Oregon Occupier Countersues For $666 Billion, Citing 'Works Of The Devil'

By Bill Chappell / NPR

Published February 18, 2016 at 8:08 AM PST

This story was published more than 8 years ago.

Shawna Cox, seen here walking with Ammon Bundy and other armed anti-government protesters at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., last month, cites "extremely serious public corruption" in a countersuit. Both Cox and Bundy face federal charges.

Shawna Cox, one of the last militants to be arrested for occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge last month, has filed a countersuit against the U.S. government and others in which she alleges "damages from the works of the devil in excess of 666,666,666,666.66."

While she invoked the number of the beast in her request for damages, Cox listed a wide array of people she plans to subpoena, including: ranchers in the western U.S.; judges and prosecutors; Oregon's current and former governor; local and state police officers; FBI agents; and "various law professors."

Cox said she plans to ask a jury to deliver civil and criminal penalties against many of those same people, who she says have worked to subvert the constitutional government and impose "socialism, communism and imperialism types of government onto the people of the United States of America."

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The complaint was filed Wednesday, the same day a federal grand jury indicted Cliven Bundy along with his sons Ryan and Ammon and two other people for "a raft of felony charges related to a 2014 armed standoff," as Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. That 2014 standoff is seen as a forerunner to the occupation of the Malheur refuge in Oregon.

Federal and state police arrested Cox and Ammon and Ryan Bundy in late January; the Malheur standoff ended two weeks later with the surrender of the last holdouts at the refuge.

The federal charges against Cox include a felony count of "conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats."

Saying that she's the victim of malicious prosecution, Cox states that her group was using the legal tactic of "hostile adverse possession" to expose what they see as the federal government's fraudulent handling of land in the former Northwest Territories.

In her complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon, Cox also says the group seized control of Malheur at a time when the refuge was preparing to shut down for the winter. She denies interfering with government employees, saying, "If anything, it was their choice to not come to work, out of guilt."

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