Attorney Edgar Steele "charged in murder-for-hire plot"

[Rev.WillWilliams]

North Idaho attorney with long ties to hate groups arrested in murder-for-hire plot
BY KATHLEEN KRELLER AND CYNTHIA SEWELL - kkreller@idahostatesman.com
Published: 06/11/10

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/06/11/1227671/north-idaho-attorney-with-long.html?storylink=mirelated#ixzz0qqfuZFJZ

A North Idaho attorney long connected to hate groups like the Aryan Nations has been charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Coeur d'Alene in a murder-for-hire plot to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

Edgar J. Steele was arrested Friday at his Sagle residence — the same day he wanted his wife and her mother to be killed in a pre-arranged car crash meant to look like an accident, according to an affidavit filed with the federal court.

"The United States Magistrate had found probable cause for the offense," said Traci Whelan, an assistant U.S. Attorney. "As for the timing of the arrest, it was prudent given he had apparently set a deadline for it today."

According to the court documents, a confidential witness approached the FBI on June 9 and told agents Steele had asked the witness to kill the two women.

The witness, who worked for Steele, said six months earlier Steele had initiated a conversation about a list of people he wanted killed, including his wife and her mother. The witness agreed to the plot and accepted money, court documents say.

The witness told the FBI Steele paid $500 in cash for travel expenses and promised as much as $25,000 if the murders were completed on Friday, June 11. According to the affidavit, Steele promised the witness another $100,000 if an insurance policy paid out after his wife's murder.

Court documents show the informant was wired during conversations with Steele, who told the witness the murders must be completed on Friday because of an alibi, court documents said.

"Prior to the interview ending, Edgar Steele told (the witness) that he has no second thoughts and he wants the plan carried out," the affidavit says."This statement was made multiple times during the meet."

The court documents say Steele told the informant if they were caught he would deny knowing them. But if the informant was caught and did not implicate Steele, the informant's family would be compensated.

It is unclear why Steele was targeting his wife. Wheelan said she believed the couple was still married and was not separated. Steele's wife was visiting or helping out with a health care issue at her mother's house in Oregon, Wheelan said.

Whelan said the complaint is just a charging document and is not proof of guilt. Steele will likely appear at a preliminary hearing on Monday, Whelan said. The case must yet go before a grand jury.

"Neither the FBI or U.S. Attorney's Office would proceed in a case where we didn't feel there was proof to charge," Whelan said.

Steele is in custody on federal felony charges, Whelan said, but she declined to reveal where he is being held.

According to his website, Steele is an author and trial lawyer who graduated from the UCLA School of Law. His law practice is "noteworthy for cases that test the limits of constitutional law on behalf of politically incorrect clients."

He is noted for his unsuccessful defense of the Aryan Nations and its founder Richard Butler in a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought against them in 2000. Steele has expressed his anti-Semitic and racist views in online rants and in the book "Defensive Racism: An Unapologetic Examination of Racial Differences."

Steele said he has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, Fox News, Dateline, NBC Nightly News, Court TV, Geraldo and CNN in connection with both his writing and the high-profile cases he has handled.

Last year, in response to the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum of a security guard by neo-Nazi James von Brunn, Steele said, "Why did Von Brunn choose to unload at the National Holocaust Museum? Because it is an edifice to one of the most stupendous lies of modern times, paid for and maintained with taxpayer dollars, that's why."

He has also represented controversial clients like the McGuckins, a North Idaho family who held off police seeking to take custody of several children during a standoff in 2001. He also sought to overturn Idaho's hate crime laws.

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/06/11/1227671/north-idaho-attorney-with-long.html?storylink=mirelated#ixzz0qqfjXX4N
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More discussion here: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t716987/

[Rev.WillWilliams]

http://www.kxly.com/news/23895804/detail.html

Attorney charged in murder-for-hire plot

Posted: 12:25 pm PDT June 14, 2010

BOISE, Idaho -- Federal prosecutors have charged a northern Idaho attorney with hiring a hit man to try to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

Edgar J. Steele, who is well known from his work representing hate groups such as the Aryan Nations, was arrested Friday in Sagle.

The Idaho Statesman reports that court records say a witness told the FBI Steele offered to pay him up to $125,000 to murder the women in a car crash meant to look like an accident. Agents concealed a recording device on the witness, and say in court documents that the device recorded Steele saying he wanted the plan carried out and had no second thoughts.

Federal court documents obtained by the Statesman indicate that Steele contacted someone he had known for the last 20 years to murder his wife and mother-in-law. The witness showed up to Steele's house last week and that's when the attorney allegedly started talking about paying thousands of dollars to have his wife and mother-in-law killed.

The affidavit of probable cause in Steele's arrest shows that he was willing to pay $500 in cash for travel expenses and promised $25,000 plus an additional $100,000 if his wife's life insurance paid out.

Steele, according to court documents, wanted his wife and mother-in-law killed in a car crash last Friday while his wife visited her mother in Oregon and wanted their deaths to look like an accident. Steele allegedly warned the hit man that he didn't want to be left taking care of a paraplegic if the accident was unsuccessful.

The author of a book entitled "Defensive Racism", Steele describes himself as "exceedingly politically incorrect." One of his more notable cases involved his defense, in 2000, of the Aryan Nations and its leader Richard Butler in a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought about by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Victoria and Jason Keenan, who were attacked by guards at the Aryan Nations compound in 1998.

The Keenans won a more than $6 Million judgment against Butler and the Aryan Nations, effectively bankrupting the organization and forcing them out of their compound near Hayden Lake.

Steele, who declined to comment on this story, is being held in the Kootenai County Jail. When contacted for comment on this report Steele's wife Cyndi also declined to comment.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report © 2010 KXLY.com. All rights reserved.

[Rev.WillWilliams]

Though Mr. Steele didn't help Matt Hale with his appeal, as expected, he did take a strong stand on Hale's behalf:
---

The Railroading of Matt Hale
by Edgar J. Steele
March 4, 2005
I've held my tongue on the Matt Hale case until now because I have agreed with him to serve as defense counsel in his anticipated retrial.

You see, Hale was declared a domestic terrorist and has been held incommunicado under provisions of the draconian and woefully-misnamed Patriot Act. Those associated with the case have been required to sign "SAM" (Special Administrative Procedure") documents which require their public silence. The Feds mean business, too, as lawyers are sitting in federal prison cells right now, accused of violating SAM agreements in other cases. I haven't signed a SAM document in Hale's case yet because I have not taken on an official role. Of course, I haven't been given direct access to Hale, either. We have been forced to communicate in writing, by letter...when my letters haven't been denied to Hale and returned by the authorities, that is. Even so, an attorney-client relationship has existed between Hale and myself for some time now.

I bit my tongue throughout my defense of Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations several years ago, too, following conventional wisdom in the legal field. That was a mistake and the last, I vowed, that I would make in using media available in a high-profile case. While I sat and watched, Butler was tried and convicted in the media. Mind you, in retrospect, it is clear he was a goner before I ever took on the case, but it didn't help that I didn't sally forth on every TV and radio show I could find, to make his case and try to level the playing field.

Because of what I am about to tell you, the Feds can be expected to use this SAM business in an attempt to bar me from handling Hale's case if he manages to persuade an appellate court to give him the new trial he deserves. Nevertheless, someone in the legal field has to stand up for Matt Hale before things go any further. Nobody else will do so, it seems, so I take it upon myself even though it means that Hale likely will have to represent himself in any retrial. And I'm going to continue to speak out on Hale's case to all who will listen. He deserves a defense and he simply hasn't been getting it. In fact, Matt Hale has been on the business end of one of the most massive railroad jobs I have seen occur in modern American courts (and that is saying something!).

Obviously, what motivates me to change position today is the lynching Hale is receiving in the media as a result of the murder of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother.

First, I offer sincere condolences to Judge Lefkow. Nothing could possibly justify what has been done to her family and herself. Nothing. Illegal acts as heinous as murder are the final resort of those both brutish and misinformed. I cannot more clearly condemn what has taken place, regardless of who is responsible (and I think I know where to point the finger, as you will learn shortly).

Having said all that, let me next say that Matt Hale is innocent. He is innocent of having anything to do with the Lefkow murders. Furthermore, Hale is innocent of the charge of conspiracy to murder Judge Lefkow, for which he was convicted and now sits in jail, awaiting sentencing. Additionally, Hale is innocent of the original charge of trademark infringement which supposedly led Hale to take part in a plot to kill the judge. Please pay close attention, because I am going to prove all these things to you today, in this very essay, with but a smattering of simple logic and the application of a couple of well-founded principles of law.

At every turn, for years now, Matt Hale has been railroaded, ramrodded and gulled by the very system which now presumes to pass sentence and punish him for crimes he did not commit. Matt Hale is a political prisoner in every sense of the word. Keep an open mind for the next few minutes and see if you don't agree.
Let's take things chronologically:

1. Matt Hale headed up the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), a branch of the "Creativity" religion. Creativity is a bona-fide, court-recognized, non-Christian religion, despite its highly-controversial and self-avowed White Supremacist nature (see Peterson vs. Wilmur Communications, 205 F.Supp.2d 1014, 2002 - go here for court's opinion). Founded in 1973 by Ben Klassen, Hale resurrected WCOTC in 1996 and ran it continuously under that name through 2002. Violence was a hallmark of Klassen's stewardship, whereas under Hale WCOTC members generally behaved themselves...with one notable exception (see 3, below).

2. Matt Hale was wrongfully denied the right he earned to be a lawyer. In June 1998, Hale graduated from the Southern Illinois University School of Law and soon thereafter passed the Illinois State Bar. He was denied admission to the Bar, and the license to practice law he had earned, though his record was spotless. The denial was on the basis of Hale's racial beliefs (part and parcel of his court-recognized religion, don't forget), though Blacks in prison for racially-motivated murders of Whites have earned law degrees and been welcomed with open arms to the practice of law upon their parole.

3. A WCOTC adherent went on a killing spree on July 2, 1999, the day that Hale announced he had been denied admission to the Illinois state bar by an administrative appeals board. Though the timing is more than suggestive, there never has been a hint that Hale suggested or countenanced the murderous rampage by Benjamin Smith directed at Blacks, Jews and Asians, which left two dead and nine wounded.

4. WCOTC's very name was stolen by the ADL, with the aid of the courts. In 2000, an Oregon corporation, Te-Ta-Ma, secretly founded and funded by the ADL through its Regional Director, Richard Hirschhaut, applied for and received a trademark on the phrase "Church of the Creator." Shortly thereafter, in May 2000, the ADL filed suit in Illinois Federal District Court through its straw man, Te-Ta-Ma, against Hale and WCOTC for trademark infringement. Judge Lefkow ruled against the ADL, which appealed her ruling and persuaded a three-judge panel to issue an order directing Judge Lefkow to reverse herself and grant judgment to Te-Ta-Ma. Lefkow followed orders, as she legally was bound to do, and subsequently threatened to hold Hale in contempt for failing to turn over every publication which bore the WCOTC name. Hale responded that he possessed none, as he had stepped aside as head of WCOTC to concentrate on the court appeal of his bar admission denial. As Hale prepared to defend himself on the contempt charge, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to commit the murder of Judge Lefkow...the very Federal judge who previously had ruled in his favor, not of any of the appellate justices who sided with the ADL against him.

5. Hale's entrapment was engineered by the FBI. An FBI plant, Anthony Evola, wormed his way into Hale's confidence and was named head of WCOTC's security force (Hale and his followers regularly received death threats and had been the targets of multiple assaults and property vandalizations through the years). Evola secretly recorded conversations with Hale that were, at worst, noncommittal concerning Evola's offer to "exterminate...the Jew rat" (a male Jew rat, as transcripts made clear). At one point, Hale was recorded as saying, "I'm going to fight within the law." Also, note that, while Judge Lefkow is married to a Jew, she herself is not Jewish, a fact known at the time to both Hale and the FBI.

6. Hale's trial was a sham. The FBI plant, Evola, testified that, during a conversation wherein he asked if Hale wanted him to "get the rat," Hale nodded affirmatively. Never was any evidence presented other than that single bit of testimony concerning Hale's alleged approval of the FBI scheme. A good deal of circumstantial and highly prejudicial evidence, especially concerning Benjamin Smith's rampage, was allowed, however. Directly upon the State resting its case, Hale's attorney, noted Chicago criminal defense lawyer and former Federal prosecutor Thomas Durkin, rose and rested Hale's defense without calling a single witness or introducing a single shred of evidence. Durkin reportedly made numerous remarks derogatory to his own client throughout the trial both during the State's case and during closing argument. I understand the ploy: by acting as he did, Durkin presumably hoped to make plain the weakness of the State's case. Problem is, Durkin didn't understand how juries respond to politically-incorrect defendants (though, prior to the trial, Durkin personally assured me that he well understood the situation in which he found Matt Hale, an assurance I passed on to Hale's family and that played a large part in their retaining Durkin; an assurance that retrospect now shows me to have been either a lie or merely incompetent).

I can just imagine the conversations in the jury room during deliberations:

"He never took the stand to defend himself, so he must be guilty."

"His lawyer kept putting him down and then didn't even present a defense, so he must be guilty."

"The Feds never lie, so he must be guilty."

"Nasty White Supremacist - he must be guilty."

Remember the composition of the jury: Black, Jewish and Asian, the very sort of people previously targeted by Benjamin Smith; the very sort of people that Hale repeatedly was shown to have denigrated down through the years.

Why was there no change of venue sought and granted, in order to get the trial moved out of the highly-inflammatory Chicago area, where the jury composition was highly predictable?

Why did lawyer Durkin put his own client down in front of the jury and then decline to put on even a bare case?

Why wasn't Matt Hale called to the witness stand? After all, Hale is a lawyer and could be expected to carefully couch his answers and be on the lookout for prosecutorial traps.

Why would Hale solicit the murder of the only judge who had ruled in his favor?

How, exactly, did Hale engineer the murder of Lefkow's family members, while his own family and lawyers, including myself, have been denied access to him?

Judge Lefkow ruled correctly in Hale's favor in the first instance - it was the appellate panel that was wrong. I studied intellectual property law extensively at UCLA under the man who quite literally wrote "the book": Professor Mel Nimmer. If Mel Nimmer were alive today, he would tell you about the established practice in this sort of case of disallowing such a trademark in geographic areas in which prior usage of it by another could be established, just as had been done by Hale and WCOTC.

Elementary law supports Hale in his quest for a law license and to protect the name WCOTC. Elementary logic disputes any inference that he wanted Judge Lefkow dead. If he wanted a judge dead for the trademark ruling, he had three candidates that apparently he never considered. Why, then, would he consider Judge Lefkow?

That brings us to the Lefkow murders this past week. Judge Lefkow's husband and mother were executed in the basement of their home with a .22-caliber weapon. The weapon's caliber is of significance because the .22 is a favored weapon of the highly-skilled assassin. When used with subsonic ammunition, a .22-caliber weapon makes only a slight "pop" in the background, usually not noticeable, even, to people standing nearby. It requires extreme accuracy to be effective, which, in turn, requires extreme closeness to the victim. Having personally had to shoot pigs with a .22 rifle, preparatory to butchering them on my Idaho ranch, I can attest to how precisely even a brain shot must be made. In short, it requires a trained, seasoned assassin to kill others with a .22-caliber weapon.

Furthermore, two men with "military-style" haircuts were shooed away from an area adjacent to the judge's house earlier in the day by someone who noted that they were parked illegally in a red zone. Go here for CNN's article today, which includes a sketch of one of the men.

Recall all the hoopla about Mossad hit squads roaming the world, including America, committing murders of those considered to be enemies of Israel? Recall how they have been fingered in more than one "false-flag" operation lately? Recall all the Israeli "art students" and "moving company employees" in the past two or three years, deported from America before they could be prosecuted for crimes they had committed?

Cui bono (who benefits)? In reality, who benefits from the execution of the Lefkow family members? Who are the alleged mortal enemies of Matt Hale, the man now being lynched by the media?

New America. An idea whose time has come.

-ed

Copyright ©2005, Edgar J. Steele
Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate
among private individuals and groups, post on all Internet
sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications.
Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.

On-Line link to this article in HTML format: http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/hale.htm

[Rev.WillWilliams]

I've been running a thread about Steele at this discussion board:

http://www.politicalforum.com/law-justice/138964-racist-lawyer-jailed.html

Feds 'disappear' Edgar Steele

By John Kaminski - pseudoskylax@gmail.com
Saturday, July 10, 2010 12:44 PM

Controversial Patriot writer and lawyer Edgar J. Steele, already jailed on suspicious charges that he tried to kill his wife with a pipe bomb, has been mysteriously removed from from a Spokane, Washington detention facility and taken to an undisclosed location, according to close friends of the Steele family.

In a letter to his friend Ingri Cassell, Steele wrote that the charges of attempted murder are preposterous and blamed his hired handyman - Larry Fairfax, a known FBI informant — for trying to cover up his own theft of silver bullion from Steele's property by trying to kill both Steele and his wife.

As the enclosed letter reproduced below indicates, Steele has been held virtually incommunicado after an initial court hearing June 11 determined he was trying to intimidate witnesses — in this case his wife and son — by instructing them on how to respond to FBI interrogation. Steele also claimed that tape recordings introduced as evidence were not authentic and had been doctored by the FBI in its attempt to authenticate the trumped-up charges.

Steele, 64, has a worldwide audience of tens of thousands of Patriot aficionados accumulated both from his noble record of public actions as well as his Conspiracy Pen Pal website. All these folks are nervously awaiting word of his condition and legal status.

Steele has suffered a recent heart attack and had other medical problems after which his close knit family nursed him back to health. Some observers feel that the heart attack was induced by forces unknown. His friend Dr. Allen Banks described it like this: "Basically the top of his heart blew off. Ed told me it felt like something had 'gone off' on his chest." Steele also had three other surgeries in recent months, as well as chronic nosebleeds that remain unexplained.

Steele most recently published a book titled "Defensive Racism," and is perhaps best known for his defense of the Church of the Aryan Nations in a sensational 2000 court trial which he ultimately lost. Friends speculated on why Steele would have been the focus of such intense federal interest at this time, and both Banks and Cassell indicated that it might have been because Steele was working on a new book about Israeli international slavery practices and its ties to several European governments.

As to whether the government's charges are legitimate, Steele's many friends and readers all suspect a government witchhunt on the order of what happened to Randy Weaver, George Hansen and Gordon Kahl. Weaver was set up by a government informant in 1992 in which his son and wife were killed, better known as the Ruby Ridge incident. Hansen was the Idaho congressman who tried to start an investigation of the IRS, but then was arrested on a pretense and shuttled around the country so his friends couldn't find him. And Kahl, another tax protester, was murdered by federal agents in a particularly grisly incident in 1983 after his decades of principled patriotic tax protests.

Steele's friend Dr. Banks put it this way. "This whole thing isn't logical. Ed is a very intelligent man. Intelligent men don't hire their plumber to kill their wife and mother in law. Plus, he has been quite ill over the past year."

The likelihood of the government's charges being true are "close to zero," said Banks, who is chairman of the Bonner Country Republican Party. "The likelihood of the government's charges against being false are close to 100 percent," Banks added.

Although Steele has been denied phone privileges while in custody in Spokane, and he has been prevented from seeing most of the letters of support that have been sent to him, at least one did slip through, and Steele managed to get a response to the sender, Ingri Cassell, widow of the late Don Harkins, founder of the now-defunct newspaper, The Idaho Observer. Cassell is also the founder of the Vaccine Liberation website.

Steele's message to Cassell, the only known communication to the outside world since his arrest, is here reprinted in its entirety.

Quote:
Dear Ingri,

Thank you for your letter.

All calls out are almost nonexistent. I was looking forward to seeing you and Al yesterday. I suppose they just turned you away? I haven't had a single visitor here so far and only barely been allowed to see my public defender. I'm not allowed to call my lawyer even until next week.

I am in Max Security, full lockdown, solitary confinement. Worse even than the treatment accorded Matt Hale. Most of mail is returned to senders — usually because of their using letters instead of full first and last names in the review in the return address.

OK. I am innocent, for what that is worth in Amerika today. Here is what happened:

My hillbilly handyman stumbled across a stash of silver bullion in one of my outbuildings — then searched and found two others (@ $15,000 & $45,000 total). Knowing I would discover the theft & know it was him. He tried to kill me with two pipe bombs he placed on the cars he knew I drove. They both failed to go off. Cyndi left town with one before he removed it, which led to the discovery of the car bomb on our Mitsubishi SUV.

This guy had offered to be a hit man before, more than once, but I dismissed him as a harmless buffoon. I had told him of the ADL & its hatred for me. This murder-for-hire plot is beyond my hillbilly hitman, so I assume he went to the ADL, which either fabricated tapes that he played for the FBI recorder or produced a mimic of me to make the tapes for the FBI on the spot. Regardless, I have been framed and set-up! BTW, the ADL was quoted extensively in the government's opening papers in court.

I haven't heard from my wife or son and fear they have been convinced by the U.S. Attorney Prosecutor of my guilt. I feel totally abandoned. What can you and others do? Ingri, I honestly don't know. Obviously, this is going to trial. I may well be convicted, which will be the same as a death sentence at this stage of my life. I am So depressed. I never expected them to come after me like this.

You may share this with others, even posting it on VNN and SF (With my address so they can write me - please write me - but tell them to put their full names and addresses [as a clear return address] on the envelopes).
[Note: at this time, we do not know his whereabouts. His address is/was - from the return on my envelope from him -

Edgar Steele #361857
Spokane County Jail
W. 1100 Mallon
Spokane, Wash. 99260-0320

Love, Edgar
---end letter---