtue of Operation Locate IRS, and he admitted in his
17 guilty plea colloquy with a federal judge sitting just a few
18 doors down from here that his Assassination Politics scheme had
19 been part of a deliberate attempt to intimidate IRS officers,
20 that Operation Locate IRS was for the express purpose of
21 intimidating or harassing IRS officers. He admitted in the plea
22 agreement the mercaptan chemical attack on the IRS office in
23 Vancouver.
24 Mr. Bell was sentenced and he did go to prison; he did some
25 time. But you will learn, and you will hear evidence, that even
12
1 before he got out of prison -- and he was released just about a-
2 ago -- even before he got out of prison, instead of planning to
3 return to a normal civilian life, he was already planning on
4 getting revenge on the system that had imprisoned him. He gave
5 an interview even while still in prison to a news reporter. He
6 told the reporter that he was planning to exact revenge on the
7 system that had imprisoned him. He added, "I'm not going to
8 kill them off. Other people are going to do that."
9 As soon as Mr. Bell got out, he began once again to gather
10 databases, and he began searching for the home address of
11 Jeffrey Gordon, the agent who had been the principal case agent
12 in his 1997 prosecution. He also began looking for the home
13 address of another federal agent, an ATF -- that's Bureau of
14 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms -- an agent by the name of Mike
15 McNall. And he was apparently, you will see from this email
16 evidence, convinced that Agent McNall was part of some kind of
17 government conspiracy against him.
18 You are going to hear the testimony of a witness named Chris
19 Groener. Groener is presently the resident of a private home
20 located in Oregon City, in the Portland suburbs, it's south of
21 the Columbia River, at 14135 South Clackamas River Drive.
22 All right. What you have in front of you on the screen
23 there is an aerial photograph of that residence. You can see
24 that it's rural, it's sort of semi-farm land, and the parcel of
25 property is itself quite rural, agrarian, and you can see that
13
1 the house is set back quite a ways from the road by a long
2 driveway.
3 Groener is going to tell you that he had just recently moved
4 into this address back in October of 2000, just this past
5 October; that the prior resident who had just moved out was ATF
6 Agent Mike McNall. Groener is going to tell you that on October
7 23rd, he came home from work, about 5:30 p.m., and he saw Mr.
8 Bell coming around the back side of the residence. Mr. Bell
9 confronted him, said he was looking for Mike McNall. Mr. Bell
10 demanded to know how long it had been since Mr. McNall had lived
11 there. He identified himself straightforwardly as Jim Bell. He
12 gave Groener his phone number. Groener wrote the number down.
13 Bell asked him who the Andrews were who were living on the
14 property. And, in fact, there are two residences on the
15 property, and there is a family by the name of Andrews living on
16 that property, and Mr. Bell had evidently found that out
17 somehow.
18 Mr. Groener asked Mr. Bell why he wanted to know. Bell, Mr.
19 Bell just said he had seen the name Andrews on the mailbox.
20 Well, Groener will tell you that the name Andrews does not
21 appear on the mailbox. He double-checked this after Mr. Bell
22 eventually left.
23 Mr. Bell made a point of looking very carefully at the
24 license plate of Groener's car, then he sat in his own car,
25 which was parked on the property, and he wrote something down in
14
1 a spiral notebook. Mr. Bell stayed on the property in the car
2 for several minutes before he finally left.
3 Groener knows Agent McNall, and he called him and he warned
4 him and he said, "There's a guy out here at the property this
5 afternoon, this evening. He came around in the back of the
6 house. He was on the property and he was looking for you and
7 his name was Jim Bell."
8 So Mr. Bell found Mr. McNall's home address and went to find
9 him. It was just Mr. McNall's luck here that Mr. McNall had
10 just moved out.
11 You will also learn that McNall's former address, the
12 Groener residence on South Clackamas, was not the only one that
13 Mr. Bell visited late in the afternoon of October 23rd. The
14 evidence will be that in his many, many database searches, Mr.
15 Bell found two home addresses in his search for Jeffrey Gordon's
16 home address. There were two various home address listings
17 under the name Jeffrey Gordon in the Portland area. One was in
18 Eagle Creek and the other was in Tualatin.
19 Mr. Bell, you will find out, kept a diary. You heard me
20 make reference to a spiral notebook. He kept a diary of his
21 stalking activity, and in that diary he meticulously made
22 entries, including some on October 23rd, that indicated he
23 apparently made a visit that day to the home of a Jeffrey and
24 Barbara Gordon in Eagle Creek, the Eagle Creek address that I
25 just mentioned, and that he then went to Agent McNall's former
15
1 address, the visit you just heard about at 5:30 where he
2 confronted Groener around 5:30, and then went to the second
3 address that he had for a Jeffrey and Barbara Gordon, this one
4 at 8300 Southwest Chelan Street in Tualatin.
5 In the last entry in his diary on October 23rd, when -- and
6 he wrote it occurred at 6:26 p.m. He wrote down a considerable
7 amount of personal, very detailed and sensitive personal
8 information about the Gordons; notably, that they had a son
9 named Joshua; that Joshua had a medical problem of some kind
10 that involved a medical insurance policy and a claim that had
11 been filed with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. You are
12 going to have to ask yourself how Mr. Bell learned this.
13 The evidence is going to be, and you are going to hear from
14 Barbara Gordon, the resident at 8300 Southwest Chelan, that she
15 and her husband, Jeffrey Gordon -- but not this Jeffrey Gordon,
16 as it will turn out -- do in fact live at that address at 8300
17 Southwest Chelan. They do have a son named Joshua. Joshua did
18 and does have a medical insurance policy pending and a claim
19 pending with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama.
20 She will testify that she does have a husband named Jeffrey,
21 as I said, and she will identify the October 23rd, 2000, entry
22 in Bell's spiral notebook as containing very detailed personal
23 information about her and her family. Correct, accurate
24 information.
25 Specifically, she will acknowledge that the address that he
16
1 wrote in the spiral notebook is hers -- was her address last
2 October 23rd, the date of the entry. On page 28 of the diary
3 there is a reference to Allstate insurance information about
4 some specific vehicles. She will identify the cars that are
5 referenced in the diary as hers. The Allstate policy
6 information is hers.
7 At the bottom of page 28 of the diary, there is information
8 about the Blue Cross Blue Shield claim number, 595-2873477. She
9 can identify that information as her policy and claim number for
10 her son Joshua's medical insurance claim.
11 On page 29 of the stalking diary there's a handwritten entry
12 by Mr. Bell about patient Joshua J. Gordon and the claim number,
13 and she will testify that her son is Joshua J. Gordon.
14 She will also testify that she never received the claim
15 statement that she was expecting in the mail that month from
16 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. That's how she got her
17 monthly claim statements was in her mailbox at the edge of her
18 property, and in October, she didn't get it. She will tell you
19 that she knows she never received the claim forms because it was
20 her habit to keep them in her house while she was using them and
21 then if she decided to throw them away, to burn her mail, not to
22 throw it away. She didn't like information sensitive of that
23 kind being put in the trash where just anybody might get it on
24 the street. Barbara Gordon happened to be somebody who guarded
25 her private information very carefully, and if she was done with
17
1 a claim form, it got burned in the fireplace or wood stove. It
2 did not go out in the garbage. She will tell you that she never
3 got the claim form information, the monthly statement, that Blue
4 Cross Blue Shield of Alabama sent out for October.
5 You are going to hear from a witness named Brian Kenney, and
6 he's a records custodian from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama,
7 and he is going to tell you that on October 16th of 2000, Blue
8 Cross Blue Shield of Alabama mailed two insurance claim reports
9 to Jeffrey Gordon and Barbara Gordon at 8300 Chelan in Tualatin
10 concerning the claims submitted by the Gordons on behalf of
11 their son Joshua. He will tell you that it was sent by United
12 States mails to the Gordons at that address, and he will also
13 tell you that is private information and that the information
14 contained on those claim forms is not publicly available in any
15 other database but Blue Cross Blue Shield's.
16 So, the evidence is going to be that on October 23rd, Mr.
17 Bell traveled from his home, parents' home, in Vancouver,
18 Washington, to Oregon with the express purpose of going to home
19 addresses that he had obtained by searching various databases
20 for the home addresses of Special Agent Jeffrey Gordon and ATF
21 Agent Mike McNall. That he went to the address which he
22 believed to be McNall's at about 5:30 p.m., where he confronted
23 Chris Groener, the current resident, then to the Gordon
24 residence in Tualatin at 7:26 p.m., according to the entries in
25 his own diary. The evidence is going to show that he crossed
18
1 the state line from Washington to go into Oregon in order to
2 accomplish this because we can place him at his home in
3 Vancouver late the evening of October 22nd, the night before.
4 He sent someone an email, and you will see that exhibit, from
5 his home at 11:08 p.m. The night before he made the trip south
6 into Oregon to go check out these home addresses and confront
7 Mike McNall or Jeffrey Gordon. You will hear that his Internet
8 access account was such that he could not have sent the emails
9 that were in fact sent from Vancouver, Washington, from a remote
10 site or other location, not even with a laptop or remote because
11 his Internet access was hardwired into his house.
12 Later that night -- now we're actually talking in the wee
13 small hours of October 24th, 2:53 a.m., now back at his parents'
14 home in Vancouver -- he posted an email to a public website on
15 the Internet. The email was titled, "Say Goodnight to Joshua."
16 "Tell him it's not his fault that his father is a thug." He
17 also noted that he had been on what he called a "show the flag"
18 circuit and that he had intended to be seen.
19 So the visit to the McNall address at 5:30 on the 23rd is
20 what is charged in Count 1 of the indictment. The visit to the
21 Gordon residence at 6:26 p.m. on the 23rd is what is charged in
22 count 2 of the indictment. Remember, it is a five-count
23 indictment.
24 Eight days later, on October 20 -- excuse me -- October
25 31st, Mr. Bell sent a fax to Special Agent Gordon from his home
19
1 in Vancouver, Washington, to Special Agent Gordon's office in
2 Portland, Oregon. This is important because it shows you that
3 if Mr. Bell needed to contact Agent Gordon for any legitimate
4 reason, he knew how to contact him at his office. He didn't
5 need to go to his home to do it. But he faxed him at the
6 office, and the fax, on the fax, he said that he was prepared to
7 come by Special Agent Gordon's home the next night. He made it
8 very clear that he knew where Special Agent Gordon lived.
9 Telephone records will confirm that the fax was sent via the
10 telephone line from Mr. Bell's residence in Vancouver to Special
11 Agent Gordon's office in the state of Oregon. One of the
12 charging statutes in this case makes it unlawful to use what we
13 call a facility or instrument of interstate commerce for the
14 purpose of accomplishing or undertaking stalking behavior,
15 stalking activity. A facility of interstate commerce can be a
16 phone line or a fax or a modem. So that is the basis for count
17 3 of the indictment.
18 Three days later, on November 3rd, Mr. Bell went to the home
19 of the third individual that I have told you that he is charged
20 here with stalking; not one of the special agents in law
21 enforcement, but a private individual. Not a special agent, but
22 in fact a real estate agent, in the town of Bend, Oregon. An
23 individually -- an individual, excuse me, totally unconnected to
24 Mr. Bell's prior problems with the IRS or the Treasury
25 Department or prior problems with the law. So who was this
20
1 third person and why did Mr. Bell show up at his house?
2 Well, you will learn that his name is Scott Mueller. He's a
3 realtor in Bend. On October 25th Mr. Bell happened to be on the
4 Internet and came across an email or message on the Internet
5 that had been posted out of New York by an individual named John
6 Young. John Young will come here and will testify for you
7 today. John Young runs a website dedicated towards exposing
8 government secrecy and publishing secret government documents
9 exposing the CIA. Wherever he thinks that there's something
10 being hidden by the government or documents are being classified
11 and he gets ahold of them, he puts them up on his website. The
12 website is devoted towards, I guess, spreading some sunshine on
13 a government which he believes should be more open.
14 Mr. Young had posted an email on the Internet in which he
15 claimed to have found some information that suggested to him
16 that there was a front organization operating out of Bend,
17 Oregon, a front organization for the CIA, and he seemed to be
18 requesting information from other people who might know
19 something about this. But he said in no uncertain terms he was
20 fairly sure that this organization at Bend was a front for the
21 CIA, and he said there appears to be a contact person for it,
22 and I think his name is Deforest X. Mueller, and he listed an
23 address of 63350 Majestic Loop in Bend.
24 Mr. Bell came across this posting on the Internet, and he
25 responded immediately to Mr. Young's posting, and he let Mr.
21
1 Young know that he would look into it from right there in
2 Oregon.
3 The evidence will show that Mr. Bell now began to run his
4 huge database searches using Oregon Department of Motor Vehicle
5 records, looking for any home address information that he could
6 find for the name Mueller in Bend. You will learn that Mr. Bell
7 identified two addresses, one of whom, the one I mentioned on
8 Majestic Loop that John Young himself had put in this CIA
9 posting on his website, but it wasn't for the name Deforest X.
10 Mueller. It came back in Mr. Bell's database sources to a Scott
11 Deforest Mueller. The other address for Scott Deforest Mueller
12 turned out to be one on Dione Way, also in Bend, Oregon.
13 On November 3rd, Mr. Bell asked a friend of his, a man name
14 John Copp, to pick him up at his home in Vancouver, Washington,
15 and to drive south with him to Bend, to find the house of the
16 CIA agent. Mr. Copp will tell you that he and Mr. Bell drove
17 down to Bend. They found Mueller's -- Scott Mueller's former
18 address on Dione Way. They found his current address on
19 Majestic Loop. Copp will tell you that Mr. Bell got out of the
20 car and he took pictures. Bell told Copp that he wanted to walk
21 on the properties, but Copp said he didn't want to have any part
22 of that.
23 When Bell got back to his house in Vancouver that evening,
24 he posted an email to the Internet containing personal
25 information on Scott Mueller and his wife, the home addresses
22
1 that he had visited. He bragged that he was "outing" -- verb --
2 a CIA agent, and he outed Scott Mueller as a CIA operative.
3 The email on the Internet, it is still there today if you
4 get up on that website because once something is on the
5 Internet, it is pretty much guaranteed to stay there. It
6 includes not only Mr. Mueller's current home address, but his
7 date of birth, his wife's name, his wife's date of birth, his
8 license plate number, vehicle makes and models, all kinds of
9 personal information, and now the identification of Mr. Mueller
10 as a CIA operative for all his neighbors and friends to see.
11 Mueller will come here and he will tell you that he is not a
12 CIA agent. He has no idea why he has be outed by Mr. Bell or
13 John Young as a CIA agent, and he will tell you that he is
14 afraid of Mr. Bell, not only for his own safety but for his
15 family's. So, that was November 3rd.
16 Three days later, on November 6th, federal agents obtained
17 two court orders based on the fact that Mr. Bell's activities
18 were now showing up on their radar screen. As you can recall,
19 Agent McNall was notified that Mr. Bell showed up at the Groener
20 residence. So the federal agents had reason to be concerned.
21 People such as Agent Gordon again was watching, especially on
22 the Internet, to see what Mr. Bell was doing on the Internet.
23 Agent Gordon had become aware of the "say goodnight Joshua"
24 message, and as I just said, Agent McNall was obviously aware
25 that Mr. Bell had shown up at the house that he had just
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1 recently vacated.
2 I mentioned that the agencies involved in investigating this
3 case obtained two federal court orders on November 6th. Well,
4 one was a federal search warrant for Mr. Bell's residence at
5 7214 Corregidor in Vancouver. The other was an order permitting
6 them to install an electronic tracking device on Mr. Bell's car
7 without his knowledge so that they could monitor his whereabouts
8 when he started driving around, especially if he started driving
9 south of the river.
10 The search of Mr. Bell's house was conducted by a team of
11 agents. You will learn that his part of the house, the part
12 where he lived, was filled with reams of documentary evidence,
13 computer printouts and runs of search after search for home
14 address information and personal information on Agent McNall,
15 Agent Gordon, and Scott Mueller, among others. Mr. Bell had
16 Oregon Department of Motor Vehicle databases on CD-ROMs going
17 back to 1994. There was evidence that he had accessed county
18 assessor's records. He had CD-ROMs of the kind that are known
19 as phone disks, which is essentially every telephone book or
20 telephone directory in the country reduced to digital form on a
21 compact disk that can be run on a computer. The basement of the
22 house was strewn with printouts from hundreds of database runs
23 and searches. The diary, the spiral notebook, Exhibit 137 that
24 you will have, was recovered in the search. The original
25 version of the fax that he had sent to Agent Gordon was
24
1 recovered with his handwriting on it in blue ink talking about
2 coming by Agent Gordon's house the next night. He had property
3 assessor's records for Jeffrey Gordon on his computers, scores
4 of his original email detailing his hunt for McNall, Gordon, and
5 later Mueller.
6 Mr. Bell was present at the house while the search was
7 conducted. He was served with a copy of the search warrant.
8 Obviously, he had to know that he must have crossed some kind of
9 line in the eyes of law enforcement if they were now searching
10 his house. But he was undeterred.
11 Three days later, on the night of November 10th, at
12 approximately 15 minutes after midnight, Mr. Bell got into his
13 car at his home, his parents' home in Vancouver. He drove south
14 across the Columbia River, he crossed into Oregon, and he drove
15 right back to Agent McNall's former residence on South Clackamas
16 where the Groeners now live, in Oregon City. The same one he
17 had been to before on October 23rd. The tracking device in his
18 car was functioning properly, and the entire drive to the
19 property on South Clackamas was recorded and captured by the
20 tracking device which was rigged to a GPS system positioning
21 satellite.
22 This device is capable of recording the exact coordinates in
23 longitude and latitude of its whereabouts. You will learn that
24 the device recorded the following:
25 Mr. Bell's car spent more than ten minutes on the property
25
1 where Agent McNall had just been living. Special Agent Gordon,
2 already concerned about his own safety, had arranged to have the
3 tracking device send him an alert if it -- essentially a page --
4 if the device moved more than just a couple miles away square
5 from Mr. Bell's residence.
6 Mr. Gordon received the alert from the tracking device. He
7 was able to follow the signals on a laptop computer that showed
8 where the car was, where the signal was coming from, and when he
9 realized the device was moving not towards his house, but was
10 actually heading in the direction of McNall's former residence
11 in Oregon City on South Clackamas Drive, he immediately called
12 911 and the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department and he tried
13 to notify Groener. Groener's line was busy, as it turned out,
14 because he had left the laptop on that was plugged into his
15 phone line. Groener had left the laptop.
16 Mr. Bell left the Groener residence before sheriff's
17 deputies could get there to respond to the scene of the
18 residence. They spotted his car about three miles from the
19 Groener residence and they stopped him while they could verify
20 that the residents back at the house were safe.
21 At the Groener residence, three Xeroxed, handwritten notes
22 were recovered from the windshields of three cars parked on the
23 property. Not just on the property, but two of the cars were
24 parked in the garage. The garage and the house are easily 75
25 yards down the road from the edge of the property. At close to
26
1 one o'clock in the morning, on November 10th, Mr. Bell had
2 trespassed onto that property, had gone 75 yards down the road,
3 had spent ten minutes on the property, as recorded by the
4 satellite tracking device, and had put notes on the windshields
5 of the cars, two of which were actually in the garage. The
6 notes all said, "Please call Vancouver Columbian newspaper
7 reporter John Branton," and then listed a phone number.
8 Well, you will hear from John Branton of the Columbian that
9 Mr. Bell had been attempting to get him to write a story about
10 him, and you will hear that Mr. Bell in fact admitted to John
11 Branton in a phone conversation that they had, not face to face,
12 in another meeting that they had that he was using DMV records
13 to look up the home addresses of agents, had gone to their
14 homes, had taken pictures, and he admitted the midnight visit to
15 Groaner, to the Groaner residence, and admitted putting the
16 notes on the windshields of the cars. So the midnight visit to
17 the former McNall address on South Clackamas Drive on November
18 10th is what is charged in the last count in the indictment,
19 which is count 5.
20 Mr. Bell was arrested on November 17th, before he could zero
21 in any more closely on the actual current residences of Agents
22 Gordon or McNall.
23 At the end of the government's evidence I will ask you to
24 find that James Bell was engaged in a sustained and systematic
25 attempt to find Mike Mc- -- excuse me -- to find Mike McNall at
27
1 home, to find Jeffrey Gordon at home, and to let them know that
2 he knew where they lived, for the purposes -- the same purposes
3 that he had in 1997, harassment and intimidation, knowing full
4 well that with what they reasonably ought to have known about
5 him, they would reasonably be afraid for their safety or the
6 safety of their families.
7 And at the end of the evidence, I will also ask you to find
8 that he went to the residence of Scott Mueller in Bend with the
9 express purpose of gathering information about Mueller and
10 posting it on the Internet in a deliberate attempt to harass him
11 by exposing him as a CIA agent, which in fact Mueller was not.
12 So I will ask you to return a verdict of guilty on all five
13 counts of the superseding indictment.
14 THE COURT: Mr. Leen.
15 MR. LEEN: Thank you.
16 THE COURT: Opening statement on behalf of the
17 defendant.
18 MR. LEEN: Yes, Your Honor.
19 Members of the jury:
20 This is a very difficult case and it will require a lot of
21 patience and objectivity on your part. There is a fine line
22 between stalking and investigating. However, that line is
23 blurred when the subject of the investigation is a federal agent
24 as opposed to a citizen.
25 The prosecutor has told you that in 1997 Mr. Bell pled
28
1 guilty to a crime, and I expect that you will hear all of the
2 details of that offense, and we will go through it both in
3 direct and cross-examination. However, Mr. Bell is not on trial
4 for what happened in 1997. That would be double jeopardy. He
5 would be tried again for something he had already been tried
6 once for.
7 But it's true, the beginning of this investigation has its
8 termination back in 1997. Mr. Bell pled guilty and he entered
9 into an agreement with the government as part of that guilty
10 plea. However, Mr. Bell felt, claimed, and continued to claim,
11 after his conviction, that he was coerced into entering that
12 guilty plea, and part of that coercion involved a prisoner named
13 Ryan Lund who was at the Federal Detention Center with him. Mr.
14 Bell believed that Ryan Lund had beaten him up. He was, Mr.
15 Bell was punished for that at the Federal Detention Center,
16 although he had done nothing wrong, and as a result of that, you
17 will hear through words that he said long before this
18 prosecution ever started, that he felt that Mike McNall, an ATF
19 agent who was in charge of the investigation of Ryan Lund, had
20 actually entered into an agreement with Ryan Lund to give him
21 favorable consideration if he would do this to Mr. Bell.
22 Some would say that Mr. Bell was delusional. Mr. Bell
23 didn't think he was delusional. He thought that there was --
24 that this was true, and he wanted to prove it. And this
25 presents a very interesting question, and it's a question that
29
1 you will have to deal with. How does a citizen prove that his
2 government has engaged in illegal conduct when he's the victim
3 of that conduct? Report it to the press? Mr. Bell did report
4 it to the press. Report it to others online, because he was a
5 member of a news group that was involved in encryption and
6 technological matters in the use of the Internet? He did that,
7 also. And there will be news reporters here, Mr. McCullagh from
8 the Wired News, who is well familiar with Mr. Bell's belief
9 about his theory that Ryan Lund had been hired by Mike McNall to
10 do this to him and that he wanted to prove it.
11 You will hear from John Young, a member of the same group
12 that the Internet -- the Internet mailing group that Mr. Bell is
13 a member of -- it's called the Cypherpunks -- that he wanted to
14 prove that Ryan Lund had been hired by the government to force
15 him to enter into a guilty plea in 1997.
16 Mr. Bell got out of prison as a result of his past
17 conviction. He used the Internet. He searched -- he didn't
18 hack into databases, which he's not allowed to, but he got
19 publicly accessible information, disks that you can buy in the
20 store, information that is on line and available to persons. He
21 also made numerous inquiries, and as the prosecutor has told
22 you, there were reams and reams of runouts of information that
23 Mr. Bell was able to accumulate lawfully on the Internet in his
24 quest to prove that Mike McNall and Jeff Gordon were engaged in
25 an illegal surveillance of him and engaged in illegal activities
30
1 and been involved in a plan to coerce him into pleading guilty
2 in 1997.
3 As I said before, many things that Mr. Bell's belief in this
4 regard is a mere figment of his imagination, but whether it's a
5 figment of his imagination or not, he had the right to
6 investigate it, and that's what he did.
7 You've heard the activity here as outlined by the
8 prosecutor. I ask you to focus in on the fact that not once did
9 Mr. Bell ever physically confront anybody in this case, and
10 there will be no evidence that he physically confronted anyone.
11 Listen to Mr. Groener's testimony, and I believe that the
12 evidence will be quite clear that Mr. Bell was very polite and
13 didn't threaten Mr. Groener at all. Any time that the police
14 stopped Mr. Bell, he never had a weapon. He never did anything
15 to put these officers in fear for their safety, except for the
16 paranoid fear that they might have by the fact of an "us/them"
17 mentality that it seems most police officers have.
18 In any event, Mr. Bell's activities were perfectly lawful.
19 At no time did -- and the evidence will be clear, at no time did
20 Agent Gordon or Agent McNall ever seek a restraining order from
21 a local court as any citizen who felt they were being harassed
22 would do and are encouraged to do. No, they went to the U.S.
23 Attorney's office, only because they're federal agents. And, in
24 fact, that's the only reason that we're here in federal court.
25 I ask that you listen very carefully to the evidence because
31
1 you will see that Mr. Bell is a very intelligent man. He's a
2 man, however, who had been greatly disappointed in life, and he
3 feels that his government has failed him and failed others.
4 His political views, well, they're downright scary to many.
5 He posted on the Internet an essay called Assassination
6 Politics. You know, there -- other people have posted and
7 written things that are equally as scary, and many people say to
8 themselves, why is such literature allowed to be freely written
9 and published? Well, it's because we are Americans that that
10 type of stuff is allowed to be written and published.
11 The evidence will not show you that Mr. Bell ever made any
12 true threats. All he did was write things that scared many
13 people. It scared the government because it called for
14 destabilization of the government. It scared these agents
15 because if his ideas, Mr. Bell's ideas, were actually put into
16 play, then anyone who had a beef with anyone, not just a
17 government agent -- if you had a bad day at work and you went
18 home and didn't particularly like your boss, under Mr. Bell's
19 Assassination Politics plan, which if you care to read it, and
20 I'm sure it will be introduced into evidence, calls for a type
21 of anonymous encryption.
22 Mr. Bell wasn't the first person to come up with this idea.
23 In fact, there's a whole group of individuals. They call
24 themselves Cypherpunks. The Wired News reporter knows them well
25 because he's a member of their mailing list, and it's a
32
1 phenomena. Many of you -- I doubt any of you have actually
2 heard of it, but you will hear a lot about it during the course
3 of this trial.
4 I will read briefly to you from the Cypherpunks' manifesto
5 so you understand the philosophy of those who ascribe to this
6 group.
7 "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic
8 age."
9 "If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a
10 memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their
11 own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass
12 laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than
13 privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to
14 restrict any speech at all."
15 "Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to
16 a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly
17 necessary for that transaction."
18 "Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous
19 transaction systems.... An anonymous system empowers
20 individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when
21 desired; this is the essence of privacy.
22 "Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography."
23 "We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other
24 large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their
25 beneficence."
33
1 "We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. "
2 This was written by Eric Hughes in 1993, one of the founders
3 of the Cypherpunks.
4 Another writer of the Cypherpunk movement is Timothy May.
5 He wrote, "Computer technology is on the verge of providing the
6 ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact
7 with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may
8 exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic
9 contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity,
10 of the other."
11 "The technology for this revolution -- and it surely will
12 be both a social and economic revolution -- has existed in
13 theory for the past decade."
14 "The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of
15 this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the
16 technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of
17 societal disintegration."
18 "Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the
19 power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too
20 will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of
21 corporations and of government interference in economic
22 transactions."
23 It was within this group that Mr. Bell posted his
24 Assassination Politics. As the prosecutor told you, it would
25 allow anybody to target anybody and provide a legal means to
34
1 make payment to someone who carried out an assassination. It
2 didn't target any particular person.
3 It was a writing that Mr. Bell posted. It was a writing
4 that he posted in early 1995, and yet it was not something that
5 came to the government's attention until 1997. It came to their
6 attention in 1997 when Mr. Bell's automobile was seized by the
7 IRS for failure to pay taxes. And when they seized his vehicle,
8 inside the car there was a hard-copy printout of Assassination
9 Politics. It was this type of writing that the IRS found
10 particularly distasteful, and so they began an investigation of
11 Mr. Bell and they started tailing Mr. Bell.
12 Mr. Bell also has some views, or has some people who believe
13 similarly to him in addition to the Cypherpunks, and that was
14 the Multnomah County Common Law Court, a group of individuals
15 who are disenchanted with the government. They felt
16 disenfranchised by their government. They would hold trials.
17 They would find at the end of trials there would be jurors. In
18 fact, Mr. Bell was a juror at one time. An undercover agent was
19 another juror. Mr. Steve Walsh, who the government has told you
20 will testify, was a juror in this case as well. This jury would
21 pass on whether people such as Janette Reno or other IRS agents
22 were guilty of committing crimes against citizens.
23 Now, many might say to themselves, how foolish. But that's
24 their right. That is the essence of political speech. And they
25 would publish their findings. Mr. Bell suggested to this group,
35
1 if you want to really enforce your judgments, you could read my
2 essay, if you want. A scary thought, but a lawful thought.
3 And this is why the government continued their investigation
4 of Mr. Bell, which ultimately led in this case to stalking. Not
5 trying to kill someone, not trying to approach someone to hurt
6 someone, but a charge of stalking. Not because Mr. Bell crossed
7 a state line with the intent to injure or harass, but because
8 Mr. Bell crossed a state line with the intent to investigate and
9 find out, put these individuals' names and addresses on the
10 Internet. And that was a very scary thought to Agent Gordon,
11 Agent McNall, and the federal -- and a lot of federal agents, as
12 it would be to a lot of police officers. However, under the
13 First Amendment, that is lawful and protected activity. We
14 don't prosecute people for what we think they might do, we
15 prosecute them for what they have done.
16 So I ask that you listen very carefully to the evidence that
17 you hear over the next couple of days. As I said when I began,
18 there are some very scary thoughts here, and yet you must be
19 objective as jurors and understand that people all over the
20 world have the right to think whatever they want. But only
21 Americans have the right to say whatever they want. And so Mr.
22 Bell should not be found guilty of crimes because he said things
23 that were scary or which people didn't agree with. He should
24 only be found guilty if he committed crimes, and he did not
25 commit these five crimes.
36
1 Thank you for your time.
2 * * * * *
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5 C E R T I F I C A T E
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7 I certify that the foregoing is a correct transcript from
8 the record of proceedings in the above-entitled matter.
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12 ________________________________ November 26, 2001
JULAINE V. RYEN Date
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