THE FRAME-UP OF EDGAR STEELE
Outrageous railroading of truth-teller whom the liars don’t like
Updated 9/5/14
The Preponderance of Evidence in Favor of Edgar Steele
The ‘Evidence’ for the Prosecution
Conclusion – More Likely Scenario
Introduction
On June 11, 2010, Idaho lawyer Edgar J. Steele was arrested on murder-for-hire charges. According to prosecutors, Mr. Steele hired his handyman Larry Fairfax to kill his wife Cyndi and his mother-in-law. Steele is an intelligent, educated man; Fairfax is a bankrupt failed logger who turned out to be a federal drug informant. The alleged plot is so preposterous that it would be laughed out of court if all the contradictions were presented. Prosecutors will likely cherry-pick the various pieces of ‘evidence’, with some claims being conveniently “forgotten” as they attempt to cover up the many mistakes resulting from Steele’s enemies’ failure to corroborate their stories.
The hypothetical killings were supposed to look like an “accident“, a “car crash“, so that Steele could receive an auto insurance payment of at least $100,000 with which to pay the hitman. But the plot involved two pipe bombs, targeting Steele’s car as well as his wife’s. The conspirators were to carry out a double murder by blowing up the wife’s car, hoping that a bombed car would look like an “accident“. Then they would try to make it look like a murder by staging a failed murder attempt, blowing up Steele’s car – or leaving a bomb to be discovered – to give the impression that he was also targeted for murder and therefore didn’t “accidentally” murder his wife and mother-in-law! The conspiracy to arrange the deal allegedly took place on June 9 and 10, 2010, yet the federal informant fitted a live 12-inch pipe bomb to the first car as early as May 30. Hence, the prosecution’s main witness would need to be capable of time travel, or, at the very least, to have “psychic” powers that enabled him to see into the future.
Alternatively, there would necessarily exist a bizarre contradiction. The defendant would need to be stupid enough to arrange a pipe bomb plot in May, then forget all about that and negotiate a second “make it look like an accident” hit in June, pay the same hitman his travel expenses, and repeatedly say he had “no second thoughts” as if there had never been a previous attempt to kill his wife and mother-in-law. Yet at the same time the defendant is demonstrably smart enough to understand how his opponents had tried to smear him and turn his wife against him by leaving out a teddy bear that was a present for one of his female legal clients, how they had engineered an audio file by digitally splicing together his spoken words and covering up the editing by raising the noise floor and re-recording via a microphone and speakers, and how prosecutors hoped to authenticate this ‘evidence’ against him by tricking his wife into saying that it was him speaking. The prosecution might surmise that Steele’s ruptured ascending aortic aneurysm of November 2009 caused him to develop into a split personality: one being just like the original Edgar Steele with a first-class legal mind, and the other being that of a complete lunatic. Occam’s Razor dictates that the real Steele is likely to be the real Steele, and the “loony Steele” is a fictitious construct of his enemies.
Steele describes himself as “exceedingly politically incorrect“, and has spoken the truth about many lies and deceptions promoted by the powers that be. He selflessly chose to risk his life and liberty by representing “hopeless” politically incorrect clients whom the government and the powerful hoped to see railroaded into prison. Even though he was keenly aware that such actions would bring him into their sights and could result in him taking the place of the very people he represented, he knew that someone had to do the job. He loved his wife and family, and, as a lawyer, had accumulated plenty of money such as stashes of silver – until it was seized by the Feds. And he was a smart investor. Between summer 2005 and April 2006, for example, he made $150,000 profit by refinancing his house mortgage and investing $100,000 in gold, silver and palladium stocks. He would not have killed his beloved wife, deprived his children of their mother, and risked the likely prospect of the remainder of his life in jail for double first-degree murder, merely for the remote possibility of the auto accident insurance paying out for an “accidentally” blown up car and potentially leaving him with a small surplus after the hitman had received his $100,000 cut. Thus, Edgar Steele had absolutely zero motive to kill his wife and mother-in-law, but his enemies had very strong motives to attempt to destroy him.
Within a week or two of Steele’s arrest, it was increasingly evident that the attempts to concoct charges against him had been botched. When his wife listened to the tapes that allegedly ‘prove’ he conspired to kill her, she noticed that there was no inflection in his voice and the background noise changed when he was supposedly talking about a “murder-for-hire” plot. More Keystone Kops than Mission Impossible. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted to doctoring audio footage from radio exchanges with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Israel, a frequent target of Steele’s criticism, broadcast the edited Freedom Flotilla communications on June 4, 2010, a mere five to six days prior to the FBI’s monitoring of transmissions purportedly originating from Edgar Steele and the federal informant. And in July 2010, audio experts said that tapes of an alleged “racist rant” by Mel Gibson had been tampered with. The tapes “had been edited to possibly remove words or piece together phrases”. Forensic audio expert Arlo West said he had found “gaps, transients and fades“. The voices were on separate tracks, allowing the editors to mix the voices. On one segment there was a 60 Hz hum when Gibson was speaking, which faded down as if someone was mixing tracks and adjusting the volume, before Oksana Grigorieva’s voice came in. Although Gibson had previously spoken some truth about Jews being responsible for wars, his belligerent, drunken behavior proved very useful to Israel in helping to dismiss any criticism of Zionism as “anti-Semitic“. Israel had the motive and the means to doctor and propagate the Gibson tapes.
A former case officer (katsa) in Israel’s notorious Mossad secret service revealed how the Mossad’s LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit) Department, responsible for disinformation and psychological warfare, planted a “Trojan” transmitter on the top floor of a five-story building in Tripoli. An IDF navy ship out at sea transmitted misleading pre-recorded audio that could only be picked up by the Trojan relay. The Trojan then broadcast those messages to be intercepted by American and British listening stations, whose operators would imagine they had picked up “genuine” transmissions originating from the Libyans, and showing Libya to be a sponsor of terrorism. And naturally, this “intelligence” was corroborated by information provided by the Mossad. Thus, Reagan was tricked into bombing Libya in April 1986.
At a July 28 hearing where Steele pleaded not guilty to four new charges, his wife Cyndi joined his supporters in court. Visitors to the hearing and Steele family members convened afterwards at a nearby private residence, and Mrs. Steele said how much she appreciated all of the financial (and moral) support. Thus, the “plot” has so little credibility that the “victim” wants to exonerate the prime “conspirator”.
The following timeline includes real and alleged events. A concise version has been added, so that the collection of contradictions in the official story becomes very evident.
Timeline (extended)
1985
Edgar Steele marries Cyndi Kunzman in San Mateo, California.
2005
March 30. Edgar Steele offers some advice for new lawyers. He says that “lots of money” is not all it’s made out to be, not to get married until “long after” they have recovered “from the process of becoming a lawyer”, to “marry a genuinely nice person” who is “exceptionally forgiving”, and to “have kids” as it is “the only way to learn how to love someone else more than you love yourself”.
2006
July 29. Edgar Steele declares that “My wife and my kids – they are my rock”.
September 24. Steele says that he has a “healthy and robust family life with a wife of twenty-one years who respects [his] opinions and even shares a great many of them”. He says his kids are “proud” of him, and they “all love each other – a lot”. And he tells how his family have a long-running ‘joke’ about the world being “full of morons”.
2007
Edgar Steele describes his wife Cyndi as “still a babe after all these years and better than I deserve, with a heart of gold and an eternally forgiving nature”.
August 27. Steele proudly posts photos of his wife…
…and three children, and describes them as “pretty people”.
2008
April 1. Steele says that before he married, twenty-three years ago, he promised his wife that he’d never hit her and that things would never be boring. And he kept his word.
2009
November 21. Edgar Steele suffers a ruptured ascending aortic aneurysm, and his life is saved against the odds. He just happens to remain sitting in his study for 15 minutes after feeling a “pop” in his chest (fearing that he will pass out if he stands up), and when he rushes to the local hospital emergency room there just happens to be a helicopter on the roof to take him to the nearest cardiac specialty unit. He is on a heart-lung machine for several hours, unconscious and on a respirator for 9 days, and in intensive care for two weeks. The surgeon later tells him that the 15 minutes he spent sitting at his desk probably saved his life, as evidenced by extensive clotting.
Late November, or most probably, December. Cyndi Steele, in the middle of having to visit Edgar and her mother who is also in poor health, arranges for the animals to be fed but neglects to turn the faucets on to a drip, and the pipes freeze. She calls out “Larry the plumber”, who happens to be Larry Fairfax, a federal drug informant. (Listen to this short audio clip.)
2010
April 14. Bankruptcy is filed for Lawrence A. Fairfax and Carla R. Fairfax, dba Fairfax Logging, Sagle. Their debts are $638,898. The judge is Terry L. Myers; the trustee is C. Barry Zimmerman. Source, originally cached by Google; by July 10 the cache only showed April 1 – 10. As of August 4 the cache was gone.
May 30 (Sunday). Lawrence Andrew Fairfax fits a pipe bomb onto Cyndi Steele’s black Mitsubishi Endeavor, according to the ATF, and by his own admission.
[…]
June 9 (Wednesday). Edgar Steele allegedly meets with a hitman in a horse barn at Steele’s property, and discusses a plan to murder Steele’s wife and mother-in-law. The hitman is described as a “witness” for the FBI; an “informant working undercover for the FBI in order to catch Edgar Steele”. In some reports, the witness is wearing a recording device on June 9 and 10; other reports hold that the witness is not equipped with a wire until June 10, and the June 9 meeting is merely “monitored” by the FBI. Although the FBI refuse to confirm or deny whether this “witness” is Larry Fairfax (due to rules about confidential informants), the information provided in news reports demonstrates that the “witness” (informant) is indeed Fairfax. The “witness” is said to have known Steele for 20 years, to have worked with him on several projects in the past, to have been promised $100,000 if the insurance money came through after the murders, to have been paid $400 travel costs to go to Oregon City, and to have talked to the FBI on Wednesday, June 9.
[…]
These characteristics match those claimed for Larry Fairfax, described as a “hitman turned informant”.
[…]
Fairfax worked for Steele on occasion as a handyman, thereby matching the “worked on several projects with him” characteristic of the “witness”.
June 10 (Thursday). The FBI’s “witness”, aka Larry Fairfax, allegedly attends a second meeting with Edgar Steele in the horse barn at Steele’s place. All reports assert that “this time”, Fairfax is wearing a recording device. In his meetings with Steele, Fairfax is reported as having worn a wire twice. Steele tells the informant he will receive payment when confirmation of death is received and Steele is not considered a suspect. Over the July 9-10 meetings, Steele allegedly says he has “no second thoughts” and wants “the plan carried out”. The killings are planned for Friday July 11, and it is agreed to make it look like an accident, a car crash. Steele says both must die, as he does not want to “take care of a paraplegic”. Apart from the $100,000 if the insurance payment comes through, payment for the double murder is to be $25,000. Fairfax requests $400 up front expenses to travel to Oregon. Steele agrees and pays him. The plan is for Fairfax to fit a pipe bomb under Steele’s wife’s SUV, and under Steele’s car, so that Steele can detonate his bomb after the first goes off, claiming that both he and his wife were targeted for murder.
June 11 (Friday). Edgar Steele is arrested on a murder-for-hire charge. Federal agents seize his life savings. An FBI agent says he is convincedSteele is guilty, and has all the evidence he needs on tape.
June 13 (Sunday). Edgar Steele phones his son, and then his wife, from jail. He explains how, by splicing together multiple recordings of his voice into a particular sequence of words, then adjusting the volume and noise floor levels, and re-recording via a microphone and speakers to mask the edits, those seeking to frame him have fabricated audio of him allegedly plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. He warns Cyndi that they will be hoping to authenticate the tape by confirmation from her that it is him speaking as opposed to a digitally manipulated audio file. And he tells how they have tried to drive a wedge between him and his wife by opening up a box and placing a teddy bear for her to find that was a present for one of his “Ukrainian girlfriends”. The “Ukrainian girlfriends” is a nickname used by Steele to denote several Ukrainian legal clients of his (note he states “case business” in the phone call to his son), but Steele’s enemies didn’t know that. They hoped to get his wife mad at him in the belief that it would give them a better chance of getting her to authenticate the tape. The mainstream media goes on to misrepresent the factsin order to give the impression that he has a Ukrainian girlfriend.
June 14 (Monday). Edgar Steele is scheduled to appear in court. However, the court building has to be evacuated and Steele’s hearing is delayed by one day, after a white powder is sent through the mail to the court. Subsequent tests are to show that the powder is mainly harmless calcium carbonate (chalk, limestone or marble). The powder is also sent to another seven federal buildings in Idaho, Washington and Utah, including an FBI office in Salt Lake City that is dealing with the Steele case.
The white powder is postmarked from Spokane. The FBI, the ATF, the Secret Service and several other government agencies have offices in Spokane.
June 15 (Tuesday). 12:30 pm. As Cyndi Steele’s Mitsubishi is in the Fast Lane Quick Lube auto shop in Coeur d’Alene for an oil change, a pipe bomb is found, attached to the bottom of the SUV. Police are called and the car is pushed outside. A Spokane bomb squad unit detonates the device, which, it is claimed, was explosive.
4:30 pm. Edgar Steele pleads not guilty in a 45-minute hearing at the Coeur d’Alene District Court, attended by his wife and son. He is denied bail and ordered not to contact his wife and mother-in-law, after Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan cites developments “within the last few hours” as ‘evidence’ that Steele is a “substantial risk to the public”. However, even Whelan admits that there is no clear motive for the alleged plot. Cyndi Steele cries after the hearing and slams her hand against the court wall. She says to court officials “I need to be allowed to talk to my husband – I need to not be stripped of my car”.
[…]
Steele explains that the government is trying to “drive a wedge” between his wife and himself by banning all contact. He tells of how federal agents seized their marital life savings on the day of his arrest last week, thereby forcing him to rely on the services of a public defender, since he no longer has the necessary funds for legal counsel.
7:00 pm. Larry Fairfax is interviewed by Detective Sergeant Dan O’Dell of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department.
8:15 pm. Fairfax is arrested by ATF Special Agent C. Todd Smith for possession of an explosive device. He is given the Miranda warning, but waives his right to remain silent.
June 21 (Monday). The authorities play the tape they hold as ‘evidence’ against Edgar Steele to his wife. Most of the footage is of Steele explaining to Fairfax what chores he wants him to do, such as building work or feeding the horses. But Cyndi notices that when Edgar is allegedly talking about the “murder-for-hire hit”, the inflection in his voice disappears, and the background noise changes. This is confirmed in a subsequent internet radio interview by a friend of the Steeles (listen to or download the one-minute clip here).
Ingri Cassel: And Cyndi did say, you know, about the tapes. Cyndi, when she’s listening to the tapes, she told him (Dr. Allen Banks) and I that, when all of a sudden the tape changes, the inflection in Ed’s voice, I mean, he has a very demonstrative voice. If you’ve ever heard him on radio, you know, he can, you know, the inflections in his voice. All of that changes – the background noise change, everything changes when he’s doing the alleged “hit” on her, you know, the “murder-for-hire” stuff. So – and they can computerize any of our voices. So, you know, she noticed real clearly, the whole, he had no inflection in his voice. And, totally changed.Jim Giles: Cyndi noticed this?IC: Yes.
JG: And she, what did she, how do you know she noticed it?
IC: She said that to Allen, and she said that to me.
JG: When did she view this, this video? When did that happen?
IC: The twenty-first, and I saw her the evening, two hours on the evening of the twenty-first.
JG: Of June?
IC: Uh-huh.
A subsequent clarification at the Free Edgar Steele site pointed out that the tape played to Cyndi Steele was merely audio, not a “video” as stated by Jim Giles.
July 9 (Friday). Edgar Steele manages to get a letter out of jail, explaining how he was framed. By now it has become evident that Larry Fairfax is a longtime federal informant, used by the FBI in drug and “hate crime” cases. There was another infamous example back in 1986, when Roy Edward Bullock was exposed as a full-time professional operative and informant for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL). Bullock, ahomosexual from San Francisco whose information was passed on to both Israel and the South African government, posed as an “art dealer“, a “populist” and a “good patriot”. He was paid $550 a week plus expenses by the ADL.
July 20 (Tuesday). Prosecutors file three new charges against Edgar Steele, relating to phone calls that he made from jail, and explosive material found after he was arrested. In addition to the murder-for-hire charge (“use of interstate commerce to commission murder for hire”), he is accused of tampering with a victim, use of explosive material to commit a federal felony and possession of a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence. The final charge carries a maximum of “not less than thirty years in prison“.
July 28 (Wednesday). Edgar Steele appears in court and pleads not guilty to the latest charges against him. The supposed “victim” in this alleged “murder plot” talks to the supporters of the “suspect” in court.
After the hearing, Steele family members and supporters of Edgar Steele convene at a nearby private residence. Cyndi Steele tells of her appreciation for hundreds of dollars in donations that have already been sent in to help fight the charges against her husband.
August 12 (Thursday). It is revealed that Edgar Steele has asked that his wife be allowed to visit him, so that they can discuss “common property and interests” and “financial issues related to their children”.
August 13 (Friday). Judge B. Lynn Winmill accedes to the request for a meeting between Edgar and Cyndi Steele, under condition that if either of them attempt to discuss the case or anything “related to it”, Public Defender Roger Peven would immediately terminate the visit. Peven is to monitor the meeting, and a recording will be sent to Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan.
September 7 (Tuesday). Cyndi Steele and her mother both file affidavits objecting to the proposed plea deal with Larry Fairfax. Cyndi describes Edgar Steele as her “loving husband”, and says she knew right from the start that he was innocent and Fairfax was the bad guy. She confirms that Fairfax stole thousands of dollars of silver bullion. And she reveals how, when she tells the FBI agent his “tape recorded evidence is untrustworthy”, he always becomes defensive and tries to insist that she should agree with him, which amounts to witness tampering.
Cyndi’s mother tells how her son-in-law provided her with “so much care and support in the past few years” as her health was failing, and even saved her from foreclosure on her home.
Larry Fairfax’s plea deal hearing is scheduled for today. It is postponed after Fairfax refuses to admit that the pipe bomb he fitted to Cyndi’s car could have exploded.
September 8 (Wednesday). Two further case documents are made available for public perusal.
Letter from Cyndi Steele to Thomas E. Moss, US Attorney for Idaho
September 13 (Monday). Cyndi Steele writes a letter for the fundraising campaign, in which she declares that she never believed her husband to have been involved in a plot to kill her and her mother.
September 20 (Monday). Cyndi Steele holds a press conference, in which she says her husband remains in jail “at the hands of the FBI and the government for something he didn’t do”. She says Larry Fairfax had been stealing from her family, and gives plenty of other reasons why she knows her husband is innocent. A phone message is replayed in which someone had called in with the name of an accomplice of Fairfax. She says the word “bomb” was on the tapes she’d been given to listen to on June 21. If the official story is correct, then those recordings were made no later than June 11 when Edgar Steele was arrested. Yet the FBI never warned Mrs. Steele or inspected her car.
September 27 (Monday). Cyndi Steele and her lawyer file a motion to vacate the no contact order banning communications between Cyndi and her husband that are essential for dealing with numerous pending professional and family business matters.
October 7 (Thursday). Larry Fairfax changes his plea to guilty to two firearms charges for making and possessing a pipe bomb. His sentencing is scheduled for December 16. At the hearing, Cyndi Steele makes a long statement objecting to Fairfax’s plea deal, which could see him serve as little as 18 months in jail for placing a pipe bomb on her car and leaving it there for weeks without telling anyone. She asks what Jim Maher and other accomplices of Fairfax knew, and why they didn’t warn anyone about the bomb.
October 18 (Monday). Judge B. Lynn Winmill issues a ruling that Cyndi and Edgar Steele can meet once a week at the Spokane County Jail, or alternatively communicate by telephone. They are not allowed to exchange notes or documents, or to discuss the “murder-for-hire” case. Also, the November 1 trial is delayed until March 7.
January, 2011. Cyndi Steele is interviewed by Dave Gahary of American Free Press. The audio file is available from this page.
Timeline (concise)
1985
Edgar Steele marries Cyndi Kunzman in San Mateo, California.
2005
March 30. Edgar Steele offers some advice for new lawyers. He says that “lots of money” is not all it’s made out to be, not to get married until “long after” they have recovered “from the process of becoming a lawyer”, to “marry a genuinely nice person” who is “exceptionally forgiving”, and to “have kids” as it is “the only way to learn how to love someone else more than you love yourself”.
2006
July 29. Edgar Steele declares that “My wife and my kids – they are my rock”.
September 24. Steele says that he has a “healthy and robust family life with a wife of twenty-one years who respects [his] opinions and even shares a great many of them”. He says his kids are “proud” of him, and they “all love each other – a lot”. And he tells how his family have a long-running ‘joke’ about the world being “full of morons”.
2007
Edgar Steele describes his wife Cyndi as “still a babe after all these years and better than I deserve, with a heart of gold and an eternally forgiving nature”.
August 27. Steele proudly posts photos of his wife and three children, and describes them as “pretty people”.
2008
April 1. Steele says that before he married, twenty-three years ago, he promised his wife that he’d never hit her and that things would never be boring. And he kept his word.
2009
November 21. Edgar Steele suffers a ruptured ascending aortic aneurysm, and his life is saved against the odds. He just happens to remain sitting in his study for 15 minutes after feeling a “pop” in his chest (fearing that he will pass out if he stands up), and when he rushes to the local hospital emergency room there just happens to be a helicopter on the roof to take him to the nearest cardiac specialty unit. He is on a heart-lung machine for several hours, unconscious and on a respirator for 9 days, and in intensive care for two weeks. The surgeon later tells him that the 15 minutes he spent sitting at his desk probably saved his life, as evidenced by extensive clotting.
Late November, or most probably, December. Cyndi Steele, in the middle of having to visit Edgar and her mother who is also in poor health, arranges for the animals to be fed but neglects to turn the faucets on to a drip, and the pipes freeze. She calls out “Larry the plumber”, who happens to be Larry Fairfax, a federal drug informant. (Listen to this short audio clip.)
2010
April 14. Bankruptcy is filed for Lawrence A. Fairfax and Carla R. Fairfax, dba Fairfax Logging, Sagle. Their debts are $638,898. The judge is Terry L. Myers; the trustee is C. Barry Zimmerman. Source, originally cached by Google; by July 10 the cache only showed April 1 – 10.
May 30 (Sunday). Lawrence Andrew Fairfax fits a pipe bomb onto Cyndi Steele’s black Mitsubishi Endeavor, according to the ATF, and by his own admission.
June 9 (Wednesday). Edgar Steele allegedly meets with a hitman in a horse barn at Steele’s property, and discusses a plan to murder Steele’s wife and mother-in-law. The hitman is described as a “witness” for the FBI; an “informant working undercover for the FBI in order to catch Edgar Steele”. In some reports, the witness is wearing a recording device on June 9 and 10; other reports hold that the witness is not equipped with a wire until June 10, and the June 9 meeting is merely “monitored” by the FBI. Although the FBI refuse to confirm or deny whether this “witness” is Larry Fairfax, the information provided in news reports demonstrates that the “witness” (informant) is indeed Fairfax. The “witness” is said to haveknown Steele for 20 years, to have worked with him on several projects in the past, to have been promised $100,000 if the insurance money came through after the murders, to have been paid $400 travel costs to go to Oregon City, and to have talked to the FBI on Wednesday, June 9.
These characteristics match those claimed for Larry Fairfax, described as a “hitman turned informant”.
Fairfax worked for Steele on occasion as a handyman, thereby matching the “worked on several projects with him” characteristic of the “witness”.
June 10 (Thursday). The FBI’s “witness”, aka Larry Fairfax, allegedly attends a second meeting with Edgar Steele in the horse barn at Steele’s place. All reports assert that “this time”, Fairfax is wearing a recording device. In his meetings with Steele, Fairfax is reported as having worn a wire twice. Steele tells the informant he will receive payment when confirmation of death is received and Steele is not considered a suspect. Over the July 9-10 meetings, Steele allegedly says he has “no second thoughts” and wants “the plan carried out”. The killings are planned for Friday July 11, and it is agreed to make it look like an accident, a car crash. Steele says both must die, as he does not want to “take care of a paraplegic”. Apart from the $100,000 if the insurance payment comes through, payment for the double murder is to be $25,000. Fairfax requests $400 up front expenses to travel to Oregon. Steele agrees and pays him. The plan is for Fairfax to fit a pipe bomb under Steele’s wife’s SUV, and under Steele’s car, so that Steele can detonate his bomb after the first goes off, claiming that both he and his wife were targeted for murder.
June 11 (Friday). Edgar Steele is arrested on a murder-for-hire charge. Federal agents seize his life savings. An FBI agent says he is convincedSteele is guilty, and has all the evidence he needs on tape.
June 13 (Sunday). Edgar Steele phones his son, and then his wife, from jail. He explains how, by splicing together multiple recordings of his voice into a particular sequence of words, then adjusting the volume and noise floor levels, and re-recording via a microphone and speakers to mask the edits, those seeking to frame him have fabricated audio of him allegedly plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. He warns Cyndi that they will be hoping to authenticate the tape by confirmation from her that it is him speaking as opposed to a digitally manipulated audio file. And he tells how they have tried to drive a wedge between him and his wife by opening up a box and placing a teddy bear for her to find that was a present for one of his “Ukrainian girlfriends”. The “Ukrainian girlfriends” is a nickname used by Steele to denote several Ukrainian legal clients of his (note he states “case business” in the phone call to his son), but Steele’s enemies didn’t know that. They hoped to get his wife mad at him in the belief that it would give them a better chance of getting her to authenticate the tape. The mainstream media goes on to misrepresent the factsin order to give the impression that he has a Ukrainian girlfriend.
June 14 (Monday). Edgar Steele is scheduled to appear in court. However, the court building has to be evacuated and Steele’s hearing is delayed by one day, after a white powder is sent through the mail to the court. Subsequent tests are to show that the powder is mainly harmless calcium carbonate (chalk, limestone or marble). The powder is also sent to another seven federal buildings in Idaho, Washington and Utah, including an FBI office in Salt Lake City that is dealing with the Steele case. The white powder is postmarked from Spokane. The FBI, the ATF, the Secret Service and several other government agencies have offices in Spokane.
June 15 (Tuesday). 12:30 pm. As Cyndi Steele’s Mitsubishi is in the Fast Lane Quick Lube auto shop in Coeur d’Alene for an oil change, a pipe bomb is found, attached to the bottom of the SUV. Police are called and the car is pushed outside. A Spokane bomb squad unit detonates the device, which, it is claimed, was explosive.
4:30 pm. Edgar Steele pleads not guilty in a 45-minute hearing at the Coeur d’Alene District Court, attended by his wife and son. He is denied bail and ordered not to contact his wife and mother-in-law, after Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan cites developments “within the last few hours” as ‘evidence’ that Steele is a “substantial risk to the public”. However, even Whelan admits that there is no clear motive for the alleged plot. Cyndi Steele cries after the hearing and slams her hand against the court wall. She says to court officials “I need to be allowed to talk to my husband – I need to not be stripped of my car”. Steele explains that the government is trying to “drive a wedge” between his wife and himself by banning all contact. He tells of how federal agents seized their marital life savings on the day of his arrest last week, thereby forcing him to rely on the services of a public defender, since he no longer has the necessary funds for legal counsel.
7:00 pm. Larry Fairfax is interviewed by Detective Sergeant Dan O’Dell of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department.
8:15 pm. Fairfax is arrested by ATF Special Agent C. Todd Smith for possession of an explosive device. He is given the Miranda warning, but waives his right to remain silent.
June 21 (Monday). The authorities play the tape they hold as ‘evidence’ against Edgar Steele to his wife. Most of the footage is of Steele explaining to Fairfax what chores he wants him to do, such as building work or feeding the horses. But Cyndi notices that when Edgar is allegedly talking about the “murder-for-hire hit”, the inflection in his voice disappears, and the background noise changes. This is confirmed in a subsequent internet radio interview by a friend of the Steeles (listen to or download the one-minute clip here).
A subsequent clarification at the Free Edgar Steele site pointed out that the tape played to Cyndi Steele was merely audio, not a “video” as stated by Jim Giles.
July 9 (Friday). Edgar Steele manages to get a letter out of jail, explaining how he was framed. By now it has become evident that Larry Fairfax is a longtime federal informant, used by the FBI in drug and “hate crime” cases. There was another infamous example back in 1986, when Roy Edward Bullock was exposed as a full-time professional operative and informant for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL). Bullock, ahomosexual from San Francisco whose information was passed on to both Israel and the South African government, posed as an “art dealer“, a “populist” and a “good patriot”. He was paid $550 a week plus expenses by the ADL.
July 20 (Tuesday). Prosecutors file three new charges against Edgar Steele, relating to phone calls that he made from jail, and explosive material found after he was arrested. In addition to the murder-for-hire charge (“use of interstate commerce to commission murder for hire”), he is accused of tampering with a victim, use of explosive material to commit a federal felony and possession of a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence. The final charge carries a maximum of “not less than thirty years in prison“.
July 28 (Wednesday). Edgar Steele appears in court and pleads not guilty to the latest charges against him. The supposed “victim” in this alleged “murder plot” talks to the supporters of the “suspect” in court. After the hearing, Steele family members and supporters of Edgar Steele convene at a nearby private residence. Cyndi Steele tells of her appreciation for hundreds of dollars in donations that have already been sent in to help fight the charges against her husband.
August 12 (Thursday). It is revealed that Edgar Steele has asked that his wife be allowed to visit him, so that they can discuss “common property and interests” and “financial issues related to their children”.
August 13 (Friday). Judge B. Lynn Winmill accedes to the request for a meeting between Edgar and Cyndi Steele, under condition that if either of them attempt to discuss the case or anything “related to it”, Public Defender Roger Peven would immediately terminate the visit. Peven is to monitor the meeting, and a recording will be sent to Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan.
September 7 (Tuesday). Cyndi Steele and her mother both file affidavits objecting to the proposed plea deal with Larry Fairfax. Cyndi describes Edgar Steele as her “loving husband”, and says she knew right from the start that he was innocent and Fairfax was the bad guy. She confirms that Fairfax stole thousands of dollars of silver bullion. And she reveals how, when she tells the FBI agent his “tape recorded evidence is untrustworthy”, he always becomes defensive and tries to insist that she should agree with him, which amounts to witness tampering. Cyndi’s mother tells how her son-in-law provided her with “so much care and support in the past few years” as her health was failing, and even saved her from foreclosure on her home.
Larry Fairfax’s plea deal hearing is scheduled for today. It is postponed after Fairfax refuses to admit that the pipe bomb he fitted to Cyndi’s car could have exploded.
September 8 (Wednesday). Two further case documents are made available for public perusal.
Letter from Cyndi Steele to Thomas E. Moss, US Attorney for Idaho
September 13 (Monday). Cyndi Steele writes a letter for the fundraising campaign, in which she declares that she never believed her husband to have been involved in a plot to kill her and her mother.
September 20 (Monday). Cyndi Steele holds a press conference, in which she says her husband remains in jail “at the hands of the FBI and the government for something he didn’t do”. She says Larry Fairfax had been stealing from her family, and gives plenty of other reasons why she knows her husband is innocent. A phone message is replayed in which someone had called in with the name of an accomplice of Fairfax. She says the word “bomb” was on the tapes she’d been given to listen to on June 21. If the official story is correct, then those recordings were made no later than June 11 when Edgar Steele was arrested. Yet the FBI never warned Mrs. Steele or inspected her car.
September 27 (Monday). Cyndi Steele and her lawyer file a motion to vacate the no contact order banning communications between Cyndi and her husband that are essential for dealing with numerous pending professional and family business matters.
October 7 (Thursday). Larry Fairfax changes his plea to guilty to two firearms charges for making and possessing a pipe bomb. His sentencing is scheduled for December 16. At the hearing, Cyndi Steele makes a long statement objecting to Fairfax’s plea deal, which could see him serve as little as 18 months in jail for placing a pipe bomb on her car and leaving it there for weeks without telling anyone. She asks what Jim Maher and other accomplices of Fairfax knew, and why they didn’t warn anyone about the bomb.
October 18 (Monday). Judge B. Lynn Winmill issues a ruling that Cyndi and Edgar Steele can meet once a week at the Spokane County Jail, or alternatively communicate by telephone. They are not allowed to exchange notes or documents, or to discuss the “murder-for-hire” case. Also, the November 1 trial is delayed until March 7.
January, 2011. Cyndi Steele is interviewed by Dave Gahary of American Free Press. The audio file is available from this page.
Discussion
One of the official conspiracy theory’s most intractable problems is that, on the one hand, the alleged murders were supposed to look like an “accident”. On the other hand, a plot featuring a single pipe bomb on a car for a hit that is supposed to look like an accident is bad enough. Yet, in the supposed Steele – Fairfax conspiracy, there are two: one on Cyndi’s car, and another to be detonated on Edgar Steele’s car to make it seem as if he was also targeted for murder. Imagine the police finding two exploded vehicles, forensics determine that pipe bombs were involved, and the police conclude that the bombs spontaneously assembled themselves and attached themselves to the cars. “Yeah, those bombs just appeared out of the blue. Y’know, it’s a hazard that drivers are well aware of. Remember how they taught us the theory of evolution of energetic devices in training school. And the fact that Ed Steele’s car was blown up proves that he didn’t accidentally plot to murder his wife accidently; some other guy must have accidently plotted to murder Steele and his wife accidently. There’s no evidence of foul play there.” A very plausible scenario.
The timeline poses another insurmountable difficulty for the official conspiracy theorist. Fairfax had already made and fitted a pipe bomb to Cyndi’s car on May 30, ten or eleven days before Steele allegedly negotiated the murder-for-hire deal with him on June 9 and 10, paid Fairfax’s travel expenses to Oregon, said he had “no second thoughts”, he wanted “the plan carried out”, and that Fairfax would only get paid if both women were dead as he did not want to “take care of a paraplegic”, etc. For example, the theorist may propose a suspension of the laws of causality, postulating that Larry Fairfax is capable of time travel or has powers of clairvoyance. The clairvoyance theory, although barmy, would have the advantage of ‘explaining’ the contradiction between the “make it look like an accident” plot of June 2010 and the “make it look like a murder” plan of May 2010. If Fairfax’s “psychic talents” were only partial, he could have sufficient precognitive abilities to see nearly two weeks into the future from May 30, perceive that Steele was going to hire him and pay him $25,000 if both women were killed and Steele was not a suspect, but fail to see that the plan was to make it look like an accident, and take the pipe bombs route instead. The problem for the rest of us who live in the real world, where the laws of physics, mathematics, logic, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc do not fluctuate whenever organized crime is perpetrating some major deception, is that, although the official conspiracy theorists inhabit several alternate parallel universes of their very own, these whacky worlds stubbornly refuse to decohere from our world.
One ploy by Steele’s enemies, in their attempts to hold on to the laws of causality, is to propose that Edgar Steele lost his mind, following his medical emergency of November 2009. This would allow them to posit that Steele first organized a “make it look like a murder and an attempted murder” hit in May 2010, forgot about that after the plot failed, then plotted a second “make it look like an accident” contract in June. That could account for Steele’s June payment of Fairfax’s travel expenses, his repeated statements about having “no second thoughts” and wanting “the plan carried out”, and his refusal when arranging the June 11 hit to comment on Fairfax’s supposed previous failure. The prosecution’s problem is that there is absolutely no evidence that Steele could have forgotten about a first murder-for-hire deal. Thanks to a lucky turn of events, there is no likely etiology for the hypothetical “crazy Steele” condition. Steele remained sitting for 15 minutes, which allowed for extensive clotting at the point of rupture (it was not a “heart attack”). He got to the local hospital emergency room, there was a chopper parked on the roof, and the surgeon’s team was waiting and started working on him in the elevator of the receiving facility. People can be clinically dead for, say, 27 minutes under chilled conditions, wake up a few hours later (no “near-death experiences”), and still remember their voicemail code. And the fact that Steele did not suffer sufficient ischemic injury to compromise his brain is confirmed by his 2010 posts on his website, his jailhouse phone calls to his wife and son, and his letter written from jail. These demonstrate that he retains a first-class mind, and could not have planned a murder-for-hire deal, forgotten all about it, and then plotted a new deal with the same hitman two weeks later.
Should Steele’s enemies attempt to address their lack of evidence for the “Steele went crazy” thesis, this introduces a delicious irony. They must propose a conspiracy theory in which the jailhouse phone calls were faked, with three actors playing the part of Steele, his wife and son; the penciled letter from Steele out of jail was faked, possibly by one of the previously mentioned actors or perhaps by a fourth person; and one of these three, a fourth or fifth person hacked into his website and posted content that mimicked Steele’s old writing style. And to what purpose – so that Steele could be sentenced to twenty or thirty years instead of a few years in a sanatorium? Or as suggested above in the introduction, they could try claiming that Steele’s mind had “split” into two Steeles: one who was exactly like the original Steele, and another who was a complete nut case. Both the “two Steeles” theory and the “fake Steele” theory are ruled out by Occam’s Razor.
Alternatively, the prosecutors may try proposing that Fairfax lied about fitting the car bomb in May, and he did not fit it to Cyndi’s car until after the June 9/10 deal was agreed. This does not resolve the contradiction of the pipe bomb that was supposed to look like an accident. And in any case, if Fairfax lied about that, how can his testimony be taken seriously on any matter? Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. However, if Fairfax did attach the pipe bomb – at whatever time prior to its discovery on June 15, then why did this confidential informant fail to mention it in his discussions with federal agents over the preceding week? A person who makes and fixes a bomb to a car is hardly going to forget about it within the next two weeks.
It’s ridiculous to imagine that a man who became critically ill in November 2009 with a ruptured ascending aortic aneurysm, who was unconscious for nine days, and nursed back to health by his family over the following months, should suddenly decide he wants to kill his wife and leave his children without their mother. At least one mainstream media outlet was misleadingly trying to peddle a rumor that Steele had a “Ukrainian girlfriend”, when, as explained in the timeline for June 15, “Ukrainian girlfriends” was a nickname that he used to refer to several of his femalelegal clients. But it is highly credible that a federal informant could have asked the recuperating Edgar Steele if there was anyone he wanted dead, and that Steele, given his political views, would have been happy to oblige with a few suggestions. Abe Foxman is one fairly obvious contender for this hypothetical list of Steele’s; others would include Morris Dees and members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). But Steele wouldn’t have named his wife or mother-in-law – once he was in full control of his faculties.
It must be remembered that when Steele was in hospital, pumped full of drugs and desperately ill, he was very anxious to get out and go home. When he came to, under the influence of the drugs, he threatened the hospital, he told his friend Allen Banks that he had to pull all the strings to get him released, and he said bad things to Allen and Cyndi, which freaked them out. (Listen to this one-minute clip from the Jim Giles – Ingri Cassel interview.) So it is conceivable that a federal informant or agent might have gone into the hospital, to lead Steele on and obtain some “incriminating” audio just as he was at his most vulnerable. The agent might have talked about murder-for-hire whilst at the hospital. Or if the agent brought up the subject of murder-for-hire whilst Steele was recuperating at home, that could have been spliced onto any drug-induced comments from the hospitalized Steele who was desperate to get out.
One of Steele’s alleged motives for plotting to kill his wife was that he hoped to get insurance money for an auto accident. Firstly, this idea is ludicrous because Steele had plenty of money – before it was seized by the authorities after his arrest. (Listen to that one-minute clip from the previous paragraph.) He had silver coins and plenty of stashes, and he frequently talked and wrote about investing – hardly consistent with someone who was broke. He did well with his investments; he made $150,000 profit between summer 2005 and April 2006 by refinancing his house mortgage and investing $100,000 in gold, silver and palladium stocks. In the alleged plot he still had to pay Fairfax $100,000 of any insurance payment. And he is a lawyer. Even non-profit lawyers with only 5 – 9 years’ experience, dedicated to causes such as civil rights, have a median salary of $80,000 per year. Also note how he wrote in 2005 that having “lots of money” is not the most important thing. Secondly, there is the absurdity that the plot was supposed to have involved two pipe bombs. When the auto insurance assessor comes to examine the case, he is hardly going to conclude that they have to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars because the cars were “accidentally” bombed – including Edgar Steele’s car to make it look like he had also been accidentally targeted for an accidental murder.
All the available evidence shows that Edgar Steele loves his wife and children, and he treasures them much more than mere money. In 2007 Steeledescribed his wife as “still a babe after all these years and better than I deserve, with a heart of gold and an eternally forgiving nature”. And also as shown in the timeline above, he proudly posted photos of his wife and three children, and described them as “pretty people”. In 2006 he saidthat he had a “healthy and robust family life with a wife of twenty-one years who respects [his] opinions and even shares a great many of them”, that his kids were “proud” of him, and they all loved each other – “a lot”. And he said that his “wife and kids” were his “rock”, and that people in the politically-incorrect (Patriot) “Movement” would “need and treasure” their family as never before. Also, note that Steele said he was most bothered about his father, who regarded him as a “nut case”. The father had been given a copy of Steele’s book Defensive Racism – some of which is available online – but had never bothered to read it. However, no one – not even the most paranoid conspiracy theorist – has ever claimed that Steele conspired to attempt to kill his father.
Steele describes himself as “half Scotch and half Irish”. His wife is half Armenian and half German – both of which are Aryan, which Steele obviously supports, and both of which are victims of the Chosen Ones, who are enemies of Steele. When Steele talked about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 that was perpetrated by the Dönmeh – Crypto-Jews posing as Turks – he explained that since his wife and children are one-half and one-quarter Armenian respectively, he took the ADL’s role in denying this genocide “very personally”. That statement is not exactly consistent with a man who hated his family and wanted to kill his wife.
Although there is no evidence that Steele loved another woman, a recent poll showed that 20 percent of adults are in love with someone other than their long-term partner. Yet how many of them go on to plot to murder their wife and mother-in-law? According to the FBI’s crime statistics for 1995, for example, there were 21,597 murders. Given a total U.S. population around 263 million as of 1995, the murder rate was about 8.2 per 100,000 population.
77 percent of murder victims were males; hence 23 percent were females, which is 4,967. Among all female murder victims in 1995, the proportion slain by husbands or boyfriends was 26 percent, which equals 1,291. According to demographic data for 1994, the under-18 population was then 26.1 percent of the total, leaving the adult proportion at 73.9 percent. About 51% were women. Assuming these figure for 1995, there were about 263 million x 0.739 x 0.51 which is ~ 99 million. So the chance of a woman being murdered by her husband or boyfriend is 1 in (99 million / 1,291) which is ~ 1 in 77,000 excluding under-18s, or an even lower probability if under-18s are included. The total population of married women in the U.S. in 1995 was about 59 million, so if the husband of one in 5 of those loved someone else, that would be 11.8 million. That’s before we even start to include murderous boyfriends, or cases where the wife loved someone else. 1.291 thousand out of 11.8 million is still only a proportion of 1 in 9,140. And since it would be wrong to assume that all of the murders were perpetrated by a husband or boyfriend who loved someone else, and that single women were never murdered, that overstates the true proportion of these cases that develop into a murder.
Not only did Steele have no motive to murder his wife and mother-in-law, neither did Larry Fairfax – in the prosecution’s alleged scenario. He and his wife Carla were bankrupt with debts of $638,898. It is hardly likely that he would have agreed to carry out a double first-degree murder for $25,000, plus a possible $100,000, which at a maximum $62,500 per killing means that he’d need to kill eleven people just to clear his debts. So Steele would have smelled a rat straightaway. The prosecution will try to argue that since Fairfax was working for the Feds, his apparent acceptance of the murder-for-hire contract was merely play-acting in order to entrap Steele. However, in that case Fairfax would have filled the steel pipe with a harmless substance such as sand, rather than using gunpowder and putting a piece of tape on the fuse in the hope that it would render the device totally harmless. Was Steele likely to risk his life and limb by opening up the pipe to take a sample for analysis to confirm that it was a genuinely explosive material, but fail to examine how the fuse was fixed? He’d just gone through a “long, slow painful” recovery from a burst aorta; he would hardly want to risk going through all that again from shrapnel slicing through the great vessels in his chest. Amusingly, Fairfax has tried to argue that he fitted the pipe bomb and accepted $10,000 in silver coins because he was “afraid of Edgar Steele“, and had pretended to go along with the plot. What did he think, a 64-year-old who had almost died six months previously, and who had subsequently undergone major surgery a couple of times in May, was going to beat him up? Or that Steele might hire a second hitman to deal with him? And then a third hitman to get rid of the second…?
Apart from all that, Fairfax was supposed to be quite happy to risk his own life and limb building two 12-inch pipe bombs, yet he was supposed to be “afraid of Edgar Steele”!
Note how Fairfax waived his Miranda “rights” and talked on the Tuesday night (June 15), when he was arrested after the bomb was found earlier that day. With him that evening was the retired District Judge turned lawyer James R. Michaud, who testified in support of Fairfax the next Monday, June 21, saying, “He’s about the hardest working guy I know. He was always on time with his crew, and honest with billing.” Anecdotal evidence in favor of Fairfax is balanced out by anecdotal evidence against him. The reports describe Michaud as a “neighbor“, although Fairfax Logging’s address was 1171 Ponderosa Road, reports say that Fairfax “made the bomb at his home on Ponderosa Road near Sagle”, and PeopleFinder lists James Michaud’s address as 470 Meadowview Drive, about seven miles away. According to the C. Todd Smith affidavit on Fairfax, Jim Michaud was an attorney “retained by Fairfax”. But other reports named John Miller as Fairfax’s “attorney“, or as his “family and public defender“.
It’s strange that Fairfax would elect to waive his Miranda rights when Michaud happened to be present, given what District Judge Michaud wrote in 2002 regarding the case of Joseph Allen Manley, who was on trial for second-degree murder. Manley’s counsel had been so inept that Judge Michaud declared a mistrial. Michaud later said, “Defendant’s counsel failed to file any motion to suppress the incriminating statements made by Defendant during his first interview by police, made as soon as Mr. Manley was arrested. There appears to be a colorable issue of whether Defendant made an intelligent and knowing waiver of his Miranda rights under the circumstances.”
And yet Jim Michaud evidently advised Fairfax to waive his Miranda rights. One possibility is that Fairfax’s employers hope to get him off on a technicality of not making “an intelligent and knowing waiver of his Miranda rights under the circumstances”. Another is that they decided he had outlived his usefulness, so the Miranda rights ploy was cited to trick Fairfax into talking.
In 2006, District Judge James Michaud also happened to sentence Richard Vincent Bertollini to six months in jail for driving under the influence and jumping bail, before Bertollini was sentenced the next year by Federal Judge James O. Browning to serve 41 months in federal prison for “illegal possession of firearms”. Given that Bertollini was a friend of the late Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and had bought him a house, and Edgar Steele had served as attorney for Butler, Michaud would have had another reason for siding with Fairfax rather than Steele. Bertollini had also been scheduled to appear before Judge Michaud in 2001, but went on the lam. Rather than risk going blind in prison, he wanted to go to Washington to have eye surgery for a separated retina. According to the police, this injury was sustained when Bertollini “slipped” on a “wet garage floor” and fell “against a wall“.
Edgar Steele’s political activities and outspoken character had gained him some powerful enemies, all of whom had a very strong motive to see him discredited and destroyed. In 2007 (and originally in 1999), Steele posted examples of death threats left for him, his youngest daughter, and his wife and children on his home telephone answering machine. The caller who threatened his wife and children said: “Hey Cyndi. If something were to happen to you, or to Nikki, or to Kelsey, or to Rex, d’you think it would be considered a hate crime? Probably not. The FBI would love to see you dead. So would everybody else, you stupid kike.” It is quite a common tactic for Jews and shills to accuse those who tell the truth about Jews or shills of being Jews or shills who are covering for the criminals. They accuse their adversaries of their own misdeeds. So it is not so unusual that a German-Armenian wife of an Irish-Scottish truth teller might be accused of being a Jew. It goes without saying that the caller is also a liar vis-à-vis “everybody else” would “love to see you dead”. As to the FBI, that would depend on the integrity of the particular individual. Given the ‘coincidence’ of the white powder and the live pipe bomb turning up at such convenient times for prosecutors, it would appear that someone was much more interested in keeping Edgar Steele locked up than in the personal safety of Cyndi Steele.
By representing “hopeless” politically incorrect clients whom the government and the powerful hoped to see railroaded into prison, Steele was putting himself in the firing line. The powers that be hated him because he spoke the truth about many of their lies and deceptions. Steele had just as little motive for murdering his mother-in-law as he did for killing his wife. However, the accusation that he plotted to kill his mother-in-law was brought in so that the alleged “crime” became interstate, allowing the FBI – Fairfax’s “employer” – to get involved.
Steele’s enemies blundered when they wrote the script for their fabricated “double murder plot”. They chose to incorporate in the tapes a remark attributed to Steele about how he did not want to “take care of a paraplegic”. This is the same Edgar Steele who had narrowly escaped death with a burst aorta, who spent two weeks in intensive care, barely able to move. Even before his empathizing experience in the hospital, Steele’s humanity and respect for others shone through in his writings, which will not go away. For example, in a letter to a liberal friend of his, Steele states that his friends include people of all political and religious stripes, Mexicans, Jews and Asians. He says that he has had black friends in the past, and currently has black acquaintances. He asks whether the fact that his own IQ is “well in excess of 25 points higher than the average Caucasian’s” makes him “superior to any white person beneath that mark” and entitles him to “hate almost everybody”. He asks whether Asians’ and Jews’ relatively high IQs make them better, and concludes the point by saying of racial differences: “There are other differences, including skin colors, but the point is that they are just differences, some of which give some races advantages in certain arenas over other races. There is no inherent superiority to be derived from an assessment of these differences and certainly no privileges that should thereby attach.”
It is clear that Steele is a separatist rather than a “hater” or a “supremacist”. He wants to live in an area with people of certain characteristics, e.g. a desire for good education, but no predilection for crime. He doesn’t “hate” people of other races, he doesn’t want to enslave them, or gas them or shoot them. But he does very much like speaking out and telling the truth about the real supremacists: who they are, their deceptions, and the deleterious effects that their actions have on the rest of us.
The “paraplegic” remark in the fabricated “double murder plot” tells us more about the person or persons who concocted it than it does about Edgar Steele. They misleadingly try to portray him as a cold-hearted, psychopathic monster, yet they are merely projecting their own characteristics onto him. The ploy was a brazen attempt to smear his character and bias a jury against him. The more audacious their charges against Steele, the harder it becomes for these liars to prevent others from recognizing how contrived these allegations are, and how he has been set up as a political prisoner.
Steele was denied bail because he was allegedly a threat to witnesses involved in his case and to the wider public. The federal authorities seized Steele’s – and his wife’s – life savings. “Use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire” is one of a list of offenses that trigger federal forfeiture. With Steele securely locked up, the authorities cannot claim that their seizure of Steele’s assets is necessary to protect witnesses or the public at large from Edgar Steele the “dangerous criminal”. Fortunately, some assets have been returned to Mrs. Steele. Should the authorities fail to release all of the Steeles’ funds, then they confirm that the motive for seizing control of this money had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the public.
Asset forfeiture is a lucrative business for the US government. In a prescient lament on how Americans were being deprived of their rights, Edgar Steele noted in November 2001 how confiscation of assets could be seen as an infringement of Sixth Amendment rights. If the defendant was previously able to afford a good private lawyer, then being forced to use a public defender is a deprivation of the right to counsel of one’s choice, and helpful when the authorities wish to employ trumped-up charges as a means of dealing with political dissidents.
It was very convenient for the prosecution that some “white powder” happened to be mailed to the U.S. federal court at 6450 Mineral Drive in Coeur d’Alene, arriving just hours before Steele was due to appear on a murder-for-hire charge, thereby postponing Steele’s hearing until the next day. That allowed enough time for a pipe bomb to be discovered on Cyndi Steele’s car, with just hours to go before the rescheduled hearing. And that enabled Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan to cite developments “within the last few hours” as indicating that Edgar Steele was “a substantial risk to the public“, and that bail should therefore be denied. The ADL confirmed this with the statement: “This new development caused the judge in the case to keep Steele in jail pending a hearing next week”. Another ‘coincidence’ is how the powder (mostly harmless calcium carbonate) mailings just happened to be postmarked Spokane – which is where the FBI, the ATF, the Secret Service and several other government agencies have offices – and, moreover, it was mailed to federal buildings such as the FBI office in Salt Lake City that was dealing with the Steele case. Buildings with addresses that the authorities would be familiar with.
The Steele case so abounds with absurdities that it has become a laughing-stock across the internet.
The Preponderance of Evidence in Favor of Edgar Steele
- Steele is of previous good character – thoroughly honest and totally non-violent
- Steele loves his wife and children – collectively his “rock”, says his wife is “still a babe” with a “heart of gold”, they “all love each other – a lot”, etc
- Steele had plenty of money, stashes of silver, etc – until it was seized by the Feds
- Steele had absolutely no motive to murder someone he loved – his wife of 25 years – for insurance money
- Steele had absolutely no motive to murder his mother-in-law
- An intelligent man such as Steele would not have masterminded a plot in which car bombs were supposed to look like an “accident”
- An intelligent man such as Steele would not have expected to collect auto accident insurance in a murder involving two pipe bombs
- An intelligent man such as Steele would not have forgotten having plotted to bomb a car, and launched a new plot two weeks later to run a car off the road and make it look like an “accident”, repeatedly saying he had “no second thoughts” about the second conspiracy
- An intelligent man such as Steele – IF plotting a murder – would be well aware that he might be bugged, especially as an opponent of the government, of Zionist interests, etc, and would have more sense than to hire his handyman as a hitman thereby raising the probability of being caught
- A man who was critically ill, unconscious and then in intensive care for a total of over 3 weeks, who eventually recovers and concludes “life is funny” but “death isn’t”, will be happy to be alive, and would not suddenly launch a hare-brained plot involving a hitman to murder his wife and mother-in-law
- The split personality “two Steeles” scenario is ruled out by Occam’s Razor and ample evidence to the contrary
- The “nutty Steele” scenario is ruled out by Occam’s Razor and ample evidence to the contrary
- Fairfax does not have powers of “time travel” or “ESP” – which in any case would be inconsistent with his bankruptcy and $638,898 debts
- An “honest”, well-meaning federal informant – assuming such a creature exists – would not build a pipe bomb with gunpowder, fit it to a car, and use a piece of tape on the fuse in the hope that it would prevent it from going off
- A federal informant who was “afraid of Edgar Steele” would not undertake a risky activity such as building a live 12-inch pipe bomb with gunpowder
- Steele, as an “exceedingly politically incorrect” anti-Zionist truth teller and lawyer who represents politically incorrect clients, and who is on the hit-list of the ADL and the SPLC, has very powerful enemies who have very strong motives to see him destroyed
- Steele has very powerful enemies with a strong financial interest in discrediting the anti-Zionist / anti-war / pro-liberty / revisionist / truth / patriot “movement” by, for example, giving others the impression that psychopathic monsters are over-represented within the movement
- Steele’s enemies have an interest in sending out the message to their opponents such as truth tellers and patriots that they can “do anything to anyone at anytime”
- Government agencies had the means to fabricate ‘evidence’ against their enemy Edgar Steele: plenty of manpower, and a budget that could extend to cutting edge audio editing or voice morphing software
- Steele’s wife Cyndi noticed that there was no inflection in his voice and the background noise changed, when he was supposed to be talking about a “murder-for-hire” plot
- Government agencies had the opportunity to fabricate ‘evidence’ against Steele, since a bankrupt federal informant, as Steele’s handyman, had access to the Steele household for months on end
- Government agencies had a strong motive for bringing the mother-in-law into the alleged “murder-for-hire” plot – to make the alleged crime interstate so that the FBI could be involved
- Given that Fairfax was bankrupt and would eagerly inform on his peers for cash, wealthy agencies of a foreign government would have found it relatively easy to recruit him, and would have jumped at the chance of discrediting one of their enemies whom Fairfax had taken into his confidence
- Steele’s enemies had the motive, the means and the opportunity to set him up on bogus murder / explosives charges
- Steele’s enemy the Mossad and related Israeli agencies such as the IDF have a history of deception, disinformation and propaganda: the Mossad’s “Trojan” transmitter relayed fabricated audio footage to trick the US into bombing Libya, and the IDF broadcast doctored audio footage of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla a mere seven days prior to Steele’s arrest
- Theodor Herzl recognized that “anti-Semitism” could be harnessed to further Zionist political aims when he said “The anti-Semites shall be our best friends”, which explains why Israel’s agencies would have had an interest in doctoring the Mel Gibson tapes
- Federal agents were caught red-handed attempting to drive a wedge between Steele and his wife by leaving out a teddy bear present, after they incorrectly assumed that “Ukrainian girlfriends” was a reference to girlfriends or a girlfriend of Steele’s, as opposed to legal clients of his
- The “murder-for-hire” conspiracy theory is so off-the-wall that even the alleged “victim” does not believe it and wants to exculpate the prime “suspect”
- The sheer improbability that a “suspicious” white powder would just happen to be mailed to the very court where Steele was due to appear on June 14, hours before the hearing, prompting an evacuation and postponement of Steele’s hearing
- The sheer improbability that a pipe bomb should be found on June 15, hours before Steele’s rescheduled hearing, enabling the prosecution to press for denial of bail by citing developments “within the last few hours” as indicating that Edgar Steele was “a substantial risk to the public“
- The improbability that the white powder mailings were postmarked from Spokane where government agencies such as the FBI and the ATF have offices, and that they were also mailed to addresses well known to the authorities, such as the FBI office in Salt Lake City that is dealing with the Steele case
- The sheer improbability that someone who was such a major enemy of the SPLC as to be on their hit list of “40 to watch“, and who was under surveillance for months by a federal informant, should not only just happen to plot a “murder-for-hire” deal, but one that was interstate to boot, thereby enabling the Feds to get involved
The ‘Evidence’ for the Prosecution
- The word of a bankrupt federal informant who demonstrably does not tell the whole truth, e.g. by failing to tell federal authorities that he had fitted a pipe bomb to a car
- The word of FBI agents who are under pressure to get results, motivated to believe they have got their man, and who – assuming they are honest – could be duped by fabricated evidence due to a combination of wishful thinking and naïveté
- Alleged audio recordings that are suspected of being tampered with, as evidenced by a loss of voice inflection and changes in background noise
Video: The Frame-Up of Edgar Steele
In the hundred-word sequence in the video, it may be seen that the main limitations are the intonation and inflection in Edgar Steele’s voice, and the transition from one word to the next. The material was all sourced from his readily available online works. The audio was created by one non-expert working a few hours a day for three days, with software costing tens of dollars. Government agencies would have much more sophisticated programs, along with the manpower for the labor-intensive operation of searching through samples of each word to get the best pitch and inflection, and sorting and documenting this array. They could even search for breath sounds and insert them. Whatever they did, it didn’t stop Cyndi Steele noticing the change in background noise and how the inflection in his voice vanished, when he was supposedly talking about the “murder-for-hire hit”.
Here’s the higher quality file:
http://www.takeourworldback.com/mp3/SteeleFakePlotAudio8a.mp3
The next version is after lowering the frequency range, making it harder to hear the edits, and the variations in audio quality between words that derives from varying amounts of compression on the source files.
http://www.takeourworldback.com/mp3/SteeleFakePlotAudio8b.mp3
The next version is after re-recording via a mike and speakers. This is how Steele suggested the audio would have been fabricated, to further mask the edits. And it has a different version of “mother-in-law”.
http://www.takeourworldback.com/mp3/SteeleFakePlotAudio7c.mp3
That was played through laptop speakers and recorded via a camera, so a better microphone and speakers would do a better job.
Given that Fairfax had been bugging the Steele household for about six months, perhaps even leading Steele into saying things when he was very ill and under the influence of drugs, they would have an extensive array of sampled words. Fairfax could ask Steele for a list of people he wanted dead, and then the Mossad audio technicians would add on the wife and mother-in-law. But whenever they lacked good samples of some particular word, they could rewrite the script to suit.
Assuming a spoken pitch range of nearly half an octave either side of a mean, the required pitch for the context might fall into a range of about ten semitones in order to get a reasonable intonation. Speech with a pitch range of one to four semitones would be classed as a “monopitch”. Back in 1775 Joshua Steele (1700 – 1791) published an essay about how speech varies in pitch, and he estimated the pitch range of his voice to be amusical fifth, i.e., do to sol which is a jump of seven semitones or covering a total of eight semitones. A range of seven semitones is regarded as a minimum for normal speech, and a 2001 study by Fitzsimons et al found that seven to twelve semitones was a realistic range in pitch, assuming a non-emotional speaker.
By having an extensive selection, 10 – 20 samples of a desired word, the forgers would have a good chance of getting their word to sound within a semitone of the required pitch, without needing to edit the pitch manually and increase signs of tampering. They would have sophisticated software for editing out transients and smoothing out the flow of words. Getting the inflection right would be a harder job. It would not be surprising if relatively sophisticated forgers could achieve a reasonable intonation and pitch range, but leave an audibly imperfect inflection, especially to someone very familiar with the real person’s voice.
Another possibility is voice morphing technology, which was already quite convincing in 1999.
Conclusion – More Likely Scenario
- Fairfax, an informant for the ADL and the ATF/FBI, gets the job to fix the Steeles’ frozen pipes in the winter, followed by the opportunity to carry on for months as Steele’s handyman whilst Steele is in poor health.
- The ATF/FBI assign Fairfax the job of bugging Steele’s home and taping anything that can be used against him.
- The ADL instruct Fairfax to talk about “murder-for-hire”, so they can entrap Steele into saying phrases that will give better results for the digital audio technicians to work with, rather than having to edit each word into a suitable sequence. They plan to have the Mossad’s Disinformation Unit manipulate the audio before relaying it on to the FBI, in shades of the February – March 1986 Tripoli Trojan job and the June 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla audio footage doctoring.
- Steele thinks Fairfax is merely a “harmless buffoon“, and gives him the job of building a new garage with secret compartments.
- Fairfax learns, shortly after his $638,898 bankruptcy of April 14, 2010, that Steele has stashes of silver worth tens of thousands of dollars.
- Fairfax is tempted, and goes on to steal some silver, thinking he can blame someone else and get away with it.
- Fairfax realises he isn’t going to be able to blame the theft on someone else, panics, and decides to blow up Edgar’s and Cyndi’s cars. He makes and fits pipe bombs around May 30.
- The bombs fail to go off because of Fairfax’s incompetence.
- Fairfax takes the bomb off Edgar’s car, goes to Oregon City to see if the bomb is on Cyndi’s car, can’t spot it, and hopes it has fallen off. Unbeknown to him, the Feds had observed him fitting it, and took it off themselves.
- Fairfax attempts damage control and tells his ADL handler that he was paid the silver as part of a murder-for-hire plot, but he is afraid to mention the pipe bombs. He says the plan was to make the hit look like an “accident”, and the hit was planned for June 11. And he claims that a few hundred dollars he received from Steele for doing work at his home was “travel expenses” to go to Oregon, as part of the “murder plot”.
- The ADL instruct Fairfax to go to the ATF/FBI and tell them that Steele is about to do a murder-for-hire deal with him.
- The Mossad’s Disinformation Unit technicians, who have already had some time to extract words and phrases, fabricate the “recordings of Steele talking” to be consistent with the “double-murder made to look like an accident” scenario. They bring the mother-in-law into the plot, so it is interstate.
- June 9. Fairfax tells the FBI about the “murder-for-hire plot”. As with the ADL, he omits to say anything about the pipe bombs. The first “meeting in the horse barn” at Steele’s home is scheduled for later that day. The Feds fit Fairfax with a wire, or merely “monitor” this meeting as per some reports.
- June 10. Second meeting in the horse barn. Fairfax is wired. On both dates, the Mossad disable any live transmissions from Fairfax, put out fake transmissions (as they did in Tripoli to deceive the Reagan Admin), and supply Fairfax with the doctored audio.
- June 11. The ATF/FBI have the audio ‘evidence’ against Steele, believe they have all they need for an arrest and seizing of property, if not a conviction, and arrest Steele. An FBI agent at the Steele residence boasts that he has “all he needs on tape”, and is “convinced” of Steele’s guilt. Eric Holder is delighted that he has an opportunity to nail Steele, given Steele’s not so complimentary remarks about “blacks”.
- June 14. Steele is scheduled to appear in court. The Feds, aware that Fairfax fitted a car bomb or bombs without telling them, and possibly aware that Fairfax also double-crossed them by working for the ADL with information going on to the Mossad, have a plan to get Fairfax and guarantee denial of bail for Steele on grounds that he is a “substantial risk to the public”. The Feds build a 12-inch pipe bomb, of such nature that a bomb technician will later say it’s one of the biggest pipe bombs he can remember. And the Feds send a white powder (harmless calcium carbonate) to the court building in Coeur d’Alene, so that Steele’s hearing is delayed by one day, thereby allowing time for discovery of the bomb. As a decoy, to make it seem like the white powder has no connection to Steele’s case, the white powder is mailed to another seven federal buildings in Washington, Idaho and Utah, including the FBI office in Salt Lake City that is dealing with the Steele case. All addresses are familiar to the federal authorities.
- June 15. Cyndi Steele takes her car in for an oil change, possibly after someone reminded her, or drained some of the oil. The pipe bomb is discovered at Fast Lane Quik Lube at about 12:30 pm, police arrive around ten minutes later, hours before Steele’s hearing is due.
- June 15, 4:30 pm. Steele pleads not guilty at a 45-minute hearing. Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan cites developments “within the last few hours” as ‘evidence’ that Steele is a “substantial risk to the public”. Steele is denied bail, banned from contacting his wife and mother-in-law, and Cyndi’s car is seized.
- June 15, 7:00 pm. Fairfax, assisted by his acting attorney the retired District Judge James R. Michaud, is interviewed by Detective Sergeant Dan O’Dell, and arrested 75 minutes later by ATF Special Agent C. Todd Smith for possession of an explosive device. He is given the Mirandawarning, but waives his right to remain silent. Fairfax is led to believe that the 12-inch “biggest pipe bomb” that a bomb technician could remember is “his” bomb, and it didn’t fall off – or get removed – after all. Fairfax tries to wriggle out with his claim that, although he taped the fuse in place, he thought the piece of tape would stop the fuse from igniting. The authorities also have the second bomb, which Fairfax emptied of powder and turned over to Sergeant O’Dell, alleged to be a diversion created by Steele to make it seem like he was also being targeted for murder. Fairfax is now in the unenviable position of choosing between up to ten years if he plays along with the Feds, or thirty years if he does otherwise.
- The Feds have Steele in jail, having successfully planted an association in some people’s minds between Steele and “terrorists” who plant car bombs and send white powder through the mail. However, they are also left with the embarrassing contradiction of Fairfax’s May 30 failed attempts to blow up the Steeles’ cars, and the Mossad’s fabricated “make it look like an accident hit” scheduled for June 11 and allegedly negotiated on June 9 and 10, deriving from the Mossad being unaware of the pipe bombs.
In other variations, Fairfax’s bomb stayed on Cyndi’s car all along, and / or the FBI doctored the tapes without the ADL and the Mossad being involved.
Determining the exact sequence of events will be the job of those with power to subpoena witnesses. For now, there is ample evidence to know that the official conspiracy theory is a total pack of lies, and Edgar Steele is completely innocent of the trumped-up charges. He should be released from jail forthwith, and he and his family paid substantial compensation for his incarceration and the trashing of their home and business.
What To Do Next
Edgar Steele’s trial, originally set for August 16, 2010, then rescheduled for November 1 and March 7, 2011, started on April 26, 2011. Prosecutors claim the case against Steele is “simple”. A more accurate description would be that the allegations are believable only by folks with simple minds.
In order to stand the best chance of beating these bogus charges, he needs a good private lawyer, not a public defender. Here is what Mr. Steele wrote July 20 in a letter that got out:
I have to use a public defender because I simply don’t have the $200,000-$300,000 it would take to hire a good private lawyer (and I can’t run the case from a jail cell). That is way too much to raise via a legal defense fund from “The Movement.” Ironic eh? There’s nobody out there like me to help…me!
It would be a cruel twist of fate indeed if, after having devoted 30 years to representing “clients of every stripe” and “struggling against the ever-shrinking limits of our Constitutional rights on behalf of the politically incorrect”, there turned out to be no one for Edgar Steele in his hour of need. If 25,000 people each donated $10, that would raise the approximately $250,000 estimation for the defense, and would be a kick in the teeth for the parasites and liars who are bent on using whatever available means they have to destroy those who expose their crimes and deceptions.
The Jews recently managed to raise over $200,000 from one source, and $250,000 from another, for the Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin legal defense fund. The $250,000 was raised at a single gathering attended by 7,000 people, which works out at around $36 per head. In November 2009, Rubashkin was found guilty of 86 out of 91 charges of financial fraud, and was sentenced in June to 27 years and ordered to pay $27 million in restitution. The evidence against him was probably too compelling in the form of money trails, so that money going towards legal defense was essentially wasted. But in the case of Edgar Steele, the prosecution ‘evidence’ is so weak, the plot so preposterous and the contradictions so prevalent, that a good defense should make all the difference.
If the Jewish people, a group totalling a little over 13 million according to their own figures, can raise over $450,000 ($3.50 per hundred head of population) to defend one of their number when the case is quite hopeless, then a much larger group should be able to raise a lesser amount when a good defense can tip the scales of justice. And if government agencies can do this to Edgar Steele, they can start coming after anyone.
The Free Edgar Steele site has a Donations page (check out the donations thermometer at that link). There is a PayPal option, and alternatively a snail-mail address to which checks or money orders made payable to “Edgar Steele Defense Fund” may be sent. In each case the money goes through to Edgar’s wife Cyndi to be directed 100% to Mr. Steele and his case. Mrs. Steele wrote an official fund-raising letter on September 13.
As of June 2, 2011, Mr. Steele has been relocated to the Latah County Jail in Moscow, Idaho.
A Travesty of Justice
In an appalling miscarriage of justice, the exceedingly politically incorrect lawyer Edgar J. Steele was found guilty on all four trumped-up charges. The prosecution’s only ‘evidence’ consisted of statements by FBI informant Larry Fairfax who had failed to tell the truth about the pipe bomb he fitted to Cyndi Steele’s car, and tapes that Mr. Steele’s wife and daughter both recognized as very dubious, with Edgar’s voice losing its characteristic inflections and the background noise changing when the alleged “murder-for-hire” plot is discussed. Judge Lynn Winmill said, in pre-trial hearings, that neither of the defense’s proposed expert witnesses would be allowed to testify about the authenticity of the recordings, claiming that one of them was unreliable and the other’s testimony was irrelevant. Later, on Monday May 2, he said audio expert Dr. George Papcun would be allowed to testify after all by video link from Bora Bora where he was on vacation. The next day, as the trial was nearing its conclusion, the judge changed his mind and set an impossibly tight deadline: Papcun could only testify in person and would have to get to Boise, Idaho, from the Pacific by 8:30 the next morning. If the judge had said this on the Monday night, then there would have been sufficient notice for the audio expert to arrive in time. As it was, he could not arrive until about 4:30 on the Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Steele had already been incarcerated for almost eleven months, and by refusing to allow an extra eight hours the judge had sealed the fate of this loving, caring family man whose priority has been the rights of people other than himself.
Cyndi Steele vowed that there will be an appeal. And new written material from Mr. Steele has been released for the first time since his incarceration. He will not be silenced, and he will not sacrifice truth and justice on the altar of political correctness.
Audio of Ed Steele’s first interview since his arrest may be downloaded from this page. He is interviewed via phone by Dave Gahary of American Free Press.
Update, 9/5/14: Sadly, Mr. Steele is no longer with us. The tragic news was posted at the Free Edgar Steele site, and a search for Edgar James Steele at the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator returns him as “Deceased: 09/04/2014”. Shortly before that, it was showing his release date as 2044. That’s more than thirty years for a totally phony ‘crime’; a fictitious murder-for-hire. Although no one was bombed or run off the road, there certainly were victims – Mr. Steele and his family. However, they, and any thinking person, know that he was entirely innocent. The guilty parties are the global criminal gang who are bent on taking even more of the world’s assets (when they already have the lion’s share), the politicians who do what is best for their careers rather than what is right, and the entire chain of self-serving officials and flunkies down to the grasping bottom feeders.
The FES site says that “Mr. Steele’s health ha[d] been in a sharp decline for the past month”, and “Based on the best knowledge at hand, the following are the most likely causes of death: drug overdoses, persistently delayed, insufficient, improper medical treatment and medical neglect.” The Victorville prison officials did not even have the guts to call his wife about his death; they left it to the mortuary to inform her.
There is no doubt that the incarceration of an entirely innocent man on trumped up charges, a political prisoner whose broadcasting of politically incorrect material was not what the ruling elite wanted to hear, and whose support for the downtrodden and the politically incorrect was not what they wanted to see, a man who was already in poor health yet denied the care he should be entitled to in any civilized society, hastened his death.
Although the criminals succeeded in shutting up Mr. Steele, and eventually in killing him, they have merely won a battle. His legacy will live on in those whom he has helped awaken to the corrupt system around them. Some day, the truth shall prevail, and the rotten edifice will come crumbling down.
The criminal gang shall know to whom they have declared war!