299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 19 A Hillbilly with a Law License

Why in the world would Grant want to be a government employee? Grant loved WAB, but he realized that he could do more of what he was meant to do— fight government corruption — at the Auditor’s Office. Work the problem from the inside. Tom, Ben, and Brian understood. They were happy for him. They knew that they would still see him all the time.

Work at the State Auditor’s Office was great. Grant actually got paid to help people who were getting screwed by the government. And he didn’t have to send them a bill. And Grant had the authority of the State Auditor’s Office behind him so he could do great things for people from the inside. Grant was now a white-collar sheepdog fighting back against bullies. It was pure heaven.

The first few months of work at the Auditor’s Office were the “honeymoon period” when everything was wonderful. One of the people Grant got to help was Joe Tantori.

Joe ran a firearms training facility for military and law enforcement. It was a compound; secure as hell. It looked like a mini Blackwater facility. The military didn’t want onlookers seeing how they trained.

Joe’s facility was about two hours north of Olympia on the Puget Sound. There were numerous Navy bases in the Puget Sound and they did not have training facilities for firearms, which seemed weird. One of those bases was the Naval Magazine Indian Island where they stored munitions for the various naval installations in the Puget Sound. The second base was the Bangor nuclear submarine. Both bases needed a place to train. So did all the various local law enforcement agencies and even the federal law enforcement agencies on the Sound like the Border Patrol and Coast Guard at Port Angeles. Joe’s range was it.

Joe constructed an extremely safe complex of shooting ranges and located it far from any neighbors so they wouldn’t be bothered. He had a few hundred acres of buffer.

But that wasn’t good enough. One of the distant neighbors was one of the three elected county commissioners. A few days a year, when the air temperature was just right and the winds were perfect, the commissioner could hear the faintest sound of gunfire. This was unacceptable. The commissioner started his quest to shut down Joe’s facility.

The county, without a warrant, “inspected” Joe’s facility. The Sheriff, who knew that the search was illegal, would not go along with it. So the county’s land use enforcement officer, who was part of the county environmentalist clique that had elected the complaining county commissioner, conducted the search. The county land use department then ordered Joe to close it based on a repealed version of the land use ordinances. That’s right; a repealed ordinance. Just like the Board of Real Estate tried with Ed Oleo. When the law won’t allow what the government wanted, why not just use a repealed version of the law?

Joe brought it to their attention that the ordinance had been repealed and that the county had given him a building permit to build a shooting range exactly where he did and to the exact standards they specified. That wasn’t good enough. Joe’s lawfully permitted facility did not fit the land use department’s “vision” for the area; a “vision” which did not include “violent” things like a shooting range and men in military uniforms. The hippies who dominated the county didn’t like the “militarization” of Joe’s land even if it was completely legal. Law and property rights needed to yield to the community’s “vision.”

This started five years of litigation, which cost Joe almost a million dollars. The land use department enforcement officer would periodically appear at Joe’s range and inspect it, despite the fact that he had no warrant. This was completely unconstitutional. But Joe’s remedy was to go to court — expensive and time-consuming court. An elected judge, who knew the “community’s vision,” did not include Joe’s lawful and harmless use of his own property, sided with the county over and over.

In all this litigation, Joe had sent the county a subpoena for all the communications between the county commissioner, land use department, and the hearing examiner deciding the administrative appeal of the building permit. The county said no such documents existed. One morning a package appeared on at the main gate to Joe’s facility. It contained several years of emails between the commissioner and the judge that said things like, “Do whatever it takes to shut down Tantori” and “I don’t give a fuck about the law. Shut that asshole down.” One reply from the hearing examiner said, “Anything you say, boss.” The smoking guns.

Except Joe was out of money. He had the smoking guns but no money to get them in front of a judge. If the county judge ignored them, he could probably get the court of appeals to care.

Joe called WAB, where Eric was able to help. He got Grant, who was now the “Special Assistant to the State Auditor,” involved, too. Grant demanded to see how much money the county was spending on that the lawsuit, which freaked out the county.

The real help for Joe came from Eric at WAB. He ended up getting Joe a new trial because of the obvious bias of the judge, and the trial was a success.

After the new trial, Joe could use his range again, and he was elated. Grant got to know Joe and Joe invited him and Eric out to the range one winter day. Eric couldn’t make it.

Joe didn’t know if an Olympia lawyer like Grant had ever shot a gun. He wondered if the fragile lawyer could handle the cold weather. They went out to the range with some steel targets in the shape of a human silhouette that fell down when they were hit. Joe handed Grant an AR-15 and said, “I bet you’ve never seen one of these.” Grant thought he’d have some fun with Joe.

“Hey, I’m a lawyer,” Grant said, “I don’t know anything about guns. Is that a machine gun? Can I see it?” Joe gave him a safety briefing on how to run an AR. Grant listened patiently, pretending it was the first time he’d heard these things.

“You ready to shoot it?” Joe asked. “Don’t be scared. It hardly kicks at all.”

“OK. I’ll give it a try,” Grant said, like he was afraid. He took the AR, kept the muzzle pointed in a safe direction like a pro, looked down range, racked a round with an effortless pull of the charging handle, shouldered the rifle, smoothly clicked off the safety, got in a perfect shooting stance, and fired.

“Ping!” on the steel target. “Ping, ping, ping,” on the other targets. Grant kept moving from the left to the right in between shots to make it harder for anyone shooting at him to hit him. He hit every steel silhouette. He clicked the safety back on and handed it to Joe. Joe was shocked. He didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not your average lawyer,” Grant said with a smile.

“What branch were you in? Marines?” Joe asked.

Grant laughed. “Nope. I’m UCG.”

“UCG?” Joe asked. “What’s that?”

“Untrained Civilian Goofball,” Grant said. They laughed.

Grant winked and said, “Well, untrained when it comes to formal training. I bought one of these and shoot a little on the weekends.” They shot together all day. Joe taught Grant some tips and tricks.

Ammunition was not a concern. Joe had cases of 5.56 ammunition. The Marines would bring ammo by the pallet and not shoot all of it, so he got the leftovers for personal use. Joe could not believe that a lawyer could run an AR like that. Grant could not believe that a guy he knew had cases of ammunition.

“So, you’re a lawyer and you can shoot like this?” Joe asked at the end of the day. He still couldn’t believe it.

“Yep,” Grant said. “I’m their worst nightmare: a hillbilly with a law license.”

They both knew who “they” were. People like the bastards who had tried to bankrupt Joe.

Joe felt like he could trust Grant. So he told Grant something very sensitive that he had been thinking for a long time but didn’t want to tell anyone. Joe had a security clearance and had to stay in the good graces of his military and law enforcement clients. He couldn’t be a “revolutionary.”

“Have you heard of an organization called ‘Oath Keepers’?” Joe asked.

“Is that some religious thing?” Grant asked.

Joe laughed. “No, that’s ‘Promise Keepers.’”

Joe explained that Oath Keepers was a large national organization of currently serving and veteran military and law enforcement. The “oath” in Oath Keepers was the oath every military and law enforcement person takes to “uphold and defend the Constitution, against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

And domestic. Those words rang in Grant’s ears.

Joe, who was former State Patrol SWAT guy, said, “We take a pledge to not enforce ten unconstitutional orders we might receive. Like to round up guns.” Joe told Grant about the other nine unconstitutional orders Oath Keepers pledged to not enforce. Things like conducting warrantless searches or detaining Americans as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Wow. This stuff was getting serious. A large national organization of military and law enforcement people pledging to not round up guns. This was not BSing over beers. This was serious.

“What I like about Oath Keepers,” Joe said, “is that they’re not militia whackos. They don’t want to overthrow the government. They want people to honor their oaths. That shouldn’t be too controversial.”

Joe couldn’t figure out how people were putting up with what was happening so he had to ask Grant, who was an Olympia insider. “When are people going to rise up?” Joe asked. “I mean, I’m no radical or anything, but this system isn’t working. If they can do this to me,” he said referring to the illegal searches and attempts to take away his property, “then they’re doing it to millions of other people. What’s up? What’s going to give?”

Joe stared off at the water surrounding his compound. “I mean, I don’t want anything violent to happen. But people will not put up with this much longer.”

“It’s a numbers game, Joe,” Grant said. “Now there are only a few Joe Tantoris or Ed Oleos.” Grant told Joe the story about Ed’s fight and Ed asking the same question Joe was.

“But every year,” Grant continued, “they get more reckless and think they can get away with anything. There are more Joes and Eds each year. It’s growing exponentially as they get greedier and more power hungry. They can’t stop themselves. So next year there’ll be double the numbers of people like you, quadruple the next year, and,” Grant did some quick math, “sixteen times the number the year after that. Pretty soon enough people get it.”

Grant paused and looked Joe right in the eye. “It’s coming, Joe. I don’t want it, but I can’t see how it’s avoidable. The Joes of the world will eventually fight back.”

Grant had been thinking a lot lately about how such a collapse would unfold, so he decided to tell Joe what he thought would happen. He hadn’t been able to tell anyone else this, but Joe had shared his involvement in Oath Keepers, so Grant would return the trust by telling him what he really thought would happen.

“It will build slowly,” Grant said. “It’ll take a period of years. First it will be by people like us moving to better states like Texas. Look at how many businesses are fleeing California. Then it will be by cheating on their out-of-control taxes. A Patriot voting block will develop and get stronger each year. Elections will become nasty. They’ll try to destroy Patriot candidates. They’ll cheat on the vote counting, which is shockingly easy when their people control the machinery of the voter counting. They’ll start to charge Patriot candidates and any of them who actually get elected with crimes. ‘Tax evasion,’ probably.”

Grant went on, “A tax protest movement will start up where people openly refuse to pay taxes. They won’t be able to afford them and the government can’t put everyone in jail. Oh, and the government will scare the population with horror stories about ‘militias.’ They’ll pass all kinds of ‘emergency’ laws. The sheeple will be terrified about the ‘crisis’ and rally around the good government who is just trying to protect them.”

This was the scariest part for Grant. “Then there will be an event. I have no idea what it might be. It could be real or concocted by them. ‘Right-wing terror’ of some kind. It won’t matter if it’s real or made up. It will shock everyone. By this time, with all the new ‘emergency’ powers they give themselves, the Patriots will realize that they need to do something now or it will be lost forever. We will. Protests, some turning violent. There will be assassinations. I don’t condone that, but it will happen. The government will crack down even harder, losing more and more support each time they do. At each of the stages, the economy will get worse and worse until it basically stops functioning.”

Grant paused. He didn’t want to say what he really thought.

“Then things get ugly.”

Joe took it all in. He knew all this was true but he’d never heard another person say it, especially someone who had a front row seat to what was really going on like Grant.

“Yep.” That’s all Joe needed to say.

Joe felt he could fully trust Grant. Joe knew he had to do something about what was happening. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to do anything drastic, but he had to do something. He couldn’t let this happen to more people.

“You, my friend,” Joe said to Grant, “are welcome back at my range any day. Bring friends.”

Joe looked at Grant in the eye again and said, “I’ll bring some of mine.”