Bernie is mad as hell that the Secretary of State sent the TBI to see if he was a terrorist threat for mentioning the Battle of Athens on a blog. Bernie says he’s still thinking about filing criminal charges. Below is an excerpt from today’s front page of his home town paper The Columbia Daily Herald.

“This has nothing to do with anything I had done of a threatening nature, and everything to do with an effort to silence me by using the TBI in ways that were both inappropriate and setting a bad precedent,” Ellis said.

Ellis said the officers were “cordial” during their questioning, and he has “nothing but respect” (for) agents who were just doing their duty.

The Battle of Athens, which happened in McMinn County in 1946, involved World War II veterans and other citizens taking up arms to prevent local political bosses from stealing an election, according to an article in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. The ex-GIs traded gunfire with supporters of the political machine for nearly six hours – eventually laying siege to the jail where the sheriff and 50 deputies had sought refuge with the ballot boxes.

Ellis said he referenced the Battle of Athens because it is an example “there aren’t too many options available to us” when votes are not being counted the way they are cast.

Blake Fontenay, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said Hargett never asked TBI agents to visit the farm. He said Hargett merely notified law enforcement of the posting “out of an abundance of caution”.

“In this day and time, whenever you have got someone referencing a violent uprising – which is what the Battle of Athens was, a violent uprising against the government – you have to sort of wonder….. He was just trying to be cautious,” Fontenay said.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Causes, Elections, Legislation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.