Feds To Retry Seven Defendants In Conspiracy Case Group Will Be Indicted Again On Bomb Charges After Mistrial Last Month

Seven people with ties to extremist groups will be tried a second time on anti-government conspiracy charges.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Porter said Thursday the plans were to indict the defendants again on a charge that they conspired to make, possess and transfer pipe bombs.

A U.S. District Court jury deadlocked on a broad conspiracy charge for all seven last month, and Judge John Coughenour declared a mistrial. Four of the defendants, however, were found guilty of weapons charges involving illegal pipe bombs and machine guns.

Porter told Coughenour he didn’t know when the new indictments would be completed. Trial was scheduled for June 23.

“We will strive to be responsible stewards of the public resources that another trial will consume,” Porter told the court.

He estimated the government’s case would take 2 to 2-1/2 weeks to present.

The defendants are Washington State Militia founder John Irvin Pitner, 45, of Deming; John Lloyd Kirk, 56, of Tukwila, and his wife, Judy Carol Kirk, 54; Marlin Lane Mack, 24, Gary Marvin Kuehnoel, 48, and former deputy militia director Frederick Benjamin Fisher, 61, all of Bellingham; and Tracy Lee Brown, also known as William Smith, 55, of Seattle.

Kirk and Smith are freemen, the other men are militia members and Judy Carol Kirk was portrayed as a sympathizer who did not attend meetings of either group.

Pitner, Kuehnoel, Mack and John Kirk were convicted of the weapons charges in the earlier trial.

The seven were arrested last summer.

The government contended that they were part of a dangerous, militant conspiracy, building pipe bombs and taking up arms in preparation for a war with federal agents, whom they feared would establish “a new world order” after United Nations forces invaded the United States by way of Canada.

But defense attorneys portrayed their defendants as little more than dimwitted patriots who were merely exercising their rights to free speech and did nothing illegal.

The government’s case included testimony from former militia members and more than a hundred secretly taped conversations between defendants and paid informant Edwin Maeurer and undercover FBI agent Michael German.

The defendants fashioned booby traps and pipe bombs and wanted to blow up a radio tower and a Bellingham train tunnel as part of their mission to ward off the “invasion,” the government said.