During the meeting, the Watchmen presented LePage with a copy of the 2012 Maine Criminal Justice Academy training manual, which instructs law enforcement officers on how to handle encounters with members of the Sovereign Citizen movement. The manual states that “the FBI considers the Sovereign movement one of the nation’s top domestic terrorist threats.” The Sovereign Citizens in the room took issue with that information and asked LePage to remove it from state law enforcement training materials.
The manual is correct in its assessment. The same rejection of government authority that prompted the Constitutional Coalition to file their remonstrances often brings Sovereign Citizens into conflict with police and government officials. Many of the crimes they commit based on their beliefs are of the white-collar variety, including bank fraud, filing false liens, money laundering, illegal firearms sales, tax violations and the manufacture of false documents. When they are confronted over these violations by police officers, whom they view as agents of a fraudulent government, however, the situations sometimes escalate to violence.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sovereign Citizen extremists have killed at least six law enforcement officers in the United States since 2000. In one such incident in 2010, two Sovereign Citizens were pulled over by local police in Arkansas in a routine traffic stop. They pulled out an AK-47, killed the two officers, and fled the scene. They were eventually killed in a Walmart parking lot after a shootout that injured two more police officers.
In addition to these more random acts of violence, some Sovereign Citizens have also planned significant antigovernment terrorist attacks. One of the most well-known Sovereigns is Terry Nichols, who helped to plan the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.
