Zoom Chron Blog

When I read yesterday that Harry, the Duke of Sussex, was already coming back to America for the Clinton Foundation shindig in New York later this month after just fleeing California with his wife, I took notice.

Prince Harry is heading back to the U.S. for another major appearance, just weeks after his family’s move back to Britain.

The Duke of Sussex, 41, is set to return to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City on Sept. 22 and 23, marking his second appearance at the event after previously taking part in 2024. Harry will join a lineup that also includes Chrissy Teigen, Bill Nye and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at the gathering, which is being held during United Nations General Assembly week.

The reason I found this relevant is because of the connection between Soft Landing in Missoula and the Archewell Foundation, which I covered here. Then I wrote about the Namchak Foundation and the connections between the Pritzker family and Jeffrey Epstein, which are numerous (more on Namchak coming tomorrow).

For today’s post I’d like to start with something WIRED wrote 13 years ago about Silicon Valley’s interest in eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism. Here’s how WIRED framed this philosophical perspective in 2013:

More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and in the meantime take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy. Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful lunches”, conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions. Across the Valley, classes in meditation and mindfulness — paying close, non-judgmental attention — have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies. The cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises, and some 1,700 people showed up at a Wisdom 2.0 conference held in San Francisco last winter, with top executives from LinkedIn, Cisco and Ford among the headliners.

These companies are doing more than just seizing on Buddhist practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valley’s goal-oriented, data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never mind nirvana. Northern California’s technology community wants return on its investment in meditation. “All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. “This is training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”

When did Bill Clinton and Reid Hoffman find Jesus–I mean, Buddha?

For CIA Bill Clinton, it was around the time of Barack Obama’s second term that he found a need to bring Buddhism into his life:

Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India, and other news outlets, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former president went so far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation.

This may come as a surprise to some but to many others it’s only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.

For Reid Hoffman, a self-professed student of philosophy, Buddhism has been in his life for much longer.

Reid Hoffman may be best known in Silicon Valley as a cofounder of LinkedIn, a partner at the venture firm Greylock, a member of the PayPal Mafia, and, until last month, a board member of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. But behind his various tech accolades is a philosophy student.

“It’s two concepts from Buddha that form a big part of my perspective,” he said. “‘The world is what you make it’ and ‘This too shall pass.'”

Yes, Reid, the world is what you make it, and YOU helped make the world a little safer for your pal, Jeffrey Epstein, as he used his influence and connections to make the world hospitable for child-fucking psychopaths.

Can someone remind me while these people are still using oxygen?

Reid Hoffman will be in New York next week rubbing elbows with Bill Clinton and Bill Nye, the science guy, because why not? It’s not like Trump has actually done anything to make it less safe for the Epstein class to continue operating, right?

Back during the Clinton era, when Epstein had free range to rape minors and snack on jerky, a scandal revolving around “Asian money” emerged after Bill Clinton got reelected in 1996.

Before we get to the Asian money scandal, let’s recall what kind of money we’re talking about when we discuss the “Clinton Foundation”, and how this money often goes to United Ways and homeless charities–always for “early childhood learning” or the more broad “education”, of course.

With this context in mind, let’s time-travel back to the late 90’s, starting with this article explaining the context behind the phrase “It was a temple, you idiot!”:

Just as the 1992 Clinton victory produced its definitive shorthand marching order — “It’s the economy, stupid!” — so has the 1996 Clinton victory now produced an explanation in the same ringing meter for its forced retreat from some questionable political fund raising:

“It was a temple, you idiot!” screams the fine print on page 637 of the Democratic National Committee’s newly released documents explaining some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations that had to be returned as suspicions of abuse surfaced.

Anonymous himself could not have penned the pain and chagrin any better under the box listing “reason” for giving back $5,000 10 days after the election to a donor whose name was offered simply as “Buddhist Temple” in the box where a person or corporate donor is supposed to be listed.

“It was a temple, you idiot!” is listed near the bottom of a page that otherwise tends to list such unsensationally gray reasons as “determined to be inappropriate” for rebuffing various generous supporters who, in retrospect, turned out to be noncitizens or, in two cases, a suspected drug trafficker ($20,000) and someone accused of being an income-tax deadbeat ($450,000).

Next, here’s another article on this Clinton problem with “Asian money”:

To bring Suma Ching Hai into focus, imagine Martha Stewart as the Dalai Lama. The Supreme Master, 46, is an elegant hostess–and clever merchandiser. At a vegetarian dinner with a TIME correspondent last week in Alhambra, California, she wore a bright yellow dress that she designed herself–embroidered with the Supreme Master monogram (SM) and available to followers by catalog. When she gestured with her hands, she flashed gold and diamond rings with the SM design, part of her Celestial Jewelry collection–available by catalog as well. (Also for sale: Celestial purses, hats, gold dinnerware, chopsticks, inspirational videos, floor lamps.) A petite woman with long, dark brown hair that cascades past her shoulders, the Supreme Master is passionate, earthy (she says she needs a husband) and more fun than the average saint. “Of course I’m divine,” she says, laughing. “But so are you.”

At the moment, Suma Ching Hai is more than divine: she is controversial. Late last year, officials of Bill Clinton’s legal-defense fund rather shamefacedly disclosed that they had returned a donation of more than $600,000 from the followers of the Taiwan-based mystic, adding to the President’s “Asian money” scandal. Nevertheless, the Supreme Master remains a fervent Clintonite. “The poor man,” she says, erupting in his defense. “You must respect his office. How can he solve America’s problems if he is distracted? He’s in debt. He’s a suspect. This is terrible.” She knows what it feels like to be investigated: the Taiwan government is looking into alleged “fund-raising improprieties” by her sect, including the transfer of $2 million out of the country.

Scandal-plagued politicians are not the only objects of Suma Ching Hai’s charity. Whenever there is a natural disaster, she is there–with money. She says she has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to victims of the 1993 Mississippi River floods and to survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing. “Before we enter the spiritual world, we are in the mundane world,” she says. “If the Buddha isn’t a helpful Buddha, he is a boring Buddha. He is a useless Buddha.”

(Oklahoma City bombing? That’s not sus at all)

Instead of a “helpful” Buddha, or a “boring” Buddha, America seems to have gotten a seriously corrupt and perverted Buddha, one who fat fucks, like Reid Hoffman, want to use to train AI.

I wish I was kidding.

What would happen if we put artificial intelligence on a path to enlightenment?

LinkedIn founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman shared a number of thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence research during the annual State of Technology Luncheon Friday in Seattle, as part of a wide-ranging discussion hosted by the Tech Alliance.

Hoffman bypassed the more near-term concerns of how artificial intelligence and machine learning will be implemented in today’s technology to think about how this headlong plunge into AI research will affect society.

This article is from 2017–which seems like an eon ago–but it’s fascinating now, looking back, to see how a nerd with an obvious caloric-intake problem was talking about training AI for a wide array of societal applications, like BIOLOGY.

He went on to explain that one’s level of anxiety about artificial intelligence research probably depends on how soon you think it will arrive, Hoffman said. If you think we’re 10 years away from developing computers with human-level intelligence, “you’re absolutely totally frenetic about it, probably a little crazy.” If you don’t think this will arrive for another 50 years or longer, you’re probably a little more blase about the whole thing.

But in the grand scheme of things, “do you know how short 50 to 100 years is on the human timeframe?” he said. If there’s even a 20 percent chance human-level artificial intelligence arrives by that point, we need to start thinking now about the impact it will have on society and the ethics that govern that research.

After all, computers only do what they are trained to do. “If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good,” Hoffman said.

Or, you could go in a different direction. Hoffman said he is particularly interested in what happens as artificial intelligence research starts to intersect with biology.

To wrap up today’s post, here’s another Epstein communication highlighting how spiritual creeps, like Deepak Chopra, were “riding the Tiger” and chumming around with the Dalai Lama who, according to Deepak, doesn’t actually know much about Tibetan Buddhism.

Hmmm.

Is Deepak Chopra still using oxygen? Of course he is, and he’s also still hijacking spirituality, as reported in 2025 in this article:

Last month, more than 20,000 pages from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate were released by the House Oversight Committee. The name of Deepak Chopra, the wellness guru with multiple bestselling books, appeared repeatedly. Emails showed Chopra recalling an evening with Epstein as “a blast. Ended 1 AM.” Chopra later expresses relief when one of Epstein’s accusers dropped her lawsuit. Between 2016 and 2019, continuing well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, Chopra has at least a dozen documented meetings with him.

Last Friday (Nov. 28), Chopra launched something that says more about modern American spirituality than his Epstein connections: an AI companion to his entire body of work. Ninety-five books, thousands of videos, decades of talks have been fed into a proprietary model designed to answer your existential questions. For 50 cents per 30-minute session, or $10 a month, readers can now ask Digital Deepak about their purpose, their fears, their path forward.

Reading about all this technology entangling itself with spirituality has me better appreciating the work of this guy (if you know, you know):

If you appreciate MY work, which is only rhetorically explosive, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page so I can consider covering the cost of my own technological harassment.

Thanks for reading!

When I called 911 to report an 8 year old girl reluctantly selling flowers for her “Dad” a few years ago, the 911 dispatcher decided to argue with me instead of doing her job and taking my report. By the time a patrol car slowly cruised by, the dad/daughter were gone down an alley. Upon review of my call, I got an apology from the shift supervisor a few days later for how my concern was handled.

When a woman called 911 last Saturday to report a man chopping at a tree and posing a threat to children at the Clark Fork market, a total of 5 cops were mobilized to assess the threat. Her speculation, later communicated to the alleged threat during said assessment, was that “in this current political climate” she was afraid he was on the verge of entering the market and attacking people.

The current political climate? Was she talking about this?

Brandon Bryant wasn’t about to enter the busy Clark Fork market to harm ANYONE, let alone children, but he DID recall possibly harming a leaf on the nearby tree as he practiced swinging around his wooden staff like he does on many Saturday mornings.

It’s kind of like what these people do:

On Friday, September 11th, I was with Brandon Bryant during the anti-war protest that’s been going on for years near the Higgins bridge when a cop appeared. Someone had been yelling from a studio window at us, but, regardless of having NOT done anything, we were both suddenly in fight-or-flight mode at the possibility that WE could be the ones who got arrested, since the local authorities have made it VERY CLEAR how targeted we both are.

Targeting the lone person of color for not acquiescing to the self-declared expertise of the estrogen collective did a number on Gayle King’s brain. Viewers got to see, in real time, how the disclosure of the juror’s color entered the gears of King’s head and the result was an amazing example of cognitive short-circuiting.

Closer to home, family members of a dead baby are really offended that a plea deal would keep the MAN responsible for the baby’s death in prison for a measly ten years after this MAN agreed to watch the baby, got drunk, then accidentally smothered the baby.

A Lake County District Court judge decided not to follow a binding plea agreement when sentencing a man Friday for the negligent homicide of 14-month-old Aniyah Star Charlo.

Star Charlo died in 2021 while in the care of family member Estevan Orozco-Charlo.

“I don’t just miss Aniyah,” Lorelie Couture, Aniyah’s mother, said. “I miss who she was going to be. I miss the daughter I was supposed to raise.”

Did Lorelie have any inkling that Estevan had a drinking problem? If she did, then I would argue that mom has some culpability in her child’s death.

Instead of trying to move on with their lives, though, family members implored the judge to ignore the plea agreement for a harsher sentence, despite the “binding” nature of said plea deal:

During Orozco-Charlo’s sentencing, statements from family urged the court to pursue a lengthier sentence than the plea agreement, which was 10 years with five suspended.

“From the beginning, we have stressed to the state that we did not want any plea deal,” Tammy Couture, Aniyah’s grandmother, said. “Please help us get justice for Aniyah.”

…

“She deserved to grow up. We deserved to watch her grow and blossom into the woman that we knew that she would be,” Samantha McNair, Aniyah’s aunt, said.

If Estevan Orozco-Charlo is an alcoholic, and alcoholism is a mental illness, then why did the judge ignore this “binding” plea agreement to impose a harsher sentence?

Ultimately, Orozco-Charlo was sentenced to 15 years with seven suspended, a 5-year parole restriction, and nearly $10,000 in restitution.

For some weird reason, the KPAX article omits the name of the judge who ignored the plea agreement to give this poor bastard more time in prison, so I had to find another article to get a better sense of who this judge might be.

Seeing this woman’s smirking face “Gayle-King’d” my brain. Of course this is the judge who ignored a plea offer to give a man a stiffer sentence for not protecting an innocent child like all those noble mothers out there.

Good job, “Kim”.

For those who don’t know what kind of judge Deborah Kim Christopher is, here’s the controversy that ensued when she referred to a mom as “you bitch” after taking her kid from her.

A judge the Montana Supreme Court removed from one case last month referred to a mom in her courtroom as “you bitch” in a remark to colleagues after a child custody hearing, and she described the grandmother as “poison.”

The exchanges were recorded in a video of the Sept. 11 hearing with Judge Deborah Kim Christopher before the Montana Supreme Court removed her from the case last month for a decision it deemed a “gross injustice.”

In that case, the judge of Lake and Sanders counties abruptly ordered a child removed from his mother who had raised him, and placed in custody with his father, who only had spent a few days a year with him.

To emphasize how seemingly incompetent this judge was deemed to be by her own colleagues, here’s more about how she conducted herself in another case:

Additionally, the Department of Public Health and Human Services filed a request to disqualify her from a different case last month. Last week, the Supreme Court requested additional information prior to issuing a decision in that case.

“DPHHS alleges that Judge Christopher should be disqualified from this matter because Judge Christopher has failed to timely rule on motions, issued an order with biased comments, twice attempted to contact a represented party ex parte and without counsel present, and also spoke with (the defendant), via videoconference, without his counsel or opposing counsel present, and advised him as to her anticipated ruling on a pending motion,” said the order from the Supreme Court in its summary of the allegations.

For Brandon Bryant, the “justice of the peace” in his case is the same justice of the peace who signed MY arrest warrant in June, Landee Holloway.

To be a “justice of the peace” you don’t have to have a law degree or really know much about anything, which is how Bill Burt was able to be a candidate.

For Landee, here’s how her experience and perspective was framed earlier this year:

Holloway spent 21 years in various roles at the Department of Corrections, including working at the Missoula Pre-Release Center and working as a probation and parole officer. In her role as justice of the peace, she’s been reelected three times and started Missoula’s ROAD Court, which offers treatment and support for DUI offenders.

…

Justice court handles misdemeanors and citations, usually those that happen outside of city limits, as well as civil matters below $15,000. The court also often handles initial appearances and bail conditions for felony cases.

Holloway explained that her judicial policy is a balance of holding people accountable, helping them move forward, and keeping the community safe.

“I think that jail is useful,” Holloway said. “Is it good in every situation? No. Should it be the first response? No.”

In Brandon Bryant’s case, the physical beat-down he took from a gang of cops outside Charlie’s turned into ANOTHER criminal charge of intimidation after Bryant made one of the cops allegedly terrified of the WORDS he wrote on Facebook.

When cops get scared, like the female cop who’s fear justified killing Ross Robertson, citizens better WATCH OUT because protecting the people with the qualified immunity to kill you is definitely one of the most important things a community can do to stay safe.

So good job, Landee! Hopefully no one ever asks you about probation and parole during the time period that Epstein researchers might be curious about, because that would be awkward, right?

Sultans servicing the Epstein class don’t have to worry about the indignities of jumping through probationary hoops and the paper trail it leaves, which can later be followed if you start acting like an uppity black having a hard time getting off the fact a mother viciously murdered her children.

To understand what I’m talking about, here’s what’s now being reported in order to figuratively lynch the black man:

The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.

…

The juror’s own mom repeatedly screamed, “You’re evil!” as he was cuffed during the incident, the report said.

Will more come out to further incite emotions on all sides of this gender war that can’t be won? Considering this fault line is one of the most effective ones to amplify in the divide & conquer approach to population control, the answer is most assuredly yes.

And when it does, will I be smart enough to ignore it?

I’ll finish today’s post with a story about a Veteran who was taken advantage of by his nurse until he died. This evil Nurse Ratched even STOLE HIS HOUSE!

A Baltimore woman says a caregiver abused her father, stole tens of thousands of dollars, forced him to sign over his home and failed to tell her when he died.

Nora Rowland told WJZ that her father retired to South Carolina in 2013 and began using home care services in 2021 after suffering a traumatic brain injury and being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

When men sacrifice their physical and mental health to serve in a theater of war, like Brandon Bryant and Nora’s father did, the hope is that we, as a society, step up to take care of them. But, if women are no longer accountable for literal acts of premeditated murder, while someone like Brandon Bryant is fully prosecuted for WORDS, then there’s no reason to keep pretending that women deserve this LARP of equality.

It’s time to reassert reality: women and men are NOT equal, and they never will be.

Thanks for reading!

While I continue to beat my metaphorical dead horse over at Substack, I had an opportunity this past week to pitch my assertion that Missoula is a CIA town with an Epstein problem in a two hour interview with Johnny Vedmore, which you can check out here.

Part of my intent in posting at Substack is to show how popular culture clues are readily available to find and piece together for researchers like me, and they often exist in these amazing things called BOOKS, which I have quite a few of.

Like this one:

The anecdote I found in the pages of this memoir immediately brought to mind the possible real-life “Switters” hiding in plain sight here in Missoula, who I wrote about here.

With that post in mind, I had to ask myself…is that YOU, Abe?

This coming week I’ll be headed back north for another report on Namchak and the ties that bind fellow travelers to exotic places, like Tibet.

And Valhalla?

God only knows.

If you appreciate my prolific output of information more free of restrictions than my physical body is, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars — but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war — but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks — but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.

These words were delivered by President George Bush to a joint session of Congress on September 20th, 2001, just 9 days after “freedom itself” appeared to be under attack.

Because THAT is why those evil Muslims hated us, right?

When the attacks happened I had only been living in Missoula for a year, having moved to town the previous summer with my girl friend to finish college. And it was to class I was headed when my hippie neighbor, Wolf, told me that we were under attack.

I finished college in 2003 as America escalated its retaliatory wars of choice in the Middle East against “terrorism”, which was the perfect setup for a kinetic war that would never end, since you can’t vanquish a concept with bombs and foot soldiers.

When the smooth-talking black man came along as a political alternative to the evil Bush regime, my “progressive” mind lapped that shit up. I had voted for Jon Tester in 2006 to stop the war, so OF COURSE I’d be voting for Barack Obama in 2008, and I would cast that hopeful hopium vote right as I started my new job at the homeless shelter amidst that little economic crisis America was experiencing at the time.

The Obama era correlated with my tenure at the Poverello Center, where I spent 7 long years within the Homeless Industrial Complex trying to make incremental improvements as the drugs and the people abusing them got worse and worse and worse. By 2016 I was burned out and ready for a change. And so was America.

Four more years went by and then, in 2020, Donald Trump and Joe Biden BOTH helped setup the plandemic op for their globalist handlers. But some of us got wise and stopped believing in the two party con-game.

When I left my non-profit career in 2020 it was to pursue creative projects, like making the documentary that exposed the scam of Tax Increment Financing, but that pursuit ended my marriage and entangled me with some troubled people, which was ultimately more damaging than inspiring.

So, after my life fell apart, I took several long road trips around the country, seeing New York City for the first time and visiting the field where flight 93 supposedly crashed.

The Tower of Voices is a monumental, ninety-three foot tall musical instrument holding forty wind chimes, representing the forty passengers and crew members. It is intended to be a landmark feature near the memorial entrance, visible from US Route 30/Lincoln Highway. The Tower of Voices provides a living memorial in sound to remember the forty through the symbolic voices as the wind blows.

There are no other chime structures like the Tower of Voices in the world. The shape and orientation of the tower are designed to optimize air flow through the tower walls. The chime system is designed using music theory to identify a mathmematically developed range of frequencies needed to produce musical notes.

I find no peace or understanding in places like these because that is not what they’re designed to do, no matter what the commemorative plaques say. What these places are designed to do is CONTROL NARRATIVES so the peasant-ants don’t get uppity before the globalist-grasshoppers have the global control grid in place.

You see there IS a class of humans who hate freedom, and they will use ANYTHING, including time itself, to slowly strangle freedom from the body politic like a deranged mother, but you don’t have to be a conscious member of this class to carry out their agenda. All it takes is a combination of money and fear to get most humans to fall in line.

The black circle inside the red one is where I lived in Missoula when the towers fell, but, as you can see, this geographic location is now a part of my personal control grid, meaning I will be charged with a crime if I enter it.

Another crime Matt Jennings can charge me with if he wants to is evidenced by THIS POST where I covered the coroner’s inquest for Ross Robertson, which was held inside the Missoula County Courthouse. Since I was in attendance at this coroner’s inquest, and since Judge Vannatta felt it necessary to exclude me from downtown to keep a state legislator safe if she wants to have coffee at Break Espresso, then technically I SHOULD BE charged with a crime for being present at the coroner’s inquest.

So what are you waiting for, Matt Jennings?

This circle of exclusion was amended because barring me from accessing a Federal interstate highway isn’t really within the scope of our little kangaroos and their narrative-controlling prosecutors who have a VERY SERIOUS Sheriff problem in Missoula AND Mineral County, where the Judge limiting MY Constitutional protections doesn’t seem to have a problem with Sheriff Funke’s miranda/Brady problem.

Just a nothingburger, right Vannatta?

Mineral County Sheriff Ryan Funke was on the other side of the courtroom this week as Mineral County District Court Judge Shane Vannatta weighed misconduct allegations from his service in another Montana county. He ultimately found the allegations not credible.

The “non-partisan” courts in Montana are a fucking joke, but here’s the problem: so is our local media. That means regular citizens struggling to survive the next round of tax hikes are almost totally unaware of how dangerously compromised our judicial system has become, to the point where I’m now trying to raise the alarm that Ryan Funke’s lawyer is out of his fucking mind.

The next few weeks, including my birthday (the 19th), should be pretty exciting around here, since I’m going to put the death of Sean Stevenson into the clearest context yet after new pieces of information have emerged, so stay tuned.

And, as always, thanks for reading (birthday donations can be made here).

Earlier today I teased context to a video clip I recorded from Thursday’s wild Mineral County Commissioner’s meeting where the usual methods of keeping Federal investigations and Confidential Criminal Justice Information insulated from public disclosure were thrown out the window by outgoing Sheriff, Ryan Funke, and his “specialized” LEO lawyer, Lance Jasper.

What is going on here?

If you’re Deb Jackson, who represents the Mineral County Attorney’s Office, what’s going on is an effort to obtain a copy of a contract proving a deal exists between the Mineral County Sheriff’s Office and a Kansas-based company, called ESU Pursuits, to provide six vehicles to the Mineral County Sheriff’s Office for $170,000 dollars (this dollar amount represents half the order, so just 3 vehicles–thank you for the clarification from a reader).

But this company, counters Funke and his LEO lawyer, Lance Jasper, is entangled in an FBI investigation, so HOW DARE Jackson subpoena Sheriff Funke AND Shawn Smalley, the former County Commissioner who resigned from his position just before questions about this deal started getting asked months ago.

Publicly available information that one can glean from online searches is one thing, but privileged information about knowledge of an FBI investigation is something else, which is why I figured an attempt to give Lance Jasper a call would be worth rolling the dice on.

I mean, it’s not like he would be dumb enough to call me back and talk about what he just blabbed about in a public during a County Commissioners meeting, right?

Right?

I called Reep, Bell and Jasper to confirm if Lance Jasper was still employed by this law firm, since I heard it was no longer in existence. A woman named Jessica answered and, instead of telling me that Lance Jasper is running a NEW law firm now called LPJ Law, she massaged the truth into a lie-adjacent omission that this new law firm exists by simply saying “yes” to my inquiry. I then gave her my name and number, not expecting the special LEO lawyer to call me back less than an hour later.

The 8 minutes I spent talking to the raspy-sounding Lance Jasper were concerning for reasons that will become glaringly apparent.

I told Jasper that, from what I had just watched online, it appeared he and the Sheriff (and former County Commissioner) were turning a simple request for records into a public spectacle for reasons that made no sense, so I asked which FBI office was involved.

Did I get a clear answer? No, Jasper mentioned “Monte”, as in Monte Shaide, but then said the investigation was being handled by the FBI in another state.

Hmmm.

After about two or three minutes I started thinking this whole conversation with Lance Jasper wasn’t making sense, so I asked a very direct question:

“When is the last time you had a drink of alcohol?” I asked Lance Jasper point blank, half-expecting him to hang up on me immediately. Instead, he kept going, but without answering my question, so I asked him again more emphatically.

“I’m not a public figure,” he said, dodging my question again, to which I pointed out he was representing one, and that there were rumors about his alcohol abuse. I got another refusal to answer and started wondering if maybe it wasn’t alcohol, but something that could keep a person up for 2 or 3 days.

I pressed Lance Jasper on my knowledge of his previous law firm’s role in the parity pay litigation against Missoula County on behalf of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, then hit him with my reporting that David Barsotti had allegedly died recently.

“I didn’t know David was dead,” Lance said. Do I believe him? No.

After Jasper agreed with me about LEO corruption in Western Montana, giving me (unsolicited) the name of a client he represented in Ravalli County I should look into, it was ME who ended the conversation.

WTF is going on here?

I’d ask Lance’s partner, Jenna Penielle Lyons Dubler-Houser, but she’s probably still recovering from Burning Man.

Tomorrow Lance Jasper has assured the Mineral County Commissioners he’s going to bring the contract for the Sheriff vehicles in order to account for the $170,000. I reached out to a few officials, including leaving a voicemail on Ryan Funke’s direct line to let him know how much I enjoyed chatting with his special lawyer.

Exactly how special, well, that remains to be seen.

If you appreciate my coverage of what happens in our neighboring county please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. I’m going to keep a close eye on this story as it develops because I think there’s more to discover, and it ties directly to the judge who enjoys nibbling on nothing burgers.

UPDATE: sounds like the Friday meeting will NOT be happening.

Thanks for reading!