Smoke and Mirrors 11

   Well I thought I would probably wait a couple more days before I posted on the trial again. The prosecution started their direct examination of Agent Steve Houg at the very end of the day on Thursday. They said they would spend a minimum of four days on their exam. I figured I would hear the whole exam before I posted. However, they broke from their exam of Houg in order to present another witness with limited availability. So Nancy Blade took the stand this morning and they continued with examining Houg after that.
   Nancy Blade was a previous girlfriend Tom Piatek. She took the stand all guns blazing. She said that she met Piatek on an online dating service, and they dated for about eight week. She testified that Piatek had told her the Hutaree was against the government. She said Piatek told her that he hated the cops. She said that Piatek told her that some thing big was going to happen. She testified that she had made statements in conversation in which she said Tom Piatek should be locked up for the rest of his life.
   However, after Tom Piatek was arrested, she had three separate interviews with the FBI and never said anything like that in any of the interviews. As a Matter of fact she attended a pretrial hearing in support of Tom. It was at this hearing that she learned that Tom was dating two other women in addition to her...And her attitude seemed to change drastically in subsequent interviews.
   The defense asked her to look at a photograph of the back of Tom's truck. There were some bumper stickers on his truck and defense asked her to read them to the court. She said she didn't have her glasses, and really couldn't see very well. But he went ahead and read them for her. One bumper sticker said "Proud To Be An American" the other said "Fraternal Order Of Police".
 She had also claimed that Tom had snowballed his attorney and lied about everything in court. Defense asked her what he lied about. She couldn't give a specific example. She claimed that it was two years ago and she couldn't remember exactly. Piatek's attorney asked her if it would refresh her memory if she could read the court transcripts from that day in court. She said that it would. So the court recessed while she sat and read the entire one hundred and twenty seven page document. Funny how she couldn't read the bumper stickers on an eight by ten photo, but she didn't have any problem reading over a hundred pages of court transcripts. And she still didn't find where he lied...
   Her testimony was really pretty short. And the examination of Steve Houg continued afterwards. I'll stop there for tonight. I'm still going to wait until I hear everything the prosecution brings out with him before I write too much about it. I will say that after two days of testifying Houg has not even come close to convincing me of a conspiracy. As a matter of fact he hasn't really said anything we haven't already heard. I think prosecution will have Houg on the stand until at least Wednesday. So I will plan for another update then.