Kent Hovind Is Back Seeking Exoneration Or Pardon From President Trump

Kent Hovind is back in the news. He has put out a plea to President Trump to have his 2006 case investigated as an example of Justice Department weaponization.  Hovind would like total exoneration, punishment of the people involved in prosecuting him and return of seized assets.  Failing all that he would at least like a pardon.  Here is his Open Letter to President Trump form Kent Hovind OFFICIAL on Rumble.

About The Open Letter

The video is an investment of nearly three quarters of an hour of lifespan, that you will never get back, so I will give you a bit of a rundown.  After Hovind’s standard intro he indicates that he will be sharing an open letter to President Trump and all conservative freedom loving Americans.  He asks people to copy the message and share it widely among those who love the Lord and might be able to step in. After some promotion for Dinosaur Adventure Land in Lenox, Alabama and a discussion of some of the fine points in the construction of Noah’s Ark, he gets to the main issue.

Hovind relates how someone who wrote him praising his creation science work was concerned about Kent being a “tax protester”.  This is what is prompting Hovind to write to President Trump about the weaponization of the Justice Department to use the law against political enemies. In Hovind’s view that is what happened to him.

In 2006 he was convicted on a 58 count indictment which consisted of multiple counts of structuring and failing to deduct and pay withholding taxes and a single count of obstructing the administration of internal revenue laws. He served a nine year sentence and forfeited a substantial amount of property. On appeal the Eleventh Circuit upheld his conviction.

Hovind praises President Trump’s executive order Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government.  His praise for our President is effusive, but there  a further ask.  He wants the President to undo he damage done to Hovind starting in 2001 when IRS began investigating him culminating in his imprisonment in 2006.

Hovind believes that the IRS investigated him because of his video on the dangers of the evolution theory.  That one is a three hour lifespan investment.

Hovind returns to the “tax protester” question:

“Atheists and God haters have run with this “tax protester” claim against me for 19 years now.  They cannot win a debate defending their dumb evolution religion against me and they are jealous of my popularity, so they look for something, anything, to try to make me look bad and divert attention away from their own silly belief that they are related to a strawberry and the whole universe came from a dot.”

Hovind then does a bit of a headline review of coverage of the “tax protester” question starting with an article from “Forbes Magazine”.  The article was actually on Forbes.com not in the magazine.  You can go to Is Kent Hovind A Tax Protester? by Peter J. Reilly to get a feel for this argument, if you are interested.  To sum it up “tax protester” is a short hand term for people who raise certain types of arguments in filing or not filing their returns and in litigation. Although Hovind  was not using those sort of arguments anymore, he had been a proponent of them in the nineties. The video in his series that came after The Dangers of Evolution was Income Tax.

From there Hovind launches into his innocence narrative.  There is video series on the topic by autodidact “legal scholar” Brady Byrum and a host of complaints about the various people involved in prosecuting him.  There is quite a bit of repetition. There is some comparison of his plight to what Jesus and the Apostle Paul went through.  He closes with his modest requests.

Hovind wants to have the proper authority look into his case, since there is no statute of limitation on fraud to expose the evil done to him and his ministry.  He wants Judge Margaret Casey Rodgers impeached or jailed. He wants his case overturned so that his reputation is restored or at least he wants to receive a Presidential pardon.  He wants the money “stolen” form his ministry to be returned and damages paid and then to be left alone.  For what it is worth when Hovind instituted a lawsuit a few years ago on this issue, the damages claimed were over half a billion dollars.

More On The Letter

I spoke with Dr. Hovind.  I asked him whether there was anything that he wanted emphasized in his letter, which covers a good deal of ground.  He emphasized three things.  The first is that his prosecution is an instance of Justice Department weaponization against perceived enemies.  The second is his view that he is totally innocent and has paid every tax that he has ever owed.  The third is his complaint against Judge Margaret Casey Rodgers. In particular he complains that during sentencing she said that his crime was worse than rape.  He has eight people who were at the trial who signed affidavits that Judge Rodgers said that.  It does not appear in the trial transcript though which Hovind sees as a serious crime that needs to be investigated.

I asked him why other people who advocated for creation science, the notion that there is scientific evidence for a six thousand year old earth in which dinosaurs and humans coexisted, were not persecuted by the IRS.  He speculated that nobody does it as well as he does.

Reaction

Interest in Kent Hovind’s plight peaked in 2015 when he faced a trial on new charges while finishing up his sentence from his 2006 conviction. The 2015 trial worked out for him thanks to some sharp legal work and bit of juror nullification. There were a lot of people on Youtube cheering for him. No one did more than Rudy Davis to get Kent Hovind’s story out there and try to support him.

Rudy’s answer is too long to reproduce here, but here is a link if you want to get all of the thoughts he shared with me.  Rudy thinks that unjust imprisonment of people on the right has been going on for a long time.  He has advocated for many imprisoned people who he views as political prisoners.  Ed Brown, whose story I also covered is among them.

Overall Rudy has been very disappointed with President Trump’s performance.  One of Rudy’s biggest disappointment was in how the birther movement which Trump championed for a while turned out.  He is glad to see the January 6th people released, but he sees that more as a bone thrown to conservatives, a sort of pressure relief valve.  Rudy believes that Trump is actually working for the AntiChrist and New World Order agenda.  He understands others hold a different view so he is not surprised that Hovind is making a public appeal to the new president.

Billy Summers, That Nerdy Trucker(Billy) on YouTube, covered some issues at Dinosaur Adventureland that are beyond the scope at this piece. He wrote me:

“Hey, sorry that I’m just seeing this now. But the only thing that I can really say about it is just like he was trying to do during Trump’s first term, he’s doing the same thing now using it as a persecution victim thing to siphon off donations from people who don’t know any better and feel bad for him.”

Paul John Hansen was a trustee of Christian Science Evangelism which was the trust that controlled the original Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola.  He was also a codefendant in Hovind’s 2015 trial and masterminded a suit to overturn the 2006 conviction. Hansen wrote me:

“The case is simple, there is no written law that identifies CSE, or Kent Hovind, that evidences a duty to collect taxes for any government agents, the record shows that the pretend defending attorney started asking the IRS agent that same question, the judge cut him off, threatened him, the attorney sat down and gave no further defense. If he would have persisted the IRS agent would have said that he had no direct written law to place such a duty on the accused, yet there is like laws that apply to many other entities. This is being sued over soon.”

Claude Bawles runs a YouTube which seems to be dedicated to Kent Hovind although not in a nice way.  He wrote me:

“My “mission” is to help stop good people falling into Kent’s clutches. My initial comments are that he outright lies about his trial and tax related crimes.”

Ernie Land is a long term friend and counselor to Hovind.  He was instrumental in keeping the new Dinosaur Adventureland conventionally tax compliant.  He played a big roll in the 2015 trial which ended up being a success for Hovind.  He wrote me:

“All I can say is maybe we actually have a chance to expose the corrupt Government and we can take the people back to the rule of the US Constitution versus all the corrupt codes, regulations, and statutes.”

Reflection

The most interesting question to me about all this is whether President Trump will ever get wind of this.  Kent Hovind has a pretty substantial following both positive and negative.  I don’t think he has ever encountered a right wing conspiracy theory that he didn’t like at least a little, although he did draw the line about flat earth to the disappointment of some.  He did get some substantial support during his 2015 trial getting as far as Alex Jones.  Regardless, Kent is his own man and not part of any discernible coalition.  Dee Holmes who blogged about Hovind during the 2015 trial suggests that he might need to connect with some of the many preachers who are in Trump’s orbit and may have been instrumental in the executive order on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.  Hovind is an Independent Baptist minister with an emphasis on the Independent, so he may not be able to pull that off.

Other Coverage

I picked up this story from the Kurisu Yamato YouTube channel which appears to have been covering Hoving for about a year.  You can find a lot of Hovind critical YouTube sites. I have not found anything in media oriented toward people who prefer reading.

Just as I was wrapping up I heard from “Kurisu Yamato” (Chis Eldrige).  Here is what he wrote:

“It would only make sense that a man who will never admit he was wrong would, as he did during the first Trump presidency, make an appeal to the highest office in the land to get his rightful conviction overturned over a decade after the fact. It would of course be even more fitting for the man who thinks he’s chosen by God to want the help of a fellow convicted felon who seems to think he’s God in erasing his greatest failure — a mistake he can’t just toss to the wayside and ignore — his conviction and 9 years in prison.

This is nothing but yet another petty move to try to make himself seem like the best person in history, and as a way to try to vindicate the paranoid delusions Hovind has that he is somehow so important and so dangerous that the government had to “lock him away” and “shut him up” yet, for some reason, could only do so for just shy of a decade and then magically has (generally) left him alone since then. Truly an interesting case of the all powerful “they” not being all powerful.

The thing I find quite funny in all this is that Kent thinks that he is important enough that Donald Trump will actually pay attention to his pleas, since, as we all know, even if Kent was important to any degree, Trump still wouldn’t care about him since Trump only truly seems to care about himself. That, however, is another discussion.

When it comes to Hovind, however, elitism combined with delusions of grandeur are the order of the day.”

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Originally published on Forbes.com.