Bedford anti-tax advocate is movement's new hero

I spent part of this week in a bizarre world. U.S. District Judge John McBryde, the no-nonsense judge once accused by a fellow federal judge of "bizarre and bullying conduct," locked me along with dozens of other spectators in his courtroom. McBryde really did order his bailiffs to lock the door.

And who was I locked in there with? An all-star team of federal income-tax haters, some of whom don't recognize the authority of the United States government, and showed this by refusing to stand whenever the judge and jury entered the courtroom.

It was the trial of Bedford businessman Richard Simkanin, who was convicted Wednesday of 29 counts of violating U.S. tax laws. McBryde locked the door because he said he didn't want people running in and out. But courthouse security was tight and protesters outside held signs demanding McBryde's impeachment.

I would bet you money, tax-free of course, that hardly anybody in that courtroom pays federal income taxes. Most were proud of it, and who wouldn't be if they could get away with something like that? Even a reporter for a "patriotic" Web site sitting next to me said she didn't pay federal income taxes. "But don't put my name in the paper," she said.

Simkanin has been locked in a federal cell for months after he supposedly had a meeting at his Bedford office and, an informant alleged, said that killing a few judges might attract attention to the cause. His supporters, including a Round Rock talk radio host who told me that he attended the meeting in question, said Simkanin never said any such thing. But McBryde wasn't taking chances.

The tax haters in the courtroom hated McBryde as much as they hate income taxes. They acted surprised when he didn't let the trial become a circus testing the validity of federal income tax laws. No, McBryde figured his job was to help a jury determine whether Simkanin broke laws when he stopped filing personal tax returns and ceased withholding federal taxes from his Bedford employees' paychecks.

Simkanin may be the ultimate Bedford character in a city of great characters. After research in his library, which he called "one of the largest tax-book private libraries in Texas," he testified that he concluded taxes were, in his words, "alleged taxes."

At one point, he became so angry about the federal tax system that he announced on his Web site that he was expatriating himself from the United States, which he said was a government "in rebellion against the Republic of Texas."

He began telling his employees that those who pay federal taxes "become tax slaves." And although we all know that's true, he took it much further.

Once he received a letter from the Department of the Treasury, but he challenged it, testifying that for all he knew, it could have been from the Department of the Treasury of Puerto Rico.

He surrendered his Texas driver's license and replaced it with his own ID cards, including one from the "International Governmental Affairs Agency." He admitted he made that up because, he testified, "it just sounded good."

He named his sister-in-law, who joined the company as a file clerk, his replacement as president. He asked her to pay him in cash and take his name off official papers so he could drop off the government's radar. His accountants told him he was making huge mistakes, and when he wouldn't listen, they resigned.

But for someone who wanted off the radar, he sure flew back on. With others, he took out a full-page ad in USA Today explaining why he had serious reservations about the federal income tax system. And he surrounded himself with that all-star team of anti-taxpayers who are household names in households that don't pay taxes. These buddies served as a crazy cast of character witnesses at his trial.

There was Joseph Banister, a former IRS special agent who was recently hauled into a San Francisco federal court by prosecutors who demanded that he stop telling people income taxes were illegal. At first, the feds considered having Banister's hearing last month on an isolated federal island to keep out the kind of crowd with whom I shared the locked courtroom. But later they relented and yanked him into a regular courtroom.

There was Eduardo Rivera, a pony-tailed lawyer from California who took the stand to say that he didn't believe that everyone had to pay income taxes. But under cross-examination by federal prosecutors, he acknowledged that a permanent injunction had been placed against him in a California federal court that prevented him from saying just those things.

There was Bob Shulz, the founder of We the People for Constitutional Education, who complained on the witness stand that this whole anti-tax argument stems from the fact that the 16th Amendment enacting a federal income tax was improperly ratified in 1913. Somebody should get on that.

And there was Larken Rose, an Internet anti-tax rebel who called income tax a "fraud without rival in history" and said the IRS was an "extortion racket." On a Web site, I found a letter by him titled "Please Prosecute Me" that begins, "I, Larken Rose, have not filed a federal income tax return for 1997 or any subsequent year."

But Rose has not been prosecuted, probably because he doesn't make enough money selling videotapes off his Web site for the government to spend money chasing him. It is Simkanin, now Bedford's own convicted tax martyr, who is the newest hero of the movement.

In closing arguments, his lawyer asked the jury, "Does he look like a criminal to you?"

These jury members, who see an April 15 tax deadline coming their way, are no suckers. Hey, if they pay, why shouldn't the guy with the funny driver's license pay, too? So in answer to the question about whether he looked like a criminal, they unanimously answered that he did.

I don't defend our tax system; I condemn the snake-oil salesmen who channel the opposition to our tax system into crazy, self-defeating channels.

And speaking of snake-oil salesmen, check out the opinion of another federal judge on whether judges who get paid with the income tax dime are impartial or not:

...The IBT nevertheless contends that because Judge Lacey is paid by the Government for performing the discrete function of an independent counsel and because Judge Lacey took an oath as Independent Counsel to support and defend the Constitution, he occupies a position with the Government. . . . The IBT has proffered factors that go to whether, in a literal sense, Judge Lacey is a Government employee, rather than whether he will be, in actuality and appearance, an impartial member of the IRB. As already noted, Judge Lacey's impartiality is not threatened by his serving as Independent Counsel. An example illuminates the shallow nature of the IBT's argument. Like an Independent Counsel, a federal judge is paid by the Government, and also must take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Taking the IBT's argument to its logical conclusion, all federal judges occupy "positions with the Government," such that they could not impartially address matters where the Government is a party. Nevertheless, it is the unquestioned responsibility of every federal judge to try all cases in a just and impartial fashion. More often than [**27] not, the Government is a party in the matters heard in federal court; nevertheless, the fact that the Government issues a judge's paycheck in no way compromises his or her ability or duty to render fair and impartial decisions. It is ludicrous even to suggest that a federal judge be barred from adjudicating matters where the Government is a party. Similarly, the fact that Judge Lacey is paid by the Government for serving as Independent Counsel and the fact that he took an oath of office in no way negates or impairs his ability to render impartial decisions...

From the Quatloos Tax Protestor Hall of Fame:

Our 100Q Woopoo chip commemorates notorious tax scam artists. Usually it isn't difficult to figure out where these crooks are coming from, but occasionally there is the exception.

Alleged "former" IRS-CID agent Joseph Bannister is a regular speaker at "tax protestor" events and has published the book "Investigating the Income Tax". In just a couple of years, Bannister has emerged as the poster child of the de-tax gurus, appearing on national TV interviews -- where, amazingly, he admits that he himself reports and pays his income tax, although advocating to others that the payment of income taxes is "voluntary". Strange.

But it gets even stranger: Many of the "tax protestor" gurus are convinced that Bannister is simply a plant and is still working for the IRS-CID in an attempt to infiltrate the de-tax industry. Pat Shannan, who lingers on the periphery of the tax protestor crowd, claims that Larry Becraft has warned that Bannister is still an IRS-CID agent and a "Trojan Horse" to infiltrate the business. According to Shanna, Becraft purportedly told Bill Benson, "I don't care what he says, Bill, he's still a !@#$% IRS agent, and I don't trust him!"

Fellow Quatlooser Otto Skinner has proclaimed Bannister to be an undercover IRS plant, see http://www.ottoskinner.com/ articles/ banister.html

Nobody even knows if Joseph Bannister is this guy's real name. Few IRS agents use their real names when on duty, because of fear of retaliation by citizens whom they have crossed. And, Bannister burst onto the scene in 1999 when the IRS was just realizing that it had a significant problem with tax protestors, so the timing is pretty suspicious.

Bannister's website is http://www.freedomabovefortune.com where he sells The Bannister Report and gives out his free report "Investigating the Federal Income Tax". Bannister claims to have been inspired by fellow tax scam artists and Quatlosers Bill Conklin and Devvy Kidd. Bannister seems to show up with Conklin and Kidd at speaking events, along with another Quatlooser, Bill Benson. We suspect Bannister is one of two things: (1) an ex-IRS agent who figured out that he could make a lot more money selling de-tax books and stuff than he could working for the governent, and who believes that so long as he pays his own taxes the U.S. government can't do much about it as long as he throws in the appropriate disclaimers into his materials (which he does) and thinks that the suckers dumb enough to believe him get what they deserve; or (2) he is -- as many in the tax protestor movement suspect -- a plant. Our bet is on the first.

Or my favorite scam artist, John Kotmair, the man behind "Save A Patriot Foundation" and the mentor and boss of a certain political discussion board operator.

John Kotmair

John B. Kotmair, Jr., of Save-A-Patriot.org has spent the last couple of decades losing case after case to the IRS. Kotmair’s argument is that the payment of income taxes is "voluntary" - an argument that has lost every single time it has made it before a court. According to taxes.com, Kotmair was convicted and served time in the 1980s, which is rather a strong anti-endorsement of his theories.

Save-A-Patriot is one of the few tax protestor scams that even most tax protestors believe is a scam. Several websites set up by victims of Save-A-Patriot actively encourage the U.S. Department of Justice to shut down this scam, and even provide on-line complaint forms about Save-A-Patriot (see below). Nonetheless, Kotmair is held out by fellow Quatlooser Bob Schultz's "We the People" scam as being one of its "experts". Kotmair, like the rest of the tax scam artists, also makes his money selling worthless audio and video tapes available only by sending him “cash or blank postal money order”.

In the past, Kotmair has attempted to appear on behalf of the "National Workers" Rights Committee” to try to convince employers that they are not required to withhold taxes or social security from members of Save-A-Patriot, but these attempts have uniformly been rejected by whatever agencies were involved at the time. It’s tough to consistently bat a perfect .000 but Kotmair seems to do it in a variety of endeavors. Even Thurston Bell considers Kotmair a "proven fraud"and Rick Haraka’s “Taxprotestor.com” claims that Kotmair is defrauding his clientele (see "Irresponsibility or Fraud" below).

Most recently, John's son, Edward Kotmair, was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and sentenced to a medium-security prison in Maryland. This caused many people to ask the quite logical question: "How can Kotmair help any member of the Save-A-Patriot Fellowship if he can’t keep his own son out of jail?" As an aside, the elder Kotmair believes that the prison guards leaked to the other prison inmates that Edward was a "government informant" and that within a week Edward had been brutalized to an extent requiring facial plastic surgery. More likely, somebody had a relative in the joint who had been scammed by Save-A-Patriot.

Schiff v. United States, 919 F.2d 830, 833 (2d Cir. 1990), cert. denied, 501 U.S. 1238 (1991) - the court rejected Schiff's arguments as meritless and upheld imposition of the civil fraud penalty, stating "[t]he frivolous nature of this appeal is perhaps best illustrated by our conclusion that Schiff is precisely the sort of taxpayer upon whom a fraud penalty for failure to pay income taxes should be imposed. Packard v. United States, 7 F. Supp. 2d 143, 145 (D. Conn. 1998) - the court dismissed Packard's refund suit for recovery of penalties for failure to pay income tax and failure to pay estimated taxes where the taxpayer contested the obligation to pay taxes on religious grounds, noting that "the ability of the Government to function could be impaired if persons could refuse to pay taxes because they disagreed with the Government's use of tax revenues.

"Did you read about the judges actions in that case, hell he openly stated that he considered this person and his friends to be 'cult-like', that is bias in of itself."

He's right you know. Check any of the thread on this case or the We The People website if you have any doubt.

BTW, Judge McBryde made that remark concerning why he thought Simkanin should be kept in jail before his trial. Simkanin and a number of his "followers" were threatening to have the judges involved killed.

From the Star-Telegraph:

McBryde issued a scathing order July 14, stating his reasons for keeping Simkanin in jail pending trial. He remained in jail Tuesday afternoon.

"He and those who share his views have a cult-like belief that laws that are generally accepted by citizens of the United States are not applicable to them," McBryde said in his July 14 order. "Certain of them have joined Simkanin in publicly announcing that they are not complying with the internal revenue laws of the United States."

The judge noted that Simkanin's Web site published what amounted to a "thinly veiled threat to public officials that they will suffer serious consequences if they attempt to do any harm to him." The warning spoke of the "fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries."

McBryde said an undercover informant present at an April 20, 2002, meeting of tax protesters at Simkanin's business quoted Simkanin as saying: "I think we need to knock off a couple of federal judges. That will get their attention."

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/local/6904851.htm

Sounds cult-like to me.

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