Daughter questions case against Steele
FBI recordings are inconsistent, she says
The authenticity of secret FBI recordings detailing North Idaho lawyer Edgar Steele’s alleged murder-for-hire plot were challenged Monday by his daughter and by his wife, the would-be victim.
Kelsey Steele, a 20-year-old student at Clackamas Community College in Oregon, said she recognizes her father’s voice on parts of the recordings but not others. “The main thing that I noticed throughout it is it’s just not the way that he talks,” she said.
An audio expert hired by the defense could testify as early as today under a ruling by Judge B. Lynn Winmill on Monday afternoon.
Edgar Steele, who gained notoriety for his defense of the Aryan Nations a decade ago, contends he’s being framed under a government conspiracy to silence him. Prosecutors dismiss the assertion, arguing Steele simply wanted his wife out of the way so he could be with a young mail-order bride he’d been courting through an international dating service.
The prosecution rested its case Monday, and the defense called six witnesses, including Bonner County Jail inmate Daryl Hollingsworth, who said Fairfax said he set up Steele for the FBI. Prosecutors used documents from 40-year-old Hollingsworth’s extensive criminal record, which includes documentation of him calling a black man a racial epithet, to portray him as a racist who agreed to help Steele, a former lawyer for the Aryan Nations, after meeting him in jail.
In a letter to 25-year-old Tatyana Loginova, the Ukrainian woman whom prosecutors say Edgar Steele was pursuing, the 65-year-old lawyer said the case against him was the work of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semites and other hate groups.
Steele wrote that the group helped manufacture a recording of him plotting to kill his wife using a collection of secret recordings by Larry Fairfax and thousands of hours of online audio files.
Steele also suggested in the letter that the case against him began when Fairfax stole $45,000 in silver, though prosecutors have shown jurors that Steele cashed in about that same amount of silver a couple months before his arrest.
“This has been a huge shock to me but not really a surprise; they have been after me for a long time because of my outspoken criticism” of the federal government and U.S. power brokers, Steele wrote Loginova.