#2358: Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf

The One People’s Public Trust is a (sort of) organization mixing freeman-on-the-land ideas and pseudolaw nonsense with smatterings of New Age fluff and conspiracy theories. Apparently, the OPPT is founded on the belief that the trust has managed to terminate and foreclose all governments in the world, leaving its belief system (and its leadership, of course) the sole legitimate legal authority, at least until it seems to have fallen apart itself sometime in 2013 – offshoots persisted, however, such as the short-lived One People Community formed in Aouchtam, Morocco. The founder of the group, Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf, currently spends her time in federal prison. 

The Trust does not consider itself an organization. Rather, “The One People’s Public Trust itself consists of every person on the planet, the planet itself and the Creator,” and their actions excellently reflect the delusions that must have gone into formulating that statement. In 2012 the trust registered a series of “declarations” claiming to foreclose on “all governments, major corporations, including banks.” The process seems to have consisted of registering UCC-1 financing statements at the Washington DC Recorder of Deeds, and when their paperwork was promptly ignored, they declared victory, issuing a mass of press releases. Minimally reasonable people would perhaps be able to sense looming legal troubles on the horizon, but Tucci-Jarraf and her fellow trustees, such as Caleb Paul Skinner and Hollis Randall Hillner, did not. The OPPT also claimed to have made an alternative to the currency systems in place around the world; however, “although there are negotiations going on continuously at the highest level, the news of the existence of the Trust is being deliberately kept out of the main stream media by the alleged corporate System to deceive the one people of this planet as it has always done.” 

The timeline of the trust’s antics is filled out in some detail here, and is fascinating stuff. A short version: After foreclosing all the world’s governments in 2012, the OPPT promised its followers $10 billion in gold and silver. When said followers started wondering where the money was, Tucci-Jarraf – who was actually a prosecutor before throwing her lot in with the sovereign citizen movement – invented courtesy notices that her followers could send to various companies and collection agencies according to the premise that a non-response from the receiving agency meant that their claims were valid. Tucci-Jarraf would even distribute documents that her followers could take to banks to deposit a fraction of their “intrinsic value” and convert it to actual currency. Needless to say, the scheme didn’t work out as OPPT had predicted (one Kiri Campbell was arrested after attempting to deposit $15 million of her “value” into her bank account as well as writing $60,000 in bad checks and was promptly sentenced to 200 hours community service). Then, in October 2013, the principal promoters of OPPT in alternative media, Brian Kelly, Bob Wright and Lisa Harrison, launched something called “the OPAL tour” to promote the OPPT, begging for donations to buy RVs; Kelly declared that said RVs would be powered by engines that run on water and that the tour would also spread news about the new free energy technology (while also asking for donations to buy gas). The OPAL tour was, needless to say, only a qualified success, and Kelly and Tucci-Jarraf subsequently moved to Morocco to (unsuccessfully) start a community and develop their free energy technology, from where Tucci-Jarraf would submit updates back to her followers in the US in her typical style (“THE WILL OF I AM: NOW, ALL I AM, BE AND DO I AM!!! THE WORK OF I AM: I AM!!”). In 2017, Tucci-Jarraf had returned to the US where she, after a round of antics including typical sovereign citizen-ploys to obtain money from the government, was finally found guilty of money laundering by a Federal jury in 2018 (together with one Randall Beane). Tucci-Jarraf’s defense consisted to a large extent of denying the jurisdiction of the judge (“I have not received any documented evidence, sworn, validated, and verified by you that you exist,” claimed Tucci-Jarraf), as well as liberal use of terms like “collusion” and “foreign actors”, in addition citing convoluted legal documents.

Bill “Terran Cognito” Ferguson seems to be a close ally.

The rest of us are, of course, left scratching our heads at the whole thing. We admit that among all conspiracy theories, the sovereign citizen movement may be the hardest one to fully wrap one's heads around: Their ideas are crazy and wrong, of course, but they seem to consistently fail to realize that whether their beliefs about the state and the law are correct or not, is ultimately not really particularly relevant to their agendas: What matters is whether the courts and government institutions will accept their claims, and given their own views about the courts and government it should be painfully obvious to them that the courts cannot and won't accept those ideas, even if those ideas were, in fact, correct (which they aren't).

Diagnosis: Sad and hilarious at the same time. The sovereign citizen movement is an endless source of amusement, and few more so than Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf, but one really shouldn’t forget that real people’s lives are actually ruined by their antics. 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki