An Archival Find Too Good Not to Share

A 1985 conversation between Walter Huss and a DOJ attorney in which Huss's bizarro understanding of the world confronts reality head on

I spent the day at the University of Oregon Special Collections library working my way through boxes 49-51 of the Walter Huss Papers. The last thing I looked at before the library closed was just too good not to share with you all.

Here’s the backstory. In 1982 Walter Huss tried to illegally import Brazilian Bark Tea (Pau d’Arco) that he claimed cured cancer. He intended to sell it in his alternative medicine/health food store at 23rd and Belmont, and also through his Multi-Level Marketing company called Priority Products. US Customs seized the tea and he was fined $30,000 by the FDA. Huss, of course, blamed the Jews.

Now, I knew this already because I’d seen a brief that Huss’s lawyer had filed on his behalf. Here are the relevant parts of that brief. [BTW, his lawyer was a Pearl Harbor truther who worked as a piano-playing Elvis impersonator at a Mexican restaurant when not being a terrible lawyer who offered Huss his services in return for not having to pay rent in an apartment building Huss owned…but a full recounting of Hartford Van Dyke’s story will have to wait for another time.]

So I knew that Huss blamed the whole affair with the confiscated tea on “the international Jewish/Communist conspiracy”, but what I didn’t know was that Huss was so delusional as to share this interpretation with a lawyer from the Department of Justice, thinking that it would help his case.

In January of 1985 Huss recorded a call between himself and “Mr. M,” the DOJ attorney who’d been assigned his case. Huss then made a transcript of that recording, excerpts from which are below. The parts in red are where the action is, but the rest of it gives you a feel for this conversation in which a DOJ attorney is gently and very professionally trying to explain to Walter Huss that no, he’s not a victim of an existential war raging in Oregon between the Jewish mafia and Christian Republicans like him, but rather, he’s just a US citizen who broke a law. I chuckled audibly in the archive when I read the sentence “you have your interpretation of the world and most people have another interpretation.” I want to emphasize that Walter Huss transcribed this phone call because he thought it made him look like he got the best of the exchange.

As to the question of whether Huss was a member of the Posse Comitatus movement, I can say for sure that he was an avid reader of a wide range of materials produced by that movement, and that he was on very friendly terms with several active Posse Comitatus members like LaVerne Hollenbeck, Edward Haman, and Everett Thoren (who Huss had campaigned with back in 1966). That said, Walter Huss also has in his archive this handy dandy letter from his friend LaVerne stating that neither Walter nor his wife Rosalie were members of the Posse Comitatus.

We might say this is protesting a bit too much. I mean, most people tend to not have in their possession letters from violent and heavily armed anti-government groups stating that they are NOT members of said organizations…but who am I to call LaVerne a liar?

As the DOJ lawyer rightly points out, Huss’s political affiliations are really not relevant to this case. But they were relevant to the conversation in the sense that Huss believed that his, shall we say idiosyncratic, understanding of the Constitution trumped what judges had to say about it. And in Huss’s Posse Comitatus-informed mind, the federal government had virtually no jurisdiction over him. The whole thing, as he saw it, was just Walter Huss against the Commie Joos who were out to get him, even though, as the DOJ lawyer pointed out, none of the people involved with the case were Jewish.

The impression I get from reading the materials around this case is that the government was quite willing to let him off with a pretty minimal fine but Huss would not give an inch and just kept coming up with one kooky legal theory after another, burning through several different lawyers (many of whom ended up begging him for payment for years afterwards) and then spending more money to file frivolous charges against the DOJ officials who prosecuted his case.

This is your brain on antisemitic conspiracy theories.