By updated February 27, 2017 at 8:07 PM
Ammon Bundy called a clandestine meeting around the dining room of their host’s home in Burns on Dec. 29, 2015, and directed the six other men there to leave their cellphones and laptops behind in a separate room.
Bundy then discussed his idea of taking over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, said occupier Blaine Cooper, called as a government witness on the fifth day of the second Oregon standoff trial.
Cooper’s testimony about the dining-room sit-down marked the first time anyone in court has referenced a late December meeting between Bundy and the other men about seizing the refuge before the Jan. 2, 2016, occupation.
During his three hours and forty minutes on the stand, Cooper also became the first cooperating witness to testify against fellow refuge occupiers.
Four defendants — Jason Patrick, 43, of Bonaire, Georgia, Duane Ehmer, 46, of Irrigon, Darryl Thorn, 32, of Marysville, Washington, and Jake Ryan, 28, of Plains, Montana — are in the midst of trial, charged with conspiring to impede federal employees from carrying out their work at the federal refuge through intimidation, threat or force.
During cross-examination, defense lawyers sought to impeach Cooper’s testimony by citing contradictory statements Cooper made on jail phone calls, including one to his wife on April 5, 2016, saying “I didn’t know they were going in there” in reference to the refuge.
They also played inflammatory videos that Cooper made, including one when he tore out pages of the Koran, wrapped them in bacon, threw them into an outdoor fire pit and then shot arrows at the Koran. They pointed out that Cooper, despite being a convicted felon, was seen with an AR-15 rifle at the Bundy ranch in 2014 in Nevada. And they elicited testimony that Cooper had spent time in institutions because of behavioral and mental health problems earlier in his life.
Cooper, his hair disheveled, shuffled into the courtroom, his ankles chained together, wearing an ill-fitting dark suit, blue-striped dress shirt and tan jail slippers – a stark contrast to the confident, camouflage-clad figure he portrayed on his Third Watch Videos that he distributed on social media during the refuge occupation.
Cooper, 37, has entered guilty pleas to conspiracy to impede federal workers in the Oregon case and guilty pleas in Nevada to conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and assault on a federal officer.
He acknowledged that he agreed to cooperate with the government in the hope of reducing a recommended six-year prison sentence. Cooper has been described by prosecutors as a recruiter, calling men to come to the Oregon refuge with guns and to Bunkerville, Nevada, in April 2014 during a standoff with federal agents outside the ranch of patriarch Cliven Bundy.
The December 2015 meeting lasted about a half-hour in the Burns home of Patty Overton with Cooper, Ammon Bundy, Ryan Payne, Jason Patrick, Joseph O’Shaughnessy, Corey Lequieu and B.J. Soper, Cooper said.
They talked of going into the Malheur refuge with guns, Cooper said, and if they encountered any refuge staff there, they’d ask them to leave politely. If not, “we’d probably remove them at that point,” Cooper said.
They spoke of having security checkpoints at the front gates, he said, and discussed logistics, such as food and power at the facility and what to do if counter-protesters came.
The refuge seizure, Cooper said, sprung from frustrations born out of having Ammon Bundy’s redress of grievance and petitions, distributed through legal avenues, ignored by local, state and federal officials. Bundy wanted the sheriff to prevent the return to prison of Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and son Steven Hammond, who were set to surrender on Jan. 4, 2016, to serve out mandatory minimum five-year sentences for setting fire to public land.
“The idea was to stay there as long as it took” to redistrict the refuge land and give it to the people of Harney County, Cooper said.
Everybody in the group favored the takeover except O’Shaughnessy and Soper, Cooper said. O’Shaughnessy agreed to be a “buffer,” provide medical support on the outskirts.
“He thought we could go to jail,” Cooper said.
But the consensus “to me was to make sure nobody came in, whether it be the FBI, BLM.”
“And U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Barrow asked.
“And Fish & Wildlife Service,” Cooper added.
After the Jan. 2 rally in Burns to support the Hammonds, Cooper said he returned to Overton’s house to get into “militia gear,” including body armor, camouflage clothing and boots.
He said others had assault rifles; he brought a GoPro and camera. As they drove to the refuge, he noticed some law enforcement vehicles and heard occupier Jon Ritzheimer say, “Somebody let the cat out of the bag.” But a good omen, he testified, was spotting a bald eagle on the drive to the refuge.
Cooper identified the type of guns that each of the men who arrived first at the refuge carried in sweeps of the property. At one point, he stood in the witness stand and showed how the others cleared the refuge building, stretching out his left hand in front of him while making believe he was pointing a rifle in his right hand.
He testified that Patrick had an AR-15 rifle during the initial sweep. According to Cooper, the men would say as they went building to building, “Is anybody in here? The militia is here … hello?”
Occupier Brand Thornton blew a shofar, a symbol “for battle — that God is with us,” Cooper testified.
Cooper admitted that he cut part of a barbed-wire fence on the refuge boundary during the occupation, saying that was an act of civil disobedience, a symbol that “we were taking the land back for the people.”
Cooper left the night of Jan. 26, first driving with others east out of the refuge until they encountered several law enforcement SUVs. They headed back west and then drove south to Cedar City , Utah, through Nevada, he said.
Barrow asked Cooper why he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Cooper said his tearful phone calls with his daughters convinced him to make amends.
“My little girl Sissy,” Cooper said. “She cries to me a half hour a day … how she wants her Daddy to come home. She tells me I shouldn’t have gone to the refuge, and should come forward and tell the truth.”
After he entered guilty pleas, Barrow asked Cooper, why did he record messages that were posted on social media, claiming he wasn’t guilty.
“Ethically, morally, spiritually, I felt like I did the right thing. I had a duty to God to do that, under the Constitution,” Cooper said, referring to his role in the refuge occupation. At first, he said he didn’t understand the law of conspiracy, but after consulting with his attorney, he realized, “I did in fact commit a crime and I have to accept responsibility.”
When Cooper was arrested Feb. 11, 2016, defense lawyer Andrew Kohlmetz pointed out that he admitted to an FBI agent that he had carried an AR-15 at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada and also fired a handgun while wearing a mask in a video filmed outside his Arizona home in front of his family – both while a felon.
Cooper said he didn’t remember, so Kohlmetz played the recording of the FBI interview. The agent asks Cooper why he carried the weapons if he was prohibited from possessing them. Cooper responded “The Second Amendment says I have the right to bear arms and says it shall not be infringed.”
Cooper, on the stand, denied that he ever possessed a gun, outside of the Bundy Ranch in 2014, since his felony convictions.
Kohlmetz, standby lawyer for Patrick, asked Cooper what his jail experience has been like. Cooper described it as “horrible.”
“Is it true you told folks on the phone while you’ve been in jail you would do anything to shorten that experience?” Kohlmetz asked.
“Yes sir I may have said that,” he answered.
Under questioning by Kohlmetz, Cooper acknowledged that he had tried in 1997 to join the U.S. Marine Corps, but was rejected because of an arrest warrant. In 2006, at age 27, he changed his name from Stanley Hicks Jr. to Blaine Cooper. Cooper said he took his stepfather’s last name because his father was physically abusive.
Kohlmetz asked if Cooper took the name of Jesse Ventura’s Blain Cooper character in the movie “Predator,” and Cooper said he didn’t know the last name of Ventura’s character.
Of the Dec. 29 meeting, Kohlmetz said: “You never told this story until today.”
Cooper responded: “My attorney had this information from the beginning.”
Kohlmetz played an April 5, 2016, jail phone call between Cooper and his wife. “Because phone calls are recorded, I can’t say a lot,” Cooper said on the recording. “I can tell you I didn’t know they were going in there.”
Under additional questioning from defense lawyer Jesse Merrithew, Cooper said in the Dec. 29, 2015 meeting with Bundy and others, taking over the refuge “was agreed upon but not when.”
Kohlmetz, citing another phone call Cooper made to his wife, said Cooper suggested he was going to destroy computer evidence in the case. The lawyer asked what happened to a video Cooper took of the initial sweep of the refuge. Cooper said he had his GoPro and a camera, but the memory cards were missing.
Kohlmetz also played a video of Cooper from jail, when he said Cooper “lied under oath” when pleading guilty in Nevada.
Asked about social media posts in which he first expressed interest in withdrawing his guilty plea but then changed his mind, Cooper said, “A lot of people thought that Trump would pardon us.”
He also said he had his attorneys tell Ammon Bundy and his brother, Ryan, about his guilty pleas before he entered them in court because he didn’t want to “go behind their back.”
“I thought I had a duty and obligation to let them know that,” he said, getting emotional. “I love the Bundys very much. They’re some of the best friends I have.”
Cooper also wrote to Ammon Bundy before he testified Monday.
“I wanted to let you know I decided to do whatever I have to do to get home to my kids,” Cooper wrote. He said he couldn’t justify sitting in prison for six years if he could do something to cut that time in half. He also said “God sent me two crappy attorneys,” who manipulated him into the plea deals.
Ammon Bundy’s wife, Lisa Bundy, was in court with her sister-in-law Angie Huntington Bundy, Ryan Bundy’s wife. When Cooper took the stand, Lisa Bundy waved to him, and mouthed, “We love you.”
After his testimony, Lisa Bundy said, “I’m so sad that he’s lying. He’s a pathological liar.”
Bundy said her husband was home with her and their family in Idaho between Christmas 2015 and Dec. 31, 2015, and couldn’t have been at the meeting Cooper testified about in Burns. There could have been a meeting, but not on the date Cooper said it occurred, she said.
— Maxine Bernstein
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503-221-8212
@maxoregonian
