Lawfare Daily: ‘A Whole Other Country,’ with Zoe Kurland and Terence O’Rourke

[MUSIC PLAYING]

“He has a specialist for Automate-Getribi-Vato.”

Unvansightensy, myler. And I said, hey Rick, I've been watching television. Are you surrounded by the Texas Rangers? Do you have hostages there with you? And he said, well, Terry, yeah, but they're not hostages.

They are prisoners of war. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Tyler McGranyan, managing editor of law fair. With Zoe Kerland, senior producer at Marfa Public Radio, and Terrence O'Rourke, an attorney-based Houston, Texas.

Just this piece of paper kind of ended at all,

because Rick got exactly what he had always been looking for,

which was for someone to tell him that his nation was real

“and that everything he thought was possibly”

going to come to pass. Today, we're talking about a whole other country-- a six-part podcast series hosted and produced by Zoe-- that tells the story of a secessionist movement in the mid-90s called the Republic of Texas.

We discussed the group's dubious legal claim that the federal government had improperly annexed Texas back in 1845. Why the ROT's leader, Rick McLaren,

stowed himself ambassador of the Republic of Texas

and saw international recognition. And why McLaren, in the midst of a hostage crisis of his own making, picked up the phone to call my guest, Terry O'Rourke, to represent him. So Zoe, I want to start with you for any of our listeners

who, for whatever reason have not yet listened to the series, could you just briefly run through and broad strokes this story you tell here? And I realize it's very unfair. It's a very sprawling tale with a lot of colorful characters,

“but in a nutshell, what is a whole other country about?”

In a nutshell, a whole other country is about a

Texas secessionist movement, a Texas independence movement that took place in a rural subdivision, very close to where I live in Marfa, called the Davis Mountains Resort. And this movement took place in the '90s, really blossomed

in the Davis Mountains Resort. And the show takes us through the story of its main author, actor Richard McLaren, who was kind of a legal, advanced and manipulated the law and kind of crafted his own narrative about what he thinks or thought a nation should look like.

And Terry, I want to bring you in here not only did you live through this period, you are also intimately involved as one of its characters in the story. Yeah, no, I was. I can, if I explained to Zoe, I'm a lawyer in Houston, Texas,

and I've served in government, but my introduction to this case story began with a phone call one day from Richard McLaren, the ambassador of the Republic of Texas. And he said, hey, Terry, we'd like to retain you to represent the Republic of Texas.

We've got this problem with the new world order. And we need you to be our international counsel. And I said, hey, Rick, I've been watching television, are you surrounded by the Texas Rangers? Do you have hostages there with you?

And he said, well, Terry, yeah, but they're not hostages. They are prisoners of war. You don't get trained for this kind of case in law school. Yes, Zoe catches up, you know, take us to the point in the story where Terry gets this phone call.

We're going to dive into Rick McLaren and his paper war and a lot of the legal angles here, but just to get the rest of the story connected, take us to the point at which Terry gets that phone call. So Terry gets this wild phone call at the point at which the Republic of Texas has kind of bloomed and boiled over in 1997.

as this joke, this cowboy performance of a nation,

actually ended up gaining power and momentum. And in 1997, it exploded into this bloody standoff that happened in the Davis Mountains.

“And Terry was in Houston, I believe when he got that phone call”

from Rick McLaren, who was barricaded up in his embassy, which we'll talk a bit more about in the mountains as the Texas Rangers were kind of barreling up the mountain on horseback and in vehicles and coming to partake in what was kind of like a real wild west standoff

out in the very picturesque rural mountains. - So Terry, take us back to that phone call. What was going through your head when you got the call from Ambassador to McLaren? - Well, I can tell you, I can tell you, this is easy.

I like pulled that phone away from my head and shook my head

and said, I can't believe this, you know.

And I knew enough about their movement. And I knew enough about McLaren. They were anti-law, you're anti-lots of things, but I believe what they said is that I heard on the media that they had hostages there and these people were heavily armed

and that people were gonna get killed.

“They have to see this, this is post-waco.”

So, you know, the idea that this is serious, this is not just some cowboy movie. This is like the real thing. Through my mind was this, that if I don't represent these people, people are gonna die,

that maybe my participation and representing them can save a lot of people from dying because the Texas Rangers clearly, well, I will get to that later, but it was as deadly serious as any case, a lawyer can ever have.

- I'm curious why they called you or why Rick called you. How did you get involved in this world? - I had met him maybe a year and a half before out in West Texas with the county attorney because we were looking at some of the work

that was done during the depression by the civilian conservation corps. They had built some beautiful things out in West Texas and some people know the Indian lodge, but they built lots of things of bridges

and water retention facilities. And that was using people who were unemployed, but them to work. And so we were wanting to do that for people who were prisoners in the Harris County jail

to get them out of jail to put them in work. And we had no models for that. And so to go see how you treat people decently to train them in jobs and have them do good civil public works.

So in that context, I met Rick McLaren, who was there at West Texas. - Zoe, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is a bit about what Terry's speaking to here of the legal side.

“You referenced this great quote I believe”

by the historian Patricia Nelson-Limerick and if I may, I'm just going to read it quickly that quote, if Holly would wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its movies would have been about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff

but a surveyor, spectator or claims lawyer, which was extremely apt for many reasons, but I want to back up to the McLaren's start in Texas and how this all began with the leans and then the paper war.

Could you tell us a bit about McLaren's paper war that he was waging before the Republic of Texas? - So Rick McLaren is, or he is, he's still alive. He is a man from Ohio. He grew up in Wilmington and he has sort of told varying

accounts of when he first learned about Texas

but he did a book report on David Crocket, according to his kind of narrative of his life when he was in the third or the fifth grade and he said he became really enamored of the state and kind of its mythology and its story and its promises.

And as he was growing up, he kind of felt drawn to Texas right after high school he moved there and he started reading regional magazines and kind of deepening his interest in the state and at the time in the '70s like Texas Monthly,

Texas Highways, these magazines were reporting on this burgeoning wine industry in the Davis Mountains which you might not think of Texas as a wine country but at the time this was kind of blossoming and Rick was very entrepreneurial.

He was a car salesman before that, a used car salesman and his sort of salesmen way took him to the Davis Mountains where he thought that he would make his fortune making wine. And when he got there, he quickly figured out

and started kind of focusing his efforts of entrepreneurial thought elsewhere

“and he moved to this unincorporated community”

called the Davis Mountains resort where it's kind of known for being isolationist, individualist in a lot of ways. It's got these plots of land that are very irregularly shaped. There's a Davis Mountains property owner's association

that governs it with covenants that you sign

when you first move there.

But other than that, it's pretty out of the eye of the local government and it's extremely remote and Rick sort of started building his own little empire as in just like a trailer and a lean too and he was living with his wife

and wasn't really having a great go of it. The wine making had totally failed and he started defaulting on property owners association payments and essentially he was a big reader and tried to get out of it and he figured that he could get

“out of it by kind of pursuing some legal avenues.”

So instead of just deciding not to pay or deciding to pay, he decided to file a lawsuit against the person who owned his property, claiming that they didn't own the land and this is where the story gets a bit tangly.

The Davis Mountains resort was a scheme essentially that was built as a development by people who didn't live in the area. So it started out as a ranch. The Davis Mountains area is called a sky island climate.

It's extremely rugged. There are volcanic outcroppings and high uplifts and creeks and all of these landscape features that make it very hard to build and live in this area. And the land was bought by a company called the global land

development corporation. And global was not familiar with the Davis Mountains resort.

“And so when they broke it up into plots,”

they had plots that they had tried to map these clean lines onto this land that told a very different story. I mean, you can't really make a plot that has like a driveway that's actually a cliff. I mean, I've met people who live in the Davis Mountains

resort who can't get to their land without basically

driving off a cliff if they were to do that without an easement or an agreement with their neighbor. And that company tried to sell these plots. Some of them sold some of them didn't. It went bankrupt.

But over time, as people move there, they started making agreements with each other to get onto each other's land through roads that were maybe their neighbors rode or they had an agreement to plant a garden on their neighbor's land or a fence didn't line up with property

lines exactly. And Rick kind of juxtaposed these maps of the Davis Mountains resort. And what he found was that across time, the land had been surveyed kind of overlapping, overlapping surveys

that happened, and the maps didn't line up. So he figured that if the maps don't line up, then the people who own land here don't actually own the land. And that means I don't have to pay property do's because there's actually no Davis Mountains resort.

It kind of doesn't exist. And so he started filing all of these leans against his neighbors, started filing lawsuits. And this was sort of his training ground for what would become his Republican Texas paper war.

In sort of attempting, essentially, to colonize his neighborhood, he started practicing for this greater ambition of taking Texas back from the US. As he was taking back, quote, unquote, his neighbor's land, he was sort of plotting this bigger picture

of what if Texas doesn't actually belong to the US and how can I get it back through filing a bunch of leans and becoming up the works with a lot of paperwork? - As you said, he kind of has this proof of concept of using the legal system to overwhelm people

and after why I was fairly successful, he amassed land and I believe some money as well. And so then he turns right his legal research to a bigger project of this idea that Texas is illegally occupied, I believe.

But Terry, I wanted to turn to you to hear more about, maybe Rick's legal theory, especially as a lawyer and someone who had represented him. And also, I found it interesting when you said at a moment ago that he was fairly anti-lawier

because it was always, I felt like this tension

as illegitimate and yet still seeking its recognition or working within the system in a way.

“So yeah, I don't know, I'm curious what you make”

of Rick's legal research and his hair brand legal theory, he's about Texas. - I had met him before I got this call of, you know, I've got hostages. When I was out there and he is an entertaining,

like as Zoe said, engaging and has a sense of humor. So he talked to me and the county attorney, the elected county attorney from Harris County about his theories of law and quite simply it was

that Texas never lawfully entered the Union.

And I know Texas history, I grew up in Texas. So I grew up with Texas history and Texas brags in John Wayne and the Alamo and all of the mythology. But I do know the history is that Texas entering the Union

as a slave state was a real problem. And that what had happened is that the Republic of Texas with Sam Houston and others had negotiated a treaty with the State Department of the United States

“for Texas to enter the Union and it was presented”

as treaties are to the United States Senate and it did not get the two thirds necessary for treaty approval, it did not even get a majority. And that was because the balance of slave states and free states.

And the people in Texas, Sam Houston and others

had wanted from the very beginning to become a part

of the United States that they collectively thought of themselves of something of manifest destiny this nation that would be from sea to shining sea and that Texas was going to be a grand part of it. So the problem was that they had failed to get in to the Union

and there was an election in 1844. The Mexican war had been going on at that time but the election had approved essentially the expansion, the national election was the people of America wanted America to go big into expand.

And so the Congress that came back new after the election that they could get Texas in with a joint resolution

“that which had a majority in the U.S. House representatives”

and the U.S. Senate. But clearance theory of law was that that was unconstitution that there's only one proper way for Texas to enter the Union as a foreign state as an independent state.

And let me say this, there are law review articles on this that that was impermissible under the U.S. Constitution. So McLaren, just like Zoe was saying about the land deal, it was void obanicio as a lawyer's would say.

So the Republic of Texas never ended.

It never entered the United States. So it's always had been there. And all these other people did unlawful things all the way up to the very day. So that when he reclaimed his things,

he was not a separatist. He was not trying to leave the Union because Texas had never joined the Union. Well, it was a fascinating legal theory. And even though it is obviously not going to be admissible

in a court law today in the state of Texas, it was no more wild acclaim than you get of Henry VII going over to Richard III and Bosworth Field claiming to be the king of England. I mean, in terms of history that had been determined theories

were sometimes found by people voting with their feet or with their rifles, just as the Alamo. - Did you get a sense that he was a true believer of this theory?

Or if he was more of a rifter, you know, latching onto it as a means to an end? - It's hard for me to say this now because I've represented him as a lawyer, so I don't want to just discuss things that I form in his thoughts,

but because I have had to discuss this with the Texas Rangers and others, I'm not revealing any privileges. It's in the mind of so many people is from the perspective of others.

This is crazy or lunatic. But from another perspective, it can be sincere. So how is that what is the mixed motive when someone has a financial political motive on one thing?

How sincere is the belief that they are caring and whether that is nationalism today or loyalty to a political party or something? So I'm familiar with that of being a lawyer representing people in politics.

So I look at it like two languages, just like Zoe was saying, is where his world, I could understand it. But I also knew the world that I came from and I had been an assistant attorney general,

a county assistant, county attorney. I mean, I knew the law in Texas, but I could speak to him for us two lines.

- Zoe, I wanted to ask you your thoughts on this.

“There is a logic, I think, to his world.”

And I think one of the examples of that is the embassy.

You may think that the first thing you would do

is set up executives' residence or a congress and you might call yourself a president, but he called himself ambassador and he put the emphasis on the embassy. I'm curious your thoughts on the same question.

- I really grappled with this idea of like, was he into Texas or was he into the financial gains? And I think towards the end, he really was someone in the show put it. He was really drinking his own cool it.

Like he sort of maybe what started as kind of an ingenious land grab, did really become a passion. And he was such a self-mathologizer. Like, I mean, I do want to go back to that Limerick quote

that you brought up. Rick was a really bad friend, tearsman. Like he actually didn't make it as a grower. He was notoriously, he tried to hunt and gagged while he was getting the deer that he shot.

Like he was really squeamish. He was kind of, people describe him as a nerd in a kind of endearing way, sometimes. There is that charisma, there's that desire to learn. But I think what he realized was like,

okay, I can't really be like the David Crocket of my dreams in the, you know, hunting and building a beautiful home in the mountains.

But what I can be is this like amazing legal mind

and kind of bring this frontiersman attitude to law and sort of work within the legal system. And he was really into the theater of law. Like Terry, I would love to hear your thoughts on this too, but that what you mentioned, Tyler,

like the embassy being his first move, like that's so deliberate because he was saying, we're a foreign nation in the US. He wasn't saying like, join the club, like where are the Texans of Texas?

Like he was saying, we are a legitimate nation on to ourselves and I'm an ambassador. He didn't call himself the president. He didn't call himself, you know, the king. He really deliberately chose to work within the jargon

of the legal system and position himself as sovereign in an extremely deliberate way.

“And even I think a lot about like, you know,”

the Republic of Texas printed license plates. They printed ID cards like they were really trying to legitimize the idea of citizenship of the Republic of Texas and Rick was huge in that. And I think taking on this sort of even if he was anti-lawier,

he really saw himself as a legal mind and I think taking on this kind of legal persona allowed him to both like fulfill a mythology about himself and also legitimize his nation in ways that I think other people who have gone about subset kind of, that gone down subset avenues,

haven't used that same kind of legitimizing language the whole way through. And it was very not to say that I want to be like that guy, but it was admirable. Like you kind of have to admire his ingenuity

through some of these systems. - Yeah, quite creative. And he would say, for example, that Republic of Texas was not an independent nation in the United States.

He would say that the Republic of Texas had been occupied illegally occupied by the forces of the United States in the New World Order. So, I mean, he was consistent in his views. - And speaking of legitimacy, if I'm not mistaken,

he sent out many, many letters to foreign countries seeking recognition of the Republic of Texas

“and got recognition I believe from maybe a handful”

or one or two, if that's correct. - I believe that Israel actually like corresponded with him. I have to fact-check that, but I know that there were a couple of nations who kind of just received, he was a faxer, a prolific faxer.

Like he was faxing embassies and nations from his lean to in the mountains, which, again, it's like he was really using the tools that he had. The 90s were alive and well, he was doing it up with 90s technology as well, also get into.

But, yeah, a couple of nations received his correspondences

and basically sent him correspondence back,

which because in his mind getting a letter back from a nation legitimized his cause to be sort of taken seriously and named as the ambassador of the Republic of Texas by a legitimate nation kind of gave him more to stand on

and in his very loophole way,

and how this played into the standoff.

If someone, if a legitimate body, you know, if another nation or a government official or a Texas Ranger called him the ambassador, he was like, I'm the ambassador, they said it. This legitimate force called me that, so I am that.

And that was kind of how he operated. - So that you could have a bureaucrat and the equivalent of the post office in Austria receive this thing and get it in the inbox and put a stamp on it and send it back of a steamed ambassador

and McLaren, we've received your request for recognition and have sent it on to our Bureau of Foreign Recognition, which would just be a piece of paper. And he would take that and then hold it out to the crowd and say, hey look, we're negotiating with Austria

for recognition, I'm using Austria's example. But if you send out enough things to enough people, like Bailey's or others but also Native American tribes,

“I mean, remember there's a whole lot of people”

in entrepreneur positions in other groups that are by our standards, pseudo nations

who are always interested in a new angle.

So he would take those things and then take them back and re-send them to the faithful of the Republic of Texas. - Yeah, I wanna move to the hostage standoff next. And related to your point, Terry, about these two dialects or legal languages that McLaren was speaking

and then kind of everyone else was speaking, including the US government. He did get some pieces of legitimacy at least in his eyes but at the same time, Terry, as you said earlier, this would never be admissible in a US court of law.

It's something that the US government would never and did not stand for. So take me back now to the hostage situation and Rick's insistence on calling them prisoners of war and this negotiation between the Republic of Texas

and the US government, the state of Texas,

“how did you square these two mutually unintelligible languages”

in many ways as Rick's Council? - Well, I tell you, I have done criminal defense cases but that was in federal court in Washington DC and some in state courts in Texas and I'm at the Law School of the University of Texas.

I can tell you there is absolutely no training for this. This experience, I don't care who you are and I did have some valuable exchange with the FBI hostage negotiation teams and others that there were lawyers in the justice department

and others who I could talk to. But we're in a land that would be a very different universe. That's all I can say except that the reality is McLaren had a lot of guns. This people had bombs, weapons, and other things

and the Texas Rangers had lots of guns and they were standing off against each other and I said to Rick, I can't represent you by a phone call. He said, hey, no problem, man. I'm gonna call a electronic meeting

of the Republic of the Congress of the Republic of Texas and we will retain you as international counsel for the Republic. I said fine, Rick. Well, about 45 minutes later, I got this like five page resolution

in the Congress of the Republic of Texas meeting in a special session electronically. His name, Terrence L. O'Rourke, to be their international counsel. It was enough for me as a piece of paper

by a person in a hostage crisis to say that I had a connection with the person on the inside. And Texas law, even if he were delusional, it would be enough that I was empowered to act as his lawyer.

So I went out to West Texas immediately and I can vividly remember the reception of the Texas Rangers. But before them, he said, I called the Attorney General's office in Texas because I'd been in a system of attorney general

and as an assistant county attorney in Texas, I had lots of relationships at cases with the Attorney General's office. I called and on the weekend of a thing where there was kind of duty officer answers the phone.

I knew him.

“And he said, Terry, are you sure you want to handle this case?”

Well, I said, you know, they're going to kill a lot of people or they're going to get killed. I mean, it really is, what is my choice? They're not going to go hire somebody else. And he said, I'll put you on the hostage negotiation team

going out to get out to West Texas. So when I got to West Texas to meet with the Rangers, they had received message from the Attorney General's office as well as from me that I was coming. I wouldn't just send guys showing up at the barricades.

But when I showed up at the barricades, I had an experience that the Rangers were so gracious

And he said, Mr. O'Rourke, it's so nice to have you here.

Here, have a cup of coffee, sit down with us. He said, this is going to be real simple. We've got these warrants and these were federal warrants

“that had come from the secret service and others”

because of the clearance activities on a variety of state warrants. And we're just going to-- this is not going to be like Waco. Just make this real clear. We're just going to execute these warrants.

Boata, you don't have to be a genius to hear the word. The key word was execute. He said, we're not going to wait around like the FBI and others did.

And we know how to handle this situation. So it'd be good for you to talk to your client. Well, boy, you don't-- it was clear to me that he had the authority to execute warrants.

These are felony warrants to use deadly force. And boy, he had it. It was a sobering moment. I mean, I came in my mind is that I was talking in the man who was going to give the orders to shoot, kill McLaren,

and all those people. So Zoe, as you mentioned earlier, McLaren is still alive. So that this didn't end in his death at the hands of the rangers or federal agents or anyone.

“Just to close the loop here, how did this story end?”

I mean, speaking of pieces of paper, that our pseudo-legitimate, illegitimate tells about the international ceasefire agreement and how the standoff came to a close. Yeah, so as we've been talking about Rick really

loved pieces of paper that told him that he was exactly who he thought he was. And so this standoff in the mountains, which was about a week long, that Terry was present

and on the ground for, standoff is not always

that interesting. It's kind of a waiting game. You might think of it as sort of gunfire and action in some regard, but the standoff was a long period of exchanging messages back and forth.

So essentially, Rick was asking for legitimacy. He was saying, can you legitimize my nation? Can you promise to have a hearing for the Republic of Texas and ask people to vote on the issue? And the rangers kind of continually went back and forth,

and said, no, we don't want to do that. But then eventually, and I think Terry, you can probably fill in some of this very caveur who Terry was just talking about. And is also in the show briefly talking about this moment.

But there was a discussion that was had that was like, you know what? We can present him with a ceasefire agreement and we don't have to go through it with all of this stuff based on what's going on right now.

And so a ceasefire agreement was sent up to Rick via an official government drop system that I'm forgetting the name of that I was obsessed with briefly. - You did harm a personnel carrier? - Yes, the harm a personnel carrier.

Thank you, Sarah. - And the messages back and forth were via diplomatic pouches. I would be making up the pouch. - Oh my God, you guys, thank you so much. Yes, the diplomatic pouches and the armor personal carriers

were a huge part of this. Diplomatic pouches, again, it's part of the theater of this sort of like legitimate nation situation. And eventually, the Rangers met Rick's terms to at least, you know, after some negotiation

and Rick sent out his wife to sign this ceasefire agreement that essentially to said you are the ambassador of the Republic of Texas and will hold a vote on this issue. And it was signed on official Republic of Texas letterhead and again, just this piece of paper kind of ended it all

because Rick got exactly what he had always been looking for

which was for someone to tell him that his nation was real and that everything he thought was possibly going to come to pass. And that ended the standoff, which could have ended, there were guns, there were bombs,

there are still pipe bomb fragments in the Davis Mountains resort, it's on the side of the road. Like, you can find this stuff, it's not, it's not like it wasn't dangerous. And Rick was on the radio shouting Mayday at certain points.

I mean, this was very real as Terry was saying, this was life and death was online but all that was needed to kind of put a halt to that was this piece of paper saying, yep, we agree with you, you're good.

“Yeah, and you have to remember that Rick was also in a certain way”

in the mind of the public and himself, David Corrish in his leadership quality, he had the people inside the embassy

They were ready to die and they said they were ready to die

“in a variety of different ways he was sending out communications”

that I'll tell you another part of it is he sent out this called the alamo just like he was Travis to come from all nations in the world, to come to aid the Republic of Texas and there were people coming. The Texas Rangers and the Highway Department, others,

had stations in all the highways and roads and they did arrest people who were coming with automatic weapons and bombs and guns. And he was trying to create an insurrection is one people, or liberation, a liberation movement.

So when you get people who are stopped carrying a whole bunch of weapons to join McLaren, the pressure on the government to end the negotiations was great. And a part of this that I haven't discussed is that

fairly early on in this, I called Dick DeGaren,

who was a friend of mine in Houston, is a criminal defense lawyer of some very famous distinguished lawyer. He's the one who represented Corrish and he was in a trial and federal court at the time and I talked to the judges clerk and said,

look, stop this, I've got a life and death matter. I need to talk to the federal judge to tell him to stop the trial. I need to talk to the attorney who represented David Corrish because I've got a situation where people have been a die. And they pulled him out of the courtroom

and he was very helpful to me from time to time. And one of the things he explained to me

“is, Terry, you have to understand that the state of Texas”

is willing and actively planning on killing your clients. You have to understand that and they're just waiting for the time that they can get overwhelming force and able to move to make it happen. And I could watch the assembly of law enforcement agencies

and weapons like McLaren was terribly worried about the so-called black helicopters, which I thought was black, black, black. So what? But I can tell you, toward the end,

when these black helicopters started showing up, I could understand it. And McLaren was really clear too. You can't just assemble this team of law enforcement people from all over the state of Texas and the United States

to take care of this hostage crisis or this problem. They're not going to sit around forever. You can't keep turning up $100,000 a day

“or $200,000 a day on sitting around having discussions with people.”

When they were ready to act, they were ready to kill. And here's a fascinating part. I don't want to try this, is it? There's these two languages going on. So I would be there in what would be called the bunker,

but it really was the headquarters of the team, the government team. And so you'd have people come in and have breakfast. And these would be snipers who've been spending the night out in the mountains.

It was cold. And they were cold. And they were coming in with all their kind of sniper scopes. I mean, highly fascinating things. And their job was to kill McLaren and the others

when they got the order. And so I'd be sitting down having a cup of coffee with them of someone who was just 15 minutes away from being up in the hills ready to pull the trigger. And then Jess Malone, the hostage negotiator from the Texas

Rangers is so skillful. He would talk to McLaren just like Zoe was saying, in the terms of, well, Ambassador to McLaren, you know, I understand what you're saying, sir. And it was just perfect hostage negotiation language.

And what would happen is that Malone and I, and even Caper would end up start saying things like, well, if you talk to the ambassador recently, and then you'd have snipers who were sitting next to you saying, what the fuck are you doing talking to this guy that we're trying to kill

and calling him the ambassador and that you're deferential to some mistake that we've made. So you had internal conflict, even within the team. It's a fascinating reality. But it was real clear to me that the governor of the state of Texas

and the Texas Rangers, you're ready to kill McLaren. I can't believe they don't prepare you for this in law school of having breakfast with snipers who are already to kill your client at a moment's notice. Yeah.

The podcast itself doesn't go into the subsequent criminal trial of McLaren afterward. Zoe Orterium, I'm curious if anything notable you wanted to touch on of what became of the so-called international ceasefire agreement

and then ultimately Rick McLaren's trial and conviction.

Well, I can speak to the fact that the international ceasefire agreement was not followed through on and from prison or from jail,

because Rick was brought to literally like a few yards away

“from the Prisidio County courthouse and jail at my house right now.”

But Rick was brought there and held there until trial. And he was tried by the state and the federal government. And in the meantime, you made a huge state about the government not following through on the vote and giving people the opportunity to voice,

you know, their need for Texas to break free of US occupation. And he was, again, tried by the state and the federal government. And in the United 99 years, he's in a prison in Amorillo. A bunch of his followers were also found guilty. And he still, you know, this movement wasn't just

the Davis Mountains resort, I should say.

Like this was a broader Republic of Texas movement that really flourished, mostly in holiday and type motels across the state. But was the statewide organization that people joined. And even though Rick was kind of the most vocal actor, there were people in the wake of this who were sort of trying to figure out,

well, what happens to the Republic of Texas now? He'd given it such a bad name. So over the next decade, the Republic of Texas, as it was known, also dissolved, you know, I mean, people were, so had these contentious disagreements about,

are we following this annexation argument? Are we trying to do something else? Do we just think we should be our own nation? Because our economy is just strong. I mean, there was this kind of world that existed

beyond Rick McLaren II that was all the sudden kind of chicken without its head, like, all right, without the super loud guy

“determining how we are seeing and what we do, what do we do now?”

And, you know, that's, that's some sort of the strongest faction is now represented by the Texas movement in Texas, which is a different spin-off story. Yeah, Rick is in President Emerllo, and he is from, you know, his most recent interviews with reporters, which is 2019,

he's still thinks he's the ambassador of the Republic of Texas. He also still sends filings to the Jeff Davis County Clarke's office. When I went there to do some fact-checking and kind of poke around the records

that Rick that involved Rick, they, first of all,

grown and they were like, not this guy, please do not talk to us about this man. He's so annoying and said, yeah, we still get mail from him. Like, he's still sending us filings, he still thinks he has claimed to this land and it continues. So he's still kicking, he didn't want to talk to me,

“but I think that his beliefs are still solidly and firmly held.”

I won't make you estimate how many pages of paperwork you think this man has generated in the course of his life span, but, Terry, I'm actually curious, your sense of the current state of the, the secessionist movement. Whether you've had other clients who are, you know, have this anti-government stance, what, you know, what's the long tail of this to the current day?

I was retained under an emergency situation where essentially I was coming into something that was, and I respect, I respected Rick's right just as if you would respect the right of an insane person day of counsel. I just, so I didn't have a problem with my representation and I had counsel for me, for me, Terry, so I wasn't getting too far out of the limb,

because there was a whole lot of media coverage in the intensity of coverage like this can make a person say things that they don't really want, but I was sometimes go down to, like, the hotel limpia in Fort Davis and talk to, you know, members of the New York Times or something else. And this has got worldwide coverage at the time,

and had people who I knew and respected in the media were saying, "It is real clear to us that George Bush, the governor of Texas, has got this cleared in his team because there are no African Americans in there, and there are no Hispanics or whatever, that these are all Caucasians, that he can show the courage that his father didn't have in Iraq,

that George Bush has got the courage to pull the trigger." And so, you know, there was this reality all the time that from the highest level, this was not just some cops who were doing something. I had people afterwards who said, "Hey, I was in a bar in Paris and saw you on television." I'm saying in that whole thing, you've got to be real careful yourself

that you're an actor in the drama, but you're the lawyer in it. When I worked with the Texas District Attorney to do the negotiated agreement to get Rick out,

that they could say anything they wanted just to get this over with,

“that they'd gone to a new stage, that Evan Levelin McLaren and her beautiful daughters,”

pleading with the governor, "Don't kill my mama, you know, don't kill my husband, it was creating a, they just wanted to get rid of it instead of having the bloodbath, but they were ready for the bloodbath." So all this time, I was still a lawyer, but when it was over, I was still in a lawyer really for the thing, and I could not continue representing them on the theory of Texas's forever Republican. I couldn't represent them in court and make those cases.

I'm a lawyer and I take an oath of office and, you know, an oath, I can't represent things I don't believe in, it was a theory, so I was drew from the case. I did represent Richard Keys, the one guy who did get away with another guy and we won't need to go through this, but in their escape, they killed one of the Rangers dogs and the world of the Texas Rangers, you killed my dog,

and one of the guys was killed, so and Keys got away. And so the amazing thing was, since I was

still his lawyer in a way, I would still get periodic calls from the law enforcement about have you had any notes from your client, which I didn't until he was captured, but that was an

“amazing story itself, which is for another podcast, how did he escape the Texas Rangers in the mountains?”

I don't have a clever segue, but I do want to ask you Zoe about the, I believe you call it a Diabolically 90's website that Rick McLeare and set up for the Republic of Texas. I mean, as we talked about earlier, he was fairly cutting-edge, and because of that, tell us the story

a bit about how this website may have become the first case in the U.S. history of

government job-owning of an internet service provider or some sort of online censorship, sort of just describe the website first of all, and then a bit about what happened to it. Rick was really into technology, which at the time was fax machines and very remedial 90's internet. In the 90's, internet was happening. If you lived in a big city, maybe AT&T would be setting up, and you could get an email address, a website, and it was still very new, but there wasn't

that much trouble. This area, the Transpacist region, is still very much the Wild West even today, and back in the 90's, there was just one guy who decided to start an internet company here. So, this man Todd Jagger, who is very lovely, and kind of a Renaissance man, he also owned a gelatoria before this. He isn't to everything, not relevant, but interesting. He decided that he wanted to, take it upon himself, to start an internet company in the area. So, he started the overland network

with, you know, a manual, he bought a bunch of routers, and this was all, again, he was the one guy. We didn't have like a big internet company here. And so, he started providing internet to people in the area, and for Todd, that meant a website where he showed his photography and was able to correspond with people in different areas, but he one day he got a new client, and that was the Republic of Texas and Rick McLaren wanting to start a website to espouse their ideas and theories

about why Texas was actually an independent nation. And Todd was very, like, yeah, you're a client, pay me in cash, and we're good, because the Republic was notorious for paying, not cash, with these sort of shady checks, which weren't, yeah, weren't, which drew upon Texas state assets and worked a lot of the time, Rick amassed with millions of dollars with them, which is crazy. But the Republic of Texas came in with a $20 bill, paid their internet service fee, and one of their members took a floppy

disc up to the embassy, and all of a sudden, Rick had access to the world from this tiny dot

“in far west Texas, which again, at the time, this was super new. This was the website, I think,”

was 96, but that's like, you know, I mean, I was one year old at the time, and that's, that's really, this is the beginning of the internet as we know it. And the website is, yes, diabolically 90s, it is, you know, big text with a lot of exclamation points, a lot of clipart. There's like a tiny sort of colonial man clipart that Rick would use a lot to

every possible graphic that he could find on this website. There was like a little bubble that

read, like, hot when he would post something new about how he was, you know, the ambassador or another little bubble would say new, and there was, you know, some new news about the Davis Mountains. You know, I look back at this now, the way back machine, thank God for the way back

“machine has preserved it very well, but it is like the most remedial internet, and I think,”

you know, for my generation, that's almost nostalgic to look at, like, there's something very comforting and soothing about seeing the low-fi graphics when everything jumps out of dust and wants to sell us something. I mean, Rick was trying to sell people something, which was the Republic of Texas,

but he, during the standoff, still had access to the internet, and was posting from the embassy,

this, you know, red alert call that Terry mentioned, people were stopped on the way to the Davis Mountains during the standoff. They'd read on his website that, you know, they needed to be in the Davis Mountains to fight the government, and he used this website as a huge tool to disseminate his message and disseminate an emergency message. And during the standoff, Todd got a call, Todd Jagger, who started the internet company and managed Rick Stilman, which he said was getting

thousands and thousands of views during the standoff. His servers crashed because so many people were

“looking at it. He got a call to take it down from the Rangers, I believe, and Todd, again,”

his spirit in starting the internet was this is free speech, and this is a new zone for people to express themselves and share beliefs. And so he said, "I won't do it unless I get something signed by a judge." And then he did get another facts, a beautiful facts, by a signed by a judge, an order to shut down the website. And so he did. But, you know, what didn't really make it into the podcast is that Todd got a lot of blowback for shutting down the website because this was seen as

curbing free speech. It was seen as censorship, and yeah, the Fort Worth Star Telegram called it

the first website closed for political reasons. And it was as far as I have researched and understood

true. That was the first, you know, active sort of government censorship on on this entity that was projecting a message they saw as dangerous. And yeah, I mean, Todd said that people didn't

“trust him and kind of left his domain after that, which was interesting. But big, big questions,”

like, you know, this show is so much about the myth of the frontier, but we are operating on so many different levels of frontier here. Like, there's sort of this tech frontier that Rick was taking advantage of. And he was very pioneering in that way. Yeah. And then you have the other side of it is, you know, the United States government has enormous power under the war's powers act. If you really think of this as a rebellion from their perspective or an insurrection, there's a whole lot

of authority. I mean, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. I mean, you get the power of the government when the entity itself is being threatened by a foe and by Rick's own language, he was a foreign nation at war with the United States. So it went both ways in the authority. Yeah, the current administration is begging to invoke the insurrection act and other, you know, other laws that will open up these these immense powers. And yeah, I did get the sense that Rick was playing with fire or if he,

if he got his wish, it may be worse that, you know, then he'd be at war with the United States and different legal regimes apply. But I do, as we kind of draw to a close here, Terry, I wanted to ask you one more question before I give Zoe the last word. Now that you've had some space between the standoff and now, you know, how you look back on that time, if there are still any misunderstandings about Rick McLaren and his project and the Republic of Texas, yeah, just how

you're thinking has evolved over the years? Well, it just, thank you for asking the real serious question about reflection because I don't think I would have as a lawyer ever thought of the things of the unlawful conduct by the executive branch that I see now and how you deal with that, I get lawyers who are on the line with that and law firms here in Houston. It does call into question your own integrity and your own understanding of the Constitution, what this is all about

in which your own dedication to law is. It's a fascinating, most fascinating stretch that I have ever experienced. I'm so enriched by, I guess, the opportunity to think way beyond anything I ever learned and try to apply the principles, but the principles of representation, like we

impaired in some way, no matter whether they're insane, no matter whether they're killers or whatever. I've represented people in death row, so I mean, I have some understanding of that, but the duty that our legal system and its larger sense still works, I guess is what I would say.

“So, last word to you, same question, you know, now that you're a year out from, I think I believe”

when you wrap this series what the reception has been and then I'm also very curious what's next.

Well, the reception has been amazing. I think, you know, I'm the only podcast producer at my

very small radio station in rural Texas and doing this project was, I mean, it was a gift in a lot of ways, it was a year of thinking about themes that I've thought about for a very long time, living out in far west Texas. You know, this cowboy cosplay, what happens when an outsider comes in and kind of tries to take hold of these methodologies of the state and become, you know, this rugged individual that, you know, Texas is built on these ideas of the individual of,

you know, the land of, you know, being someone who can hold your own and I've been totally, I mean, not going to live, I've been really enamored of that as I've lived here and it's a very

complicated relationship that people have with this state and its values, but there's so much pride here.

And it really is, I'm sorry to do this, like a whole other country. I mean, Texas is in itself

“this, this place with its very, with a very clear identity and I, I think, getting to be out here”

in a place that is still referred to as mythic Texas, this place where, you know, the land is beautiful, the trees are green, the sky is big, like you are just kind of in the midst of the myth in a way that I feel very grateful to have been able to think through these questions while being in this place. And the people of the Davis Mountains resort were so generous in telling me about their lives and what brought them out there and they were honest about the fantasies that brought them out there,

too, that's a huge part of the show that is not part of the legal action, but is part of the sort of narrative thrust of it. And I, I miss reporting in the Davis Mountains resort and I miss it and it's so fun to get to talk about it and it's fun to be on here at Terry because these conversations have, I mean, I know I'm not giving in awards acceptance speech right now, but these conversations have really enriched my life in ways that I didn't expect and I think local reporting is really

special, too, because you're accountable to these people. I see a lot of the people that I interviewed at the laundry mat or at the grocery store and you kind of can't have a bad relationship with someone you see every day. So, you know, knowing that people like the show and, and felt that it accurately reflected what happened is cool and how a lot of people tell me stories about Rick. One guy recently came up to me and said, "I bought a microwave from that guy," or, you know, another person said that

they had gone camping on his land. And you know, everyone has weird kind of connections to each other out here and it's really fun. But yeah, I became super obsessed with these questions about the frontier and what it means to play cowboy and so the next project I'm working on is about outer space as the next frontier and these private space companies that have sort of taken the home of space exploration and they've really flourished in Texas. So, the series which is still currently

being developed and I'm reporting out is it aims to answer the question, why Texas and kind of what about Texas and the mythology and the culture here has influenced the way that we're approaching the colonization of the cosmos, essentially. And it's been interesting and, you know, some of the same themes have come up as in a whole other country. So, there's some connections there for sure. Well, if nothing else, I hope this was a nice excuse to get the gang back together. That sounds

like an amazing next season. I highly encourage all of our listeners to go drop everything you're

doing and listen to a whole of their country from Marfa Public Radio, Zoe and Terry, thank you for so much for taking the time. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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