Suspected Pipeline Bomber Has Anti-Government Extremist Ties, Admired Joseph Stack

Anson Chi on YouTube

Anson Chi, the north Texas man authorities suspect bombed a natural gas pipeline station in Plano, Texas, on June 18, is an anti-government extremist active in the tax protest movement.

Chi, 32, a former engineer who claimed to have “retired” but was living with his parents, supported many causes, including environmental and animal rights causes, but the convictions he expressed most strongly in on-line writings were anti-government ones. He routinely posted anti-government comments to his Facebook Wall, collecting them from both the right and left.

However, statements by Chi in recent years reveal a strong connection with the right-wing “patriot movement,” especially its tax protest branch. The tax protest movement claims Americans aren’t required to pay federal income taxes and a government conspiracy is hiding this fact. “There is no law for the average American to pay the income tax,” Chi claimed in 2010, “as stated over and over again by the Supreme Court—case closed!”

In 2010, after fellow tax protester Joseph Andrew Stack flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a suicide attack, Chi posted a link to Stack’s suicide note while proclaiming, “Bring down the IRS!”

Chi’s postings reveal familiarity with the movement’s pseudo-legal arguments, as well as key figures. Chi easily rattled off the names of tax protest gurus and court cases involving tax protesters. Saying he was a “paralegal,” Chi claimed to be friends with tax protest movement attorneys Tom Cryer and Larry Becraft, and to have attended the trial of Sherry Jackson, a former IRS employee who joined the tax protest movement and was convicted in 2007 of failing to file income tax returns.

Chi was also familiar with the pseudo-legal arguments of the sovereign citizen movement, proclaiming in late 2010 that he knew “all about admiralty maritime law and the strawman theory.”

Chi’s other fixation was on the banking system; like many anti-government extremists, he was obsessed with “international bankers” and the Federal Reserve. “Your life is under control by greedy private bankers,” he told visitors to his Facebook page, “especially since they print YOUR money based on nothing but thin air!”

Chi liked the movie Zeitgeist, as well as other recent popular on-line movies that combined New World Order and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories with New Age concepts. Chi’s postings reflected the theories advanced by such movies. “The private central bankers like the Rothschilds—changed from Jewish name Bauer, like Henry Kissinger changed from Heinz Loeb,” he wrote in 2010, “are…a bunch of con artists, working as the financial gatekeepers…for the Vatican.”

Alleged Cop-Killer May Be Anti-Government Extremist

Source: Ogden Standard-Examiner

In the latest twist to a deadly shootout that stunned the residents of Ogden, Utah, a recently revealed search warrant affidavit provides evidence that suggests the defendant, Matthew David Stewart, 37, may have been an anti-government extremist.

The shootout began on January 4, 2012, after police launched a raid on Stewart’s residence to execute a search warrant—an informant had alleged he was growing marijuana (16 plants were reportedly later found).  According to police, Stewart hid, opening fire on officers as they searched his residence.  Six officers were hit, some more than once, and Ogden police officer Jared Francom was wounded fatally.  Stewart allegedly continued firing as the officers fled the residence.  Police eventually wounded and subdued him in a backyard shed. 

Stewart was charged with aggravated murder, seven counts of attempted aggravated murder, and production of a controlled substance in a “drug free zone,” along with a dangerous weapons enhancement.

In March, authorities released an affidavit explaining the results of the search.  According to the affidavit, Stewart’s former girlfriend said that Stewart was “into” conspiracy theories and that he believed the federal government had no right to collect taxes (the primary belief of the anti-government extremist tax protest movement).  She claimed that he had not paid his own federal or state taxes since 2005 and that, if he were “forced” to pay taxes, he would “kill IRS employees.”  According to the girlfriend, Stewart claimed that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was “misunderstood.”

The affidavit further claimed that police recovered “computer-generated documents” related to anti-government extremism, anti-police Web sites, Oklahoma City bombing Web sites, instructions for making potassium chloride (used in explosives), and a map to the closest IRS building (where Stewart once worked as a security guard), among other items.  According to the affidavit, police also discovered “what appeared to be the makings of a bomb,” which were later removed and detonated by the bomb squad. 

Last summer, according to police, Stewart had allegedly told someone that if police ever raided him, he would “go out in a blaze of glory and shoot to kill.”  After the release of the affidavit, a neighbor of Stewart’s told a local television station that Stewart had allegedly talked about moving to Montana and “get[ting] myself a compound.”

Officer Francom was the first police officer to have been killed by a suspected domestic extremist since May 2010, when two West Memphis, Arkansas, officers were killed by anti-government “sovereign citizens.”  Since 2000, 27 police officers have been killed in the United States by domestic extremists.