The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that protective orders can keep guns out of the hands of people accused of domestic violence, and at least one expert feels that could help a major figure in a separate case — Hunter Biden.
That's according to Eric Ruben, a professor at SMU's Dedman School of Law and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Peter Tilem, a criminal defense lawyer and former Manhattan gun prosecutor, who both spoke to Politico for a story published on Friday.
The legal team for President Joe Biden's son was closely monitoring the case United States v. Rahimi heading into Friday's decision, the outlet reported.
“Since the Founding, the Nation’s firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” the court’s majority opinion read.
The case marked the high court’s first major gun ruling since 2022, which established a new standard for determining if gun regulations are constitutional. On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned an appellate court's decision that found the Second Amendment protects domestic abusers’ right to own guns.
As Politico noted, the provision in question is a "sister provision" to one that bans drug-users from having guns. The Biden team had hoped — it turns out, unsuccessfully — that the court would've struck down the sibling provision.
That didn't happen, but Hunter Biden may get a small assist from Chief Justice John Roberts.
Writing in his majority opinion, Roberts said the court was only allowing the removal of guns from people who a judge first deemed a danger to others. He notably avoided scenarios that don't involve a judge's danger determination.
“[W]e reject the Government’s contention that [Zackey] Rahimi may be disarmed simply because he is not ‘responsible,’” Roberts wrote. “'Responsible’ is a vague term. It is unclear what such a rule would entail.”
And therein lies a potential boost for Hunter Biden: The federal law that bans drug-users from having guns "doesn’t necessarily make them a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner or anyone else," Tilem said. That leaves the door open for Biden's team to argue the drug-user prohibition may be unconstitutional altogether.
Justice Clarence Thomas was the single dissent in a case where a domestic abuser demanded access to his gun after it was taken away due to a victim's protection order.
"This opinion was cleaning up a self-inflicted error by the court two years ago in the Bruen case," he said.
The Bruen case was a suit against the State of New York, which requires a person to show a special need for protection before they can obtain an unrestricted license to get a concealed weapon.
What was different in this case, Litman explained, is that there is no originalism argument because when the law was written, it was legal to beat your wife.
"There wasn't any history for understandable and irrelevant reasons, sad reasons, really, of regulating domestic offenders at the time," said Litman. In fact, it wasn't until 1920 that it became illegal in all 20 states not to beat your wife.
But the case on Friday had to turn out the way that it did, said Litman, "and Thomas' adherence to what they said in Bruen really just shows the rigidity of the way he approaches the Constitution."
He predicted that the "originalism" argument would play out in the coming years, but in Friday's case, it was clear that the majority of the court agreed a domestic abuser shouldn't have a gun.
"You can come up with relevantly similar regulations that we used to do, and he's saying society would do. But now take that question and think about, for example, gay marriage. Is that relevantly similar as to marriage as it used to be or abortion?" he asked.
The sister of killer Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found not guilty of intentional homicide after crossing state lines and shooting three protesters — two to death — has taken to Gofundme to plead for financial help as she and her mother face eviction from their apartment.
According to Faith Rittenhouse, her brother, who has been touring the country giving speeches with the support of Turning Point USA, has refused to help out his sibling and mother.
On GoFundmMe, she wrote, "Just under 4 years ago, our lives were shattered when my brother was involved in a tragic shooting incident. The aftermath of this event uprooted our family's stability and left us grappling with grief, trauma, and the harsh reality of starting over."
She added, "We’ve had difficulty obtaining and maintaining employment due to the fact many people still believe my mother drove Kyle or was somehow involved in his decision to go to Kenosha. We've struggled emotionally, mentally, and financially to piece our lives back together."
Noting that she is only asking for $3,000 (with $2,145 donated as of Friday morning), she wrote, "With my brother's unwillingness to provide support or contribute to our family, we've been left to navigate this journey on our own," while pointing out that medical issues have waylaid her from being able to keep a job.
"We've exhausted every resource available to us, but we're still coming up short. The reality is that we have nowhere else to turn, and time is running out.
"Your donation, no matter how small, will go directly towards preventing our eviction and ensuring that my family has a roof over our heads. Whether it's covering rent, utilities, or even helping us find temporary housing, your support will make an immeasurable difference in our lives.
In an interview in November with Kyle Rittenhouse's lawyer, Mark Richards, the attorney said his client is "working, he is trying to support himself. Everybody thinks that Kyle got so much money from this. Whatever money he did get is gone."
He added, "He’s living, I don’t want to say paycheck to paycheck, but he’s living to support himself. Obviously, as his lawyer and somebody who I want to do well, I hope he does re-engage in his studies. But right now he is working full-time, he is living a law-abiding life and he is doing something that he enjoys.”
Marine Corps veteran and avowed neo-Nazi Jordan Duncan plans to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to manufacture firearms, Raw Story has learned.
Raymond Tarlton, Duncan’s lawyer, told Raw Story his client anticipates entering a guilty plea during a hearing scheduled in federal court in Wilmington, N.C., on June 24.
Federal prosecutors filed a superseding charge of conspiracy to illegally manufacture firearms — specifically, a rifle with a barrel less than 16 inches long — against Duncan earlier this month. The charge overrode an earlier indictment with more extensive charges, including one related to an alleged scheme to sabotage electrical substations as part of an alleged plot to launch a race war.
LinkedIn photo of Jordan Duncan, a Marine Corps veteran whom the government alleges had classified military materials on his hard drive.
Duncan had been the last remaining holdout among five co-defendants, the rest of whom had already reached plea deals with the government.
Liam Montgomery Collins, the alleged ringleader of the neo-Nazi terror cell known as “BSN,” entered a guilty plea of conspiracy to illegally manufacture a firearm last October. Co-defendants Justin Hermanson and Joseph Maurino earlier pleaded guilty to the same charge.
Only one of the co-defendants, a former porn actor named Paul Kryscuk, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to damage an energy facility.
The government alleges that Collins wrote on Iron March — an online forum for Nazis that was active from 2011 to 2017 — that he was recruiting for “a modern-day SS,” alluding to the paramilitary organization responsible for security surveillance and state terrorism in Nazi Germany.
Collins recruited Duncan, who trained as a Russian linguist and specialized in intelligence and communications during his Marine Corps service, to join BSN while the two were stationed at Camp Lejeune, according to Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent John Christopher Little. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is the law enforcement arm for the Navy and Marine Corps.
Collins wrote on Iron March that he was “looking for an intelligence/comm guy for his group,” Little testified during Duncan’s detention hearing.
While Collins completed his military service obligation at Camp Lejeune in late 2020, Duncan joined Kryscuk in Idaho, where the group had held a paramilitary training and hoped to establish a base of operations. While staying with Kryscuk, Duncan worked for a Navy contractor outside of Boise.
When the FBI arrested Duncan in October 2020, they found classified Defense Department materials on his external hard drive, as reported by Raw Story.
A federal magistrate also noted during Duncan’s detention hearing that authorities found a fake ID and a Defense Department passport in Duncan’s possession at the time of his arrest.
Court filings by the government disclosed that the FBI investigated Duncan for potentially mishandling classified materials, but the probe did not result in additional criminal charges. Prosecutors had agreed to exclude any mention of Duncan’s possession of classified documents were his case to go to trial.
Raw Story is suing the Department of Defense and the Navy for access to records about the classified materials investigation.
Tarlton declined to comment on what sentence Duncan, his client, might face. But a court filing indicates that Collins, who pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy to manufacture firearms charge, faces a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison.
Collins, Kryscuk and Hermanson are scheduled to be sentenced on July 23. It remains unclear when Maurino is scheduled for sentencing, and his lawyer, Damon Cheston, declined comment when reached by Raw Story.
Last summer, Judge Richard E. Myers II issued an order that tightly controls how Duncan, Collins and their lawyers may share the classified materials — identified by the marking “FOUO,” or “For Official Use Only” — that were found on Duncan’s hard drive at the time of his arrest.
In 2021, as the Republican Governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts signed a "largely symbolic" proclamation declaring The Cornhusker State a “Second Amendment Sanctuary.” Now, calling the legislation a "show vote," U.S. Senator Ricketts has blocked a Democratic bill that would have restored a ban on bump stocks, like the one used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
Just four days ago, in a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Courtruled a bump stock, that effectively turns an AR-15 into a machine gun, cannot be regulated under current law. Justice Clarence Thomas authored the majority opinion. The device is so dramatically lethal pro-gun President Donald Trump banned it in 2018.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito made clear: if lawmakers want to ban bump stocks, they can, by passing a federal law:
"Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act."
On Tuesday, Senator Ricketts blocked a bipartisan bill banning bump stocks – what the Supreme Court suggested and what Donald Trump had done – which was sponsored by Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
Bump stocks increase the rate of fire from approximately 45-60 rounds per minute, to 400-800 rounds per minute.
Senator Ricketts called the vote on banning the lethal accessory that effectively increases the rate of fire by a factor of ten, "another day in the Democrat summer of show votes," and called the legislation “a gun-grabbing overreach."
“This bill will not pass,” Ricketts also said, as the Associated Press reported. “It won't pass because enough people in this building still believe in the Constitution, and the Constitution affords Americans the right to own a firearm.”
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) blocks Democrats' unanimous consent request to ban bump stocks:
"[Schumer] claims this bill will ban bump stocks ... If you actually read the bill, that's not what it does at all. The Bump Act targets common firearm accessories, not just bump stocks." pic.twitter.com/2zSuF149rR
— The Recount (@therecount) June 18, 2024
Had Crumbley or his wife, Jennifer Crumbley, used the cable lock, the simple act of securing the weapon might have saved four teenagers’ lives, spared seven others from being shot and avoided traumatizing many more people. It also might have prevented their 15-year-old son from becoming a murderer and being sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
In the end, James and Jennifer Crumbley were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison because their actions enabled their son to access the handgun he used to kill his classmates.
We believe the results will be more muted. Here’s why:
Parents have a duty to protect
While the verdict illustrates the importance of limiting children’s access to firearms to keep communities safe, holding parents responsible is not new.
U.S. law, through both statutes and court decisions, has long imposed on parents an obligation to protect others from the harms their children might inflict, and ensuring that children do not have access to firearms is part of this duty.
This responsibility covers both a child’s civil harms and their criminal acts, either of which may involve property damage or injuring a person.
Historically, these parental responsibility laws included prohibitions against contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which have been part of state criminal codes since the early 20th century.
The Crumbley parents’ cases fit within this legal tradition. What is unique, however, is that they were charged with more serious and more substantive crimes. Why? Likely due to the unusual and, one hopes, utterly unique circumstances of the case.
When it comes to serious injury and death among children and teens, firearms are more dangerous than cars, abduction, drugs or disease – all those harms we parents worry so much about.
In part due to the Oxford high school shooting, in 2023 the state of Michigan enacted a law which mandates that individuals store firearms in a way that is inaccessible to children.
Under this new law, adults can be charged with a misdemeanor if a child gains access to a firearm that they improperly stored. However, if the child injures or kills someone with the firearm, adults can be charged with a felony crime that carries a potential prison sentence. Importantly, this statute applies to all households, even those where children do not live but only visit.
The Michigan law is not alone in its approach. Currently, 26 states and Washington D.C. have laws that mandate the safe storage of firearms and impose criminal penalties for failure to comply.
These laws are in place to encourage responsible firearm ownership, which includes keeping children safe from firearms. In Michigan, legislators expressed their hope that the law will encourage more responsible behavior.
Safe storage prevents harm
The Crumbley verdicts could lay the groundwork for how other parents who fail to secure their firearms might be charged if their child commits a shooting. At least two otherrecent cases involve parents who were criminally charged when they allowed their child access to a firearm that was used in a shooting.
It is unlikely, however, this will become the norm. In each of these cases, the facts were extreme. The parents either took no action to prevent access to a gun or actually acted to facilitate the child’s access to the weapon.
Fear of a fine or imprisonment is also unlikely to be what will drive parental behavior. At the end of the day, most parents want to keep their children and others safe. Finding a solution that works for families is possible – securely storing a firearm is fast, easy and cheap.
Think it over: 10 seconds could make all the difference.
The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.
A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.
Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.
She did not want to go.
But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.
Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.
What was possibly happening here?
As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of whichRaw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.
The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.
“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”
The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.
These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.
These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.
And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.
‘A plane full of ballots’
Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”
Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.
The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.
The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.
With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.
The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”
Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.
Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.
“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.
Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”
Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.
A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.
But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.
Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.
Sabrina Keliikoa as seen during a legal deposition on March 22, 2024. (Source: Deposition video via Staci Burk)
“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”
“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”
Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)
“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”
What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.
Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.
Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.
Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’
On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”
Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.
“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.
“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.
“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.
As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.
Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.
Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.
Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.
“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”
At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.
At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.
Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.
Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.
The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.
“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”
As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.
In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.
And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.
‘He fabricated everything’
Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.
Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.
Jim Penrose as described on the website of the Institute for World Politics in Washington, D.C. (Institute for World Politics.)
“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.
“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”
The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.
Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?
Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.
The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.
Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.
More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”
Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.
“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.
“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.
A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp
Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.
In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.
One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.
Except for the fact that it is real.
It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.
The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)
As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.
The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.
The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”
‘There was no goldmine’
Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.
She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”
Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.
“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.
But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.
“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”
This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”
No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.
“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.
“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”
The band breaks up
These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.
Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”
Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.
In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”
Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.
Some of the key players involved have also split up.
Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”
Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.
“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.
Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.
In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”
But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.
Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.
Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.
Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.
Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.
Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.
“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”
Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.
“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”
“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”
* * * * *
Key players
Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.
Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.
Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.
Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.
Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.
Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.
Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.
Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.
Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.
Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.
Shawn Wilson is the president of MSG Risk Management & Intelligence (formerly Mayhem Solutions Group). Jim Penrose told Staci Burk that he was initially concerned that Wilson, along with Kenneth Scott Koch, were “hostile actors” intent on harming Sabrina Keliikoa.
Punchbowl reporter Andrew Desiderio revealed Democrats are ready to fight back against the Supreme Court's embrace of bump stocks.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said something must be done to curb the extreme ruling from the High Court that made the previously outlawed addition to guns legal.
“This MAGA court is going off the deep end,” Schumer says of the Friday bump stock ruling which multiplies the number of bullets a gun can fire by the pressing of a trigger.
During an interview following the ruling, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) told CNN that Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion that a gun fitted with a bump stock was different to a machine gun was dishonest — and that both allow the shooter the ability to rapid-fire multiple rounds.
“It’s just not honest," Heinrich said of Thomas' ruling. "I know these mechanisms. I’ve seen not just the videos, but I’ve used some of these weapons. He’s not being honest about what this does, and it is incredibly dangerous.”
He also argued that there's no valid use for bump stocks other than hurting people.
“Who is going to use these bump stocks? It’s going to be street gangs and cartels and mass shooters,” Heinrich explained. “And innocent Americans are going to die because of this decision. I find it incredibly troubling.”
Taking to the Senate floor on Monday, Schumer announced, "As soon as tomorrow, Democrats will seek passage of a federal ban on bump stocks… The question is, will Republicans join us? Republicans were supportive of banning bump stocks when The Trump Administration took this step, so they should support it tomorrow."
See the clip of Schumer below or at the link here.
ABC News host Jonathan Karl fact-checked Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) after he claimed that violent crime was up under Joe Biden's presidency.
During an interview on Sunday, Karl asked Scott if he agreed with the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a ban on bump stocks, which allow some guns to fire more rapidly.
"We trust and believe and respect the decision of the Supreme Court," Scott opined. "What we need to focus on, Jon, is the violence that we're seeing across this nation. Under Joe Biden, we've seen the greatest increase in violent crime in my lifetime."
"Actually, Senator, as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they're actually down this past year," the host said.
"Under Joe Biden, neighborhoods like the ones I grew up in have never been ravaged [more]," Scott insisted.
Thomas' opinion, which was harshly criticized by Justice Sonia Sotomayor was considered a major setback for opponents of allowing weapons of war to be commonplace in American homes.
Before discussing the controversial decision by the conservative-majority court with Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, the former RNC chair had a few words he directed at Justice Thomas.
"Mark, I will just cut to the quick," Steele began. "Folks really don't give a damn about the life of people when your court says, 'Yeah, you can just take this piece of equipment and latches onto your gun and just pull the trigger and have 800 rounds, 800 rounds in a minute be dispensed from that weapon.'"
"No human finger can fire 800 rounds in one minute, Clarence Thomas, but this bump stock can," he exclaimed.
"I mean Clarence Thomas thinks differently and he decides what the law is because he rules us. That is all I can really say," Stern replied. " You know, he claims that bump stocks do the work of a human with a lightning-fast trigger finger — I think that's outrageous. Bump stocks increase the rate of fire from about 180 rounds per minute at most to 800 rounds per minute as you said, they were used in the Las Vegas massacre."
"They decrease accuracy and their only use is to slaughter as many humans as possible in as short of time as possible," he added. "What Justice Thomas did was completely butcher the statutory text here. I think it's hard to overstate just how much violence he did."
Speaking about the ruling on MSNBC, Dahlia Lithwick explained that there are two different stories. First there is the ruling. Second, she said, there is a determination of reality.
"I don't think there's any other way to read Clarence Thomas' page after page of, sort of, gun-fetish fan fiction," Lithwick explained. "He accompanied the [ruling] with photos and images and lots of substituting of his own understanding of how guns work for that of the ATF. It's their job to do this. It's his job to be a justice."
However, she continued, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace was "saying really an essential thing, which is this is of a pattern we've seen over and over and over again, where justices take it upon themselves to decide what clean water is. What swamp land is. What is air pollution? What is a particle? What is COVID?"
The executive agencies that oversee such issues are staffed with experts in their fields, but in its attempt to decide on a ruling, "the justices can sort of read a quick tutorial and become experts on all things." And it "is really at the sort of [the] beating heart of what is so very scary about this opinion and so many others. It is a systemic effort to dismantle the administrative state as we know it and to substitute the ideas that justices get principally from amicus briefs from interested parties as truths."
She and Wallace discussed the two stories plaguing the court, one of which is an ethics concern, and the second is the fears of what they'll write into the legal framework of the United States through their docket.
On the former, Lithwick argued that people should not say that the "Supreme Court has an ethics problem, but that the United States has a Supreme Court problem."
Legal analyst and former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann remembered hearing from conservative lawyers eager to cast a ballot for Trump because they wanted a Supreme Court with "judicial restraint."
"For those people, I would say look at this decision. This is the complete antithesis of that," he said.
Watch the discussion in the video below or at the link here.
'Gun fetish fan fiction': Legal columnist on Clarence Thomas ruling redefining reality
www.youtube.com
The ruling drew a stinging dissent from the court's liberal justices.
"When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent. "A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires 'automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.' §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent."
"Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands," she also wrote. "To do so, it casts aside Congress's definition of 'machinegun' and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose."
Over 500 people were shot in 11 minutes in a Las Vegas shooting in 2017 in which the shooter used the bump stock addition to his assault rifle to massacre civilians.
MSNBC host Katie Phang recalled that "the Las Vegas shooter, in October 2017, had 18 rifles and a handgun. Thirteen of the rifles were outfitted with bump stocks. The shooter used all but one of those bump stock-equipped rifles. With the assistance of the bump stocks, the killer unleashed a total of 1,049 rounds in just 11 minutes."
Christian Rincon quoted the dissent on X, saying, "Sotomayor cooking the s--t out of the majority."
"The Supreme Court just gutted a years-long bump stock ban," said Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV), whose district includes part of Las Vegas. "This is terrifying for so many communities impacted by gun violence, including Nevada’s First District and the victims of the 1 October shooting. An angry lawmaker is a motivated one. This fight is far from over."
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie was killed in the Parkland school shooting, called the ruling "radical."
"The bump stock decision is radical, even for this Supreme Court," he wrote on X. "This Supreme Court is now on record as the Court which has guaranteed because of their extremism that more Americans will die from gun violence. They have also guaranteed that the talk of violence by MAGA, will be more deadly."
"I’ve talked to dozens of law enforcement folks — fed/local, Trump-y/anti-Trump — all but one or two thought the bump stock [regulation] Trump pushed through post-Las Vegas was modest, reasonable, and didn’t infringe on Second Amendment rights. Court is going far beyond where any court has gone on guns," wrote New York Times correspondent Glenn Thursh.
Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern posted a compilation of cell phone videos from the shooting, saying, "Listen to the gunfire in these videos from the Las Vegas shooting. Automatic fire—a continuous spray of bullets enabled by a bump stock. 60 people [were] slaughtered in 10 minutes from 490 yards away. That is what the Supreme Court just legalized."
Bump stocks are devices that modify a semi-automatic rifle and ultimately turn it into a rapid-firing one.
Donald Trump's administration classified that bump stocks make a semi-automatic gun a machine gun, which is illegal in the U.S.
But, according to Clarence Thomas who was writing for the majority, bump stock guns require that the trigger still be held to continue firing — thus it still takes the shooter's effort.
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” he wrote in his opinion. “Even with a bump stock, a semiautomatic rifle will fire only one shot for every ‘function of the trigger.’”
The ruling declared the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority with the ban by declaring it makes legal semi-automatic weapons into illegal machine guns.
The Supreme Court's vote was 6to 3, with liberal members angrily dissenting.
A bump stock was used in the 2017 mass shooting at the concert in Las Vegas that killed 60 people.
LinkedIn photo of Jordan Duncan, a Marine Corps veteran whom the government alleges had classified military materials on his hard drive.
Sabrina Keliikoa as seen during a legal deposition on March 22, 2024. (Source: Deposition 
Jim Penrose as described on the website of the Institute for World Politics in Washington, D.C. (Institute for World Politics.)