“The War Within” Official Feels Extremists’ Wrath

Stanislaus County Clerk Karen Mathews first got threats over the counter at her office in California. Then she received threatening letters. Then bullets crashed through the windows.

“All recorders in this state know they are violating the rights of the government (people),” one letter proclaimed. “You will be a message to all of them. You will not be warned again. The next bullet will be directed at your head!!!”

Finally, someone broke into her house in Modesto and waited for her to arrive home. The man knocked her to the ground and kicked her black and blue. He held a handgun to her head and pulled the trigger, saying, “Die, bitch.”

The gun clicked three times. It wasn’t loaded.

The attacker cursed Mathews, the elected clerk-recorder for the 411,000 people of Stanislaus County in central California, and delivered a warning.

“He told me he and his friends were tired of being patient with me, that I was going to do my job, record what was brought to me,” she recalls.

“You are a messenger,” he told her. “Luck of the draw, lady. You are a messenger to the other recorders that if they don’t begin to do their jobs, this could happen to them, too.”

Mathews is a victim of what federal authorities say is an increasing wave of paper terrorism waged by anti-government groups.

She is the nation’s first public official assaulted by extremists who accused her of not upholding her oath of office.

The Oregon man charged with breaking into her home and attacking her is linked to a tax protesters and common-law group known as Juris Christian Assembly.

His motive, authorities say: to force Mathews to accept the common-law documents that group members tried to file.

The Juris Christian Assembly believes the government is corrupt and that citizens have the right to establish their own government and court system.

The ugliness against Mathews started about three years ago when she refused to file the group’s documents, including papers attempting to remove a $416,000 IRS lien against a member.

In June 1995, the FBI arrested the accused attacker, Roger Steiner, 57, of Baker City, Ore., and eight Juris Christian Assembly members. They await trial in U.S. District Court on charges of assaulting a public official.

Mathews says her case shows how groups protesting against government officials can turn violent.

“I’m not the first public official that’s been threatened - but the first one who has actually been assaulted,” she says.

“I can’t describe how scared I was. I thought he was going to kill me.”

Mathews says she knows 42 other county recorders in California who have been threatened by anti-government activists. “I’m worried that this is going to happen again.”

Security guards and county sheriff’s detectives now provide her around-the-clock protection.

Hedy Immoos, a hate-crime analyst with the California Department of Justice, says there’s been a phenomenal growth of anti-government groups in the state.

“It’s one of the fastest-growing trends we’ve ever seen,” she says.

That frightens Mathews.

“They call themselves ‘patriots,’ but for a group of grown men to decide to beat up an elected official…is an act of cowardliness.

“Where in the Constitution does it say they have the right to break into my home and threaten to kill me because I don’t see things the way they do?”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo