Extremist Leader Seeking To Indict Obama For Treason Says He Was Questioned By FBI

Carl Swensson (inset)
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The leader of a movement seeking to have President Obama indicted for treason told TPMmuckraker he was interviewed this week by the FBI.

Carl Swensson said that FBI agents, accompanied by state police, came to his Georgia home Wednesday asking for information about what law enforcement fears is a plan to take over a Tennessee judicial building. “They were concerned that we were gonna storm the courthouse,” said Swensson.

He denied any intention to do so, saying that the goal was in fact to make citizen’s arrests of several of the court officers. “People went up there to effect the arrest of the criminals there,” he said.

A spokesman for the FBI’s Georgia office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As we reported yesterday, Walter Fitzpatrick, a retired naval commander, last month was arrested and charged after trying unsuccessfully to make a citizen’s arrest of the grand jury foreman in Monroe County, Tenn. The foreman, Gary Pettway, had previously declined to convene a grand jury to indict President Obama on charges of treason, a major goal of the movement with which both Swensson and Fitzpatrick have been involved.

Fitzpatrick’s arrest prompted Swensson to call in an online radio broadcast for volunteers to travel to Monroe County and try to get Fitzpatrick released from jail, and to get Pettway and several other court officers arrested. “If we don’t come to his assistance,” said Swensson of Fitzpatrick, “we don’t deserve the freedoms we have.”

So, on April 20th, Swensson and several others showed up in Monroe County, but failed to achieve their aims. One member of Swensson’s group, Daren Huff of Georgia, was himself arrested and charged with intending to incite a riot, after telling police he was carrying an AK-47 and a Colt .45 in his truck. That truck was emblazoned with the logo of the Oath Keepers, a group that has stoked fears of a government plan to confiscate weapons.

Swensson told TPMmuckraker that when his group failed to find any police officers willing to arrest the court officers, they left peacefully. “We had a nice lunch and went on our merry way,” he said.

Still, the FBI appears to have been monitoring the situation from the start. A local news station has reported that Huff had already received a visit from the bureau before he traveled to Tennessee.

Swensson, Fitzpatrick, and their allies believe that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen — a constitutional requirement to serve as president — because his father was Kenyan, and therefore a British subject, at the time of Obama’s birth. “There was no question that to be natural born, you must have parents of the soil, born on the soil,” said Swensson. “By Barack’s own admission, his father was Kenyan.” The founders instituted this requirement, Swensson added, in order “to prevent the possibility of divided loyalties. And now here we are.”

Swensson described Fitzpatrick as “the only person in this country who has ever in the history of this country issued a criminal complaint against the president alleging treason.” He said that the retired naval commander’s action puts the federal government in a difficult position. “If he’s right, then BHO must be removed,” said Swensson. “If he’s wrong, then he gets court-martialed” — a process the military would be loath to set in motion.

As a result, Swensson said the federal government is running scared. During Fitzpatrick’s recent court dates, he said, “they have had this place loaded down with FBI and law enforcement officials from all over the place.” Swensson believes that “the powers that be up in Washington are nervous enough” about Fitzpatrick’s charges that they may be trying to create a “false flag event.”

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