JORDAN, Mont. — FBI agents maintaining their 34-day standoff with the anti-government “freemen” let former Green Beret Col. James “Bo” Gritz enter the group’s ranch Saturday for more than seven hours of talks.
Gritz emerged late in the afternoon and left by car with a Highway Patrol escort for an FBI debriefing at an undisclosed location. He said he would talk to reporters afterward.
Gritz has publicly urged the freemen to surrender and face trial in federal court. In 1992, he helped end the bloody standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, by persuading white separatist Randy Weaver to surrender.
Weaver accompanied Gritz to Montana on Thursday but said the FBI would not let him go to the freemen’s ranch.
Since his arrival, Gritz has met with FBI officials each day to discuss his undisclosed plans to end the standoff in which an estimated 18 freemen are holed up on the ranch.
After a nearly two-hour meeting Saturday morning, a car carrying Gritz and Jack McLamb, a retired Phoenix police officer, was escorted to the ranch by a Highway Patrol car carrying an FBI agent. Gritz and McLamb got out and walked until the freemen sent a car that took them to the main house on the ranch, which they entered.
FBI agents have surrounded the freemen complex since March 25, when they arrested two leaders of the group in a sting operation. Some of the freemen are wanted on federal and state charges ranging from writing millions of dollars in worthless checks to threatening to murder a federal judge.
The only outside negotiators allowed to talk to the freemen before Gritz and McLamb were state officials, including four legislators, who have met with them several times. Relatives of the freemen have also been allowed to visit.
The freemen contend they are not subject to federal or state laws, but are sovereign citizens of their own country and are governed only by common law. Like Weaver, whose wife and son were shot to death along with a U.S. marshal in the 1992 confrontation, the freemen ascribe to the Old Testament-based, white supremacist Christian Identity movement.
Gritz, 57, became a hero in right-wing circles when he staged several unsuccessful commando-style forays in Southeast Asia in the 1980s to search for prisoners of war. His activities were curbed after U.S. authorities charged him with using a passport under a false name.
Based in Nevada, he later became a lecturer on emergency preparedness, self-sufficient living and homeopathic remedies. As a Populist Party presidential candidate in 1992, his slogan was “God, guns and Gritz.”
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