30 August 2001. Thanks to Anonymous.
This is Day 2 of Jim Bell's testimony at his trial in Western Washington District Court, Tacoma, WA. Bell was convicted on two counts of interstate stalking and sentenced on August 24, 2001 to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000; see: http://cryptome.org/jdb-hit.htm
See Day 1 testimony: http://cryptome.org/jdb040601.htm
Additional Bell testimony will be posted in the near future.
Typographical errors are in the original.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT WESTERN DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON AT TACOMA UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Docket No. CR00-5731JET ) Plaintiff, ) Tacoma, Washington ) April 9, 2001 v. ) ) JAMES DALTON BELL, ) ) Defendant. ) VOLUME 2 TRANSCRIPT OF TESTIMONY OF JAMES DALTON BELL BEFORE THE HONORABLE JACK E. TANNER SENIOR UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE, and a Jury APPEARANCES: For the Plaintiff: ROBB LONDON Assistant United States Attorney 601 Union Street, Suite 5100 Seattle, Washington 98101 For the Defendant: ROBERT M. LEEN Attorney At Law Two Union Square 601 Union Street, Suite 4610 Seattle, Washington 98101-3903 Court Reporter: Julaine V. Ryen Post Office Box 885 Tacoma, Washington 98401-0885 (253) 593-6591 Proceedings recorded by mechanical stenography, transcript Produced by Reporter on computer. I N D E X TESTIMONY OF JAMES DALTON BELL: Direct (Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Cross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 MOTIONS: Defendant’s Motion to have Defendant Examined Mentally . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Denied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Defendant’s Motion for a Mistrial . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Denied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Defendant’s Renewal of Motion to have Defendant Examined Mentally . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Denied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Plaintiff’s Motion to Strike Defendant’s Testimony if all Government’s Questions are not Answered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Motion to Withdraw as Attorney for Defendant . . . . . . . 164 Denied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 (Defendant present.) MORNING SESSION (Jury not present, 9:50 a.m.) THE COURT: Did you have a motion, Mr. Leen? MR. LEEN: Yes, Your Honor. Your Honor, I think that the defendant is suffering from a major mental disorder. He has accused me of threatening him, and he is developing connections of random events, as if I’m involved in – well, colluding with the government and the court and government in general to deprive him of a fair trial. And he insists that – and he insisted this morning, in fact, when I came into court that I was threatening him. This arose out of a meeting at the Federal Detention Center yesterday. It took place about, between 8:30 and 10:30, 11:00 o’clock in the morning, and at the end of it, the defendant told the day officer, or the officer in the visiting room, that he had been threatened, and he continues to say that. I put a declaration under seal, which I have given a copy only to the defendant and the court, as to my version of what happened and why I believe that the defendant is not competent at the present time. I’m asking that he be examined. The court has heard his trial testimony. It goes beyond his trial testimony to extreme agitation, as well as these fixed beliefs of illegal behavior going back to 1996. Thank you. THE COURT: Does the government wish to be heard? MR. LONDON: Your Honor, obviously I’m at somewhat of a disadvantage because I don’t know what the nature is of some of the factual assertions made in what has been filed under seal, but I can say this. To the extent that it appears to involve accusations against Mr. Leen of collusion with the government, those accusations have been made by the defendant before, and in fact they were made as early as December before Dr. Johnson undertook his evaluation of the defendant. Dr. Johnson was apprised of those sorts of allegations prior to meeting with the defendant and examining him, and I think that they do inform, to some extent, his conclusion that the defendant was, while perhaps presenting certain clinically diagnosable conditions, nonetheless – THE DEFENDANT: He did not say that, sir. MR. LONDON: -- nonetheless competent to stand trial. THE COURT: I think the record should reflect that this court has observed Mr. Bell both before the start of the trial and continuously during the trial. It appears to me he knows what he’s doing. He knows right from wrong. He understands the nature of the charges against him, and if he wanted to, he could assist his attorney. But it appears to the court that he wants to do it his way. He wants to tell his story his way. So the motion will be denied. Mr. Bell, I understand you are having some problems whether you should appear or not? THE DEFENDANT: My microphone isn’t on, sir. Do I speak to you directly? THE COURT: Oh, I can hear you. THE DEFENDANT: Okay. I will speak loud enough so everybody in the court – yes, there are some serious problems going on. THE COURT: As to this courtroom, what are they? THE DEFENDANT: Well, as of yesterday morning – well, you say this courtroom, sir? THE COURT: Yeah. THE DEFENDANT: Just within the walls of this courtroom, or are you referring to the trial process? THE COURT: In front of the jury. Because the jury decides innocence or guilt. THE DEFENDANT: I understand that. THE COURT: Has anybody threatened you within the confines of this courtroom? THE DEFENDANT: Other than a death threat I received yesterday – or I was relayed yesterday morning concerning – my – I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to speak at this point for just a moment. There is a desire to have me not speak of at least two incidences in 1997 involving a Valdez Maxwell and a Billy Martin. Valdez Maxwell, about 6 – June 15, 1997, overheard and relayed to me a threat, a death threat. He’s – Mr. Maxwell is not responsible for the contents of that threat. He – Valdez Maxwell is a nice guy. Billy Martin was a local thug in Kitsap County Jail. He communicated a death threat against me – it’s hard to remember – the July or August time frame of 1997. I was in a very – I was very depressed during that period of time, particularly due to the first threat that was delivered to me. I’ve been told that I cannot speak of those incidences despite the fact that the threat apparently did come from government sources originally, those two threats. That leads me to conclude – well, my state of mind for the last three-and-a-half or so years has been thoroughly based on those incidences and my reaction to them. Records will show that I was extremely depressed in 1997, particularly at Kitsap County Jail. I was – THE COURT: Mr. Bell, I’m talking about now. I’m not talking about 1997. THE DEFENDANT: Yes. I was threatened – THE COURT: You’ve been in this court since last Tuesday. THE DEFENDANT: Yes. THE COURT: A week ago. THE DEFENDANT: Yes. THE COURT: Tomorrow.. THE DEFENDANT: Yes. Physically – THE COURT: I’m asking you – THE DEFENDANT: Yes. THE COURT: -- has anybody, since you’ve been in this court, or in the marshal’s quarters downstairs, has anybody, by name, threatened you in any way? THE WITNESS: Within the four walls of this courtroom, no. THE COURT: I’m talking about the United States marshal’s quarters downstairs where you’ve been confined. THE WITNESS: You mean the temporary confinement? THE COURT: Yes. THE WITNESS: The four cells down there. THE COURT: Yes. THE DEFENDANT: No, no one has spoken – I have – or correction. I have discussed the issue a few minutes ago with one U.S. marshal, a few minutes ago, concerning the threat, but I was discussing the threat. It was not reported to me. THE COURT: All I’m asking you, has anybody, on behalf of the United States Attorney’s office – by name now – or any United States marshal that’s come in contact with you threatened you in any way? THE WITNESS: I would rather not answer. I apologize with respect to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Marshals, no. Marshals are professional people. They are – they do their job quite well. I’m not aware of any – THE COURT: Has anybody in the United States Attorney’s office – THE DEFENDANT: I do not – THE COURT: -- or connected with them, that you know by name, threatened you – THE WITNESS: I do not know – THE COURT: -- personally? THE WITNESS: I do not know the names of the personnel in the U.S. Attorney’s office. I would not know who they were, if they were to contact me directly. THE COURT: Has anybody in this courtroom, from time to time, or any of the witnesses, or anybody else that you can think of, threatened you in any way? THE DEFENDANT: As to the witnesses, never. Most of the witnesses were people that I have never met or seen before. A few exceptions, of course, were my – certain of my friends, and, of course, they have never threatened me. There were other people – no. No. The witnesses in this trial so far have never threatened me. It was not those people who gave me the threats. THE COURT: All right. Is there any reason that you should not continue before this jury? THE DEFENDANT: I – I’m not an expert in legal ethics. I’m not an expert in court procedure. I’m not a lawyer. I’ve never had any formal legal training. For me to answer that question, I’d have to conclude, would require me to know a lot about legal ethics that I do not know. I’m not a lawyer. I think there probably is a lot of problems with my continuing if I’m not allowed to say my piece. If I’m not going to be allowed to say my piece, as the threat indicated, then this proceeding is probably going to have to stop. If I’m allowed to speak my piece about many incidences that occurred, testimony that will – I will be happy to give, but it will take at least six hours, I believe, if properly considered. THE COURT: Mr. Bell, you do not run the courtroom. THE DEFENDANT: I realize that. THE COURT: Do you understand that? THE DEFENDANT: I realize that. THE COURT: Is there any reason now that I shouldn’t call the jury in and continue? THE DEFENDANT: I think there’s a great deal of reason. THE COURT: Well, give me one. THE DEFENDANT: I’ve been threatened. I do not have legal representation this morning. THE COURT: Do you want to remain in the courtroom? THE DEFENDANT: Do I want – I do not feel any threat – any immediately physical threat in this courtroom. There are plenty of witnesses, nothing is going to happen. I’m happy to remain in the courtroom. It’s not physically within the four walls of this court that I would be attacked. So, physically I have no problem with staying in this courtroom right now. THE COURT: All right. Ready for the jury? MR. LONDON: Yes, Your Honor. THE COURT: Okay. Bring the jury. THE DEFENDANT: I – I apologize. I still do not believe this proceeding should continue under the current circumstances. THE COURT: They are going to continue, sir. (Jury present; 10:01 a.m.) THE COURT: Good morning. (Some jurors respond “Good morning.”) THE COURT: Be seated. Continue direct examination, Mr. Leen. MR. LEEN: Thank you, Your Honor. DIRECT EXAMINATION (Continuing) BY MR. LEEN: Q. Mr. Bell, Counts 1 and 2 accuse you of stalking, interstate stalking, on October 23rd, 2000. Count 1 says that you stalked Mike McNall, and count 2 says that you stalked Jeff Gordon. So would you tell the jury what you did on October 23rd, and why you did it? A. I would like to precede my answer with a comment that yesterday Mr. Leen delivered a death threat to me on behalf of the federal government against myself and six other members of my family if I talked about certain things that happened in 1997 to me at Pierce County and Kitsap County Jail. June 15th, 1997, a man named Valdez Maxwell, who is a nice guy, delivered a – nicely reported the knowledge of a threat to me. A person named Billy Martin a couple months later delivered a threat to me that he proved was from the federal government. I’m currently under coercion here. I do not trust this man to be my attorney. He’s continuing to answer questions. I will continue, I guess, to answer his questions under the circumstances, but I have no legal representation here at this point. Frankly, I’m scared. I reported this to 20 attorneys over an unmonitored attorney phone line at SeaTac Federal Detention Center yesterday, including communications to my other attorney, Mr. Solovy, (206) 621-8777. I’m very bothered. I’m very scared. Could you please re – could you repeat the question, please? Q. The question I asked you was, in count 1 and count 2, you’re accused of interstate stalking. A. Yes. Q. Count 1 says Mike McNall, count 2 says Jeff Gordon. And the government said that you did this on October 23rd. So I would like you to tell the jury what you did on October 23rd and why the actions – why you took the actions you did. A. I apologize. October 23rd. Q. 2000. A. On that particular date, I did some more research that I ad been doing all during the summer concerning various names of people that had followed me on Father’s Day Sunday, I believe it was June 22nd, 1998, looking into why their vehicles had been following me. Apparently their vehicles had been taken in an impound lot, I suspected, and had actually been used by federal government people without – of course, without the knowledge of the actual registered owner. Q. Well, you didn’t know the name of Mike McNall on – in June, did you, Mr. Bell, during 1998? A. June of 1998? No. Not – I only learned Mr. McNall’s name when I ordered Ryan Thomas Lund’s case file, criminal case file, from Tacoma court in about Setpember of 19 – or of 2000, last – yes- -- last year. I ordered his case file and I found out that Mr. McNall was the investigator involved in a case. Q. But I was asking you why on Ocotober 23rd, 2000, you took any action directed toward Mike McNall. Can you answer that question? A. Okay. I – one of the things that I did, and, again, I don’t recall the specific date, but I – Q. Try and focus on October 23rd, because that’s the date in the indictment. A. Yes, I understand that. I was aware of Mr. McNall’s – I was aware of Mr. McNall’s association with the Ryan Lund case. He was the person who was listed as part of the search on Ryan Lund on – on July 2nd, 1997. He was the person who wrote up the application for the search warrant for the house of Ryan Lund. I – he was there with – Ryan Lund was there when the search was done. Mike McNall personally talked to Ryan Lund. A nine- shot New England Arm – Arms 22-caliber pistol was found at – in Ryan Lund’s house. Ryan Lund was a four-time violent felon. Violent felons are prohibited from owning firearms. Q. Mr. Bell, I think we went over that yesterday –- or the other day, and you pointed out he got a very good, extraordinary sentencing. But I want to know why, on October 23rd, the government says that you crossed over from Vancouver into Oregon for the purpose of injuring and harassing Mike McNall. Is that true? A. No, absolutely not. Q. Then why did you – did you go into Oregon from Vancouver on October 23rd? A. October 23rd? Q. Yes, sir. A. I went over, and I may have done some shopping on the way. Many people in Vancouver, Washington, where the sales tax is seven percent, frequently go over to Oregon where the sales tax is zero percent and they do shopping and they visit other things. I used to live in a place called Aloha, Oregon. Most of my friends are in Oregon. And I’m very familiar – Vancouver and Portland are sort of like basically the same big community. Q. So you have friends who live in Oregon also. A. Oh, yes. Many – you know, a number of friends and – Q. Did you do any investigative activities of Mike McNall on October 23rd? maybe is that the day that you went to someone’s residence that you might have thought was connected to him? A. The last known address that I had for Mr. McNall was a place that has been spoken of before. The address is one of the five pieces of information I don’t recall at the moment. Q. Is that on the Clackamas Road, that address? A. Yes. Yes, the Clackamas Road. Q. We saw a picture of the long driveway and the two houses. A. Yes. Well, and the fact that I didn’t see it from an airplane, yes, that happened to be the, the house. Q. Mr. Groener and Mr. Andrews. A. I didn’t know the name Groener at the time. There was – I knew the name Andrews from my other research, and I believe there was a reference to Andrews on the mailbox. I – as I recall it. Q. Did you think Mike McNall lived there on October 23rd, 2000? A. I didn’t know. That was his last known address for me. I wanted to speak to Mr. McNall about the Ryan Lund case, because I did not know for sure which particular person had told Ryan Lund to assault me that day back on November 25th, 1997. I felt that, based on my vague understanding of government procedure, perhaps Mr. McNall was Lund’s handler. Lund was obviously a government informant based on my paperwork, my research that I’d done. But I didn’t know whether he was the informant for Mr. Lund. Q. Okay. So that’s why you – A. Or – Q. – wanted to talk to him. But why – A. Sorry. Q. Now, you’re trying to talk to him at home. Now, maybe that’s the thing that’s causing some people to be disturbed. Why did you want to talk to him at home rather than officially at his office or on his telephone or maybe you from a pay phone, something like that? A. I didn’t know for sure whether or not it was Mr. McNall. I suspected Mr. – he was the only named agent involved in the search. I suspected Mr. McNall was part of – or was the person who talked to Lund. But it could – the federal government is a large organization with many, many people, and it could have been someone else. I did not know, if I had walked into, let’s say, the ATF office in Portland, I didn’t know that that would ring sufficient alarm bells to tell the person who was the contact for Ryan Lund that Jim Bell was looking into the case. I felt that it was possible, Mr. McNall was not the person guilty of telling Mr. Lund to attack me. And if so, I felt it was vital to get ahold of him by means other than to officially walk in or call in and leave telephone records. I suspected my phones might have been bugged at that time based on the fact that I was talking about on the Internet a lot of this research. This was not a secret research. Dozens – at that point it was on the Internet, hundreds – no, thousands of people at that point had known. I had originally – Q. The Cypherpunks list? A. Yes, the Cypherpunks list. Many of my suspicions were reported in about June or July of 199- -- or ’98, of – to the, what’s called the Cypherpunks list which you’ve heard of. A thousand members at various times. It’s also been written about by a person who is not here, Declan McCullagh, a journalist who testified a few days ago. Q. Were you in communication with him prior to October 23rd about this investigation? A. Oh – Mr. McCullagh? Yes. Frequently. Q. So are you saying that your intent when you went to the Groener, what we know as the Groener residence, was not to endanger or harass Mike McNall, that was not the intent you had? A. Absolutely not. I wanted to find out – I wanted to ask him, nicely, do you know about Ryan Lund, and – I would – and I would tell him that I believed that Lund assaulted me on government orders, and I would ask for him – a comment, does he know, and if he didn’t know, I would say, “Could it have happened without your knowledge, Mr. McNall?” and probably the answer to that would be yes. Q. Did you – did you think you were committing a crime by doing this? A. No. I was trying to – well, virtually, I was trying to prevent a crime or to identify a crime. I was trying to find out – Q. What were you going to do with this information? If you could establish your theory, what were you going to do with the information? A. I was going to talk to journalists. I was – I already knew about Declan McCullagh of Wired News. I would have relayed this to John Branton of the Columbian who reported. Q. Is that the guy who testified? A. Who testified, Branton. And there were other people in the Portland Oregonian that I was going to tell this material to. My extensive research last summer was intended to support all of my allegations, and I, I drove by addresses of vehicles – of – that were last registered owners of vehicles who were following me and I knew the people involved didn’t know what went on, but I wanted to find out if there was a pattern to the vehicles that had been following me on Father’s Day Sunday 1997, and it turns out there was. Despite the fact I wans’t even close to Clackamas County on that particular day, June 22nd, 1997, virtually all the suspicious vehicles that were following me were registered from Clackamas County. I drive through Clark County, Multnomah County, and Washington County, and only – and the vehicles that were suspicious were all registered, surprisingly enough, in Clark County – or Clackamas County. And when I eventually did my research last summer, I was not able to find even a single one of those vehicles at the last registered address. I did not – Q. Mr. Bell, let me ask you – let me ask you one other question about the trip on October 23rd when you went to the Groener residence. Did you go to the residence of a – of a Barbi and a Jeff Gordon? Did you go to that residence at all that day? A. At the time I didn’t know – I don’t recall the specific first name, but, yes, I did. Q. You went to that residence? A. Well, I think – if – other than the ambiguity involved, I don’t know. But I – Q. Well, what I’m trying to find out is, did you take some action towards them with the intent to – to them or – A. No. Q. It says just Jeff Gordon, so I don’t know which – A. No. Q. – Jeff Gordon we are referring to, but did you focus on any Jeff Gordon that day? A. No. I was doing a lot of road trip research, and, again, I had been doing it for many months, and that was just another one of the addresses that I was looking into. I figured I would ask the Jeff Gordon who happens to be here those very same questions. But I – Q. Did you go to any other destinations other than the Groener farm residence? A. There was a – there was an address of an Eagle Creek, Oregon – I believe that was the name. I knew it was no longer the address of the particular Gordon he is referring to in Tualatin, Oregon. Q. Okay. A. But I was just being thorough about my research. I wanted to – in effect, I was trying to collect all the jigsaw puzzle pieces so when I put it together I would eventually get the whole picture. I did not have the whole picture. I was acting as a one-man investigative agency with very severe limitations on my ability to do this research. Q. So whatever your purpose, you say it’s investigative, it wasn’t to injure or harass, that was not your purpose? A. No. I visited many locations last summer of people that I had no intention of even contacting. People I fully were aware were – had no knowledge of this. I simply wanted to get all the jigsaw puzzle pieces together so that I could show the picture of what actually happened. Q. Okay. A. I did not – I did not want to involve them other than to be able to collect the data as to all of those vehicles that were following me on Father’s Day Sunday. At that time I was very – well, I was being followed around on Father’s Day Sunday 1998. Q. Okay. Now, on October 31st, count 3 ways that you used a facility of interstate commerce for stalking. And the government has introduced a piece of paper with some blue writing on it, and there’s also a copy that is black writing that’s a facsimile, and according to Jeff Gordon’s testimony, that was received at the IRS office – and I’m not even exactly sure where, perhaps Portland – and it was in a response to a letter that was earlier written to you. Now, do you know – can you speak to that? A. I think you’re referring to a fax. Yes, I think I recall that. Q. Do you want – do you want – was your – did you send a lot of faxes, or was that the only one? Did you send it – let me ask you that first. Did you send it? A. Well, other than the fact you haven’t shown it to me, I’m recalling a particular fax that, yes, I did send. Q. Okay. A. I don’t want to agree to a fax that I haven’t even seen, but I do recall a fax that I did send, yes. Q. Did it relate to some items that had been seized from you? A. Yes. It – Q. And the return, it discussed about the return of them? A. Yes. The government had had a lot of my property for the preceding four years, almost four years, that was taken originally on April 1st, 1997. As of that point, I had not received back two computers, which I still haven’t received back, even as of today. And there was also a matter of four guns that I had had on April 1st, 1997, and they, of course, couldn’t return it to me because at that point I was a felon, but they – but there is a procedure where I tell them to whom I want them delivered. Q. Is that where you said you wanted Mr. East to be able to be your designee? A. Yes. My friend Bob East, I was perfectly happy to give him the guns. Yes. Q. Okay. You don’t have the guns yourself, do you? A. No. Q. Even when you were out, you never did get them back. A. No. I’ve never – I’ve never seen them since, since Bobby’s got them from them. Q. Now, it says that – so did you send a facsimile on that subject matter? Without having to look for it right now, did you send a facsimile from Vancouver to – into Oregon for the IRS office? A. I had a phone number to which I sent the fax. Q. Okay. A. Where it actually went, whether the number was forwarded, sent somewhere else, I do – I have no knowledge for sure. I do know, as I recall, that it was a 503 area code phone number. 503 is the area – used to be the area code for years back for all of Oregon. More recently it’s been limited to the northwestern corner, the Portland metro area and so forth. The other area of Oregon is now 541, I think. Q. Where were you physically when you sent that facsimile? A. Standing in my basement in the largest room at the north wall of – standing in front of the fax machine. Q. So you were in Vancouver and sent a fax to the 503 area code? A. Yes. Unless – Q. So you don’t – so you don’t take issue that whatever, that that fax went interstate, or probably went interstate? A. Telephone forwarding is very odd. I have the technical background to understand that. When you call an 800 number locally, it could go literally next door. You don’t even necessarily know where it went. I assumed it was going to go to Oregon, but I obviously have no personal acknowledge how it went, but it probably went to Oregon because of the 503 area code. Q. All right. Now, did you do that with the intent to put someone, and I guess this would be Jeff Gordon or someone at the IRS office, in fear of death or serious bodily injury? A. No, I didn’t. Q. To him or to his family? A. No, I didn’t. Q. All right. Would you comment on the message, then, because the message says that you would like to either go by with you or your designee – A. Yes. Q. – to his office or maybe to his home. A. Yes. Q. And so some people might think that this is – that this needs explanation. A. Okay, and I would be happy to supply an explanation. I was talking to my attorney on another matter, an appeal of the issue that I was convicted of a few years ago. Q. That’s Mr. Solovy? A. Mr. Solovy. Q. You have no problems with him? A. None, that I’m aware of. Q. All right. A. Mr. Solovy. He had received communication from a fax, I guess, and he sent me a copy of it, I guess, that said that if I didn’t pick up – not me pick up, but have my – those guns picked up by November – I believe it was November 1st, they would be destroyed, on November 1st. Now, it didn’t say this on this particular fax. The fax that I received a copy of from Mr. Solovy had actually been sent many months before, but I was in verbal contact with Mr. Solovy, and Solovy said that he had recently been told that if the guns weren’t picked up by somebody, my designee, they would be destroyed. Well – Q. Now, you knew you couldn’t have the guns yourself. A. Oh, certainly, yes. I was a felon at that point, and I still am. Q. Okay. A. I was convicted. Q. So what was your purpose in sending the fax with the message that it had on it? A. My purpose was to – well, my purpose was to inform the people who were threatening to destroy my guns or – guns, that, yes, I do want – I want them to be sent back and I’m accepting a designee do it. When I was getting ready to write the message, I happened to notice that the date was October 31st, 2000, which happened to be Halloween, and I made a little joke that’s been vastly overblown. And I wanted to make sure that they were aware – very graphically, because I only heard about that on October 31st – that I didn’t want the guns to be destroyed. I wanted them – I wanted to arrange for their return. Q. All right. So that was your intent of sending a fax? A. I wanted to make sure the guns didn’t get destroyed, that’s right. They were aware that I was making provision to have them sent or picked up by somebody. That somebody turned out to be my friend, Bob East, the man who testified a few days ago, yes. Q. All right. And count 4, it says that on November 3rd, 2000, you traveled across the state line from Vancouver into Oregon with the intent to injure or harass Scott Mueller. A. That’s right. Q. This is the trip to Bend, Oregon. A. I remember the indictment says that. Yes. Q. Now, when you – first of all, when you left Vancouver, was your purpose to go to Bend? I mean, was that the purpose of the trip? A. In general, Bend, yes, that’s true. It was a road trip. It was – my friend John Copp, who drove his own vehicle, and I was inside of it, likes to go on long road trips. We usually go on forest roads, but he likes to drive around and go camping and such, so he and I – I knew that he wouldn’t mind a trip of a hundred plus miles, and we both enjoy it, so, yes. The purpose of going over there was to visit Bend. I hadn’t been to Bend – Q. Were you – A. Sir, let me answer. Q. I’m sorry. A. I hadn’t been to Bend for over ten years. I did a lot of caving in the Bend – Q. We discussed that the other day. A. In the Bend area. Q. The John Naro Caves, is that the name of it? A. What’s that? Q. The John Naro Caves. A. I don’t recall that. There’s a Lava River cave, there’s a Boyd cave, there’s a – there’s a few other caves that I frequently visited – or in the mid ‘80s, I visited in Bend Oregon. Southeast of Bend, Oregon, usually. Q. What’s important to this trial is, what was your intent regarding visiting the Mueller residence or taking photographs of the Mueller residence or writing down tab numbers? Was your intent to injure or harass him? A. No. No. My intent was simply to figure out why there were get – there were being odd problems with the Oregon DMV data. Inconsistencies in names, inconsistencies, two people at the same address. The reversed names. Q. And when you got that information, that’s the information that you sent back to John Young? A. Actually, I sent it to the Cypherpunks mail list, and I believe at the time John Young was probably a subscriber to the Cypherpunks mail list. I didn’t specifically want to send it back to him. I wanted – there was an ongoing conversation, you might say, on the Cypherpunks list and I was simply adding my research to that issue. Q. You mean this was just a piece of a thread of a larger conversation that was going on? A. A much larger – well, a number – you know, a number of other people participated. John Young had said, I have an odd address out of a government database for an organization called ISTAC. It refers to somebody with a little letter cia, and that seems rather unusual. And he wanted to know, does anybody know about a – if there is a CIA installation in Bend, Oregon. And I just happened to have access to data, and I looked into the – what I knew, based on the databases of the Oregon DMV. And I found odd inconsistencies, errors. Declan – or the name in the database was Deforest X. Mueller. Mueller. The name in the Oregon DMV database was Scott Deforest Mueller. There was also a vehicle registered to a Forest Scott Mueller. At the same address, there were two – a man – apparently a man and a wife both named Ashe. If I had just seen the CIA reference in the original thing, I would have said, oh, you know, ho hum. But when I saw the various inconsistencies in, in the DMV data, that peeked my curiosity dramatically and that made me want to visit, take a look, find out if this was actually a business or a residence. It turned out it was a residence. It seemed rather strange that any government person would be publishing his home address, as if it were his business address, and that’s basically what it was. Q. And then you took the photos and – A. Yeah, I took a couple photos and – at that point we visited two addresses, took photos, and then we went to the top of Pilot Butte or Hill in the center of – now it’s in the center of Bend, it used to be on the edge of Bend, and I looked at the city, which has grown dramatically in the last ten years. And just – at that point it was getting late. It was totally dark, and John and I drove back, and he dropped me off at – at my residence in Vancouver, and I assume he went home. Q. So you didn’t contact Mr. Mueller personally? A. No. And I had no intention of it. Even if I had seen somebody in the, you know, in the driveway or the front yard of these residences, I had no intention of even approaching them. Because that wasn’t – I didn’t – well, I would have – frankly, I was trying to avoid even the implication that I was trying to bother these people. Q. Okay. A. It wasn’t the person that I was concerned with, it was the data that I, I found out, and I was trying to resolve, why is an address labeled CIA in Bend, Oregon, and why did it appear to be a residential address. Q. So this is unrelated to the Mr. McNall and Mr. Gordon and Ryan – A. Totally and completely unrelated. This has nothing to do with the Gordon/McNall thing. Q. Okay. A. It was something I did to check out a very curious set of facts that I had managed to dig up. Q. Now, on November 10th, count 5 says that you traveled across the state line, again, with the intent to injure, harass Mike McNall, and I – I believe that on November 10th we’ve seen – for that day we’ve seen a video of your movement, that you went back to where Mr. Groener and Mr. Andrews live. Is that correct? A. Yes, that’s right. Q. What was your purpose of going back to that residence since you knew that Mike McNall didn’t live there? A. Okay. I had a very specific purpose, and I also had a very specific purpose – Q. Or didn’t you believe Mr. Groener the first time? Did you think he was lying to you? A. Please, let me answer the question. Q. Okay. A. This is involved, but, frankly, it makes sense. I had visited there a few days earlier. I had talked to a person who I didn’t know his name at the time. It turns out to be Mr. Groener. I believe he testified that I was there. A few days after that, my residence was searched. I had done, as far as I knew, nothing to justify to have my residence searched. Q. A few days after when, you mean after November 3rd but before November 10th? A. I believe that’s – again, I don’t recall the specific dates. I can recollect it, but – Q. Is that the chronology, though? A. Yes. But, please, let me continue. All I had done is I had dropped by the residence and said, I’m looking for Mike McNall, and – well, I dropped by, and I drove down this long private road. And the reason I drove down the private road is because it’s a rural area. It turns out there’s no place to park. There was a two-lane road, and there was a driveway, and there was literally no place to park by the side of the road. There’s a big, not only a ditch, but a hill there. It was like I couldn’t park there without blocking the road, and the road was very, very curvy there, and it would – and I had to drive down to physically find a place to park. And I was openly, openly trying to find Mike McNall. I had no problem. I didn’t want potentially somebody in the government agency who had done something wrong to find out, but it wasn’t like I was trying to keep my research secret from the average man on the street. So I drove down, parked in front of the house. The driveway was not marked. It was not no trespassing or anything like that I could see. Q. You said private road. Did you see a sign that said private road? A. The only thing that I saw – well, there was a piece of, a flap of metal that was bent over onto itself. It might have been a sign. I mean, you know how pranksters deal with things like that. There was a – there was a – what looked like sort of a nailed-on piece of metal, the flap was bent over on itself. That’s all I saw. I didn’t try to bend back the metal to see what the thing said. But it looked like it might have at one point been a sign, but I didn’t want to fiddle with it because I didn’t – I mean, that wasn’t my purpose for being there. I drove down and nobody was there. There were two houses. I assumed that maybe it was – one of them was a rental. I – Q. You’re talking about the past one. I’m asking you now about – you’ve explained that. But what about – A. I don’t think – actually, I haven’t explained what I’m just explaining now. I have not had the opportunity to explain what happened that day, and I would like to. Yes. On that day, during – or about November 3rd – he gave me the date – I did drive down, park, knocked on the door of the bigger house. There was no answer. I think there was one vehicle in the garage. Not – there was room for two, but there was only one vehicle in the garage. Nobody was home. I walked over to the smaller home, and it didn’t really have a clear front. It’s hard to explain. The door didn’t – it didn’t have the porch thing or the porch arrangement to know for sure whether that was the front. I knocked on the door that I saw. There was no answer. I then walked around the back to try to see if maybe I was knocking on the wrong door. I wasn’t. So I came back, and just then apparently a man had arrived in a car, or – and he asked me what I was doing there. Perfectly reasonable question under the circumstances. And I said, “I’m looking for a guy named Mike McNall.” He says, “Well, I don’t know.” You know, “Who are you?” And I – and I said, “I’m an acquaintance. I’m an acquaintance.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know. There used to be a guy who lived there,” he said, “some time ago. I occasionally got the mail for him.” And I said, “Oh, okay. So he’s no longer here,” and “fine.” At that point, I said, “Well, okay.” I think I may have asked him whether he knows where McNall lived. He said he didn’t. So at that point I said, “Okay. Well, thank you very much.” And at that point I went back to my car, got in my car, wrote down the fact that I talked to a guy at this particular address. Q. Is that the spiral notebook that we’ve heard about? A. Yes, I believe I was writing on that spiral notebook. Q. What was the purpose of you keeping a spiral notebook? A. Well, despite the fact that I’m computer literate, I didn’t happen to have a laptop computer at the time, and so I had to fall back on old tried and true methods. And spiral notebooks work just as well – I shouldn’t say just as well. They work pretty good. Q. These are your notes of your research? A. Oh, yes. Yes. I’ve been taking that – that book had been filled out with research I took – I made as far back as May of last year, yes. Q. May. So shortly after your release you started the notebook. A. Yes, that’s right. I basically looked into – I collected jigsaw puzzle pieces, in effect. Names, dates, places, addresses. I recognize fully that most of these, many, many, many dozens of addresses, if not hundreds of addresses, had no relationship at all to anything. They were jigsaw puzzle pieces to fill out, not only what I alleged, but the entire background associated with it. People that wouldn’t even have known about this – these things. People who might have lost a car, being seized by the government, but was later on used to follow me, let’s say. I didn’t know for sure these people didn’t know, but I strongly suspected they didn’t know. But I wanted to be able to document, I wanted to be able to find the vehicles later on that had been following me and demonstrate that, no, the current own – the last registered owner was not the current owner, for example. Q. So if someone said that you weren’t being accurate, you had your notes there. A. Oh, yes. I wanted to have a – I wanted to fill out the entire jigsaw puzzle with lots of data, and I wanted to be able to explain it to people like you, and I poured over it for a long time. That’s the reason I’m able to tell you without any notes whatsoever the names, dates, places, addresses involved. I can tell you a number of registered – well, let me – companies, individuals. Q. I just asked you about – I wanted to get an examination of the notebook, and I think you have, but – A. Yes. Q. So, but that was back on the 3rd of November. A. That’s right. Q. And I was asking you about November 10th. Now, between the 3rd and the 10th, was your house searched? A. Yes. I think it was on the 6th. It was on a Monday. It was definitely on Monday, and I think the Monday was the 6th. Q. And did you feel – what – and was the search, the fact that the search took place, did that have anything to do with the fact that you went back on the 10th, or – A. Oh, very much so. Q. Will you explain that, please. A. Because, of course, I racked my brain, I think – I thought, I hadn’t done anything to justify having the house searched. All I – well, basically I visited some addresses and did a little bit of research. And I thought, what could possibly – I knew – I mean, I had no reason to believe that anything I had done in Bend was a problem, and so forth. And I came to the conclusion – well, not really a conclusion, but the best hypothesis, and I have a scientific background, as you know. My hypothesis at this point is that the person that I met at the Mike McNall residence actually knew Mike McNall or who he was or where he worked, and as a cons – and also would have known, perhaps, that Mr. McNall was extremely secretive about his address. Remember, I had gotten his address from a DMV database – actually, a few years ago DMV database. Mr. McNall’s 2000, year 2000 address, was actually the Federal Building in Portland, Oregon. I knew his address from back when he was willing to have his address listed in the Oregon DMV data list. The person who ultimately, Mr. Groener, who testified to have known that man presumably knew that Mr. McNall was an extremely secretive person and didn’t want to have his name known, certainly not in the telephone directory and not even in a DMV database. So I suspected that this particular man – reasonably, he didn’t do anything, I guess, wrong, or I suspected he didn’t, contacted the people he knew, perhaps Groener directly, and he may have embellished the story a little bit, made it sound a little bit more ominous than it really was. Or, I didn’t really suspect that. I’m fully aware that these federal government people dramatically overstate reality. If you were to read the original complaint, you would – it would make me look awful. These people are masters of the half truth and the implication and the insinuation. They will take -–as I said once to somebody, they would turn Santa Claus into a misanthrope, an angry old man, and they would turn the Grinch into a saint. They could turn – and they could do it without officially lying because they know they can. They get away with it every day. Every document that comes out of these people has those – Q. Did you feel that the search warrant was based somehow or another on your visit on the 3rd of November, is that what you’re saying? A. I felt it had to be. That was the only thing. I had – I had openly talked to this man. I had told him who I wanted to see. This man asked me my name. I gave him my name, Jim Bell. He asked for my phone number, and I gave him my phone number. No problem there. I had no problem identifying who I was. I had an open reason to be there. I was trying to talk to Mike McNall. And, in fact, as an example of this misrepresentation, in a later document I read that I had in fact asked the person, that Mr. Groener – or not asked, told him my name and address. And the implication, the suggestion in the document by the government was that I had, by telling him that, was I was trying to intimidate him. No, no. I didn’t tell him my name until Mr. – the person, the guy, Mr. Groener, asked me. I didn’t intend to bother anybody, including Mr. Groener. I just wanted to talk to Mr. McNall. That’s all I did that day. Q. Okay. So you told us that your purpose to talk to him wasn’t to injure or harass, but what about your – on November 10th, you were in Vancouver and you went into Oregon again, didn’t you, on a trip? We saw it on the screen. A. Yes. Q. What was your intent then to go back to the same place where you knew he wasn’t at? A. Yes. Q. That’s my question. A. Because I came to the conclusion that the search of my residence was – or could have been justified by that incident or – I don’t even want to call it an incident, just that event – I was afraid that either the person that I had met had himself distorted or embellished or he had talked to somebody and the government people had pumped up the implications of what I was doing there to make it sound vastly more serious than it really was. And it wasn’t serious at all. I was just looking for that guy. Q. So now you know, though, that you’re not going to go see Mike McNall. Why do you want to talk to Mr. Groener? Do you want to ask him about it or something? A. Because I knew that Mr. Groener, the per – the person I met, who later on I found out his name was Groener, knew the truth about what had happened, the pre- -- that, I guess it was on November 3rd. He knew that he had asked me for my name and a phone number. He knew that I, I didn’t act threateningly. He knew that I, I left immediately after taking some notes. I mean, you know, he knew this stuff, and I knew that he knew this stuff. And I was afraid that his words had been distorted, and I wanted this man, Mr. Groener, to talk to a reporter that I’ve been talking to for a number of years, Mr. John Branton of the Columbian. So – Q. Now, there were three notes that said, “Please call John Branton at the Columbian” with a telephone number, each in baggies that were found at the place. A. Yes. Q. Is this – is this how you wanted him to – is this what you did to get them to contact Mr. Branton? A. Yes. I left the notes around 12 midnight, and let me explain why I drove at 12 midnight. It was about nine o’clock that I called John Branton of the Columbian at his home address, you know. He actually lives very close in the area to my residence. And I said, “Mr. Branton, I believe that the government has pumped up what happened that day as a justification for searching my house.” I suspected the government – because I know the government people liked – they like to arrest people on a Friday, I was afraid that on the next day I was going to get arrested. Q. Why do they like to arrest people on Friday, sir? A. Keep them over weekends, incommunicado so they can’t talk to the media, talk to the press, talk to their family. Q. Okay. A. So I knew at eight o’clock or nine o’clock that night that I needed to get the truth out. I needed Mr. Branton to be able to talk to those people, or one of them at least, the one that I met, talked to, and I didn’t know particularly who it was necessarily. I didn’t know the name Groener at the time, you see. Q. So you didn’t know which house particularly he was associated to, is that right? A. No, he didn’t – he didn’t walk into a house. I had left before he even physically walked into a house. I did not know for sure what he had done or who he had talked to. He mihgt have talked to other people who lived there, and I figured I would be thorough and I would leave a note on every car so that everybody who leaves the next morning – Q. Uh-huh. A. – would know that I wanted them to talk to John Branton. You see, because it was so late and I didn’t even know the phone number of these people, Mr. Groener or the people who lived in the other house, I couldn’t very well go down there that night at nine or – well, ten o’clock. It would – it would have bothered them, of course. You don’t want to have somebody show up at your house at nine or ten o’clock. At the same time, I couldn’t have really go down at like seven – six or seven in the morning and wait for them to leave. I mean, I – because there was no place to park at the road. But I did need to communicate with these people, very important, so that – so that John Branton could talk to them. So I, I quickly concluded that the only thing, my only option at that point, to get the word out quickly enough, was to leave notes on the cars at night, you know – I had no choice – and say for them to call John Branton. So I called John Branton. I said, I’m talking – I’m going to go leave people notes and I’m going to – these people will be calling you. I’m telling you now because that’s – you know, I want you to know when these people call on notes left in their cars, why they are calling and the circumstances involved. Q. All right. Did you – so your purpose for going to Oregon on November 10th was not to injure or harass Mike McNall. A. No. I was trying to get the truth out about what I had actually done on November 3rd, 2000; that in fact I hadn’t don anything unusual to Mr. Groener. I hadn’t acted threateningly. I hadn’t acted in an odd fasion. And I needed to get the news people, the newspaper people, Branton, for example, to talk to these people and verify that because I wanted to show that whatever justification was used to search my residence on the 6th. It would be shown to be wrong. Q. Now – A. I was desperate to get the information out quickly. I knew I may have only had a day more to do it. I didn’t know I was not going to be arrested the next day. Q. You thought you were going to be arrested the next day. A. Right. I knew it was possible that I might be. It turns out, I think I was arrested on the next Friday after that. Believe me, I’m well aware of that interesting tactic, that Mr. Jeff Gordon is fully aware of. If he testifies, he will tell you. Q. Why – okay. So, now, what was your intent of writing an email to the Internet which the subject matter was Mr. Anonymous say good night to Joshua, or Joshua say – do you remember there email – A. Yes. Q. – that we’ve heard testimony about? A. This is related to something that I did, which admittedly was a mistake. I wanted to be able to demonstrate that the government was doing close-in surveillance of my residence, and I – including physically mounting a very tiny camera on a house nearby and wa- -- watching. I mean not watching with the eye, but with perhaps a motion-sensitive recording system, and I will explain that later, what the implications of a motion-sensitive recording system means. Q. Why the email? Why did you send the email? A. I felt that I was – effectively, I was being electronically stalked. That is to say, all my emails on the Internet were being read. In itself that'’ perfectly easy for even you to do. Not emails, but posts in public areas. Anybody can go to a site called deja.com – d-e-j-a – and look for my Internet address and find out every Usenet post I’ve ever posted. That’s not surprising or difficult, but I believed I was being watched physically and electronically watched. I wanted to be able to demonstrate to prove the electronic watching and the elec- == and the physical watching, and I, I composed an idea on how I was going to do that. I was going to provide evidence that the camera would provide to the government, that they would have, they would be desperately willing to use to – and it would reveal inadvertently in some method in the process of a sarch. What I did was, I did something that was frankly wrong. I visited an address, which has been temporarily mentioned, and I looked in a mailbox and I saw a couple of what looked like bills or statements or something. And I am not going to tell you that I didn’t take those bills. It had some information; I wrote the information down. Later on I went home, and I very theatrically stuck paper in a fireplace insert in the – in the back family room of the main floor of my house, a wad of paper. Okay. I kneeled down, stuck it in, and I lit it. This was adjacent to a large glass window that faced out over the area that I believe the camera was able to see. My thinking was this: They would eventually learn of my email, they would eventually – Q. The good night Joshua? A. They would track down the fact that I had written down this information. They would put two and two together, and they would – and if I was – if my theory was correct – and, again, I’m a scientific person. I solve problems with the scientific method. I concluded that they would inadvertently reveal the fact that they knew that paper was burned on that night in that fireplace insert, but they wouldn’t openly come out and say it, but they would do something very critical that would tell me that in fact the information about the burning had gotten done. It turns out that exact – that exactly that happened. During the search, the female agent, named Julie Anderson, I – I later on found out it was Julie Anderson – she asked my mother totally out of the blue, apparently, despite the fact that the warrant didn’t mention it, she asked, “Could I look in your fireplace and take a sample of what I find there?” My mother, who had no knowledge of any of this, said, “Sure. No problem.” My mother later on said to me, “She did an odd thing this morning. She asked to look, to take a sample of ash from inside the fireplace.” At that point, inside of my head, bingo. I concluded that that was the reason for looking in the fireplace, to find a sample of this burned paper which they would have believed I took that night. However, a few weeks later in a phone call to my mother, I made another tactical error. My mother had a stroke three- and-a-half years ago due to some pressure involved with the government’s relationship with me, and I wanted to make sure that she remembered the fact that Anderson had asked her for ashes in the fireplace. And I said – excuse me. [Witness takes a drink of water.] I said to my mother over a monitored phone line – I knew it was monitored at the time – but I said to my mother, “Please remember that that female agent asked you for the ashes or for the contents of the fireplace because it’s very, very important,” I said to my mother. The fact – “I cannot explain to you why it’s very important,” but it was very important. Well, it was overheard, of course, by the people doing the monitoring, and they came – they did a similar amount of thinking, and they concluded that the reason that it was important to me is because they had been doing that surveillance that I told you about and they had to have an explanation. They devel- -- they needed it, an explanation as to why it was that they looked in the fireplace. Q. Let me just ask you one last question, Mr. Bell. Why – A. Mr. Leen, there’s about six hours more of testimony. I could give names, dates, places. People following me on Father’s Day Sunday. They were ... Q. I’m sure the government will ask you about that – A. Mr. Leen – Q. – on cross-examination. A. – Mr. Leen, you do not represent me at this point. THE COURT: To the witness. To the witness. THE WITNESS: I apologize. Q. (By Mr. Leen) Why – THE COURT: What’s the question? Q. (By Mr. Leen) Why do you believe that the government would spend such vast sums of money to monitor you? A. Why? I have no idea the amount of money that they’ve used. I keep getting my words misconstrued. Even my own attorney there, who I don’t think represents me anymore due to the threats. I have never said that they are expending vast sums of money. For all I know, we’re talking about a relatively tiny number of people involved here. Certainly, by the size – by the standards of the government. They’re probably not expending vast sums of money, but I believe that they decided that because of what I wrote many years ago they were going to set up a system, a practice of looking into me, because they couldn’t – they couldn’t destroy what I wrote. Do you understand? They could not destroy it. On the Internet things last forever. The only – they could kill me, but killing me wouldn’t have helped. It wouldn’t have done them any benefit to kill me. In fact, it would have made things far worse. What they – the only ting they can conclude is, they needed to discredit me very seriously. That was the only tactic that they had left. They couldn’t kill me, they couldn’t destroy my work. They had to discredit me. And when you want to discredit somebody, you need to know a lot about them, you need to do a lot of very serious research. You need to do a lot of observation, and with that observation maybe they thought they would eventually find something that Jim Bell could be discredited with. And I believe that was the reason that they have done virtually all of the surveillance they have done on me. Q. Do you think that you committed any crime? A. Other – other than the incident about the mail, ah, traffic laws, I don’t know. Q. Do you think you committed the five crimes in the indictment? A. Certainly not those. It has later been hinted that my use of Oregon DMV database information is inherently illegal. As of 1997, various laws were passed to prevent people from, I guess, or – relating to the use of that information. I used that information to protect myself. I used that information to look down addresses of cars that had been following me and found out that the people who last owned the cars were not the people involved. I used that information as a protective measure against threats made. We have at least four or five more hours of testimony where I will relate names, dates, places of information I looked up. I don’t remember individual plates, but I remember names of people, registered plates, incidents of following me on Father’s Day Sunday. I could point out – I have drawn various maps last week, being ready to relate to you in detail following incidents that occurred: Following me in a car on Father’s Day Sunday and in the four or five days previous. Government agents that showed up at odd places, at parks in Vancouver, Washington. Various – things that I took data on and later on verified last summer. If Mr. Leen stops this line of questioning at any time in the next four or five hours – and I hate to take up your valuable time. There’s a lot to say. THE COURT: Mr. Leen, any other questions to this witness? MR. LEEN: No, Your Honor. THE COURT: You may – we will take a 15-minute recess. The jury is cautioned, please do not discuss the case among yourselves or with anyone else. Please go to the jury room. (Jury excused; 11:00 a.m.) THE COURT: Anything to take up before the recess? MR. LEEN: Well, Your Honor, we’ve come to a problem because I really have nothing further to ask the defendant and he insists that he has hours of more things to talk about. But I – if that’s not a problem with the court, then I guess I have nothing further. THE DEFENDANT: It relates to my state of mind, why I believe things were happening that I – THE COURT: Mr. Bell. THE DEFENDANT: Thank you. THE COURT: Is the government ready to cross-examine? MR. LONDON: We are, Your Honor, and I don’t anticipate that it will be very lengthy. THE COURT: All right. Fifteen-minute recess. (Recessed at 11:00 o’clock.) (Jury not present.) THE COURT: Ready for the jury? Yes, Your Honor. THE COURT: Bring the jury. (Jury present.) THE COURT: Let the record reflect the jury has returned. Cross-examination, Mr. London. THE WITNESS: My microphone – is my microphone on? Thank you very much. Before I am cross-examined, I would like to make a statement. THE COURT: Just a minute, sir. There’s no question put to you. THE WITNESS: Okay. THE COURT: What is the question, Mr. London? CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MR. LONDON: Q. Mr. Bell, just before the break you were asked if you committed any crimes, in your own mind you believed you committed any crimes in this matter. I think that you said that other than the theft of Jeff and Barbi Gordon’s mail and possibly the use of some DMV information, you don’t believe you committed any offenses in this case. Is that a correct or fair characterization of what you said? A. I would like to say that at this point I’m not represented by counsel. Mr. Leen does not represent me. I’m wondering whether it’s proper legally and ethically for them to even question me without representation. Mr. – an attorney is – THE COURT: Mr. Bell, do you understand what the government just asked you? THE WITNESS: Yes. But I want to explain – THE COURT: Do you understand it? THE WITNESS: I’m not – I will voluntarily answer some questions from the prosecutor because as a jury you have a right to hear answer – many more answers than they are willing to let you hear. But at the same time, I’m not waiving my Fifth Amendment right against – because I do not have representation in this trial. Normally when you think of testimony, cross- examination, there’s a guy over there who is supposed to basically look out for my rights. That – Mr. Leen simply does not fulfill that function – THE COURT: Mr. Bell. THE WITNESS: -- in this courtroom. THE COURT: Mr. Bell. Will the jury please go back to the jury room. (Jury excused; 11:20 a.m.) THE COURT: Mr. Bell, do you intend to answer the questions put to you by the government? THE WITNESS: I intend to answer voluntarily, but without waiving my Fifth Amendment rights. THE COURT: I didn’t ask you that. THE DEFENDANT: I am not a lawyer, sir. I do not know legal ethics questions. I do not know whether my position – even my position here is proper and ethical and – under the circumstances. I’m a legal quagmire here. I have no formal legal training. I haven’t been to a day of law school. I do not know the legal circumstances I’m finding myself in at this very moment. THE COURT: After that, do you intend to answer the government’s questions? THE WITNESS: I intend to voluntarily answer some questions of the government. MR. LEEN: Your Honor, the defense would move for a mistrial. THE COURT: A mistrial will be denied. MR. LEEN: May I renew my motion that the defendant be – that we adjourn and that the defendant be examined mentally? THE COURT: That motion will be denied. MR. LONDON: Your Honor, I’m going to move that if the defendant does not answer all of the government’s questions on cross-examination, then his testimony on direct examination be stricken and the jury told to disregard anything he said. THE WITNESS: I believe that’s improper since I’m not represented at this point, sir, but that’s a vague legal question that I don’t really understand. THE COURT: Bring the jury back. MR. LEEN: May I move to withdraw again, Your Honor? THE COURT: That will be denied. (Jury present; 11:24 a.m.) THE COURT: Let the record reflect the jury has returned. Next question, Mr. London. Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, I’m going to ask the question with – again. At the end of your direct examination you told Mr. Leen that you believed you committed no crimes in this matter except possibly your use of certain DMV information and the theft of mail from the Gordons at 8300 Southwest Chelan, Tualitin, is that correct? A. Under coercion I do answer this question. I believe he’s mischaracterizing exactly what I said. I didn’t say I had specifically violated laws. I referred to, for example, database use as being an alleged issue. I believe it’s a First Amendment issue. I do get to speak. I have a right to protect myself with database information, particularly in the outrageous treatment that I’ve been gotten – been given. But basically, I’m not aware of any other – anything I may have done wrong. Q. Mr. Bell, a few moments ago, you said that you used DMV information, data, as a protective measure – those were your words, were they not? – as a protective measure for the purpose of tracking down cars that you believed – A. Well – Q. – were following you – A. – I did – Q. – isn’t that correct? A. I did research in the DMV data for the purpose of identifying evidence in a long pattern of – of elec- -- of following and surveillance that I had received over a, a substantial period of time. Yes, I did that. Q. And do you recall saying that you did this as a protective measure. A. It was frankly in self-defense. I needed to know who these people were, or more accurately, whose cars they were and why it is they all came from Clackamas County and why it is that they all happened to be engaged in a road following campaign against me on Father’s Day Sunday 1998, yes. Q. So whether it was as a protective measure or in self- defense, as you’re saying now, can you please explain to us how or why you had to protect yourself or defend yourself against Scott Mueller in Bend, Oregon? A. I’ve never claimed that Scott Mueller had anything to do with these other issues. In fact, I specifically recall saying to you that has nothing to do with the other two instances. I was simply checking out a curious database thing. It was a day road trip. It was interesting. I got to see Bend after ten years. Mueller, Mr. Mueller, had nothing to do with it. I am sorry that Mr. Mueller got listed in a government database as – letters CIA associated with him. I was checking out a curious sequence of data to find out the truth, and I was willing to go all the way to Bend to check out these curious database results that I found. Q. Mr. Bell, you didn’t just check out this information. You returned from your trip from Bend. You got on the Internet, and about three o’clock in the morning, you posted all of Mr. Mueller's personal information to the Cypherpunks site. You answered John Young, and you announced that you were outing Mr. Mueller as a CIA agent. Isn’t that correct? A. That’s hyperbole. The fact is, I hadn’t outed anyone. The original data was presented in the government database. I was checking out, with the information I had, the question of whether or not that original information was somehow accurate. I over – I certainly overstated the case. I wasn’t the one who revealed the address or the odd name or anything. I – vaguely, I was bragging a little bit. I, I had gotten information that indicated that there was name problems with DMV data. Yeah, I did say I outed a C – CIA agent. If I was talked to by a journalist, the journalist would have said, Mr. Bell, what you really should have said is I outed a suspected or a possible or an alleged or a, whatever, CIA person. That would have been far more accurate. I apologize for the wording error. It was sort of a joke at that point, unfortunately. Again, I’m sorry that Mr. Mueller had his name listed with the letters CIA. Not his name, but Deforest X. Mueller, which is sufficiently similar with his own address to make one think that there was a problem there. That’s what I was doing. Q. You’re sorry now, but, Mr. Bell, you told the jury just a few minutes ago in your direct examination that once something is on the Internet, it’s up there forever, isn’t that correct? A. That’s true. And the original messages that referred to the government database entry for that particular person was there forever as well. The address was there forever. Deforest X. Mueller, that name was there forever. Literally, anybody could have done the same research that I did. Nothing that I added made – did anything to stop the release of information that had already occurred. The original mistake, frankly, was made by probably somebody playing a joke, entering information into a government database somewhere, and that’s the reason for the confusion. I did not, and do not, have anything against Mr. Mueller. I wonder sometimes why his vehicles are registered under odd names, like Deforest Scott Mueller, in addition to Scott Deforest Mueller, and why two other people were listed as being at his address. That was very curious. I’m still curious about that. But I have never felt that Mr. Mueller – I have never felt badly toward Mr. Mueller. Before he testified, I had never met Mr. Mueller. I was simply checking out information. Q. Mr. Bell, how is it any of your business? Why don’t you tell this jury why it is any of your business to take personal information from Mr. Mueller, whether it’s erroneously transmitted to you in the first place or not? MR. LEEN: Objection – Q. (By Mr. London) To go – MR. LEEN: -- Your Honor. Argumentative. THE COURT: You may ask the question. Q. (By Mr. London) Why did you appoint yourself the outer of Mr. Mueller without checking to make sure that you had t right? Did you call the CIA and say, “Is this one of your agents?” A. Are you going to let me – MR. LEEN: Objection, Your Honor. A. – answer the first question before – MR. LEEN: Objection, Your Honor. He’s asking – he’s not asking questions – THE COURT: Back up. MR. LEEN: -- he’s making statements. THE COURT: Back up, back up. What is the question, specifically? Q. (By Mr. Leen) Why was it any of your business to out Mr. Mueller or anyone else on the Internet as a CIA agent? A. Business? That’s not my business. I, I mean, if you use the term “business” literally, it’s not like a money-making opportunity. I was curious about an odd report of an odd database entry. People do things for hobbies. Some people collect stamps, some people collect coins, some people play golf. People on the Internet do things for other people. If I wanted to find out about something, I would put a message on the Internet, and I would say, “Does anybody know about this?” I have done many of that. I have also answered questions in technical areas that I know about – chemistry, electronics, computers and such. People on the Internet do that kind of thing for each other. When somebody reports an odd database entry, I was motivated to check it out because I had access to data that could be used to check it out. Something that relatively few people would have been able to. Why did I do it? I was curious. I was – I was mystified, as well as the person who originally posted the message on Cypherpunks, Mr. John Young, the person who testified last week. That was what I wanted to do. I was curious. Q. Let’s talk about your access to some of those databases. In fact, you got some of these DMV registration records from Scott Beketic, correct? A. The first data disk I bought from – I believe you got the name wrong. His name is actually Mike Beketic. He may have a middle name of Scott. I don’t know. Q. Mike Beketic. A. Yes. He goes by the name Mike. Q. Right. Let’s – and you got some of this information from him, correct? A. Yes. And the first database disk I ever bought from Mike Bektic was back in about 1994 or ‘5, I believe. Q. But you promised Mr. Beketic, did you not, that you were not going to use this information for anything other than commercial purposes, correct? A. No, I didn’t say that. Q. Mr. Bell, four years ago you got in trouble because, among other things, you were attempting to harass and intimidate IRS officers. A. No, that’s not true. Q. Well, Mr. Bell, do you need to look at the transcript of the plea colloquy from 1997 when you told Judge Burgess – A. Yes. Q. – that that’s exactly what you were doing? A. I received a death threat indirectly communicated by a person named Valdez Maxwell, who was very apologetic. He is not the person involved. He didn’t – he overheard something on about June 15th, 1997. He was talking to some government investigators. He had a problem himself with the IRS. This was at Pierce County Jail. And he communicated a death threat to me that said that I had to cooperate with the government, and that included accepting a plea agreement the government investigators didn’t like, but it was the best thing they could get. So I pled guilty to a number of things I didn’t do. There were a couple of things that – one thing that I did, one thing that was very arguable, but there were I think at least two or three others that I didn’t do, and this man is referring to that particular thing. Q. Mr. Bell, are you trying to tell this jury that there was no basis for your guilty plea to obstructing the internal revenue laws by collecting home address information for John Treosti, the case worker assigned to your collection matter by IRS, Joan Luethe and Lynn Rose, IRS investigators with whom you had contact? Are you telling the members of the jury – MR. LEEN: Objection, Your Honor. Q. (By Mr. London) -- that there was no basis for your guilty plea on those facts? MR. LEEN: Your Honor, can I ask that the prosecutor ask a question, not – THE COURT: Do you understand the question? THE WITNESS: Which one? THE COURT: Any of them. THE WITNESS: I’m sorry, my attorney started talking when I – THE COURT: Do you want him – THE WITNESS: He isn’t my attorney, but – THE COURT: -- to repeat it again? THE WITNESS: When Mr. Leen started – THE COURT: Mr. Bell, do you want the question repeated? THE WITNESS: Yes, please. THE COURT: One at a time. Q. (By Mr. London) Was there any legitimate basis for your plea of guilty in 1997 when you told Judge Franklin Burgess, in the room next to this one, that you had been attempting to intimidate IRS Officers John Treosti, who was assigned to your collection matter, Lynn Rose, and Joan Luethe? A. Much of that plea was – was basically fictional. There were certain small items which reflected the truth. Okay? But a lot of it was invented or was expanded on dramatically and they added things that shouldn’t have been added, and I agreed to it because of the threats, because I was told that it didn’t matter, if I was guilty of one thing, they could just add as many things as they wanted. At the time, I was – I was extremely depressed because of the threats, and frankly, I, I agreed to it. I agreed to it – Q. Mr. Bell, the judge asked you at the time whether your plea was voluntary and whether in any way it had been coerced. Do you recall that? If you don’t, why don’t you look at the transcript, because – A. No, I remember well what happened that day. I had been given a pill the previous day. I was groggy and sleepy. And I could still understand what was going on in the courtroom. Okay? I do not recall what the drug was. I, I had asked for something for minor pain. They didn’t tell me what they were going to give me. And maybe it helped for the pain, I don’t know, but I was groggy and sleepy the next day. Did I – did I answer what – that I was not coerced? Yeah, I said I was not coerced. Well, frankly, I – if I hadn’t been coerced badly enough to agree to things that I didn’t do or things that were vastly over – overstated, I certainly wasn’t going to tell the truth when I was asked whether I was coerced. That wouldn’t have made sense. And I was extremely depressed during those times. Very depressed because of the threats that had been made to me a few weeks earlier. Yes, the plea exists. Yes, it says what he says it does. No, it was mostly fictional. There were nuggets of truth in it. Mostly it was fictional. It was written by government people before they even talked to me about the plea. They wrote the plea. They asked me to sign it and agree to it. I did not say anything to them to help them write that plea. They wrote the plea that they wanted me to sign. No editing was allowed or possible by me. I was not given the option of striking out things that were not accurate. They didn’t give me that option. Q. Mr. Bell, Exhibit 51 is not the plea agreement. It is the transcript of your – question and answer between Judge Burgess and yourself. A. Yes. Q. Judge Burgess, in that colloquy, as we say, asked you if the facts as stated in the plea agreement were correct, and you said to all of what’s been alleged, that’s true. You were also asked about whether your plea was voluntary, and you said it was. Are you here now today to say that that’s a nugget of fiction? A. No. He’s accurately saying that then, under threat, I did say the things in that, that plea agreement were true. He’s correctly relating the fact that I did say in court that I hadn’t been threatened to agree. Both of those, those statements by me were false. Yes. Q. Did Ryan Lund threatened you? He said you had better take the deal, correct? A. Those were approximately his words after he struck me – Q. And then this morning – A. – a few times. Q. – you said that Mr. Leen threatened you, correct? A. He – more accurately, he communicated a threat and he added some threats of his own, yes. He threatened to cut me off after 30 minutes if I discussed the Valdez Maxwell situation, a person that he has legal dealings with a few years ago. He also threatened if I mentioned the Billy Martin incident in Kitsap County Jail a little bit later after that. And I believe one – and other things that he didn’t want to come out in court, or he didn’t want to come out in court was the following, on the following – Father’s Day Sunday, 1998, and four or five days previous, various odd incidences of surveillance of me. They do not want me to speak about those things, despite the fact that I have about four or five maps there that I would be happy to explain, a very odd incident that occurred on Father’s Day Sunday. Q. Mr. Bell, on Friday we were talking, Mr. Leen was asking you about Assassination Politics, and you described it, and I quote, at least half of a joke. A. No, the title was half of a joke. Assassination Politics. Q. All right. It would be like a sable rabbler, correct, to remind the other guy that he’s potentially a target? Do you remember saying that? A. The term saber rattling has been around ever since there’s been sabers, you know. The knight, or whatever, shaking the saber. That’s traditionally referred to – when, for example, we do a fly-by with a military plane next to China, as happened recently, that’s a very mild form of what’s called saber rattling. Showing the flag. Q. Mr. Bell, you said that the purpose of handing out the diskette at the common law court meetings was to try to get some discussion or some feedback on this theory that you had of Assassination Politics, isn’t that correct? A. Yes, I said that. True. Q. Now, in Exhibit 42, which was your email to S. Wills, dated January 31st, 1997, do you remember saying the following: “Keep in mind that in a smoothly functioning commonlaw-court system, the vast majority of offenses will be dealt with purely with fines, very few people” will actually – or “would actually get killed, and those people would be the ones who were really serious offenders or repeat offenders. . .” So the idea of assassination politics wasn’t simply sable rattling, was it, Mr. Bell, it was that people actually were going to get killed, isn’t that correct? A. No. I was describing the theory of how society would run if this –- my essay idea was implemented. Q. And you described, in fact you said it was sort of – A. Could I answer the question, sir? I am not done answering the question. I also testified previously, on Friday, that this would be at least ten or twenty years in the future. I did not know. This is speculation on my part. I was discussing a theory. Q. And you talked about putting dictators around the world out of business, correct? A. That’s one of the effects, yes. The Pol Pots of the world that kill Ugandans. Q. You didn’t put Pol Pot on trial in the Multnomah County Common court system, Mr. Bell. A. No, I didn’t participate in – Q. You put tax collectors and IRS agents – A. Sir, let me answer the question, please. Q. The question was not done being asked. You did not put Pol Pot on trial, did you, sir? A. I didn’t put anybody on trial. Q. You were a participant – A. The incident that he’s alleging. Q. – in the common law court, were you not? A. I attended a small amount of meetings. Mr. Wilson himself testified to maybe three. I don’t recall specifically whether it was three or two or four, but it was about that number. The only participation I did was I acted as a juror on one ase. Other than that, I was there to talk to libertarian friends that I – who also went to that meeting, to see what was happening, to look into potential infiltration of the group, and, well, to engage my weakness of eating pizza. Q. Exhibit 14, the May 5th – May 5th, 1996, email to Cypherpunks. You said, “Maybe the most useful task we could accomplish would be to identify them for later targeting.” Do you remember writing that? A. Well, it’s been five years, but it sounds like something I might have written during that time frame. Probably I wrote it. Q. Okay. Exhibit 15, the May 23rd, 1996, email to the Northwest Libertarians on Operation LocateIRS. Quote, “I want to propose a project that the LPO . . . and Oregon libertarians can do, to really help push freedom and shake up the statists. I propose that the name and address of every IRS employee in the state of Oregon be identified and located and published.” Did you write that? A. That sounds like something I wrote during that time frame, yes. But it’s been five years. As far as I can tell, that’s – that’s probably an accurate recollection. Q. And “It would also act somewhat as a deterrent to those same statist agents: These people don’t know exactly what we intend to do with this information, or what we (or others) may decide to do in the future. They can well imagine a breakdown in order sufficient to allow people armed with such a database to.... well, you get the idea. . . . We needn’t concern ourselves with these future issues. It is very likely that these people will be far more pliable and less abusive in the future if they are well-known.” Does that sound like something you wrote? A. Again, other than the fact it was five years ago, that sounds vaguely familiar? Q. “We should take advantage of the advent of computers and databases to do this. I already have a fresh copy of the Oregon state DMV database, and as I understand it each registered political party in Oregon is entitled to get, free, a copy of the voter’s registration database from every county. The combination of these two databases, plus the more common two-disk CDROM telephone directories of the US, should make it relatively easy to find somebody once a name is identified.” Do you remember writing that? A. You mean like the particular day? No. Does it sound like something I wrote? Yes. Did I probably write it? Yes. I probably wrote it, yes. Q. All right. Exhibit 17, the May 23rd, ’96, email to avatar. Subject, “Operation LocatIRS.” “Remember, however, that the level of abusiveness that the average IRS agent thinks he can get away with is strongly determined by what he thinks may happen in the future if he’s called to account. Morally, can we forgo a system that has the prospect of cowing the IRS into at least a certain degree of submission?” Are those your words? A. Again, its sound like something I probably wrote. I don’t doubt that that was one of the messages that I sent. That’s – Q. Exhibit 18, the May 23rd, ’96, email, again to avatar. Subject, “Operation LocatIRS.” “Their discovery that the are being catalogued and indexed may have a substantial effect on them. That, indeed, is the goal.” Not your words? A. That sounds – well, again, you’re picking out five-year-old emails, but in general, that sounds like something that I would have written during that time frame, yes. Q. All right. Exhibit 29, that’s on October 24th – A. My – excuse me. My microphone – I’m sorry, it was turned down. Thank you. Q. Exhibit 29, an October 25th, ’95, email to talltom, Operation LocatIRS. “Having a copy of the Oregon DMV database, it occurred to me months ago that one useful project would be to identify and locate all the Oregon IRS agents. They way I see it, they will tend to be less aggressive if they think that many people know where they live.” Your words or not? A. It certainly sounds like something I would have said during that time frame, yes. Q. All right. We heard Exhibit 34, the tape made at the common law court meeting on January 9th, ’97. And you were overheard on that tape saying, “it might be a little more psychologically effective if they were to receive their notices in their” mailbox – “mailboxes at home.” Do you remember saying that? A. Yes. After I had consumed one large pitcher full of beer, I think I did say that. Q. You say that sounds – this all sounds like something that you wrote at the time. But, in fact, all of these emails predated your pleading guilty and going to prison, and going to prison didn’t really stop you, did it? I turn to your – A. Are going to let me answer the “didn’t stop you” or – Q. Go ahead, answer. A. Well, I object to this kind of questioning, the manner in which it’s being delivered. Didn’t stop me? He has to be more specific about what he was doing – what he’s asking about stopping me. He obviously wants to stop me in general terms. I think you ought to be more specific about what the “stop me” portion of it means. Q. Mr. Bell, even from prison, in June – June 22nd, specifically, of 1998 – you were still determined to collect home address information on federal officials, were you not? A. After having been threatened at least a couple of times, and then – and, frankly, stalked, followed, yes, I was interested in finding – not only government people, but I was interested in finding out registration information for vehicles that were following me, even when I knew that the last registered owner was probably had nothing to do or no knowledge of the following. I was collecting a lot of jigsaw puzzle pieces to try to find out what they were up to, and I believe I found out what they were up to, but they do not want it to come out, and that’s why Mr. Leen cut off the – his questioning of me, which he did, virtually, as the threat came yesterday. Q. Mr. Bell, Exhibit 60, June 22nd, 1998, from prison, you wrote your friend Greg Daily: “I can hunt them down just as well on the geography of the English language as the streets of Portland.” Does that ring familiar to you? A. Yes, it sounds like hyperbole, or I was writing a rather florid letter. But, yes, I believe I recall that. I believe that it was a handwritten letter. I didn’t have access to a typewriter at the time. I saw it in among, oh, 3,000 pieces of discovery information that I haven’t been given the satisfactory opportunity to look at yet. And I’m not – I’m being denied the ability to look at my notes that were sealed in an envelope. So I’m working on memory here. That was one of about 3,000 pieces of paper that I looked at in discovery about four or five days ago. I’ve been denied access to it since then. More than four or five days ago. Six, seven. Q. Just about a year ago, as you were preparing to get out of prison or getting out of prison, you gave an interview to Mr. Declan McCullagh of Wired News. Do you remember giving that? A. I probably talked to Declan McCullagh a number of times. Q. And you knew that what you were saying was very possibly going to be reported in one of his articles and on the Internet, correct? A. Oh, absolutely. It was done over a monitored telephone line, taped. It was in prison, of course, and they do that. They tape phone calls from inmates outside. All the inmates know. It’s not – it’s actually posted. They specifically say, in some prisons, “We monitor and record this information.” That’s right. And they warn us ahead of time. When we arrive there, they say, this material is being taped, phone calls are being taped and the mail is being monitored, specifically for two reasons. One of which is security of the institution, and the other is protection of the public. Those are the two things they use that information for, they claim. Now, whether they – they don’t disclose whether they use that information for anything else. They don’t tell us that it’s being used to collect evidence in a trial. But it appears that they are doing – they did that, and they didn’t warn people about that. Yes, I recall that very clearly. Q. Mr. Bell, I mean, you spoke to Mr. McCullagh fully understanding that what you were saying to him, wholly apart from any monitoring of the prison telephone lines, was very possibly, very probably going to appear in one of his articles, correct? A. Oh, absolutely. I knew that Declan McCullagh was in fact a journalist for Wired News. I had probably talked to him – I don’t mean talk, physical voice; I’m talking about email – for year – I don’t know how many years. I don’t know how far back our communication goes, but, yes, a long time. And I fully was aware he was a journalist, and I was talking to him as a journalist. Q. And he quoted you, “If they continue to work for the government, they deserve it. My suggestion to these people is to quit now and hope for mercy.” A. Yes. Q. Did you say that to him? A. That’s a very accurate quote of what I said. Declan did an excellent job. I have heard no quote of Declan’s that did not sound to be precisely the way I said it, to the extent of my recollection. He – Q. Exhibit 108, May 28, 2000, email to mkepp. It says, “I guess I’m ‘intimidating’ ALL their agents! Have you read my essay yet?” Do you remember saying that? A. I believe that sounds like something I said. Well, whether it was – Q. The essay, would that have been a reference to Assassination Politics? A. Well, will you – keep in mind, when you say “said,” there’s verbally said and there’s written said. Q. Okay. A. So let’s be – let’s be clear about this. That was probably an email message. My response to them, or – would have been written. But, yes. Q. Exhibit 110, July 23rd, 2000. You wrote in an email to someone named Glover, “I am going to DESTROY these suckers.” Destroy in all caps. “Read my essay again.” Do you recall sending that email. A. Yes. But given the fact that I’ve been threatened multiple times, followed and such, frankly, I was feeling rather unhappy about these people forcing me to accept a phony plea agreement that had been violated, virtually every aspect of it that was written, multiple times. I was – a person would have to be – not normal to be very unhappy about these people and how I was treated. Yes, I did say that. I was very unhappy. There was a problem. They had – they beat – they mistreated me. Q. Mr. Bell, in 1998, in front of the same judge, Judge Burgess, who took your guilty plea, supposedly the one that’s been coerced, you had a hearing for – on allegations that you had violated conditions of your supervised release. Do you remember that? A. I recall that. Q. You were in court with Judge Burgess for how many days, three days? A. Two days. It was on May 21st, 1998, maybe, and June 2nd or 3rd of 1998. I’d been waiting – excuse me. Correction, 1999. I had been waiting eleven months for a probation violation hearing, which I can tell you is virtually unknown. Probation violation hearings usually occur with two, three weeks of arrest on a probation violation charge. Q. Mr. Bell, in the two days of those hearings, did you ever once say to Judge Burgess, “Your Honor, I want to withdraw that guilty plea. That was coerced”? A. No. The reason I didn’t was because that wasn’t the question that the – that judge, Burgess, was there to judge. He was there to judge the probation violation issue itself, and as far as I was concerned, I was still under threat. I was working, in effect, within the system. The question involved was simply whether I had violated the probation. The issue of the previous threats, the violation of the plea agreement, were in fact explicitly not allowed for me to discuss. They would have cut me off, just like Mr. Leen cut me off by not asking questions. They would not have allowed me to use that hearing to reopen these previous issues. They would have said that’s not relevant, Mr. Bell, we are only talking about the probation violation. Q. Mr. Bell, you didn’t even try, did you? A. I was under threat by – Q. Who was threatening you, Mr. Bell? A. The threats were the threats that had been delivered two years previously. Q. Was Judge Burgess threatening you? Was Judge Burgess part of the conspiracy against you? A. Not that I – not that I was – well, let me answer that as accurately as I can. I would not have known whether or not he was threatening me other than if he had said it in open court, and, of course, there is a hard working stenographer here, and would have been there, and I think was there, taking down all the words at that time. I – Judge Burgess certainly wouldn’t have made any such threats, and I certainly wouldn’t have found out about any such threats that I could directly attribute to Mr. Burgess under those circumstances. So, no, I have – Q. Mr. Bell, you pled guilty in 1997. A number of years went by. A number of years have gone by. In fact, as of this day, have you filed a motion to withdraw your guilty plea in 1997? A. I have asked my previous – or, no – another attorney named Jonathan Solovy, who had prepared the appeal on the probation violation charge, the appeal which was filed on January 15th of this year, I asked him – I said I wanted him to do that, and he said, “Well, that’s not what my job is for,” he says. “I was appointed to do the appeal, and that’s all.” Q. Mr. Bell, you have filed what we call pro se motions throughout this case, if not the other cases, have you not? You filed your own motions with the proper legal form right from the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac. Have you not? A. Let’s – let’s – please explain the term to the jury “pro se.” Q. By yourself, without your lawyer’s help. A. Yes. Under normal circumstances the attorney handles filing motions – sorry about this. Q. Please continue your answer. A. I will. I will. I just – (Witness has a drink of water.) A. Under most – THE COURT: Just a moment. Jury, please go to lunch. Do not discuss the case among yourselves or with anyone else over the noon recess. Be in the jury room at 1:30. (Jury excused.) THE COURT: Mr. London, why do you leave the podium when you’re asking a question? MR. LONDON: Well, I’m sorry, Your Honor, I actually – THE COURT: What do you mean you’re sorry? Why do you say you’re sorry? Don’t do it. MR. LONDON: I won’t do that anymore. I was getting a document. THE COURT: Do you understand? MR. LONDON: (Nods head.) THE COURT: 1:30. Anything to take up before the noon recess? Either party? MR. LEEN: Your Honor, I would ask that the court caution the prosecutor just to ask one question rather than multiple questions and then we all have to go back to what the first question was. THE COURT: Counsel. MR. LONDON: That’s taken – well-taken, and I will be more careful. THE COURT: Oh, boy. Court’s in recess. 1:30. (Recess.) AFTERNOON SESSION (Jury not present.) THE COURT: Ready for the jury? MR. LONDON: Yes, Your Honor. MR. LEEN: Yes, Your Honor. THE COURT: Anything to take up before the jury comes? MR. LONDON: No, Your Honor. THE COURT: Either party? Bring the jury. (Jury present, 1:34 p.m.) THE COURT: Let the record reflect the jury has returned. Continue cross-examination, government. Witness is still under oath. Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, on October 24th, 2000, you sent an email posted to the Cypherpunks site. This was the “Say goodnight to Joshua” email, Exhibit 141. You had just gotten back from your excursion to the home of the Gordons at 8300 Southwest Chelan, Tualitin, and McNall’s former residence on South Clackamas River Drive, and you published this email to the published list knowing full well that Jeff Gordon, or somebody like him, was probably reading your public postings on the Internet, correct? A. I was suspecting full well, not knowing. I had no personal knowledge, but I strongly suspected that given their extreme interest in me for the preceding few years, they would – they couldn’t be kept from doing something like that. Q. And you would learn from reading the Gordons’ mail that they had a son named Joshua, correct? A. Yes, that’s true. Q. And as far as you knew, you had the Jeffrey Gordon that you were looking for, this man right here, correct? A. No, actually not. I suspected that he was probably somewhere else. But the one that I found was a possibility, one of a few. Q. All right. So in your mind it was possible that you had the right Jeffrey Gordon and that you now knew that he had a son named Joshua, correct? A. Well, actually, like I say, I was doing a test. I wanted to see if I got – a scientific – the scientific method by which I used, you formulate a hypothesis and you do various tests on the hypothesis to determine whether the result matches your theory. My theory, I had come close to what I thought would be the truth, so I did a test to find out whether I got the reaction that I thought I would get, and so I posted to an area an unaddressed email which had information that virtually literally nobody else in the world would understand unless they had been electronically stalking me or following me. That message means nothing to somebody who doesn’t have the information that I had or who had been not – not following me around. I knew that if I got the, quote, unquote, proper reaction to it, it means they have been basically spying on me, following me, and they knew perhaps where I was going and so forth. I was trying to determine whether or no they were doing that. And they later verified through the various of their actions that they were in fact following me and reading that mail. So I – Q. Okay – A. This is effectively a scientific test, but it’s done in a nonscientific arena. Q. You could have performed that same scientific test by simply putting in that email the address 8300 Southwest Chelan, right? Wouldn’t Agent Gordon have been able to recognize that as his address if it was the correct one? A. No, I had no – I had no desire to cause undue problems nor reveal more information than I wanted to reveal. I wanted to see whether or not they would show an indication that they knew what I was doing even before having seen that particular address. If they were doing the extensive research during last summer that I suspected they were doing, they knew where I had gone at the time I had gone there and not days or even weeks later, like, oh, they’re only now willing to admit. So I was doing a test, and it was a – I think effectively a productive test, and I designed it to make sure that it didn’t bother people ahead of time, people who were not involved, to a greater extent than what I did. I’m sorry if it wasn’t a perfect test, but it was a useful test. Q. And do you think it wasn’t something that would have caused Agent Gordon some concern to see on the Internet that you now knew he had a son named Joshua? A. No. If you look clearly at the note, it says nothing about Jeff Gordon here. It could have been referring vaguely to Mike McNall, let’s say, or anybody else in the telephone directory. There is nothing in that note that mentions Jeff Gordon. Nothing at all. He obviously had more information than he’s willing to admit, and Mr. – Mr. London in his questioning forgets that it was simply an unaddressed message that doesn’t mention Jeff Gordon or any other name except Joshua. And Mr. London just revealed to you that it was Jeff Gordon that knew about – or Mr. London obviously believes Jeff Gordon knew something about this message beyond what the message itself said. He revealed information there. That’s the reason for scientific tests. In this case, in a nonscientific arena. Q. In Exhibit No. 143, your October 25th, you got an email from John Branton of the Columbian newspaper. He quotes you, “I did a road trip a couple of days ago which probably worries the Feds. Talk to Jeff Gordon of the Treasury Department and Mike McNall of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (Portland office.)” Did you tell Mr. Branton that? A. I’m seeing a blue screen here. I would like to read the whole thing, if I may. AGENT GORDON: 143. MR. LONDON: 143. THE WITNESS: Can the jury see that? MR. LONDON: They can if we publish it for them. THE WITNESS: I would appreciate it if they would, if you are going to ask questions about it. Q. (By Mr. London) Do you see that email in front of you? A. Yes, I do, on the screen. Q. Do you see where it says what I quoted, “I did a road trip a couple of days ago which probably worries the Feds”? A. Uh-huh, I see that. Q. Did you write that? A. Sure. Q. Does it say anything there about research? A. Sure. Q. Does it say anything there about research? A. The word research? No. Q. Does it say anything there about investigating anything? A. No. I told Mr. Branton many times before over the previous four months that I was doing an investigation. It isn’t necessary for me to reiterate the same word over and over again. Mr. Branton was very familiar. I had sent him probably dozens of emails over the previous five or six months, ever since I got out of prison, middle of April 19 – or – the year 2K problem – 2000. The year 2000. Q. So five days later, on October 30th – A. Yes. Q. – Exhibit 163, you publicly posted an email to the Cypherpunks list about libertarian principles, and then you said, “And there are no ‘statutes of limitation’ on our response to these people regardless of current law.” Is that correct? A. Certainly. That principle does not involve concept of statute of limitation. Q. “Now would be an excellent time for anyone to go to their county voter’s registration office, and order a copy of the voter’s registration database for current and future use.” Did you also write that part of the email? A. Sure I did. I wrote that. Q. There wasn’t anything there about research, was there? A. No, I didn’t use the word research. Q. All right. Let’s look at Exhibit 171. This is a fax that you sent to Agent Gordon from your home in Vancouver to his office in Portland, the one where you let him know that you could come by his house the next night. Where in that fax is there any indication that the purpose of your wanting to come by his house is to privately discuss the Ryan Lund deal or any electronic surveillance that has been done on it? A. Nowhere, because that was not the function of my sending the fax. The function of my sending the fax was to respond to a threat to destroy guns, valuable guns. Rather than that, I responded that I was arranging to have them handled. And that was the purpose of the fax. The subject of surveillance of Ryan Lund was not a problem of this issue. Q. You knew he did – that Mr. Gordon did his business at his office, correct, and that it’s not appropriate to do business from your home when you’re a public official? A. Mr. Gordon apparently does his business in a number of locations, particularly people’s houses where he visits them to intimidate them, as he has intimidated a number of my friends and family. Mr. Gordon clearly does a lot of work outside of his office. Q. Are you capable of understanding the distinction between a duly authorized law enforcement officer who is given powers by the government to investigate matters and a private citizen who decides to take things into his own hands? A. Take – I disagree with the premise of the question. Q. Well – A. Let me answer – Q. Let me – A. – the question – Q. Do you – A. Let me answer the question. THE COURT: Just a minute. Q. (By Mr. London) Do you understand that he carries a badge? THE COURT: Counsel. What’s the question? Q. (By Mr. London) Do you understand that he is given the authority to do certain things by virtue of the fact that he is a trained law enforcement officer who carries a badge? A. And he also carries a gun which would – he implicitly threatens people that know he is armed. I did not take things into my own hands. I talked to many newspaper people: Branton of the Columbian, Painter of the Oregonian. I talked to Declan McCullagh. I’ve talked to other people. They did nothing about my suspicions. I collected information to prove. They keep ignoring me. As far as I know, there are no other newspaper reporters in this courtroom. As far as I know, this case has been boycotted by the Seattle P-I, the Seattle Times, the Vancouver Columbian, and the Portland Oregonian. Take this thing into my own hands? Sir, I had no choice. I was the only one who was going to look into this material. There is no one I could go to other than my own self to do this. I wanted to do this research so I could prove to people, including the jury here, if it came to that, that I was right. If it wasn’t for me, no one would ever have heard about this material. I did it myself. Is that called taking it into my own hands? Fine. If that’s what it’s called, fine. But somebody has to do this. Q. Mr. Bell, do you understand that if you have a grievance against the government, whether it is groundless or whether it is meritorious, you have ways, you have options of having that grievance aired? You are aware of that, aren’t you? A. It is said that there are ways. Whether or not those ways actually work is a big question here. Q. Well, do you know how to file a lawsuit? A. Not yet. Q. Do you know how to make a Freedom of Information Act request? A. Actually, I did. Last summer of 2000, I did a Freedom of Information Act request of the U.S. Marshal Service to find out precisely when and where they moved Ryan Thomas Lund at various times during the time in 1997 when he was moved from Douglas County Jail in Roseburg, Oregon, to Multnomah County Jail in Portland, Oregon, and finally to SeaTac FDC. I did that because I learned that that was public domain information, I could do that. And I wanted to find out why Ryan Thomas Lund actually arrived at SeaTac FDC on November 20th, 1997, rather than on November 21st, which was the implication of what happened downstairs on the 21st of 1997 when he arrived in civilian clothes with paper, talk – admitting his guilt in front of cameras and microphones. I wanted an explanation, where was Ryan Thomas Lund between the day of November 20th, 1997, and the next day? He wasn’t in the area at SeaTac. He was there the next day when they put him in the same area as me. I wanted to know, where were they hiding Mr. Lund that previous day? That would tell us a lot. I’m not being allowed to show that information. Mr. Leen wouldn’t look up that information for me. I’ve asked dozens of people. THE COURT: He’s answered. Next question. Q. (By Mr. London) Do you know how to file a lawsuit? A. Not yet. Q. Do you know that if you hire a lawyer you can have a lawsuit filed on your behalf? A. Generally speaking. I have heard that to be true. Q. And you know that if you sue somebody, one of the things that you are entitled to is what we call discovery. You are allowed to depose them, you are allowed to get statements from them under oath. A. Well, if discovery is anything like the discovery in this case, it will be mighty ineffective. Q. Mr. Bell, please answer the question. A. Well, that was a good answer. Q. Mr. Bell, are you aware that you are entitled to depose people if you have a grievance against them after you file a lawsuit? A. Assuming I’m allowed to, normal procedure is that. I get to have them under oath, and I, or my attorney, get to ask many questions. That’s the normal procedure, and if the procedure works the way it did in this system, I wouldn’t get that. But that is at least the published answer that you will get from attorneys as to how the system works. Q. Exhibit 229, the interview you gave to Declan McCullagh of Wired News after the search warrant had been executed at your parents’ house. In that exhibit you were quoted, or at least a statement is attributed to you, “he acknowledges that he’s shown up at the homes of suspected BATF agents and has done DMV searches on their names – all in an effort to let them know that surveillance can be done in both directions.” Is that something that you said? A. Hold on. I’m beginning to find it here. Is that published to the jury? Q. No. The statement has been admitted – THE COURT: Do you understand the question, sir? THE WITNESS: Part – it’s continuing to move around – THE COURT: Do you understand the question. THE WITNESS: I can’t even see it, sir. I’m sorry. MR. LONDON: I’m quoting – THE COURT: He can’t see it. MR. LONDON: It’s not an exhibit. It’s not an exhibit. It’s admitted in the form of testimony from the state – from the exhibit. A. There is no direct quote there. There’s no – Q. (By Mr. London) All right. Did you acknowledge to Mr. McCullagh that you had been doing DMV database searches on ATF agent’s names? A. The only error here is, it says “agents” plural. The only database search I did of a person I knew to be an ATF agent was one person, Mike McNall. So that plural should have been turned into a singular. But what Mr. McCullagh didn’t write, which, of course, is because he just chose to write the article this way, is the information I looked up on dozens or even hundreds of other people who were in fact not even government employees. Again, former owners of vehicles that had been used to follow me around, probably taken from police impound lots. Q. Okay. A. So I had – Q. Did you tell Mr. McCullagh that you had done this, showing up at the homes of Agent McNall, as it turned out, in an effort to let him know that surveillance can be done in both directions? A. I think there was a – there was a quote about that, and I think there was a quote that was from me, or approximately that was – not exactly a quote, but that was a reference, yes. Q. He quoted you, saying, “I wasn’t all that happy before but I’m hopping mad.” But now I’m hopping mad. “If you think this is going to stop me, baloney.” Did you say that? A. Sure, because of all the threatening activity over the last few years and the abuse that I have suffered. I did say that, sure. Q. All right. Now, you suggested to the jury on Friday, and I think again somewhere here this morning, that the reason for tracking down Agent Gordon and Agent McNall at their homes was to try to investigate the claim about the Ryan Lund – A. Right. Q. – incident and the illegal surveillance that you believe has been done on you, correct? A. Yes. That’s – that’s – that’s certainly a true statement as far as it goes, that’s true. But the investigation includes many other issues, as well as that. Q. And I think you tried to suggest that you could not have talked to them at their offices or officially because a visit to their offices might have been seen by others, and I think your phrase was that it would have waved a red flag to others, is that correct? A. Yes, possibly. If – I accepted the possibility that Mike McNall might not have actually been the handler who talked to Mr. Lund and asked him to assault me. There was that possibility, and I accepted it, and I didn’t necessarily. And if it wasn’t him, it was somebody else. And that somebody else, it would probably be a good idea if he were not alerted that my investigation might eventually address him. So contacting the officer directly would have alerted, perhaps, that guilty party, and I didn’t want that to happen. The only alternative I could think of was to visit Mr. McNall, ask him, is he aware of the assault? If he didn’t order it, does he have any idea who did? Does he have any choice words, perhaps an off – an apology or a sympathetic word that says, well, perhaps, you know, sorry about what happened. That wasn’t my idea, or – he might not have said it in such a way with a full admission, but he at least would have been able to tell me something that I didn’t already know. And if he had been not the person who was involved, then I would have accepted that reality. Q. And is it your testimony that you could think of no alternative short of showing up at people’s homes at all hours of the day or night in order to try to have some kind of communication with them away from others who might be monitoring the conversation? A. That was the best alternative I could come up with. And the visit at twelve midnight to that one address, I have explained why it was that I had to get word to them very quickly. The reason the notes were in a plastic bag is simply because Oregon, as you know, is wet. Washington is wet, too. Dew, rain, and such. I was leaving the messages at twelve o’clock midnight. I knew that was the case. I was going to put them on under the windshield wiper, and I knew that by the next day they would be either damp or fully wet if they weren’t protected somehow. That’s the reason I put them in the plastic bag, and I left them under the windshield wiper. That’s the best I knew how to do it at that time. If I could have waited there, if it was daytime I would have simply knocked on the door. I wanted to make sure John Branton of the Vancouver Columbian understood that I hadn’t done anything improper days earlier at that address. Q. Mr. Bell, if you were so concerned about keeping your communications with Agent McNall and Gordon secret from these others who might be monitoring them, then why were you publicly posting things about them on the Internet and why were you trying so hard to get reporters to write about all of this? Does that make sense to you? A. Given the level of abuse that I suffered for a period of years, I couldn’t avoid talking to the news media. I feel so strongly about that. Communication with these people is minor compared to your overall scope of the problem, and I wanted nobody else to claim later on that I had failed to interface with the proper news media-type people. I wanted there to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that I had exercised all the proper channels, and the news media simply wouldn’t listen to me. They publish stories whenever the government wants something reported, like an arrest or a search or a trial – well, not this one. Whenever they report it, or whenever it happens, it gets reported. In my case, no. Whenever I – I gave all of these accusations and more of these accusations to Branton and then Painter of the Columbian and the Oregonian, and others, and they did nothing, nothing at all. Q. Mr. Bell, on October 23rd, you went to the home of Jeff and Barbi Gordon at 8300 Southwest Chelan, Tualitin, and you opened their mailbox and you took at least two pieces of mail out of their mailbox, correct? A. I apologize. Q. And you opened those pieces of mail. A. I apologize for that. Q. What did you do with the mail? Did you write down the information right there by the mailbox or did you take it home? A. I believe I stopped on the way home at a McDonald’s, and I was very hungry at the time. My blood sugar was very, very low. I was feeling unhappy. I had to sit down somewhere. So I bought whatever it is I usually buy there, I ate, and I copied the information. Q. Into your notebook? A. Yes, I did. Q. And then when you left the McDonald’s, did you go back home? A. Eventually, yes. Q. What did you do with the mail? Did you put it back or did you destroy it? A. I threw it in the trash at the McDonald’s, as I recall. Q. So earlier when you were testifying about burning something in the fireplace after you got back, that wasn’t the Gordons’ mail? A. No. But I – I did intentionally, as I said, theatrically put it in with the window shades open and this large, clear window in the back of the house so that – and I in fact moved – I positioned my body so that it was clear at the time from the back of the house exactly what I was doing. And I took a piece – pieces of ordinary paper, no – you know, just some blank pieces of paper, some pieces of trash that I just happened to have or – junk mail, and I burned them, and I – I don’t think I recall ever having done that maneuver ever before or since. What we usually do is just toss them in a sack and eventually we shove the sack in there and burn it. Now, I did a very theatrical thing that I felt would be seen if there was surveillance going on, and I put those individual papers in there and I lit it so that there was – it could be seen from behind me. Q. When you were at the Groener/Andrews property earlier, around 5:30 on that day, you actually went to the mailbox and you opened that mailbox up, too, didn’t you? A. Excuse me, the Groener? Q. Andrews. A. The Andrews. No. Q. Well, Mr. Bell, it doesn’t say Andrews on the mailbox, so how did you know that there was somebody there named Andrews? A. As far as I recall, it said Andrews on the mailbox, and in fact I wrote it down, a notation in my notes that says Andrews on mailbox. Q. And in fact – A. I don’t recall. Q. In fact, you were here when Mr. Groener testified that it doesn’t and did not ever say Andrews on the mailbox. A. Well, he also testified that the road – or the driveway was labeled “private road,” and I don’t recall that either. And I looked. Q. And I it your position that unless something is marked private road, you have the right to drive onto private property and remain there uninvited for a while, even after someone has asked you to leave? A. Well, as you know, this was a rural area. It wasn’t like there was a parking space in front. There was no place to park on the road. I wanted to visit. I had no alternative but to put my car there, or to take my car down the driveway the first time I went there. I couldn’t have stopped – if I hadn’t stopped toward the house, I would have blocked the driveway, and that’s not good. I couldn’t have parked on the street. The cars going by go by fast and there’s no, no shoulder room to park. So I had to go down there. And it was about – well, many, many hundreds of feet to the house. I didn’t see anything wrong with going and parking in front of the house. That’s basically what people do in a rural area if you don’t have a place to park farther away. I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I still don’t. As for the nighttime visit, which I was forced to do under the circumstances. I did – I could put the car, in effect, block the driveway, but not – simply, there was no alternative, and then I went down, left the messages, and came back up. I figured the blocking the driveway was not a problem at twelve midnight. Chances are they weren’t going to come and go at that point. So that’s why I was willing to block the driveway at twelve midnight, but I wasn’t willing to block the driveway at four o’clock in the afternoon or five o’clock in the afternoon. Q. 5:00 o’clock, 5:30 – A. Somewhere around there. Q. – in the afternoon of the 23rd when you went to the Groener/Andrews residence, you didn’t just drive down the driveway, did you? You actually got out of the car and you walked all the way around the house. A. Yes. Q. Correct? A. I first knocked on the big house’s door, waited three, four minutes, and knocked again. No answer. There was one vehicle there in the garage. There was room for two. That person – somebody was apparently gone. I then walked to the smaller house and knocked on the door. Again, no answer. That – but that second house, the smaller house, the way the ho- -- the door looked a little bit odd, and it wasn’t clear that that was the front door or the side door or the back door. So I went around what I later on determined was indeed the back, and I didn’t find any more direct door, so I came back, and that’s when I met that person who was later identified by name. But I didn’t know his name at that point. Q. And when you made the second visit on the night of November 10th, a little after midnight, you went right inside the carport to put those notes on the windshield, did you not? A. Exactly. I had to. The cars were in the garage. The door – the garage door was open fully. They apparently didn’t close the garage door, and I wanted to make sure that those people actually saw the notes the moment they got into their car, so I put in underneath the windshield, just the way a meter maid – I mean, a meter maid would put a ticket under the windshield wipers. That’s exactly what I did. Q. Well, Mr. Bell, you had this information about the Andrews and the Groeners and their address. Why didn’t you just give John Branton that information and say, these are the people you should contact about my theories about Ryan Lund and everything else? Why was it necessary to go onto the property after midnight? A. I was very unimpressed with John Branton’s ineffectiveness ever since I first contacted him about my accusations and suspicions two years previous. Or – by telephone over a monitored phone line from SeaTac all the way down to Vancouver Columbian in about July, the beginning of July 1998. Mr. Branton – you’ve heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Well, Mr. Branton, unfortunately, was the opposite of Woodward and Bernstein. If the story wasn’t thrown on his lap, all printed up and ready to go, Mr. Branton was totally uninterested in looking at it. I could – I tried for many months to convince him that there was a story here. One of the reasons why Mr. Branton is so reticent about acknowledging all of the various contacts is because, frankly, he is embarrassed, I think. I gave him the biggest story that he will ever see in his entire career, and he totally blew it. So, if you ask me, why didn’t I give that information to him? Well, frankly, I did eventually, I believe, but he wasn’t going to follow up on it. That’s why I didn’t give it. The system doesn’t work the way they say it does or in the movies. Sometimes you have to do things for yourself, or to take things in your own hands, as this man would try to make it sound bad. Sometimes you have to do things for yourself. I found that out. Q. Exhibit 229, which was not admitted. We – it’s not admitted in the form of the article, but Mr. McCullagh testified to the accuracy of a statement he attributed to you. He said, “I’m feeling very hostile and I’m not going to be stopped.” You also said, “I am thinking very seriously of picketing Jeff Gordon’s house.” Do you remember saying that? A. Yes, that’s right. Q. Can you explain how picketing Jeff Gordon’s house can be explained to this jury as investigation or research? A. It was – no, it was a protest. I wanted to – picketing is a well-established, long-term method of expressing one’s protest. I was protesting the threats I received, the violations of a plea agreement, forcing me to accept a phony plea agreement, and so forth. I had a lot of complaints, and if picketing was going to do it to express my frustration, I was willing to do that. When I said I was hostile, the picketing was going to be my solution to the hostile, you know. Some people – I didn’t intend to bring it beyond that. Picketing is legal. Picketing is a long-established method of protest. That’s what I was thinking of doing. Q. Actually, in fact, you were fully capable of picketing his place of work, were you not? A. Given the fact that whatever his place of work is, probably a multi-story building, taking up the entire city block. Well, it’s physically possible, but as a practical matter, it just isn’t seen. Q. I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the ideas that are discussed on the Cypherpunks website. You spent some time on Friday talking about encryption and the ways that messages can be masked or coded so that they are really totally private. I want to ask you about a concept that is discussed quite a bit on the Cypherpunks website called plausible deniability. Does that have any familiarity to you? A. Yes. The term “plausible deniability” is actually a term that’s most frequently used in reference to governments and, of course, in America, usually the federal government. The concept is often that when something happens, let’s say the government is at least alleged to have done something, the higher-ups would like to be able to say, oh, we have no knowledge of that, or I have not seen any evidence of, or that kind of thing. Their answer has to be plausible. That is to say, if not totally proven, and maybe they didn’t see the evidence, but the overall term is called plausible deniability. It means that a high government official can say, I have no knowledge of that. I have seen no information on that. Our agency has not involved. We have no record of that. It must remain plausible, otherwise people start to laugh. That’s what plausible deniability is. Q. In fact, didn’t that – didn’t that have its origins during the Watergate era when the Nixon administration was caught doing some illegal things and there was some discussion high up about being able to maintain plausible deniability? In other words, having a story that would explain what they had been caught doing? A. Yes, I’m old enough to remember Watergate. Yes, that’s exactly right. The principle involved was they wanted to be able to deny the actions of a few burglars who broke into the Democratic National Convention, and basically they wanted to be able to say, well, we didn’t know. The fact is, of course, they did know and they tried to cover it up. That was eventually uncovered by two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, and they made a movie and a book about it. Very exciting. And I wish all reporters were that persistent and effective. Q. Now, on February 3rd, 1996, you sent an email to someone named Matthew@psyched.demon.co.uk. The subject was BZ, which you will forgive me, it’s a chemical, I think, Quinuclidinyl Benzilate. Is that correct? A. Quinuclidinyl Benzilate, yes. Q. What is that? A. It’s something that the federal government developed in about 1951 or ’52 – the United States federal government, excuse me. It was developed as a nonlethal chemical warfare agent. Not exactly like – it’s not like tear gas or anything. It is a material which, if ingested, basically incapicitates you for literally a day or two. It makes you sort of like a baby. You can’t react. Your health is not injured, but you are, in effect, that you can’t operate. The idea was – oh, the government paraded around the country in something called Operation Blue Skies. That is, they wanted to demonstrate that warfare was going to be humane later on. The idea was that you could spray this over a military base, let’s say, and then walk in about two or three hours later and all of your opponents would be just sort of laying there passive and you could just handcuff them up and take them away, and it would be like you wouldn’t kill them, you would just bring in a van and carry them all away. And that was called Operation Blue Skies. And the government went around with demonstrations where they – I think they had a cage that had two portions, one side was a cat, the other side was a mouse, and there was a partition between the two. And the cat, of course, wanted the mouse, but the mouse couldn’t get away, and they spritzed the cat a little bit with this material, and after a few minutes the cat was dreaming, and they opened up the partition and nothing happened. And this was an example of how the federal government wanted to demonstrate the future of warfare. No more killing, no more bombing, just spray a little spray and everybody is happy. Q. All right. Now, do you remember telling this person, Matthew, in the email that you were going to send him via the mail some of this drug BZ, or this chemical BZ, but saying that you were going to misspell the person’s name, I guess the addressee’s name, so that, quote, “It would be similar enough to get there, the destination, but plausible deniability would have been maintained”? A. I think I vaguely recall something like this. The guy – Q. Would you like to have a copy of it? A. That particular one, I don’t need to see that one. I think the person had previously said that he had seen a lot of other drugs, LSD, heroin, and a few other things, and he was curious about that. Q. Okay. On October 13th of ’96 you sent another email, this one to a Michael Froomkin, with a cc to the Cypherpunks. And the subject was blinded identities, regarding exporting signatures only. And I think this involved possibly some encryption subject matter. You said, in a discussion of the creation of anonymous bank accounts, specifically, remember plausible denial. Do you remember that? A. What year was this message, please? Q. In was 1996. A. Oh, my memory is really being tested here. Again, the term “plausible deniability” is – has been turned into almost a funny term. Q. In 1997, March 8th, you sent an email to the mailing list libernet-d. The subject was “AP,” I assume Assassination Politics, “as Burning Bed.” And in that one you discuss the advantages of using Assassination Politics with the common law court, and you stated, quote, “plausible deniability is maintained should a convicted defendant die. Nobody at the common law court would be involved in that incident.” A. You said something about burning bed? Q. That was the subject line. A. I’m not even sure what that refers to. It sounds very odd. Q. Do you remember talking about Assassination Politics and saying – A. Yes. Q. – “plausible deniability is maintained should a convicted defendant die. Nobody at the common law court would be involved in that incident? A. Other than the title, “Burning Bed,” which honestly I can’t recall, I’ve had many discussions of this type, subsequent to my writing of the essay in mid, you know, early middle of 1995 and on. But again, the Burning Bed thing, I have no idea what that refers to. Q. All right. Well, October 20th of 2000, in an email to a George@orwellian.org with cc’s to the Cypherpunks, you said in a discussion of entering false names on computer documents, “plausible deniability is maintained.” Do you remember that? A. I’m sorry. I apologize. Please repeat the question. Q. October 20th of last year, 2000 – A. Sure. Q. – in an email to George@orwellian.org, in a discussion about entering false names on computer documents, once again you talked about plausible deniability being maintained. A. Sure. The address that was George@orwellian.com, well, you may have picked up on the joke already. Have you ever heard of George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm? The site is called orwellian.com, and this particular person has to be – happens to be a George, and it’s obviously, the thing was a joke. I mean, his own email address was written to be a joke. Yeah, there was probably a reference in there to plausible deniability. Again, this is a very, very famous term. If you were to do a web search for plausible deniability, on an Alta Vista or some other – Yahoo or any other search engine, you would find thousands and thousands of hits on plausible deniability. This is a well-known phrase. I don’t know why he’s focusing on this, but it’s a well-known thing that people talk about it, they laugh about it, they – you know, it’s one of those things. It’s – so many government scandals have been based on, well, the breaking of the plausible deniability concept. Q. Well, isn’t the idea that if you get caught doing something illegal, it’s a good idea to have some kind of story you can use to suggest that perhaps you have a legal purpose for doing what you were caught doing? A. I guess so, and I’m very fascinated to find out what Jeff Gordon’s explanation for all his activities are. That of, you know, the infiltration of the common law court and a few other things. Q. I don’t think you ever thought that was going to be exposed, did you? If it wasn’t for me that wouldn’t have been exposed. You wouldn’t have had to have an explanation. What is your explanation, sir, about the common law court? What is your plausible deniability? THE COURT: Any other questions of this witness? MR. LONDON: I do, Your Honor. Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, if you will forgive me, but the protocol that is used in court is the lawyers ask the questions. MR. LONDON: I would like permission to be able to approach the witness and show him – THE COURT: Give it to the clerk. THE CLERK: Is it marked? MR. LONDON: Not yet. It’s just for the purposes of the cross-examination, and I won’t mark it at this point. A. There are three pieces of paper here. Are you referring to one or all three? Q. (By Mr. London) They are altogether. Mr. Bell, on the top sheet, do you see where it says “DMV 2000, Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles on CD-ROM”? A. Yeah, that’s the first page here. Q. Right. And, in fact, the second page is an envelop from Bootleg Computing, Astoria, Oregon, sent to you at your address at 7214 Corregidor. A. Sure, I see that. Q. All right. Now, the third is – A. Wait, hold on. You mentioned – what did you say about my address at 7214 Corregidor? Q. Yes. Do you see – A. The first page here doesn’t – Q. Do you see the second page? It’s the envelope. A. Awe, okay. Sure. I see that. Q. It’s DMV 2000, which is – A. Okay, I see that now. Sure. Q. All right. Now, do you see on the first page where it says, “We warrant the above DMV Databases will be used for ‘marketing’ purposes only in accordance with all Oregon and federal laws”? It’s right beneath the line. A. Just a second here. Okay. Well, he’s misspelled warrant. Q. Do you see that, where it says that? A. It also says Oregon laws. That’s true. I was in Washington. I’m not aware of the federal laws, but, yes, I see that line, sure. Q. I’m just asking you if you see that. I’m also asking you if this is something you recognize. This was actually taken during the search of your home. A. Mm-mmm. Q. And Bootleg software is in fact the company for Mike Beketic, the guy who sent you this stuff, isn’t it, the DMV material? A. Well, I don’t recall any reference in the search warrant which would even have made this a legitimate subject of the warrant. However, there’s a legal point – Q. Right. A. – and I’m not a lawyer and I have never been in law school, so I won’t – Q. Okay. A. – try to comment. Q. Do you have the third document that I gave you? It’s the email exchange between you at loubell@pacifier.com and mike@bootleg@pacifier.com? A. Yes. I was using my mother’s email address temporarily for a while. Yes, this is a printout of something, and it will take me a moment to read it all. Q. All right. Does that look like an email exchange you had with Mr. Beketic about prices of getting databases, Oregon DMV databases on disk and so on? A. The portion that I wrote, yes. There is also other reference – there’s careted information, quote information. Q. All right. Well, do you see the – do you see the, down near the bottom third where, according to the careted information, Mr. Beketic told you, “You’ll need to sign and date a little form (new laws) stating the data will be used for ‘Marketing Purposes’ only”? A. Mm-hmm. I see that. Q. And then what’s your response there? A. Well, it looks to me like I wrote “Fine by me.” Q. Mr. Bell, when you were brought before this court on these charges, you asked to be able to have an attorney appointed for you, correct, based on your financial status? A. Well, apparently I’ve been denied an attorney. Mr. Leen has not been acting as my attorney. Q. Sir, that’s not my question. We’re not here to talk about Mr. Leen now. I’m just asking you, when you came before this court, did you fill out a financial affidavit? A. Uh-huh. Q. In support of your request to have a lawyer appointed for you for free? A. I don’t recall that specifically. Q. All right. MR. LONDON: Well, can I ask the witness to hand – excuse me – the clerk to hand the witness this? A. Is this in relation to evidence in the crime charged or is this something entirely different? Q. (By Mr. London) This goes to your credibility, sir. A. Okay. Sure. Okay. Q. All right. You’re looking at the same document I’m looking at? A. Well, actually I’m not looking at it. You’re apparently asking about material that has nothing to do with the crime charged. I apologize, but I’m concerned about your tactics, sir. I do not have an attorney representing me at this time. That man doesn’t do so. I don’t believe I should be questioned under these circumstances. I need legal – proper legal counsel. I have been patient to your persistent questions, and I apologize to the jury. I have been denied 15 defense witnesses. This is not a fair arrangement here. THE COURT: What’s the question, counsel? MR. LONDON: I have handed Mr. Bell a copy of the financial affidavit that he filled out before this court in which he made certain statements to this court on penalty of perjury. I would like him to look at it, and I want to go through some of the things he said in this case. THE COURT: Do you understand the question, Mr. Bell? THE WITNESS: So far he doesn’t have a question, but – THE COURT: Do you understand the question? THE WITNESS: Which question is this? Q. (By Mr. London) Do you see in front you a document called “Financial Affidavit” which you signed on 11/20 of 2000? A. Yeah, I believe so. Sure. Q. All right. And this is a document that asks you to report your assets and your financial information to the court so that the court can determine if you qualify for appointed counsel, is it not? A. Its comments are cryptic here, but I will take your word for that. MR. LEEN: Your Honor, the defense objects to any inquiry into the financial affidavit. It is a matter that should be relevant only for purposes of appointment of counsel and for Pretrial Services, and as such, I believe its filing is for restricted purposes. THE COURT: The objection is overruled. Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, at the bottom, what does it say? Do you see “warning”? A. Sir, with all due respect, the only person in this room who has ever claimed to represent me as a lawyer has just made an objection, and never having been a lawyer and never being a lawyer and I never will be a lawyer, I know enough about law to know that he has made a valid objection. And frankly, I have to follow, while I cannot in general necessarily trust Mr. Leen’s legal advice, in this particular instance I see that he has the grain of truth here, so I’m going to have to decline, respectfully, answering questions about this document because I do not have a lawyer that I can fully confide in and get advice from, despite the example that you just saw. One of the very first times that Mr. Leen has spoken up in this hearing today on my behalf. THE COURT: What’s the next question for the witness? Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, on this form it asks you about assets and other sources of income. “Have you received within the past 12 months any income from a business, profession or other form of self-employment” – A. I do not know. I have – as I mention previous – Q. I’m not finished asking the question. If you will just be patient, you will have a chance to respond in a moment. -- “or in the form of . . . interest, dividends . . . or annuity payments, or other sources? “ Do you see that question on the form? A. Sir, I am no longer looking at that form. Did I receive anything? I have no idea. Q. Do you see your signature at the bottom of this form? A. I believe I did when I last looked at the document. Q. And do you see where you checked off the box “no” when it asked you about other sources of income? A. I was not aware of any at the time. Q. So you weren’t aware of the trust account that’s administered on your behalf by your attorney J. Marvin Benson in Vancouver, Washington? Are you saying that when you came before this court you were not aware – A. Sir. Q. – of the trust account that was maintained – A. Sir. Q. – for you by J. Marvin Benson? A. Sir, you’re asking me about confidential attorney communications here, it appears. You have gone far beyond what is ethically possible in what – in a court of law. Have you no shame? Sir, have you no shame? Q. Mr. Bell, there is nothing privileged about Mr. Benson’s distributions to you of $2000 a month all during the month of last summer – A. Sir. Q. – and fall. A. Sir. Q. Mr. Bell, we’re not here to argue about law and privilege. We’re here for you to answer some questions. A. I have – Q. So far the Court has not told you not to answer the question. THE COURT: What is the question, counsel? Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell, did you report to the court on the financial affidavit your shares in the Templeton Emerging Markets Fund – 1852 such shares, to be precise – that you had on an invoice right here, 2/12/01? A. I don’t recall. Q. All right. MR. LONDON: Well, I’m going to ask the clerk to hand the witness these documents. THE WITNESS: I decline to answer any questions about the documents that were just handed to me. The circumstances of this hearing are thoroughly improper. I do not have proper legal representation. He is obviously very frustrated, the attorney is, that he has totally destroyed his own case and he is trying to use whatever tactics he can. THE COURT: Mr. Bell. Do you decline to answer the question? THE WITNESS: I have said before that I’m not represented by – THE COURT: Do you understand the question? THE WITNESS: I do not understand the circumstances under – THE COURT: Ask him the question again. Q. (By Mr. London) Mr. Bell – THE WITNESS: I must – excuse me, sir. I must – THE COURT: Mr. Bell. THE WITNESS: Yes, sir. THE COURT: Do you or do you not understand the question you are being asked? THE WITNESS: I have to respond to the question with the statement that I am taking the fifth amendment, which even innocent people are entitled to do, according to a recent decision of the Supreme Court, based on this man’s continuing to question me – THE COURT: Will the jury please go to the jury room. Do not discuss the case among yourselves or with anyone else. (Jury excused at 2:25 p.m.) THE COURT: Where are we? Well, the government asked the question. MR. LEEN: Your Honor, the defendant I think has taken the Fifth Amendment, and I think he should be allowed to do that on a – the government is alleging perjury, false statement. It’s an unrelated crime, it’s a collateral matter, and he’s invoked the fifth on his own. I think that that should be the end of the inquiry. I don’t think that he can be compelled to answer such a question. MR. LONDON: My response is that he certainly is entitled to take the fifth, but I believe he should take the fifth as to each and every one of the $2000 checks that I am prepared to show him, that he not only took, but did not report to this court. THE COURT: Well, even though there hasn’t been any objection to it, isn’t it beyond the scope of the direct examination? MR. LONDON: I don’t believe, Your Honor, that when something goes to the defendant’s credibility that it really is beyond the scope. He has talked for many hours to try to convince the jury of his version of events, and I think the government is entitled to probe his propensity or lack of credibility, and this is certainly evidence on point in that regard. THE DEFENDANT: Given the government’s attacks on me – THE COURT: Mr. Bell. THE DEFENDANT: -- during the last four years – THE COURT: Mr. Bell. THE DEFENDANT: I’m sorry. THE COURT: Well, if you’re sorry, don’t do it. THE DEFENDANT: All right. Thank you. THE COURT: You’re saying, even though the question is beyond the direct examination, you can test his credibility? MR. LONDON: Yes, Your Honor. Our position is that the objection is beyond the scope – THE COURT: Well, hasn’t he already put his credibility in issue? MR. LONDON: He has. That’s our view as to – THE COURT: Well, how many times do we put it in issue then? MR. LONDON: Well, if he puts it in issue once, I’m entitled to show why he’s not credible, and this is direct evidence of why he’s not credible. If he wants to plead the fifth, that’s fine, but I would like to be able to take him through each and every one of these checks and let him plead the fifth as to that and why he didn’t report any one of those on his financial affidavit under penalty of perjury to this court. THE COURT: Well, if I understand that, isn’t that a separate charge? MR. LONDON: It can be. He hasn’t been charged with it. Yet. THE COURT: Don’t you – are you saying that this court should now determine whether he’s perjured himself or not? MR. LONDON: No. THE COURT: Well, what are you saying? MR. LONDON: I’m saying simply that we should be allowed to ask him about each one of these checks that he deposited in his bank account and why he didn’t report – THE COURT: Well, we’re not there. Back up. MR. LONDON: All right. THE COURT: You’ve asked him certain questions, you say, that test his credibility. Does the test of credibility raise the issue of perjury? MR. LONDON: Perjury is implied in terms of what he did on that form. THE COURT: Who decides perjury? MR. LONDON: A jury, after it’s charged. He isn’t charged. THE COURT: After it’s charged, but he hasn’t been charged with perjury. MR. LONDON: He has not been charged with perjury. He is in peril of being charged with perjury. That’s why his invoking of the fifth makes absolute sense, and we are not opposed to his declining to answer the question on the grounds of self-incrimination in view of the jeopardy that he’s in for a perjury charge. However, we believe the appropriate thing is to be able to ask of him as to every one of those checks, and then have him invoke the fifth as to every one of those checks. THE COURT: Well, since you have gone beyond the direct examination, and he – there’s been an objection. He says he wants to take the fifth. I’m going to sustain the objection. MR. LONDON: Will the jury be informed that he has taken the fifth as to this line of questioning? THE COURT: I don’t intend to tell the jury, to say anything. The jury has already heard it. Haven’t they? Now, is there any other questions that we’re going to get in this? Because I don’t want the jury to go out every five seconds while we take up an issue. Let’s, since they are out, let’s take a 15-minute recess. (Recessed at 3:30 p.m.) (Jury not present, 2:47 p.m.) THE COURT: Anything further to take up? Before the jury comes back. MR. LEEN: Your Honor, I would like to make a motion for a mistrial for the prosecutor’s direct eliciting of a fifth amendment response from the defendant while he was on the stand. THE COURT: That will be denied. MR. LONDON: We’re not going to do any further cross- examination with him. We are done. THE COURT: Any other witness you intend to call, Mr. Leen? MR. LEEN: No, Your Honor. THE COURT: Any rebuttal? MR. LONDON: No, Your Honor. And I’m wondering if before the jury is brought back if this might be the time to do the instruction conference? THE COURT: Of course not. Bring the jury. (Jury present, 2:49 p.m.) THE COURT: Let the record reflect the jury has returned. You may be seated. Any further questions of this witness, Mr. London? MR. LONDON: No, Your Honor, no further cross- examination. THE COURT: Redirect, Mr. Leen? MR. LEEN: No questions, Your Honor. THE COURT: The witness may step down. THE WITNESS: Thank you. (Witness excused.) * * * * * C E R T I F I C A T E I certify that the foregoing is a correct transcript from the record of proceedings in the above-entitled matter. _________________________________ __July 2, 2001__ JULIANE V. RYEN Date