Thomas Caldwell’s wife awakened him in a panic at 5:30 a.m. on January 19.
“The FBI is at the door and I’m not kidding,” Sharon Caldwell told her husband.
Caldwell, 66, clad only in his underwear, went to see what was happening outside his Virginia farm. “There was a full SWAT team, armored vehicles with a battering ram, and people screaming at me,” Caldwell told me during a lengthy phone interview on September 21. “People who looked like stormtroopers were pointing M4 weapons at me, covering me with red [laser] dots.”
Agents demanded that Caldwell, a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy who suffers from debilitating service-related spinal injuries, come outside and lay down in the grass.
“Someone grabbed my legs and dragged me through the grass. They threw me face down on the hood of the car, kicked my legs apart, put a chain around my waist and put me in handcuffs.” Caldwell said he looked up to see Sharon, his wife of 22 years, dressed in her nightgown holding her hands up with a sock in either hand. She, too, was covered in red dots from the weapons aimed at her. Sharon, 61, begged to put on her socks before they forced her outside in the cold. “I said a prayer, ‘Father, please don’t let them kill my wife,’” Caldwell said through sobs.
Caldwell was forced into the back of a police car for nearly 40 minutes; he asked several times what he was being charged with but FBI agents refused to answer. Eventually, Caldwell was led back toward his house. “I have a [collector] ’63 Thunderbird in my garage as a reminder of my grandfather, a retired Army colonel. An agent kicked one of the doors open and was leaning with his battle gear up against the car, scratching it up.”...
Even though he is a central figure in the Justice Department’s shaky “conspiracy” case against the Oath Keepers, Caldwell said he never joined the group. He was approached by Stewart Rhodes during a post-election rally in Virginia. Rhodes told Caldwell he did “security” for conservatives and asked Caldwell if he would ever volunteer to help. He gave Rhodes his contact information....
But Rhodes, curiously, has not been charged although he is Person One in the indictments. (Darren Beattie at Revolver News has a few investigative reports on Rhodes and the Oath Keepers case.) Even more curious is how the FBI quickly identified Caldwell, accessed his social media posts and other contacts, sought a warrant, and arrested him less than two weeks after the protest when he never even entered the building and committed no serious crime
Rhodes was not indicted. Why not? Was he another FBI informant? An agent provocateur? This is all beginning to smell of entrapment.
The overheated rhetoric of the Oathkeepers and the 3%ers was always a little offputting to me, because it basically screamed, "Hey, FBI. We are coming to overthrow the government! Whatcha gonna do about it?" If you wanted to drag in people full of good intentions but easily entrapped, this is how to do it.
In 1775, the Revolutionaries in Boston had the good sense to not publicize their intentions, at least with any particular name. The organizations that finally opened fire on the Redcoats were members of legally recognized organizations. It would be hard to prosecute members of the legally mandated militia for being members of that militia.
What few hints there were in print were sufficiently coy to be lawful. An article in the Essex Gazette wroite, “POWDER bears
a very good price in this town; the people from all parts of the country, the
fall past, having bought up almost all there was, to defend themselves against wolves, and other beasts of PREY.”[1] The “beasts,” of course, were the royal
government.
[1]
Essex Gazette, January 10, 1775.
Wolves. Remember that. Anyone that invites you to join a revolutionary organization might well be a good-hearted patriot. I think it also likely he is an FBI agent or informant as appeared in the conspiracy to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. "Lone wolf" attacks are nearly impossible for the government to prevent because there is no group of conspirators to infiltrate.
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