Enemies of the State (2020) Movie Script

1
This is
leann's and Paul's house.
This is the dining room,
which is really nice.
And then this here,
the computer that Matthew
plays on all the time,
spends most of his day on this
thing here playing his war games.
Matt grew up on
the Internet, we didn't.
Leann and I were raised...
She can speak for herself,
but we're similar personalities.
We're the kids in class that
sit down,
and follow the rules,
we color in the lines.
We're part of a system,
that's who we are.
Matt's generation was different,
we raised him to think
critically.
We raised him to be free.
And there's my Matthew,
look at how big he his.
- Say hi, Matthew.
- Hello.
Look at how big he is.
My son was a pioneer
in this activist group
anonymous.
Matt ran a server and he had
connections with wikileaks.
And someone leaked information
and uploaded it on his server.
That's, I believe,
one of the reasons
why my son was tortured
and why he sits in prison now
smeared with false charges.
We didn't tell a single
soul what we were planning on doing.
Uh, no one knew.
We set everything we could
in order.
We packed in the middle of
the night with lights out,
just playing music, in case
they were listening to us.
We got rid of phones, and then
we wrote on notebook paper
and burned it and flushed
it down the toilet.
We packed our car
with the few things
that we were gonna take with us
under the cover of darkness,
and left early in the morning.
As we were approaching
the border,
we bought large sunglasses that
would fit over our glasses,
we bought hats that would
fit on over our heads
so you couldn't do
facial recognition,
and that's how we traveled
the last 20 miles or so,
30 miles.
We went to a small
border station at fort Francis
and as we came through,
we declared to them
that we were giving ourselves up
and we were Americans
seeking asylum,
based on the convention
against torture.
- Good to see you.
- Good morning.
Good morning, Matt.
- Coming in? Okay.
- I am, thanks.
I was surprised by
their profiles to begin with.
These are highly educated
individuals that have all worked
for the American military
at some point.
And the fact that they chose
to come here to seek
that safety,
at first, I was wondering why
Canada, why not go overseas?
But logistically, this was the first
safe place that they could enter.
They came well documented, with
medical records from the United States,
they had a large volume of court documents
as well that I was able to go through.
And once you start piecing it
together,
you see that something
serious is going on,
and this is an important
story that needs to be heard,
and these are also very
vulnerable people
that need legal assistance
in Canada.
This is a hearing into
the claims of Matthew dehart,
Paul Joseph dehart and
leann Christine dehart.
My name is Patrick roche and I
will be deciding your claims.
So rather than have you all
stand
'cause I know, sir, that you
are impeded with the chains,
I'll just point to each
one of you and just answer.
Do you solemnly affirm
that the evidence
that you shall give
today shall be the truth,
the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth?
- Yes, sir.
- Yes, sir, I do.
- Yes, sir.
- Okay.
We do have an observer who
is not present in the room,
but is in a separate section
and that's Mr. Adrian humphries
from the national post
and he's observing
by video conference as per the
order of may the 16th, 2014.
I first came
across Matt dehart's name
when he was the subject of
a federal court decision
and I literally had
the highlighter
and I'm whipping through this
and it's like
anonymous, child pornography,
torture, us servicemen.
And it was all these key flags
that I was highlighting
that I knew that this would
be an interesting story
but also suspected that it
would probably be a story
that would require a little bit
of digging
to ascertain the truth behind
some of these broad statements and
allegations of what was going on.
I didn't quite realize
at that point, how bizarre,
how twisting and turning,
and complicated
this story would really be.
What connection did you have
to anonymous or wikileaks?
I had been involved with anonymous since
2006, basically since its inception.
In terms of wikileaks, I ran a server
called the shell on the Tor network,
which is a hidden secret
computer network.
It's used by free speech
activists.
We had provided mirrors
for wikileaks
so they could, in case their
site was taken down,
they could host some of their
material on their front page.
So this is a parallel type
of site?
Well, imagine like a second
Internet but it's private.
The only way you can get
to that site
is if you're running
the software called Tor.
So it's essentially a way to get
into this secret parallel
Internet world?
Yes. They call it the deep web
or the dark net.
Hi, everyone, welcome to
the last class of the semester.
Today we're gonna be
talking about anonymous
in light of anonymity
and its history as well.
So just to begin, you know, this morning
I decided to Google the dark web,
and these are the images
that came up,
of the kind of hooded hacker,
the green and black background.
Studying anonymous
already felt like
being part of an exciting
spy story.
There was just a lot of mystery
and mystique and paranoia
in the study of anonymous.
But the Matt dehart case
just bumps that up
to a whole different level.
My first encounter with
Matt dehart was a package,
a mail package that was sent to
my office.
And it was a packet of
information compiled
by Matt dehart
detailing his case.
"Dear professor Coleman, I've followed
your coverage of the group anonymous
and believe you are one of only
a handful
of public leaders who
understand its culture.
I'm hoping that your residence
in Canada
will shield you from
us government pressure.
"I believe my story will
interest you."
He had been running
this secret server online,
where someone had dropped off
information,
a file, which he claimed had
information
about a CIA operation that
the FBI was interested in,
right, and they didn't want
these files out in the world.
I mean, that alone
is a bombshell. Right?
That's a bombshell if that's
the case.
This is the wikileaks era.
They became a really
important clearing house
for taking information that
people either had access to
or were stealing that people
felt was in the public interest.
And so again, anonymous activists were
either acquiring that information,
they were given
that information,
they were maybe hosting
that information.
And because a lot of that information
was acquired through illegal means,
or was politically sensitive
and the government didn't
want it out in the world,
this was kind of the main reason that
government officials went after the hacktivists
and the hackers and others
who were part of anonymous.
Matt dehart
claims that in January 2010
because he had been tipped off
by someone,
he takes the server offline
and copies those documents
that were supposedly put on
the server on USB drives.
Whatever information
is on those drives
is absolutely the reason
why all the problems
for the deharts potentially
started in the United States
and it seemed like the
government had a vested interest
in getting those drives and
investigating what was on them.
January 25th, 2010,
that's the day that everything
changed.
I was at my church office.
I got a call from Matt.
I could tell, there was
something in his voice.
He said, "dad, you need to come
home now."
I raced home, it was three
or four miles, and, um...
Everything in our house
was tossed on the floor.
There were rubber gloves
everywhere,
drawers were emptied,
clothes were all over the place.
They searched everywhere.
They left a search warrant
and it said they were looking
for evidence of child
pornography
between Indiana and Memphis,
Tennessee.
There's never been any suspicion
or anything like that to think
that my son
had anything to do with child pornography.
But you do ask.
And I remember my husband
asking, "Matt, did you do this?"
And I remember my son looking him in
the face with tears in his eyes saying,
"no, dad. I didn't do this.
I don't know what they're
talking about."
Two and a half,
three hours in our house,
they found nothing that they
could arrest him with on that day.
So you tell me what that's
all about. I don't know.
Something's fishy. The minute it
happened, we knew something was fishy.
Something's fishy.
Something's going on.
So you're just left with
questions,
is it just because my son
was active on the Internet?
Is it because we find out later
he was involved with anonymous?
You know, historically the FBI
has used questionable methods,
um, in order to surveil
activists.
This was certainly the case in
the late '60s and early '70s,
uh, with certain government
programs that were very secretive,
where the FBI used
disinformation
and dirty tactics to go after
activists.
Suddenly, the United States
government has you in their crosshair.
If I could describe the feeling
that I could see on him,
it would be like looking at your
chest and seeing a laser there,
knowing at the other end of that laser...
I'm speaking metaphorically...
But at the other end
of that laser there is a gun
that could shoot a bullet
into you.
Which they certainly
had the power
to do anything they wanted
to him.
So he needed to drive,
and he drove
and he ended up in Mexico.
Matt had two USB drives
that had evidence
of what was on his server,
the shell.
Matt dehart has claimed that he sent
the copies to someone in the UK.
If they do exist in any way,
they absolutely verify
his claims,
which he's made
very, very consistently.
I don't know how
easy it would have been
for him to live down there
for any length of time.
And so we decided as a family,
we were going to fight this
together
and prove that, you know,
they had made a terrible mistake.
Little did we know
that it doesn't matter.
Truth does not matter.
It doesn't matter.
My name is Brett kniss, I worked at the
Franklin Tennessee police department
from 1999 to 2012.
During that time,
I was a detective for eight years
and five of those years I was on
the FBI cyber crimes task force
with the Internet crimes
against children task force.
The beginning of the Matthew dehart
case was the victim's mother,
who was a private
investigator at the time,
had made a report
to the police department
that her at the time
14-year-old son had been groomed
and was solicited for
sexually explicit photos
and videos of himself
masturbating for the camera.
Floor nine.
I'm Carrie daughtrey.
I'm assistant United States attorney
here in Nashville, Tennessee.
I am the project safe
childhood coordinator,
which means that I prosecute
child exploitation cases.
And I've been doing it for
a little over 15 years.
What happened in this case
is that
the defendant was on a very popular
game called world of warcraft
and met these two
individuals who were minors.
And he began grooming them.
He represented himself as
being the son of a mobster
and represented himself as being
in a prestigious school
in New Jersey.
Um, so really coming across
to these boys
as just being a really exciting,
you know,
different kind of person,
and he represented himself
as being a teenager as well.
According to the second victim,
Matthew dehart, under the
alias of Matthew dimarco,
drove down to Tennessee to
meet with the second victim.
He snuck out of the house
and went down the street.
Matthew dehart picked him up,
took him out for dinner,
took him to a gun range
in another town,
and gave him an adderal,
and provided him with a beer.
It's a classic example of
grooming of the victims.
At some point,
he brought into the mix,
um, what he "identified" as two
teenage girls that were friends of his.
Um, but, in fact, it was him
pretending to be these girls.
And it's through these,
um, uh, online identities
of the teenage girls that
he was able to convince
the two boys to send him
images of themselves.
So the victims and
their families were very scared
when I started this
investigation.
They knew that he had guns,
and they were afraid that
he was gonna come down
and potentially harm
the families
and the victims themselves.
It took a lot of convincing
to get them
to believe that Matthew
dimarco, this mobster's son,
was actually Matthew dehart,
the son of a minister,
who lived with his parents
in Indiana.
Don't I look wonderful?
It's Matthew,
the handsome guy in his suit.
Turn around, Matt,
you can be mister model.
No, turn around normally.
Let's sing a song of america
of her shaded woodlands
and sun-washed shores
of the glow of prayer
through the gloom of fall
of Liberty standing
at her golden door
we were patriots, all of us.
We all believed in serving
the country.
I joined the army
right out of high school
and I was a linguist.
Paul had joined the army
and after he served a few years,
went into the air force and
was commissioned as an officer.
I started off as leann did
in the army as a linguist.
So we were trained to intercept
foreign communications.
In my case, it was German,
so we were trained to
listen to east German,
primarily military
communications.
When I got out of the army,
I went to college,
and to help pay for that,
I went through air force RotC.
And of course since I had
a linguist background,
it made sense for me to go into
the same career field again.
I already had
a security clearance before,
it was easy to update that,
and so I was assigned to
NSA at fort mead, Maryland.
While we were there,
Matt was born,
Walter read army medical center.
And then with part of
my work center
we transferred to Hawaii.
When the Berlin wall came down
and the Soviet union fell apart,
they started paring down
the forces
and they offered an
early retirement option.
And I still wanted to go into
ministry.
And so when the opportunity
came to retire early,
I retired and went to seminary
and then started working
in ministry.
I met Matt
through his dad, Paul.
I attended the church
that he was preaching at.
Matt, my little brother, and I,
we hit it off pretty good.
We all got along,
we all had a nerdy sense of humor,
video games, things like that.
Threw around a few big brother
ideas every once in a while,
but nothing past like tin foil
hat conspiracy type things,
just silly stuff.
Matt dehart is absolutely
best described through stories.
And I guess the best story
that really will help you
understand who he is was
when he ran for student council
president, back in high school.
He came to me and another friend
of ours and he enlisted our help.
And I'm like, "oh, what
do you need help with?"
And it was to be bodyguards.
Like secret service.
And so we had to dress up
in black suits
and he gave us like ear pieces
and wires
and he'd make us walk him down
the hallway
and I think we gave him
a codename, I'm pretty sure,
and we'd talk into our wrists.
He would walk through the hallways
like he owned the building,
and you had hall monitors,
teachers, sitting out there
and they would say,
"let me see your pass."
And Matthew, I mean,
in this very deep male voice,
without a single smile
on his face,
would just stop in his tracks
and turn to them and say,
"you don't need to see a pass."
And he'd just keep walking.
He wore a black trench coat
before all that stuff was there.
His hair was big,
he had big afro-looking...
Are you willing to stand up
to authority for a just cause?
I was not a part of
his kaos computer club,
but, yeah, this is how
he got people involved.
There were times when we thought, "okay,
we're just gonna cut the computer off."
But for him
that wouldn't have worked.
For other kids, maybe you could
have pulled the plug and said,
"no computers. Get down.
Study your books."
And, you know,
"sit down and shut up."
That would have never worked
for Matt.
Losing the election resulted
in a dead fish being put
in the ceiling of the
student council office.
Matt wanted it to fester
in the summer heat.
He claimed that it was a rigged
election
and that was Matthew's revenge
for losing the election.
He was clearly a smart guy.
He very much knew technology
and computers to a level far
exceeding my own knowledge.
Um, and frankly he liked
showing that.
He really showed that
he loved teaching me,
he loved being the smart guy
in the room.
If you watched the show,
leave it to beaver as a kid,
there was a character on
there named Eddie haskell.
Now Eddie wasn't all that smart,
but he could charm any adult
to get away with pretty much
anything.
Hey, Wally, you get
that crazy flat tire
back on the car before
your old man caught you?
- Hello Eddie, what's new?
- Nothing, Mr. Cleaver.
It's not important and I think
I hear my mother calling.
He can talk himself
into any situation, good or bad.
He can also talk himself
out of almost any situation.
We lived in New Jersey
from 1996 to 2001.
2001, we moved to Pennsylvania,
so he ended up
homeschooling the last year.
2003 to 2005, we lived in
elmira, New York,
and then 2005, we moved to Indiana
because leann's mom was there.
And while Matt was there,
he was doing different kinds of work.
According to
Matt dehart's own timeline,
he seems to have moved in tech
and geek circles
for many, many years.
One day
on the way home from church,
my youngest said, "mom,
have you ever heard of anonymous?"
I said, "it means that they don't
know who you are. It's anonymous."
He said, "no, not that.
A group on the computer."
He said, "Matt told me about it."
I could absolutely imagine
him being a part of anonymous.
But Matt was also
very conservative,
just in the way he carried himself.
And I mean, like...
He loved guns and, you know,
I mean, he was such a person
that spanned the spectrum
of personalities.
He wanted to do
something challenging
and meaningful, I think,
he wanted to serve his country.
He, um... both his parents,
Paul and I had,
so he joined
the air national guard.
I know that he got
a top secret security clearance,
just as Paul did and just
as I did when we were in,
and that his interest
was in the drone program.
But what he was doing
and what he was gonna do,
that was something
we chose not to discuss.
The details of what he did
or didn't do,
obviously, I come from
a security background
and so I wouldn't ask him
questions about those things
and he didn't talk to me
about exactly what he did,
but his afsc was all source
intelligence analyst.
He was diagnosed with
depression,
and it didn't stop him from
getting in.
But after he received
his security clearance,
which everything went fine,
it wasn't too long after that
he was called in and told
that they would exit him
with a honorable discharge because
they were afraid of the depression.
He challenged this discharge,
but eventually they ruled
against him,
and then the raid
on our house on January 25th,
and that's when the whole
building came tumbling down.
He's curled up at the bottom of our
bed on the floor, shaking, twitching.
I can't let that happen.
I can't let that happen, something's gonna...
I don't know what's gonna happen to him,
but that right there for the next
three or four days, he'll die.
He'll kill himself or
something will happen to him.
That's not gonna happen.
We've gotta do something.
When he says, "here's what I
wanna do,"
I'm saying,
"oh, you're right. Okay, fine."
I drove him to
near the Russian embassy.
There was two feet of snow
everywhere, we drove straight through.
Matt slept most of the way.
Thankfully, he finally got
some sleep.
When did you take a
visit to the Russian embassy?
The middle of February 2010.
Where did you go
and visit the Russian embassy?
Washington, DC.
Why did you go
and visit the Russian embassy?
Because I believed the united
states was going to charge me
with national security
offenses, um... eventually.
And I was seeking asylum
for protection.
No one who hasn't been through
this would ever understand this.
They would say, you know,
"you're a retired air force officer."
You're a pastor of a church.
You're just this average American person
and now you're driving your
son to the Russian embassy.
What's that all about?" Of course
the FBI would say. "You're a mole."
But who are you gonna go to?
Where can you go to protect yourself
from the United States of America?
If the United States of America
has you in their crosshairs
and you think it's for
something that you didn't do
but they're gonna come
after you anyway,
where do you go? North Korea?
Why did you
believe in February 2010,
that the United States was
going to eventually charge you
with national security offenses?
Because I was aware of what was
uploaded to the server in late 2009.
And that search warrant was executed
at my parent's place in January.
I believe that was their true
intent to find evidence of that.
As this whole case evolved,
you know, I did ask myself
from time to time,
"is this just a matter of
people being paranoid,
or is the system really out to
get them?"
We said a prayer
before he got out of the car,
and we exchanged "I love yous."
And I thought that would be
the last time I'd see him.
If they granted him asylum.
I drove off, cried all the way
back to wherever I was going,
you know, saying I can't believe
this is what it's come to.
It was in February of 2010
that his father took him to DC
and dropped him off near
two different embassies,
the Russian embassy
and the Venezuelan embassy,
for him to go in and defect.
Um, and I don't know what he did
when he got into those embassies,
but I certainly can understand why
the FBI became interested in that.
Did you give the Russians
any information?
I told them a few things.
What kinds of things
did you tell the Russians?
I told them my unit
was a drone unit, a uav unit.
I told them that I have
expertise in computer networking.
I told them that most
of my friends do as well.
Um, stuff like that.
Almost every step
of this story is emerging
from some secret, shadowy world.
When it became even larger, and I
didn't know it at that point in time,
but when it involved the Russian
embassy and the spy world...
Um, again a very shadowy world.
So secrecy, secrets and shadows
were everywhere on this story.
And so it was extraordinarily
hard as a journalist
to find documented, accurate,
confirmable information.
I did get a call from Paul and
he said, you know, "everything's okay."
It was short because we were
very careful
about what we said
on our phones.
And then, you know, you find out
later on
that they have audio of him
and Matt talking in the car.
They have pictures of Matt, you
know, at the Starbucks coffee shop.
So they were being
surveilled the entire time.
So they were
supposed to contact him
and they didn't call him,
so he assumed it was
a no answer.
He originally was gonna take
a bus back.
But he chose to rent a car.
So he rented a car
from bwi airport,
he was driving back
through the mountains
of West Virginia
on interstate 64.
He spun out in the
car and the car was totaled.
What else is gonna happen? Can we add
anything else to the stress level?
Is there another thing
that can happen?
You know? But he survived.
It is certainly one
of the most unusual cases
that I have handled, um...
And certainly I can say
that I've never seen
a defendant or his family
go to the extremes
to avoid prosecution
as happened in this case.
We thought, "well,
if there's any problems,
he won't get a passport."
I mean that makes sense, right?
So he got a passport.
All right, so we applied to
this language school in Montreal
in his name, you know,
everything up and up on the credit card.
Anybody who wants to look
can find it.
Go up to plattsburgh, New York,
goes across the border,
no problems at all.
What stands out in this case
to me
is the United States
government's reaction
between August 6th
and August 20th, 2010.
On August 6, 2010, Matthew's up
in Canada,
he's studying French,
and his student visa
in Canada is about to expire.
And in order to reset it,
he needs to cross
into the United States
and then go back into Canada.
It was a Friday, and he was coming
across to get his visa stamped,
and soon as he did that and
turned around and walk back over,
he was supposed to Skype us
and, you know, let us know that
everything went okay
and we'd come up and see him
during the semester break.
And we didn't hear from him.
And we... you get that dark
heavy feeling
and you know something's
terribly, terribly wrong.
You're detained
on August 6, 2010,
and you're eventually told
at some point
that very day
that the FBI's interest in you
is in regards to
national security matters,
- is that correct?
- Yes.
I was brought into
a detention cell,
held for less than an hour
and then brought to a
medical examination room
where I was given an iv.
I had refused it at first
and they just said,
"well, you have to do this,
it's part of our procedure."
Um, there was two FBI agents
working there,
um, as well as I believe
a doctor.
And were you told
what was being given to you?
No, I wasn't. And I was
brought back to the detention cell.
I said, "can I talk to
my lawyer now?"
Because they were just staring
at me.
They said, "no,
it's a national security case."
It was only recently when one
of a number of documents was declassified
that actually gave
total credence
to that story,
it verified that story.
He's explicitly
detained at the border
because of an espionage
investigation.
That's one of the few things
we know about this case.
It wasn't that
we disbelieved Matt,
but there's a level of belief,
and then there's the level
of actual confirmation.
There's a relief in that,
okay, yes, this is true,
but there's also a heartbreak
that says
this really did happen
to my kid,
this is what they did to him.
Not long thereafter, I was
brought up to a conference room.
It's a large conference table,
one FBI agent's on the right,
the other's on the left,
sort of at the corner
of the table.
The FBI agent to my left
asks me,
"do you know what this is
about?"
- Okay, and?
- I said, "no, I don't."
And then he said,
"how about deal?"
Deal was an individual in
my air national guard unit.
He was also in
my world of warcraft guild.
What's your relationship
with them now?
You know all this information...
They expanded their questioning
to ask about the visit
to the Russian embassy,
what I spoke to the Russians
about.
But they always came back
to deal.
I don't know if you
know anything about computers...
They thought deal
had leaked information,
posted it to my server called
the shell,
and then further leaked it
to wikileaks.
And yes or no, were you aware
of what information
they were speaking of?
I believed I was.
I had a copy of that on a flash
drive I brought to Canada with me.
Matthew came
to the Canadian border
with this magic pen drive where he
had a lot of his supporting evidence
and naively gave it up to
Canada border services officers.
That pen drive became this
little battle, um,
'cause we never got it back,
and I kept applying to have it
returned
because there were files on it
that were gonna corroborate
some of, you know,
Matthew's allegations,
and god knows where it is.
If it's not with cbsa,
I believe there's a possibility
that it may have been returned
to the us government,
but that's pure speculation
on my part.
Has this information,
as far as you know,
ever been exposed publicly?
No, I believe it's part of
wikileaks insurance policy,
they call it; Should their site
be shut down,
they would leak a certain
quantity of information
that would be damaging
to certain governments.
Tell us the Russians,
Venezuelans,
anybody could just do
this in the United States.
I don't think so. I think only
people with specific capabilities
and specific intents
can do this.
By the time
this interrogation happened,
a lot of military secrets
had been given to wikileaks,
most famously the video
collateral murder
by Chelsea Manning,
which showed a video
of us military gunning down
journalists in Iraq, right?
And so I could just only
imagine that the FBI
was really desperately
trying to find evidence
of people within the military possibly
giving over information to wikileaks.
So basically, you're detained in regards
to national security allegations.
How do we go from there
to you being indicted
on two counts related to
child pornography allegations?
We were aware that
the defendant wasn't in the us
but got a call from the FBI
up in Maine
who had seen that there was an
FBI investigation in Nashville
involving this case,
and let us know that he
had come across the border
and wanted to know if we wanted
to proceed with any charges.
They called down because they
had nothing to hold him on.
Mind you, they had nothing
to hold him on.
This moribund complaint
from parents in Tennessee
was sort of dusted off
and opened up
and then used as a blunt
instrument to investigate
what appears to be the true
interest and focus of the government
and that's national security,
espionage.
Up until that time,
I had just previously
finished the majority
of the forensic analysis
on the computer
that was seized, or computers
that were seized
at Matthew dehart's residence.
At that time, I was able to
have enough probable cause
to have several charges
of him against...
For the distribution, production,
and solicitation charges.
So we didn't want to let him go.
If they only had
eight hours to detain him,
um, then he could have
crossed back into Canada
or gone wherever
and disappeared.
So at that time, I had
enough probable cause
to submit, uh,
obtain a arrest warrant
and he was detained on
my child pornography charges.
He said,
"here, we have this now.
You're gonna start telling us
about what we wanna know,
otherwise you're gonna face
this."
It said production of
child pornography on it.
I said, "I have nothing
to do with that, this is bs."
The FBI agent told me,
"I know that. It doesn't matter.
You need to answer
our questions."
At that time,
I was feeling more groggy,
it was when I first thought
I was drugged.
- Tell us, Matt.
- Answer his questions, Matt.
What were you doing
at the Russian embassy?
What's your relationship
with wikileaks?
We were literally
on the verge of publishing
when I'm saying, "no, we have
to put the breaks on this"
because I've just learned
that the FBI documents
on one of the times
he was interrogated alleged
that he had contacted
the Russian embassy,
"offered to sell them secrets."
And that the Russian
embassy official told him
that we can't operate right now
within the United States,
you have to move to Canada to contact
our spymaster at the embassy in Ottawa.
Eventually what emerges
is this picture of Matt
and some of his fellow air
national guardsmen conspiring
to sell government secrets.
According to the document, Matt told
the FBI of one member of his unit
who could remotely access a
department of national defense portal
and get some information
through that.
And that Matt allegedly offered
to act as a bit of a middleman,
that if his colleague
could get the information,
then he would maybe find
a buyer for it.
In the document, it seems like he's,
you know, selling out his friends,
giving over their names
to the FBI,
kind of snitching on them.
When you pump
somebody full of drugs,
you're gonna get all kinds
of stuff.
You're gonna get them to say
things you want them to say.
Of course we have no audio
recording of the interviews,
so we don't know if Matt really
said this,
and then if he did say this,
he also claimed
that he had been forcibly
drugged by the FBI
and tortured
and so that the information
is not reliable for that reason
alone.
I got a call that I
needed to go downstairs in intake
and process a person who came in
who did not transport well.
I remember the disheveled look.
I remember the pale appearance,
I remember the bizarre, um,
behavior,
the emotions all over the board,
and the non-compliance.
I'm just... was not
complying with the officers
as far as like standing up,
sitting down, processing,
I wasn't sure if he had taken
drugs or coming off of drugs,
so to play it safe
I sent him out
to the emergency room
just to get an evaluation done.
He's interrogated so intensely
he ends up in
the emergency room at 1:00 A.M.
And he's evaluated
by the er doctors
who say that he's
paranoid and delusional.
I think they say at one point, this is in the
public record, that he had a psychotic break.
Because he's telling them
that he's being interrogated
by the FBI on matters of
national security and espionage,
which is of course the classic
paranoid delusional thing
that crazy people say.
Except in this case
it's actually true.
Looks like the thorazine
was started on August 9th.
"Our clinical opinion,
and the purpose of this letter
to you,
is the concern about the impact
of an old major tranquilizer referred to...
Called thorazine.
That has never been indicated
for use with Matthew,
based on our clinical
diagnostic impressions of him.
He has no history
whatsoever of a psychosis,
therefore no clinical
justification
for the use of any
antipsychotic medication,
and especially thorazine
that has always
had the potential for major
side effects.
And this would especially be
significant
"if this medication was
started early in his arrest."
His doctor confirmed that
that's what they used
years and years ago,
they would use amphetamines
mixed with thorazine,
which makes a "beautiful" truth
serum from what I understand.
One of the most
surprising set of documents
have to do with the consent
to assume online identity.
And it's very clear,
in capital letters here it says,
"consent to assume
online identity."
And basically, what he is
allowing the FBI to do
is to change the password
so he doesn't have access
to these accounts anymore,
uh, but the FBI has access
to these accounts
and can assume his identity
so that people who are
interacting
with these accounts think that
they're interacting with Matt dehart.
And what's incredible
about this is first of all,
I just didn't even know
this was like an option,
I guess I was like, "oh, I guess
this is something
that the FBI would of course
want for investigations."
And then it's just surprising
that he would give this consent.
You spoke earlier of having been
tortured, while in detention,
so would this have been
during the period
- of August 6th to the 20th or 21st?
- Yes.
So do you wanna
tell us what happened?
I was put in what's called a dry cell.
I... this was probably Monday,
or it must have been Sunday,
I'm sorry.
They were knocking on the door every 15
minutes or so so I wouldn't go to sleep.
I had no bedding,
it was just a concrete slab.
They took my suicide smock away
from me,
so they left me in the cell
naked.
And I had to go to the bathroom,
they wouldn't let me out.
So I soiled myself.
They threw bleach water all
over me and all over the cell.
Um, I was freezing.
And now, um, pretty much
the whole time
the FBI is coming
every day to interrogate me
for about five or six hours
a day, I would guess.
Um, and then I collapsed
in the courtroom.
The judge allowed his lawyer
to put the phone up to his mouth
so that he could talk to me the first time
I heard him, and he sounded like a zombie,
"dad,
they say I'm spying for the Russians."
And that's it.
Tuesday was the first day
in the submission chair,
I think.
It's a chair with leg
restraints and arm restraints.
I was sat in there naked.
It's such a strong reaction
from the FBI,
from the department of justice,
you have to ask why they were freaking out.
Because I think
it's indisputable
from the record that
they were freaking out.
I had a canvas bag over
my head and I couldn't breathe.
I was screaming
that I couldn't breathe.
And I felt like drips
of cold water on my arm.
And then I got shocked...
like tased.
And I'm screaming and spitting
and stuff.
Why don't you take
a deep breath, it's okay.
Just take a deep breath.
Pause for a second.
- Don't be in a rush to talk.
- Can you shut that off for a second?
There is a mask
that they will use
in a submission chair
if you do spit.
And it does look like
what beekeepers would wear,
working in the fields.
But there is a mask
that they will put over
for the officers' safety.
The fact that he was
tortured and all of this stuff,
it was extremely overwhelming.
And I have to be honest
with you.
My first thought is,
"is my kid, is he out to lunch?"
And then when I saw
what was on the drives
and what we did to people,
and what we still do
to people, it all made sense,
why people would want
to cover up things.
And why they would destroy
people's reputation
if not destroy them.
It made all the sense
in the world.
The only way to make the
facts in this case make sense
is to entertain some kind
of wild conspiracy theory.
Which is fucked up because I
am not a conspiracy theorist.
I'm a former corporate
wall street lawyer.
But the only way I could make the
government's reaction make sense
is if I make some kind
of assumption
that he's got his hands
on some crazy information
that they just did not
want to get out there.
The day before we
sought asylum in Canada,
my son was concerned that he
would lose his life over this,
and he wanted one other
person to be able to see
what was on those files
that he had,
and I'm the other person that
went through those files.
That was it for me.
I knew what this was all about.
I knew what this was all about.
And I thought, "we're dead,
we're dead."
During the time in 2001
when there was the Anthrax scare
and several people had died,
it was blamed on other parties
outside of the country,
and my son discovered that
it was indeed
perpetrated by the CIA
and covered up by the FBI.
Obviously, the information
that was downloaded
or dropped on his server
was meant for wikileaks,
it was a leak for the world
to know
that the Anthrax attacks
were not
by some middle eastern group
at the time.
It was perpetrated by the CIA
in order to drum up support
for bush for the Iraq war.
I do feel like the information
that was supposedly placed on
his servers
is the big missing key
to all of this.
No one has seen these files,
right?
If they do exist in any way,
it would be essential to really
prove or disprove what Matt
and his family have been
saying all this time.
Do I know where
his thumb drives are?
The government's got one.
But they haven't decrypted it
as far as I know.
And I think there's some
in Europe.
But do I know exactly
where they are?
No. And if I did, I wouldn't
tell you.
I'm not gonna be playing
20 questions on our sources.
I'm sure you understand, Allen,
as a source protection organization,
we're not going to be
inscribing circles around
who our sources are,
how we communicate with them,
any properties that might
be used to arrest them
or criticize them
in some future process.
- This call is from...
- Matthew dehart.
An inmate at a federal prison.
Hello?
- Hey, buddy.
- Hey.
Hey, what's up,
how are you guys doing?
Good, how are you?
I'm okay. I just got
a few letters done today.
Otherwise Friday's are pretty
uneventful.
Good, quiet is good.
Oh, yeah, we used to
watch movies,
but we're not allowed
to do that anymore.
- Okay.
- Oh, that's too bad.
Everything went okay today,
so we're good.
- With the doctors, yeah, it's all good.
- Okay.
Excellent. Very good. All right
sounds good want to say a prayer?
Yep. Lord, thank you for today
and everything given us,
continue to watch over us,
protect us,
keep us safe from all harm,
lord.
Bring us back together
as soon as possible,
- we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.
- Amen.
We ask that you just work
this whole situation out,
have mercy, lord,
have mercy on people
that are in rough situations,
help us spearhead it, dear lord,
and just work
this whole situation out.
Thank you
for all your blessings.
- Amen.
- Amen, amen.
So you guys are good?
- We're good.
- We're good, buddy, we're good.
Okay, sounds good. You guys have a great
evening and have a great day tomorrow.
And, mom, I love you very much.
I love you very much
too, buddy. God bless you.
Sometimes it's very off-putting.
We live in the woods because
we don't wanna be bothered,
and we wanna...
We always thought, you know, stay out
of the view of people
you don't want watching you.
So sometimes when people just
kinda show up out of the blue,
it is a little disconcerting,
to say the least, anyway.
I'd like to think it's just
people doing their job,
but the last years
has taught me that
never take anything for granted.
Always be aware
of your surroundings.
Because there are people
who are not
who they're supposed to be.
No FBI agent has
talked to me formally.
They went to my
80-something-year-old mother,
spent three hours,
and asked her how many languages I knew,
what I did in the military,
how often did I travel,
and was I loyal to this country.
What does that sound like
to you?
It sounds like a blast
out of the past
from somewhere else, doesn't it?
It'll be interesting
if he comes back.
That would be interesting.
We can't say that we're not
being watched. I mean,
we know from experience. So just as we're
standing here a helicopter flies over,
a plane flies over,
a car pulls up at the end of the driveway
which I've never seen before
and stops.
But it's not that you have to have
a little guy in your backyard,
they don't have to have
a monitor,
just the fact that they know
that you think you're
being monitored is enough,
because that keeps everybody
in line.
Good morning. We're here on united
states vs. Matthew Paul dehart.
We have Carrie daughtrey
and lynne ingram
for the government and Mark
scruggs for the defendant.
I came on the case in approximately
February or march of 2012.
Matthew had been in custody
since August of 2010.
So I think the first focus
was to try
to get him released
on some kind of bond
or some kind of supervised
release
so he that he could get out
of custody.
Detective kniss,
is it your position that victim one
has ever actually met this man
personally one on one?
From my interviews with victim
one, yes, he has met him.
Okay. And yet victim one couldn't
pick him out of a lineup, correct?
- That's correct.
- One of the victims, the second victim, was able
to positively identify
Matthew dehart
from a driver's license photo
immediately in a photo lineup.
Um, the first victim
who had met Matthew dehart,
probably a year and a half
earlier in the dark,
wasn't able to identify him.
One of the victims' phones,
upon which this was supposed
to happen,
was given back to the victim
without being analyzed.
Cell phones at that time
were flip phones.
They weren't the smart phones
like we had today,
so they didn't retain a lot
of information and data.
And that data, once they delete
it, was easily overwritten.
So with the technology,
the forensic technology we had
back then
it was not able to recover
any evidence
that we could use in this case.
One single detective analyzed
the stuff
that was on Matt's computer,
detective kniss,
and as far as we know,
there's no indication
that we ever saw,
that Matt ever saw,
that anything was found
on his computers.
I found images of the first
victim
on Matthew dehart's computer
hard drives.
We don't have a single
bit of evidence saying
this picture was sent
with this time stamp
to this place and was
received at this time.
That does not exist
in Matt's case at all.
I found still images of
the victim masturbating
and was able to positively
identify
it was the victim by showing
a sterilized image to the victim
and he was able to identify
certain features in his bedroom
through those images.
We also found multiple days'
worth of chat fragments
where Matthew dehart
was portraying himself
as a teenage female to
solicit these victims
for these images and videos.
The government basically
typed out an alleged chat
that Matt had online
with minor number one
and minor number two
and so forth.
But they were never reproduced in
the form they were allegedly found.
We changed the screen names
to depict victim number one,
or suspect, or Matthew dehart when we...
As part of the...
Changed the screen name from his
screen name to Matthew dehart.
That's the only alterations
we did.
And we did that to protect
the identities of the victims.
The overall arching theme for us
is this makes absolutely
no sense.
This doesn't follow standard
rules of criminal procedure.
This doesn't follow
constitutional law.
Something else is going on here.
So you'd say this doesn't make
any sense.
The only thing that
ever makes any sense is
somebody was interested in him
for national security purposes,
and this is what he said
in court from the beginning.
It was a ruse to get
a hold of his computers
for national security stuff.
The question became just why was he
being prosecuted on the pornography
when it seemed to me
the focus of the investigation
was his connections
or alleged connections
with "wikilinks" and anonymous?
He was making
an argument to his lawyers
that all of these allegations
were trumped-up allegations
as part of a national
security investigation.
And behind closed doors,
the judge
was allowed to see some
of the secret information
that the government had
in regards to it.
And she came out
and in open court
said that she understands why Matt
dehart would be far more concerned
about the national security
allegations
than he would be about any
of the child porn allegations
and that the weight of the
evidence was not as firm
as she thought it was.
And that's when...
Probably the moment
that I started to feel
much more comfortable in knowing
and believing and thinking
that there was something
far more to this
than mental health
or an immature kid trying
to avoid responsibility
for a horrible allegation,
that there was something
very real here,
there was something
potentially very wrong here,
and that this was a case that
the world needed to know about
and the world needed to have
answers to.
And the fact that
an impartial judge
who had more information
than the rest of us have
is skeptical
of the firmness of those charges
and, in fact,
allowed Matt dehart to be free on bail,
this is a really big deal to me.
Had she decided otherwise,
it would have put a different
kind of spin on the story.
Matthew is a
very intelligent person,
he's also, you know,
pretty hyper.
Uh, and he wanted
the direction of the defense
to go in one way
and I felt like it should go
in a different direction,
so we came to, I guess,
a parting of the ways
to the extent that I felt like
a particular strategy
should be pursued
and he didn't want to do that,
and so I withdrew from the case.
So Matt was let out on bond in may of 2012.
And Matt's given a lawyer
from a pool.
And we went down and met
with him.
It was in an office
in Nashville, Tennessee.
I remember as clear as day.
Very big office, big windows.
We walked in
and the first thing...
He was sitting at a table,
he was sitting back at a table like this.
He had a couple of assistants,
his other colleague was here,
maybe there were two people they later
introduced as private investigators.
And he said,
first thing he said was,
"it's very unusual for
someone who's 26 years old
to have his parents with him."
Um...
"You can stay at this meeting,
but from now on you're not welcome
in our meetings with your son."
What I recall
as being the boundary,
the point where we, my partner
and I, my law partner and I,
decided that this was
an unusual circumstance
and that we had to exclude
the parents
from our client relationship
actually occurred
in the room I'm in now,
a conference room in our office.
And my memory is Matthew
and his parents were there,
my law partner was there,
and I believe our paralegal
was there.
And at this point, I had
begun to be concerned
about Paul and leann dehart
and about their understanding
of their son's circumstance
and particularly about their
control over his decisions.
And Paul dehart had begun
to articulate
and advance an idea that
the federal government
was listening to our
conversations.
And he pointed to a window
in this office
and asked if we had seen
the window move, vibrate.
And he asserted that he
had seen the window move,
and that meant that
the government
was listening to us
at that moment.
It wasn't long after that
when we reached the conclusion
that it was in Matthew's
best interest
to undergo a full
psychological evaluation.
And then he told his parents.
When a judge and a doctor says
that someone is mentally
incompetent,
they can put you away forever
in prison
as mentally incompetent,
and they threatened Matt with that
in order to get him to plea.
One day, Paul said,
"I can't let this happen to my son."
He had just seen what had
happened to Aaron swartz,
and he said, "I don't wanna
come home,
and find that that's
happened to my son too."
A co-founder of the social news
and entertainment website
Reddit has been found dead.
Police say 26-year-old
Aaron swartz
killed himself yesterday
in his Brooklyn apartment.
Swartz was facing a federal trial on computer
fraud charges; He had plead not guilty.
My one thought is, "I need
to protect my son's life."
That's how I felt about it.
I can't describe it
any other way.
My son is in danger
and I am in operation mode.
And I'm gonna protect him
and unfortunately,
it's protecting him
from our own government,
the government that we
swore to support and defend.
He cut off his ankle
monitor and threw it in the weeds
and went to Canada
the second time.
That morning,
we were scheduled to be in court.
When I woke up,
I had a voicemail,
I believe,
actually from Paul dehart,
that was in the middle
of the night,
saying that he and his son
and his wife were in Canada
and they weren't coming
to court.
And we informed the court
that we believed
that Paul dehart was
unstable and dangerous.
Paul, with the active
support of his wife leann,
controlled their son,
their adult son,
and ultimately took him
to Canada.
By the time I met Matt
in person,
he had been released on bail.
Probably on the tightest
bail condition restrictions
that Canada's immigration
refugee board
had probably ever issued.
Um, he could not leave
the very small apartment
that he shared with his parents.
He had a GPS monitoring
bracelet,
he had to check in every week.
It was extremely minor
interactions
he could have
with the outside world.
Matt sent his parents out
so we could have a one-on-one
private conversation.
And there in his bedroom
he started to tell me
the first draft of his version
of events
of what he went through.
And we spoke for hours.
I was very cognizant of the fact
that he had a very firm grip
on how he's presented
to the world.
Like, for instance,
I had a photograph
of him provided to me
from the us authorities
and it was his mug shot
in his orange prison uniform.
Clearly, it looked like he had
been crying,
his eyes were all red
and watery,
and he didn't want us to use
that mugshot
and asked through his lawyers
to provide us
with an updated photograph
of him.
And of course it's him smiling,
friendly,
and he was even wearing
a hockey t-shirt,
you know, as like a message
to Canadians,
"look at me, I like hockey,
I'm not a threat to your country.
I should be welcome here."
And as a journalist who's
being impartial to the facts,
I was aware of the spin
that he was giving me,
as well as the spin
and the reluctance
that the various governments
and agencies
were also giving me.
It was a multi-part story.
It was an incredibly important
piece,
to kind of confirm that, you
know, the more important case here
is the espionage case.
And it was through the
reporting of Adrian Humphreys
that we started to see that
picture a little bit more clearly.
And more so
that other journalists started
to follow the case.
Wikileaks describes him
as an alleged wikileaks middle man,
but when he found
that secret document,
he didn't publish it,
he didn't release it,
and to this day, he's not
allowed me to read it,
or others to read it.
So at this stage
of his trajectory,
I'm a little uncomfortable
saying he's a whistleblower,
um, other than the fact that he's
certainly trying to blow the whistle
on the way
the us government treated him.
There was,
I think, about 15 months
of seeking asylum in Canada,
and the parents
were very, very active
in looking for support wherever
they could find support
for the idea that Matthew
was a wikileaks-type
whistleblower
who had been unfairly
accused by the United States.
And one supporter they found
was a lawyer in Brooklyn.
Matt, when he came up here,
was free and out on bond,
but because of a kind of
ludicrous technicality,
Matt dehart is now in a maximum
security prison in Canada.
They actually had their
hands clamped on his,
and I said, "you cannot
do that, he has PTSD."
Can I ask you where he got that?
Yeah, from being tortured,
that's where he got PTSD.
- And who tortured him?
- The FBI tortured him.
Tor ekeland was in the videos,
joined in the promotion,
and people came
to their support.
The courage foundation
supports whistleblowers,
truthtellers, journalists,
anyone with courage
to stand up for the truth.
One of the first people
who were probably, um,
beneficiaries
of the courage foundation
would have been Chelsea Manning
and Edward snowden.
And along the way over the
years, other people were added
and supported and became
beneficiaries
and my son was selected
as one of those beneficiaries.
It certainly was coincidental
that his story was evolving
as the Manning case
and the snowden case,
as they came out into the media.
It did seem like he was
sort of riding on the tails
of that kind of investigation
that was going on.
By late 2009,
someone had uploaded a file to the shell,
which is a server which I
operated the front end of.
Matthew dehart wants
to portray himself
as this whistleblower to make
him appear to be the victim.
I consider myself to be
an information freedom activist
and a political prisoner.
He can say what he wants to
to get people to follow him,
all I gotta say
is they haven't looked
at both sides of the story.
The timeframe that
my prosecution occurred
was after our government started
going after whistleblowers,
or potential whistleblowers,
so that means my prosecution
was politically motivated.
When all of this media
was being generated,
we were prohibited by
court rules and local rules
and ethical rules and DOJ policy
from talking to the media. Um...
So it was interesting to see the
perspective that they were putting out
and it certainly wasn't a well rounded
story about what was going on at all.
It was a little frustrating.
They put up Facebook pages,
held news conferences,
they put up gofundme pages,
they tried to raise money
by promoting
the anonymous conspiracy theory.
I can only imagine how difficult
it must have been
for these victims
and their families to see
Matthew dehart
and his family billing him
as being
a victim of the system
when, in fact,
they were the ones
who were victims
and were being victimized again
by dehart
and his family in the media.
A former American
soldier allegedly turned hacker
who was seeking asylum in Canada
has been deported to the us.
Thirty-year-old Matt dehart
claims he is being persecuted
by the United States government
for his political beliefs
as a hacker and whistleblower
involved in leaking sensitive
government information.
His claim for refugee status
in Canada
was denied and so was a similar
claim made by his parents.
Joining us this morning,
Paul and leann dehart.
He wanted to stay here, you wanted to
stay here and now you may have to leave?
We, we are under a departure
order.
We have to leave by April 1st.
It ended with the
claims for asylum being refused.
Because the board member ruled
that at the end of the day,
we hadn't presented sufficient
evidence to show that, um,
uh, the United States government
was unable or unwilling
to offer Matthew
and his family
the protection that they needed.
They brought him
across the border at buffalo.
And then I went up to the
border to meet Paul and leann
because they had a legitimate concern
that they were gonna get detained.
I'm in Canada right now
with the deharts.
They're about to cross back
over to the United States.
Certificate of departure
from Canada.
We pulled over by the fence,
I opened up the two tool boxes,
I thought, "okay, we'll have the
inspection and go in and talk to them."
And he handed us
our passports back
and leann said he told him,
"now we'll just be on our way."
And I'm like, "that's it,
really?
We're just driving, there's no questions?
There's no..."
So that's... it's a tremendous
relief. Um, I... I can only...
Um, imagine that the reason
why this went so smoothly
was because the world
is watching,
and I appreciate everybody
who's been following
our story, so, yeah, that's it.
It's a story that
I thought needed to be told.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate the way you did it.
Okay, all the best, sir.
Him fleeing to Canada,
and this whole national
security investigation
gave us an opportunity to submit
an external hard drive
to the FBI to decrypt
and from there,
I was able to start my analysis
on that encrypted hard drive
and that's where I found
the images of the second victim.
He soon plead guilty after that.
After all these years
of outlandish claims he's made,
and all the resources
that the government
has had to expend
to deal with this case
and to deal with these claims,
he did plead guilty.
He admitted that he had
exploited children
and justice was done
in the case.
Yes, I plead guilty
to something I did not do.
You have to keep in mind
all the power
in the us court system
lies with the prosecution.
It's what they decide
to show you,
what they decide to show
the judge,
and especially if you're
sitting in county jail,
you have almost no
negotiating power.
If that went to trial,
all you would have to do
is show one picture
of a naked kid
and everybody in there
in Tennessee
or anywhere else in our
country would say "guilty."
And all you would have to say
is, "oh, and by the way,
this young man went into
the Russian embassy."
And every single one of them
would say, "hang him."
I didn't consider
90 months to be unacceptable.
I had already been incarcerated
for close to five years.
Uh, with good time,
I'd only be spending
about two and a half years
in prison.
Compared to what I was
being threatened with
if they had sent me
to DC to be prosecuted,
which was something
like 30-50 years.
Um, and I wanna see my family
again
and I wanna be able to live
a normal life again.
It's not like he
just waltzed up and said,
"okay, yeah, I'll plea to this
nasty stuff that I didn't do."
No, it didn't work that way,
he was threatened, we were
threatened to go to prison,
if he didn't take the plea deal.
We're a very close family and
we would all die for each other.
We're here on the sentencing
in the United States
vs. Matthew Paul dehart.
Are there any witnesses
today for the government?
No witnesses, your honor,
but we do have victim impact
statements.
We hope you realize the great
truth of your conviction.
These charges you have
confessed to are not bogus,
they are real.
You are finally exposed
and the lies you were living
are no more.
The seven years we have awaited
justice
has taken a great toll
on our family.
Watching you and your mother
and father in Canada
try to build your case of lies
was even more painful.
Thankfully, Canada has
sent you back to face us all.
We're the real victims
of the web you spun
to trap our children.
My son initially
thought you were a friend.
A fiend is more like it.
You undermined our core
Christian beliefs.
I honestly believe that you
thought this was a game.
You got away with it for quite
a while,
but the game is over.
You have lost.
You are captured and have
admitted your wrongdoing
only after many delays
and manipulation of the courts,
the press, and anyone else
who would listen to you.
You are answering to this court
today,
but one day,
I believe you will stand
before the judgment seat of god.
At the end of my son's plea,
the judge made the effort
to say,
"what about this national
security case?
Is this still open?
Can Mr. Dehart be charged
with this?"
And the government said,
"well, yes, he could."
We're looking forward to
the day, September 11th, 2018.
Strange date they picked
to release him.
And we fully expect,
it would not surprise us at all,
if they don't come by with
some vans and arrest him,
for something else.
So we never know,
you never know.
The plea that
I had to sign included
my Canadian credit
towards my sentence.
And that was the deal,
it's a binding contract
between the defense
and the federal government.
And evidently they can break
a contract with impunity,
and that's lawlessness.
It's very frustrating.
It's almost like somebody in DC
or somebody is still
extremely upset and worried
about the information
that Matt came across.
And if I was paranoid
and conspiracy-minded,
I would say that somebody was
trying to send him a message.
And that message is,
"be careful, we can still fuck
with you.
And this isn't over yet".
This is gonna be Matt's
room. Um...
I started putting some things
in his bureau for him, um,
his clothing.
Uh, I have to buy him
new clothing,
he lost a lot of weight
in prison, and that's okay.
And so I'm just trying
to get things ready
and organized for him
when he comes home.
This is, um, guy Fawkes,
and my son,
I think he's had this mask
since like 2005,
so I keep that.
I had been at
the second victim's house,
and this is in the evening, um,
taking some... getting some
additional information
when the phone rang
and it just so happened to be,
I think the caller ID said
it was a law firm out of New York City.
Um, n-no, about what?
The second victim
had informed Matthew dehart
that the police were
involved at this stage.
And so Matthew dehart,
portraying himself as a lawyer
from a law firm in New York,
said he's trying to get everybody
to stop contacting his client,
which is actually him, from further
investigating these allegations.
Pre-texting?
- Phone pre-texting.
- Okay.
As I was doing the forensic analysis
of Matthew dehart's computers,
I found a transcript that was typed out
by Matthew dehart as to what to say.
He had done a little bit
of research
into certain United States
statutes about phone calls
and certain legal responses.
He made a whole script
as to what to say
so he wouldn't get off script.
So he could make it sound
authentic.
Uh-huh?
No. I don't know what
you're talking about.
- Thank you.
- Okay, you're welcome.
Today's date
is the 8th of January,
I'm here with... and his mother.
- Uh, you identify his voice as being Matthew's?
- Yes.
The first conversation
you played
sounds very much to me
like it was Matt dehart.
After that call was finished
with the victim's mother,
the suspect, Matthew dehart,
called back wanting to speak
to the second victim
to try to find out
from him what was going on.
I can get my mom
if you want me to.
I'm not really sure right now.
Like, I don't know whether you're
the age you tell me you are
or I don't know, Matt.
The victim was
very scared at that time
'cause at that time,
the victim still believed that
Matthew dehart
was Matthew dimarco,
the son of a infamous mobster
out of New York or New Jersey.
And it was very apparent
that this victim was scared
and did not want to talk
to Matthew.
Yes.
Yes, I'm in a tough situation
right now.
Fifteen minutes after that phone
call, Matthew dehart calls back
and wants to speak to
the victim's mother again,
and the victim's mother
had a conversation
which I was also present for
and recorded.
Wait, your aunt
and uncle called your dad...
saying your aunt and uncle
are being harassed?
Yeah?
Uh-huh.
And that's Matt
supposedly impersonating...
Uh-huh.
And so does your cousin have the
same name as you or something?
So two different last names,
but you're both Matthew?
And that's where the confusion...
Okay.
And...
What's your dad do?
I don't know what your dad does.
It sounds like
this has just become
a very desperate situation
for him
'cause I think he knew
he was gonna get in trouble.
Through my investigation,
I was able to find out
the name of another individual
somewhere in the United States.
That victim was interviewed and I was
given a report on the conversation
that the investigator
and the other victim had.
And through that,
it was learned that
there were other things going on other than
just the exchanging of images and videos.
And that's according
to the victim.
If the government
had this evidence against him,
I would have liked to
have seen it in court.
It boggles my mind
why the government left...
The police force left
all of these things dangling.
It's just something
I don't know.
It's, it's very disturbing,
and, uh... if true,
it's despicable behavior
and sad to hear about.
The victim had...
Did not wanna come forward
as far as prosecution
was concerned
unless this was to eventually
go to trial.
In resolving any of these cases,
we're always talking
to the victims
to make sure that they are
comfortable
with whatever resolution it is
that we're trying to come to,
and sometimes the defendants end up
getting to plead to lesser charges
or less time
in an effort to avoid, uh,
having the children testify.
When Paul dehart
told us the government
was listening to us and that
he observed the glass move,
was that part of a plan
to create something
that didn't exist,
and was it calculated?
Mexico, Russia, Venezuela,
Canada, all those things.
Were... were they done
because they believed
that he was a target
of the United States
and that there was
a conspiracy to harm him?
Or did they do that because
they couldn't accept him
for what Matthew is?
You know?
And did their own beliefs,
their own fundamental
Christian beliefs,
laid on top of a military
background,
cause them to create and promote
a concocted conspiracy
rather than act in the best
interest of their child?
B-Because of the level
of secrecy,
uh, from all ends
involved in this case,
um, there's really no firm way
of...
That I can find of truly
knowing where the truth lies.
Matt's probably the only one
that really knows.
This case is a microcosm...
It's one case in a world
where we are all suffering
from the promotion of lies
as truths.
We... we...
Everyday, we are subjected
to circumstances
where if someone says
something that's not true,
and says it enough times,
it will find support
and eventually be accepted
by other people as true.
I think we often
establish stories and narratives
with incomplete information,
and then activists
and advocates take a stance,
um, just hoping
that's the right thing.
And then stories get written,
and Wikipedia pages get written.
And, yeah, it takes a life
of its own as being truth.
If we ever want to live
in a world
where we can trust the truth,
it also means having
to reevaluate evidence
as new things come up
and maybe change your mind.