Jim Bell - Investigation, Prosecution and Imprisonment

Investigation, Prosecution and Imprisonment

According to testimony by a federal agent, the federal government began infiltrating the Multnomah County Common Law Court via Steven Walsh, a government agent who attended the meetings under a false name and who even began to lead the organization. According to court documents, Bell attended three meetings of the group nearly a year after Walsh's infiltration.

In February 1997, the Internal Revenue Service acted on Bell's tax debt, docking his wages and seizing his automobile. Inside the car, investigators found bomb-making instructions, political literature and detailed information concerning cyanide and fertilizer.

IRS officers raided Bell's home on April 1, 1997. He was arrested in May of that year, and, in July, he pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of IRS agents and the use of a false Social Security number (officials alleged that he had used four such numbers since 1984 in order to conceal his assets; Bell said that he did not believe anyone had a right to know his real Social Security number).

As part of his plea bargain, Bell pleaded guilty in July 1997 to collecting the names and home addresses of IRS employees, and the home addresses of FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and police in Clark County, Washington; Bell also accepted responsibility for conducting a stinkbomb attack in the Vancouver IRS office. He was convicted of the two low-level felonies and sentenced in December 1997 to eleven months in prison followed by three years of federal probation. As a condition of his sentence, Bell was compelled to pay, upon his release, $1,359 in restitution for the stinkbomb attack. He was also subjected to three years of supervised release, during which he was barred from accessing computers and from possessing chemicals.

In Bell's June 2003 lawsuit, Bell accused the federal government of extorting the 1997 plea agreement from him. Bell asserted that when he balked at that agreement in November 1997, in part due to the government's violation of the terms, government agents instructed fellow inmate Ryan Thomas Lund to assault Bell. The lawsuit alleged that Lund did this at about 6:00 P.M. on November 25, 1997, for the purpose of intimidating Bell, and to keep Bell away from his family and the news media. Later, in an ostensibly unrelated event, Lund filed a lawsuit stating that on December 14, 1997, two days after Bell's December 12, 1997 sentencing, Lund (who was in solitary confinement at the time due to his assault on Bell) had a "slip and fall" accident while alone in his cell, ostensibly due to a wet cell floor. Lund had also been promised a 27-month sentence for his illegal possession of firearms and methamphetamine, when the relevant federal law required a mandatory 10-year sentence. Bell alleged that the sentence reduction and lawsuit payoff were engineered to reward Lund for extorting Bell. Bell claimed that he was kept under "inhumane conditions for at least ten days".

Bell further alleged in his 2003 lawsuit that a forged appeal case, number 99-30210, was entered into the court record. He stated that "Ninth Circuit Court personnel ... began corruptly falsifying, forging, and improperly adding to and deleting from the Ninth Circuit Court documentary record ... with regard to appeal #99-30210." Bell's October 2004 amendment further alleges that, a handwritten note, "purportedly signed by Bell, but not in Bell's handwriting style", was forged to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He alleges that this notice of appeal was filed around June 20, 1999 (claim 505), and that, "... Ninth Circuit personnel agreed to and did continually add false records to that docket, and at various times they deleted some of those false records and substituted new false records, for the purposes of concealing the true events and for continuing to obstruct Bell’s access to justice and his constitutional rights." (Claim 510) In his lawsuit, Bell seeks to establish that over a dozen government employees were guilty of numerous felonies.