The Last Time the Justice Department Prosecuted a Seditious Conspiracy Case

Lenawee County, Michigan, had an apocalyptic Christian nationalist militia problem about a decade ago. The group called itself the Hutaree, a name that members said meant “Christian Warriors,” though the FBI said it didn’t mean anything at all. 

The Hutaree saw themselves as soldiers to a higher power. The ex-wife of the group’s founder, David Stone, characterized her former husband’s beliefs as religiosity that spiraled out of control. She told reporters during their trial that “[i]t started out as a Christian thing …. You go to church. You pray. … I think David started to take it a little too far” and “went from handguns to big guns.” 

The group’s now-defunct website declared, “The Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God wills it.” The “About Us” section skimped on the details about how the group started or where it was based, but it did talk about the “one day” arrival of “an Anti-Christ”: “All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded.” One link led to the “BEAST WATCH,” a subpage that the sociologist Amy Cooter explained “must have been intended to have frequent updates on modern signs of the apocalypse.” Another led to the “Evil Jew Forum.”

Stone, “Captain Hutaree,” served as the group’s helmsman. Cooter explained that three of the eight other main Hutaree were related to him. That includes Stone’s second wife, whom he wed at a ceremony attended by many of the group members. 

An undercover FBI agent served as Stone’s best man. 

Indeed, it turns out that when you start talking about killing police officers and about the End Times, people listen, and they don’t tend to like what they hear. Some time earlier, a neighboring militia had grown concerned about the Hutaree and went to the FBI. In March 2010, federal law enforcement arrested all nine members of the group, and the Justice Department charged them with a host of serious offenses.

Why should anyone care about the Hutaree now? Because one of those serious charges was seditious conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 2384. It was the last time the Justice Department would use the statute until the present day. And the fate of the Hutaree may offer some insight into why. The judge in the case threw out the seditious conspiracy charges, along with the other more serious charges on the docket. And in the end, three Hutaree members pleaded guilty to standard-fare federal weapons charges. 

It’s looking more and more like prosecutors might dust off the statute in response to the insurrection of Jan. 6. Federal prosecutors continue to pin conspiracy, though not seditious conspiracy, charges on leaders of several extremist groups in connection to the riot. And Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin has dispatched federal prosecutors to build seditious conspiracy charges against the rioters. I wrote two weeks ago about a time when seditious conspiracy charges stuck at trial and survived on appeal. But the Justice Department has also occasionally whiffed under the statute. The trial judge’s decision in the Hutaree case isn’t binding precedent. But the Hutaree are worth a second look.

Being a member of a militia isn’t itself a particularly distinguishing feature in Michigan. Andrew Arena, an FBI agent who helped to investigate the Hutaree, told the Washington Post that throughout his career probing extremist groups with the bureau, “the 64 million dollar question was always: Why Michigan? … We had representatives of every known right-wing, white supremacist, anti-government group out there.”

The Hutaree stood out even among the busy crowd. Cooter, who did fieldwork studying Michigan militias, described the Hutaree as “largely isolated from other people who were not members of the unit and were effectively withdrawn from many aspects of civil society,” a level of isolation unique among Michigan militias. She characterized the group as “very religious, more volatile, reactionary, and more like the militias of the 1990s than other Michigan groups today” and noted that in her fieldwork studying Michigan militias “[the Hutaree] were the only group [she] intentionally avoided.” And the Hutaree paired this zealotry with cartoonish amateurism. They pathologically ignored basic safety procedures; at one joint-militia training session, Cooter recounts, a Vietnam vet from the Southern Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM) confiscated a Hutaree member’s rifle and made him participate in the drills with just a stick. 

The occasional Hutaree collaborations got old fast for the SMVM. The SMVM’s spokesperson later told a local reporter that his group “felt that [the Hutaree] were a group that could become very radicalized very easily. That’s because of the ultra-religious nature of their leader and the whole government. They lashed out against other units and the government.” SMVM’s wariness of the Hutaree led to outright cooperation with the FBI in April 2008. The SMVM spokesperson told reporters that they blew the whistle on the Hutaree because they “struck us as potentially unstable and possibly dangerous.” Some self-interest didn’t hurt, either: “[W]e value good relations with local and federal law enforcement,” the spokesperson said. An SMVM member sent emails to the FBI with links to the Hutaree’s online presence and details about one Hutaree member, Joshua Clough, later named in the grand jury’s indictment. “Do I get my ‘Junior G-Man’ badge yet?” the SMVM member asked after ferrying over an email replete with details about the group.

The FBI sent an undercover agent to keep tabs on the group, and law enforcement Become a supporter of IT Security News and help us remove the ads.