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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
Antifa Goes on Trial in North Texas w/ Journalist Adam Federman (G&R 481)
00:40:32
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
- [00:14]
B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds at the Brain and Red podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I am joined by
- [00:26]
C
Bob Bozenko in Ohio.
- [00:29]
B
And today we are joined by return guest Adam Federman in another episode in our State of Repression series. Yeah, it's very exciting. It's not a happy topic. Adam covers two beats, one of which is public lands environmental policy under the Trump and Biden administrations. We've talked with Adam in the recent past about Greenland, but then also Adam covers repression. It started out as repression of environmental activists, but it's moved into this sort of bigger, bigger piece as that is what's happening with the government. Adam works at Type Investigations as a reporting fellow, has written expense extensively on corporate and police spy and non environmental activists. He has a new piece out in these Times which is about the recent convictions of the Prairieland defendants. So Adam, welcome back to the Green and Red podcast.
- [01:27]
A
Thanks for having me back. Thanks for having me back on, Scott. Always great to be here.
- [01:31]
B
Yep. And we have we're going to talk about Prairieland and the case and we're going to talk about, we'll talk about the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the expansion of the terrorism label, which ties in with all of this. But week before last, nine activists were convicted on federal charges related to a protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center and Prairie Land up in North Texas. And the backdrop of this is that Trump has been, the Trump administration has been weaponizing the Department of Justice against his political foes. They've been expanding the terrorism label. But we're also seeing a lot of resistance. We this past weekend we saw some of the biggest protests that we've ever seen with the no Kings rallies. And then we've also seen this like resistance in places like Minneapolis. And this is all in that backdrop. And so maybe we could start off talking about Prairieland. And so do you talk a little bit about what happened, I believe it was on July 4th on 2025, just to set a little bit of the context.
- [02:31]
A
Yeah, that's right. It was a July 4th protest last year, 2025, and it was outside of the Prairieland ICE detention center, which is an Alvarado, Texas, I think it's about 45 minutes from the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan area. And it was a small, relatively small group about a Dozen folks who participated. And the idea was to have a noise demonstration where they would set off some fireworks, try to reconnect with the inmates inside this detention center. Detainees inside the ICE detention center, which has become this particular facility has become somewhat notorious for its poor treatment of detainees and everything else. It was a late night protest. I think they started around just before 11pm and things definitely went off the rails. One of the individuals who was participating in the protest, who no one else actually knew prior to that night, who had come from a town about an hour and a half away, started vandalizing some of the vehicles in the parking lot and spray painting them with anti ICE slogans. And long story short, a police officer was eventually called and arrived on the scene. Lieutenant Thomas Gross. He got out of his car, actually pulled his. This was revealed at the trial, had not been reported previously, but he pulled his weapon first. And I think in a span of about 6 seconds, the shots were exchanged. One of the activists, a former Marine reservist named Benjamin Song, had brought a gun to the protest, an AR15 style rifle. He fired and we can get into this, but there are different interpretations about what actually happened in that exchange, et cetera. The officer was hit just below the neck, sustained minor injuries. A handful of the activists were arrested that night. Song remained at large for 11 days. There was this big manhunt. A lot of homes in the area were raided by the FBI as they tried to gather evidence and expand their crackdown on this network of activists and their supporters. And then I think one of the important things to keep in mind in the context of this conversation is that it wasn't until after. So this was July 4, 2025. It wasn't until after the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September that they wrapped all of this up in the Antifa crackdown on Antifa Project that the Trump administration has now elevated as one of its kind of primary objectives in terms of suppressing political speech and resistance. So that's in a nutshell, what happened on that night. But as you noted, this has become a much bigger story. The defendants who will be sentenced in June on federal charges, which they were con convicted on, most of the charges that they faced also face state level charges. So those cases are yet to come. And of course there will be appeals and efforts to overturn the convictions.
- [05:54]
C
Why don't you talk about the other eight? Because you have one guy with the gun, but yes, nine people.
- [06:00]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [06:00]
C
What were they doing and what were. How did the state go after them?
- [06:05]
A
Most of the folks who participated in the protests were doing what you would normally do at a noise protest, which is make noise, set off some fireworks. And yet many of them also faced attempted murder charges, but were found not guilty. Only Benjamin Song was found guilty on one count of attempted murder, so it's important to point that out. The others faced a variety of other charges, though, including riot, organizing a riot. And perhaps one of the most significant is material support for terrorism for having participated in this. Essentially what the government argues is a conspiracy. That's their kind of the backdrop to this entire case. An attempt to characterize what happened as part of a much larger organized effort by the radical left, or quote, unquote, antifa, which isn't even an organization to essentially ambush, target, attack law enforcement. So they bundled all of these other individuals up into this larger conspiracy. And I should also add that not only those who were actually present during the protest itself, but they have arrested. I think it's close to seven or eight, maybe even nine other individuals who were not actually present on the night of July 4th. And one of the defendants who was found guilty during the trial that just wrapped up, Dario, his name was Dario dez, was not present, but had moved a box of anarchist zines from his girlfriend's apartment to another home after the July 4th protest. And he was actually found guilty on a charge of conspiracy to conceal documents, even though these are standard fare sort of political magazines and booklets. So the case has implications that go well beyond Prairieland, that go well beyond the radical left. And these individuals, those who were found guilty and those who still face state charges, could spend many years, decades in prison.
- [08:15]
B
And what sort of, I assume Benjamin Song is gonna. Is facing like some pretty serious time. What are the. What's the standard time that can be served for the materially the terrorism or the concealing of documents?
- [08:29]
A
I don't know offhand on its own how many years for material support for terrorism, but I think taken together the collection of charges, that many, if not most of the defendants phase is something like 10 to 60 years in prison. So it's. It's a long time. And even there are a handful of defendants who pled guilty and cooperated with the government. There are five, all of whom testified at the trial. I was not there for those days, but you can read accounts of their testimony. Even though they pled guilty and made some sort of a deal with. With the feds, they still face, I think, up to 15 years in prison and also state charges.
- [09:10]
B
It's also important to note that with federal time you serve 90% that like different states have different rules and regulations around parole. And so if you were just convicted on state charges, you could serve like less time than your sentence. But with federal time, it's usually like 90% or more of what you, what you serve.
- [09:31]
A
That's. Yeah, that's useful to know. And the other thing I would just add in terms in the context of this case is that the judge, Judge Pittman in the Northern District of Texas and Fort Worth, kept a very sort of tight leash on courtroom proceedings and is a, he's a Trump appointee, member of the Federalist Society. And the expectation is, I think, that the sentences will be harsh and punitive.
- [09:59]
C
This group was were the authorities aware of them beforehand? Had they worked together? Did they just come together ad hoc?
- [10:05]
A
It's a complicated question in a way. And it also actually relates to the story that I published because I of course had FBI records from 2018 that show the agency opened an investigation into Antifa Dallas, Fort Worth. But as I think most listeners of this podcast know, and Scott, you pointed out many times before, there is no real Antifa isn't really an organization. It's a political philosophy. It's anti fascism. It has roots that go way back. So I think the activists who were involved in this protest, some of them knew each other better than others. They were part of a left leaning counterculture in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. I'm not from there. I don't feel like I have great familiarity with the political culture of that part of Texas. So I don't want to actually go out on a limb and try to characterize the sort of world that they were coming from. But I think these are people who engage in direct action and protest, not infrequently. They're part of various mutual aid societies. Some of them were involved in battles going back to the Keystone pipeline campaign and things like that. And obviously ICE and Trump administration's immigration policies are hot button issues, for lack of a better phrase. And certainly in Texas, it's not surprising that they would be engaging in this kind of protest.
- [11:28]
B
The other thing we see in Dallas and Fort Worth, and I've seen like Candace Byrne, who writes for the Texas observer and Treefaut right about this is like open carry at protest is a pretty normalized thing in the Dallas Fort Worth area on both sides. We'll have right winger. I think I saw actually video of right wingers maybe carrying guns in DFW at no Kings this weekend. But then also there's like groups on the left, which have done this as well.
- [11:54]
A
Yeah, I think it's become more and more common since really since the end of the first Trump administration. But that was sort of. That. That was a big issue, of course, in the trial was discussion about the fact that there were guns at a protest. And of course, Texas is an open carry state and it's not. You do see it on both sides, et cetera. So that was something that certainly was discussed.
- [12:21]
C
Most of what I know came from like brief stories and headlines, but. So there were. See, I thought there was like one snitch, use that phrase, who was highlighted. But you said there were five. Were these people who just got scared after everything went down and decided to cooperate or.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah.
- [12:36]
A
So I don't want to use the word snitch just because we don't actually have any. I guess in the sense that this particular individual sort of, well, turned on some of the other defendants in a way. We don't have any evidence to suggest that he had been recruited. Recruited by law enforcement. His name is Nathan Bauman. He came from College Station, Texas. Had no previous engagement in political protest, did not know any of the other individuals involved in the action. Young guy. And a lot of questions surrounding how he got involved in this event. And he was the one who brought spray paint and started going, going rogue, so to speak. The others, though, there was a lot of pressure on these individuals to cooperate. I think some of the defendants who pled guilty and cooperated with the government had not been at the protest, but were involved in some way in helping Benjamin song during those 11 days that he was on the run. And again, I just want to be clear that I attended the last week of the trial. I was there for the last day of witness testimony and then I was there for closing arguments. I did not see the cooperating defendants testify. I did read about some of their testimony and how flawed much of it was and how in many cases they didn't even seem to really support the argument that the government was making. But in terms of the nitty pretty details about exactly what they said and the pressure that they faced in making these deals, I can't really speak to that at this point.
- [14:10]
C
But they, they probably were not like, working with the government beforehand. That doesn't seem to be the case.
- [14:17]
A
There's no.
- [14:18]
C
They weren't like provocateurs or infiltrators or anything or.
- [14:21]
A
Well, there's no evidence to support that yet. But I guess what I would say at this stage is that I wouldn't rule that out. I don't think that we actually have enough information to answer that question definitively. And I would also point out, and this is not something that I've looked into in any kind of detail, but there were two individuals at the protest on the night of July 4th who went under a couple of aliases which I can't recall from memory right now. They were not apprehended. No one knows what happened to them. Apparently no one. I the. I've been told that no one even really knows who they were. So that remains an open question. Nathan Bauman, as I've said, I'm told that he just got into this because he was interested in a girl, had gone to a no Kings protest. They sent him the information about this upcoming event and he went. I still think it's unusual that he would bring spray paint and not having never really participated in a protest, engage in that kind of behavior. That strikes me as unusual. However, that's all we know at the moment. The only other thing I would say is that based on the documents that I have and that we published at in these Times, in the story that ran last week, and you can go read the documents for yourself, the FBI had opened an investigation into ANTIFA Dallas Fort worth, sometime in 2018, perhaps 2017. And that comes with everything that an FBI investigation can deploy, including potentially informants. So we don't really know how deep the FBI had gone into this group then and up to the present. So I think it's still very much an important question and not one that I would say has been settled.
- [16:08]
B
So what did those. What tell us a little bit about what those documents tell us from 2017, 2018?
- [16:14]
A
Yeah, so it's two pages, they're brief, and much of the material in them is redacted. What they tell us is that the. The Dallas field office opened an investigation sometime around 202018 into a handful of groups loosely affiliated with Antifa. They were. They give a number of different names. Antifa, DFW, Dallas Antifa, Antifascist League, Dallas Workers Front, Anarchist Extremists. And I what's notable here is that the FBI concluded that this group posed no threat to national security. The agency was not able to identify any potential criminal violations. So they closed the investigation because this group was not a threat and likely presented that information to the U.S. attorney's office in A. Of course this was 2018. Prairie land protest is July 2025. But the gov the prosecution builds its entire case around this idea that ANTIFA poses an existential threat to the nation, and they bring on their expert witness, Kyle Scheideler to make this case. They have FBI agents testify on the stand. And the point that I make in the story is that evidence that countered that from the very agency that is building this case is relevant to this trial and it was not included in discovery, although it's. Whether the DOJ willingly or unwillingly omitted this from discovery, as I've been told by legal experts, is irrelevant. It should have been included. The FBI should have turned it over. It should have been available to the defense team so that they could have questioned folks like Shideler and the FBI agents who took the stand about how the agency changed its determination from 2018 to 2020 25, and why that potentially matters.
- [18:15]
B
I have some questions about Shidler, but I have one other question about just on this, on this track is that is Antifa was definitely a rhetorical sort of, it was an adversary of the Trump administration that he talked about often. Seems as we've talked with you before, but definitely they've moved some structural pieces around or and augmented some structures within the DOJ and within the FBI and probably other agencies. But how much did we see that happening in the first Trump term? Was it just him ranting about Antifa or were they making these moves then which like laid the groundwork in the. My other follow up to that also would be is like, how much did the Biden administration continue with that?
- [18:58]
A
I think we started to see under the first Trump administration the kind of the scaffolding being erected around, around this idea that antifa and the radical left and they use different terms. Right. To characterize the enemy within. I think Antifa has become a stand in for all of that. But it didn't, I wouldn't say that it got all that far during the first term. You had, you actually had some like Ted Cruz, I think, sent a letter to Bill Bard asking him to go after Antifa from Mexico, Cancun maybe. But I think as the FBI documents that, that I reported on show, there was no there. And I don't have any reason to believe that it was a priority for the Biden administration. We all know that it's a bipartisan sort of thing to go after political dissidents and radicals. But I think this notion that Antifa is a larger sort of structural threat is new to the second Trump administration. And we're seeing that advance by the, the doj. And we don't, I don't yet have a good sense of what's happening internally, what Kind of moves they're making to target organizations or individuals aligned, supposedly aligned with Antifa. That remains a bit of a mystery beyond what we've seen at Prairieland and a few other isolated cases.
- [20:33]
C
Were they defended by kind of like pro bono lawyers? Did they have good legal representation and what kind of arguments did their lawyers make?
- [20:41]
A
It was a mix. It was definitely not a movement defense. It was not really a unified defense. As far as I could tell. There was some court appointed lawyers. I think it took a long time for defendants to get good representation. They'd been in jail since July, since that night. And the case moved slowly during the first.
- [21:03]
B
It's like they were held on literally like $10 million bond, right?
- [21:06]
A
Oh, the bond was. Yeah, just off the charts. Yeah. And they were held in really deplorable conditions in county jail for the first several months. And then I think things really accelerated after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization. The bond, the Bondi memo, which, the, sorry, the presidential memo, National Security memo, expanding on this idea of Antifa as a threat and the sort of political beliefs that surround it. And then this trial became the. The poster child for the administration's crackdown on Antifa. And they were very public about that. When the, when the indictment was unsealed, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi made a lot of noise about what this signified and they moved things very quickly and the judge was incredibly willing to meet them halfway in terms of moving this forward. Yeah. And here we are.
- [22:06]
C
So did their lawyers make just a basic First Amendment defense? These are zines, these are ideas.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah, sorry, I forgot the second part of your question. So the defense first, I should say that. And this remains somewhat of a mystery. The defense rested after the prosecution made its case. They called none of their witnesses. And it, yes, it surprised everyone. I was actually in the courtroom that day. This was Tuesday, the last week of the trial. The government had just spent the last two weeks, witness after witness, all this evidence introduced Kyle Scheideler of the center for Security Policy and on. And you had the nine defendants and their various defense teams. I think their belief was that the government's case was weak and that they could make their case. And closing arguments, they each got about, I think it was 12 minutes in their closing. The government got, I think an hour and a half. So they made a variety. The First Amendment argument was in there. The idea that this was just a protest, it was not some sort of conspiracy. They tried to debunk some of the Antifa. Claims. But it was, it was a mix. It really was because each defendant was facing their own particular charges and their attorneys argued on their behalf. Certainly it was coordinated to some extent, but I think that that probably presented some real challenges for all of them.
- [23:43]
B
My question, while we're still in the trial, because you've mentioned him a couple times and I think your piece talks about him as the state's like star witness. Could you talk about Kyle Scheidler?
- [23:53]
A
Yeah, Kyle Scheidler.
- [23:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [23:55]
A
I don't know a huge amount about him. He's become the star on the right for his expertise on Antifa. He works for this right wing think tank called the center for Security Policy, which it's bread and butter, is going after Muslim Americans and hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism, et cetera.
- [24:14]
C
It's the issue in Texas right now for the elections. They're going after the mosques and everything.
- [24:20]
A
Yes, and I did do some reporting on that when I was down there. And it is an interesting corollary to what we're talking about right now because a handful of prominent community leaders in the Dallas Fort Worth area have been detained and deported or remain in detention. And it's worth just pointing out that one of the detainees at the Prairie Land Detention center let Kordia, is a Palestinian student. A young woman who was involved in some of the protests at Columbia, who had been arrested, sorry, detained by ICE and ended up in the Prairie Land facility, was I think only recently released after having been detained for over a year.
- [24:59]
C
He diabetic and had all kinds of
- [25:02]
A
health issues, has been experiencing health issues. And there are a number of really horrendous stories surrounding detention in Texas. So anyway, Scheideler, he testified before the Senate in October 2025 and he drafted this paper on Antifa. It's all open source material and really provides nothing new. And he was the government's expert witness. This was the guy who made, essentially made the case that or tried to make the case. I don't know how ultimately how persuasive or effective he was. I guess convictions were delivered. So on that score, I guess you could say he succeeded. But he's made a career for himself out of this. This is his thing. And this was, I believe, the first trial that he has served as an expert witness at. But I would, I would expect to see a lot more coming from him and the center as the administration moves ahead with this, this project.
- [26:01]
B
I assume he's a talking ahead on like right wing media as well. Sounds okay.
- [26:05]
A
I Believe so I haven't done that sort of. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole. But the Intercept has done some good reporting on his background and the Center's politics and broader political project. Yeah.
- [26:19]
C
So I still can't get over they called. No, they didn't state. They didn't mount the defense. They're. If they want experts, my God, there's like literally thousands of people who law professors and academics and people like that. You could talk about antifa and no,
- [26:34]
A
it's a bit mystifying. And in fact, one of they had a witness list and one of the witnesses on that list was Mark Bray, who has written a couple of books on fascism. And the government actually introduced screenshots or photos of his book that one of the defendants had on their phone as evidence supporting this idea that it's his anti fascist handbook, whatever.
- [26:57]
C
Yeah.
- [26:59]
A
So the decision not to call him, not to call others, who you just described the legal. The defense teams have not at least publicly explained what their reasoning was, but obviously in the wake of all of these convictions, I think their own questions about why that strategy was undertaken.
- [27:22]
B
Yeah. So is there grounds for appeal? Are there appeal? Are they moving forward with appeals?
- [27:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. A handful of motions were actually filed on Friday. I have not read through them yet. I think some of them are posted at the support committee's website. And it's my understanding that the appeals process is an ongoing thing and that additional appeals will likely be filed after the sentencing in June. I don't think there's much among the defense or the support committee. I don't think there's much hope that the judge is going to uphold any of these, but it'll eventually get bumped up to the 5th Circuit and I guess good luck there. Right.
- [28:04]
C
Yeah, it's. That might be worse on the Supreme Court, but they're surfing.
- [28:09]
B
Boy. Just to talk about the like bigger backdrop of what's going on, which we've talked about with you a couple of times, we're really seeing this sort of weaponizing of the Department of Justice and other agencies related to it. We've also been seeing the expansion of the terror label. Trump actually spoke at something on Friday where he was talking about environmentalists, but he corrected himself and said, actually I just call them environmental terrorists. And so how does this case fit in with that greater narrative that they're trying to create, that the Trump administration and the right wing media is trying to create?
- [28:45]
A
They've definitely been throwing the domestic terror label around at every opportunity. We saw it with Alex Preddy and Renee Goode, after they were shot and killed, essentially immediately described as domestic terrorists. We've seen it in the instances of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which the shooter's politics remain pretty ambiguous, but they just call him a domestic terrorist. This framing, it's almost become meaningless in my mind, if you're going to apply it with such sort of disregard for any kind of relationship to ideology or politics. But of course, the Trump administration's efforts to demonize the left, of course, is standard. And I think that the bigger project is to defang and undermine institutions, organizations, support networks, potentially crack down on in ways that we have not even seen yet on protest and organizing in the run up to the midterms November. And we saw, I guess it's worth just remembering the administration's first targets, which were student activists involved in the protest against the war in Gaza, including Mahmoud Khalil, who was a green card holder and arrested in the lobby, detained in the lobby of his apartment. He has an Oscar taken off of the street in Massachusetts. And on. It is part of a larger. I don't even know if we have the right words to describe it. Blue scare, political repression, you take your pick. But it's been somewhat scattershot, I think, as everything the Trump administration does tends to be. But it's swept up many victims in its wake.
- [30:36]
C
Like, on the surface, it's. We can look at this and it's insane.
- [30:38]
B
Right?
- [30:39]
C
It's preposterous that you're labeling these people. You mentioned earlier, the bipartisan nature of it. The campus stuff started with Democrats and they greased the skids for all this. But I haven't seen any support for Prairie Lane. I'm sure no one's going to tell you, but. And just in general, even with the Minneapolis murders, like, you don't see really Democrats, Democratic leaders coming out and doing anything or saying anything about this. Trump, doesn't he just have an open field that do whatever crazy shit he wants? And I think most Americans know it.
- [31:05]
B
It's.
- [31:05]
C
This is preposterous. But is there anybody, any. Were there any support for these defendants in Texas?
- [31:12]
A
Very little, I have to say, was. I think Democrats in general are afraid to touch anything that involves ICE and immigration.
- [31:19]
C
75 voted to praise them as civil servants. Right.
- [31:23]
A
And I think in particular this case, most even left larger organizations have. Have kept their distance. There was a small group, but there was. The support committee had organized a kind of a protest. Protest slash information table in the park across from the courtroom. There were only a handful of people there. I saw there was a pastor who showed up on the last day because I think some of the members of the support committee had met with local religious leaders and tried to explain to them why this case mattered. But I think that is something they've really struggled with, is building awareness about the case and gaining support from larger organizations that might have some influence. And certainly the political class has not gone anywhere near it.
- [32:13]
B
To Contrast this with cop city, like cop people, 30 some odd people, maybe more. I'm getting my numbers wrong. We're charged with rico. I think there were some terrorism charges thrown in on that, all at the state level with the Georgia, Their like legal support fund raised like four or five million dollars. And my understanding is with the Prairieland folks, they didn't come close to that. And yeah, and also with the cop City defendants, we've seen a lot of like more in. I don't know if we're seeing politicians, but we're seeing like other institutions which have supported those defendants where it's just not happened here.
- [32:48]
A
I think part of the explanation for that is that the cop city movement had built up over the course of years really and they established a foundation and a network and supported popular and public support. The Prairieland K. It's a nice, it's a. It was a protest that went off the rails and there, there wasn't a groundswell of support for. There's a lot of opposition to ICE and the Trump administration's policies on immigration. You can see that all around. But I just think they're very different examples. And I can, I think the cop city, yes, they had a very robust bail support network and were effective in rallying around the folks who were detained. And I think it was actually more than 60 who were faced the RICO charges.
- [33:36]
B
Yeah, I was said 30, but I meant 60.
- [33:39]
A
No, but it was a lot. And a not insignificant number also faced domestic terrorism charges, which I think, I don't even think those indictments have been brought. The RICO charges I believe have been tossed. The movements support it. It does it, it matters.
- [33:52]
B
But how it's a. There's a broad based organizing effort around Cop City which included like racial justice groups and environmental groups, community groups, which is not what we've seen here.
- [34:05]
C
How much it would seem to me the venue had something to do with this too. We're seeing, not necessarily in cases like this, but we're seeing grand juries and juries toss a bunch of stuff that, that Trump's people are bringing. But this is Texas.
- [34:16]
A
It's Dallas.
- [34:17]
C
Right. Is that the old. You can indict a ham sandwich in Texas, but I would assume that probably contributed to it.
- [34:23]
A
I think it's part of it. So it's Fort Worth. And as I learned in some of the reporting, we don't want to mix Dallas in Fort Worth.
- [34:30]
C
Yeah, especially.
- [34:31]
A
No, but I'm a native 30 years. Yeah. I don't know. I don't have any credibility. So when it comes to Texas, but
- [34:40]
B
technically a fourth generation Fort Worthy in here.
- [34:43]
A
All right, good. So you'll sympathize with maybe with the judge who made it clear that this was not a courtroom in Dallas, this was a courtroom in Fort Worth and they were going to play by his rules. And as you guys may know, having read Thumb about the case, one of the the big things he did on day one during jury selection was declare a mistrial because one of the defense attorneys was wearing a T shirt with the faces of civil rights protesters underneath her blazer. And Judge Pittman said that this was prejudicial and he declared a mistrial. Observers and some of the reporting on that particular day indicate that he was not particularly pleased with some of the responses that prospecturers were giving to questions about ICE and protest. So maybe he felt like things were moving in a direction that he didn't, he didn't like. Anyway, he called, declared a mistrial a week later, had a new jury pool, it was smaller, and he basically required that the attorney submit questions to him, which he then posed to the jury pool, effectively handpicking the jury. And there were a number of other decisions that he made denying motions. He denied a motion from one of the defendant's team, Zachary Evitz. They wanted more information. They wanted additional discovery on law enforcement records related to Antifa, which are directly related to the story that I wrote. And presumably in such a discovery request, the FBI would have been forced to hand over those records. So the judge denied that motion. And then he actually fined each of the attorneys $500 for what he called frivolous activity. And then I guess one other thing I'll add is that he granted a government motion asking that the defense not be allowed to make a argument that the defendants were acting in self defense on the evening of July 4th. So they couldn't make that case. And it given some of the information that came out in the trial, the fact that the police officer pulled his weapon first on the last day during closing arguments, Benjamin Song's attorney, Philip Hayes, made the argument that Song was actually shooting his, the rifle into the ground it was suppressive fire and that the bullet ricocheted and then struck the officer in a shoulder blade. So essentially arguing that this was based on forensic evidence and video, that he was not aiming at the officer, there was no intent to murder. So that you could see where that self defense argument might have been, how it might have been used if judge had allowed that to happen. So yeah, it was, it was a tough backdrop, I think defense and I don't think they face an easy road ahead with the fifth Circuit and also the cases in Johnson county at the state level.
- [37:41]
B
I have one last question. I don't know if Bob has anything else. My last question is because, and you refer to this in the article too is are we seeing any other prosecutions like this right now you talk about Rose City Antifa, which is Portland area. You see sometimes salacious right wing media stories about they found an antifa safe house in Portland, things like that. But have we seen any other like prosecutions like this?
- [38:06]
A
Nothing as high profile. I haven't followed this at all. But there was the case in California that appears to have been shaped and massaged by the FBI. This Turtle island cell that we, you and I, Scott talked about at one point.
- [38:24]
B
I have Southern California. Yeah.
- [38:26]
A
Was it Southern California? So I haven't actually kept hats on that. I don't know where things stand, I think because I think the, what the government runs up against is the fact that these cases are or effort to build these cases. They're incredibly weak. We've seen that with Cop city with the J20 and there just isn't evidence to support any kind of organized left wing conspiracy to overthrow the government. But that doesn't mean that they won't try to prosecute organizations and activists in other ways. And I think we'll see that in the next, the next half of term 2.0.
- [39:06]
C
Yeah.
- [39:08]
B
Adam, always great to talk to you. Although even if it's not always the greatest of topics. Really appreciate you coming on folks. We've been talking with Adam Fetterman, journalist who has a new piece in these Times called FBI Files Counter Government Argument in Texas Antifa Trial and end. So folks should check that out and we'll have that in the show notes. If you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you are listening to this on audio platform, give us a rate and a review. If you really let's go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit the support button or become a patron@patreon.com GreenRedPodcast Also, Adam is a new Blue sky account holder, so you can also follow Adam on Blue Sky. I've recently noted and until we talk again, folks, go out there and make trouble and misbehave and we'll catch you again soon.