February 26th 2017 newsletter
Looking For a Job with Benefits? Canadian County Sheriff Department Disseminates Child Porn to Employees
This is probably the most disturbing story we have ever worked on in the history of the Sooner Tea Party on many levels.
- First you have the idea that a man responsible for catching child predators and child porn has been accused of getting his "satisfaction" from the child porn he has seized from perverts.
- Then you realize that the man has been accused of storing child porn on his computer instead of keeping it locked away in the evidence room.
- Then you take in the fact that the man is accused of sharing it with coworkers according to the accusations.
- Then you learn that the man is accused of lying to the District Attorney on polygraph tests that returned false positives and representing them to the D.A. as conclusive polygraph tests.
- Then you learn that this same accused man is accused of lying on the witness stand over confessions that an accused child predator might not have made.
To top everything off you learn that both the OSBI and the Attorney General Office has zero interest in investigating despite having audio tapes of the accusations that were corroborated by the accuser and other sources that verify that the accuser's story has remained consistent over many repetitions.
The story came to us like so many others; someone asking for help after being screwed over by one government agency or another. The story was incredible but once you have done this long enough you learn the truth to the old saying: "You just can't make this stuff up."
Initially the story was a stalking case with a Canadian County Sheriff Department employee involved through a personal friend or acquaintance that was doing the stalking so instead of busting the crazy stalker the facts were twisted around and the accuser was accused of fabricating the case. But there are some people that won't lie down for abuse and a very motivated person started digging around.
Around the end of December this abused person approached us after being recommended by two friends, one that was with another law enforcement agency and another weird liberal libertarian type who actually loathed the Sooner Tea Party but recognized that if anyone could break this story it was us. Their personal story and the abuse they had suffered was extensive but as the story unfolded we realized that the best way to get the family some help was to expose the Canadian County Sheriff Department employee that was accused of causing all the problems and not for the stalking but for far, far, worse crimes.
Meet Captain Adam Flowers, the lead investigator for the Canadian County Sheriff Department. Flowers is actually not a cop we are told, not CLEET certified, but more of a technical expert at digging out data from computers and phones. For years Flowers has been working on the internet attempting to bring down child predators, perverts, and child porn. Flowers and Sheriff Chris West of the Canadian County Sheriff Department brag about the 100% conviction rate on Flower's work, a fact that ought to set a reasonable person's alarm bells ringing.
While digging around the the county our abused person befriended another victim of Captain Adam Flowers, a former DHS caseworker/investigator that at one time had worked with Captain Adam Flowers on some of these child predator cases. At some point Flowers is accused of beginng to border line sexual harass, flirting and sending inappropriate text messages and pictures we were told. The flirting supposedly leads up to an episode where Captain Adam Flowers calls the woman over and says "Check this out!" and shows her a child porn video of an eight year old girl being orally sodomized by a grown man. After warning the woman not to tell anyone that he had shown her the porn video, which was said to be stored on his computer, not on a disk, but accessed by double clicking the monitor, the woman was left believing that Adam Flowers was getting his satisfaction from the child porn he was seizing off perverts. Then we were told the relationship soured once in the woman apparently didn't respond in a positive manner to the attention.
So the DHS caseworker finds themself being investigated for allegations of a relationship with another deputy. Now keep in mind that this woman is pregnant pregnant, not just a little bit pregnant, and she is getting hit on and harassed. She apparently has to take leave in advance of the birth and comes back and finds herself welcomed back…until she becomes uncomfortable with what she says is Captain Adam Flower's flat out lying to the District Attorney over confessions and polygraph tests that had failed due to false positive. In other words, Flowers was said to know the results were invalid but is accused of lying to the D.A. in order to secure a prosecution. Suddenly the working relationship sours and the woman finds herself unable to perform her job she says because Adam Flowers won't return calls or messages about cases.
After hearing the details several times we asked our source to get the former co worker on the phone and record the conversation discussing the accusations. Around the first of January this was done despite some retaliation the family suffered, cut brake lines on their car. The source has a busy life but a few days after they have the recording they message us on a Saturday morning to set a 11:00 am meeting to hand over the recording.
Eleven am comes and goes, no source, no tape recording. A few weeks pass and we find out why. Literally on the road to the meeting location the phone containing the recorded call gets reset remotely, wiping out the recorded call. The source becomes alarmed, takes the phone to a phone repair shop who verifies the reset and sends them to a phone forensic expert that verifies the reset and finds a spying app on the phone. The source believes that someone was monitoring her phone messages and reset her phone to destroy the recording. True or not, coincidence or not, the fear was real.
But the source had made a back up copy of the recorded call.....
If you can't access the MP3 file that means we have overloaded our data quota because the response has gone viral. Respond to this email and we will send you a copy of the audio file.
A few weeks later, right after the first of February we have the recording in our possession. It sounds very bad, very bad, absolutely incriminating to the Canadian County Sheriff Department. OSBI is limited by statute but they can get jurisdiction through a House or Senate Committee that has subpoena power so we plan to approach House Member Bobby Cleveland to arrange the meeting with OSBI.
Then the source calls early morning on the 8th of February in panic mode. Several strange events had occurred, several friends on Facebook that had connections to the Canadian County Sheriff Department un-friend her on Facebook and she gets a phone call that concerns her. We thought we had a few days to get things done but immediately we send out three copies of the tape recording to three legislators including Cleveland, for our personal safety. Rep. Bobby Cleveland is properly alarmed at the accusations and arranges a meeting for us with the OSBI. What we didn't specify was who we needed to meet at the OSBI and in hindsight that might have been a mistake because Captain Adam Flowers was on an OSBI task force and considered their top expert in child porn and busting predators online. Flowers received the 2015 OSBI Director's Award for Law Enforcement for his work with the internet child porn and predator division of OSBI.
Mr. Steve Tanner, the head of the internet child porn/predator division calls us within minutes of the message that OSBI will be in contact with us and a 3 pm meeting is set for a few hours later on the 8th of February. I really didn't realize that Tanner was the head of the internet child porn/predator section, I thought he would have been independent. Tanner has another investigator, David Gatlin sitting in on the meeting and the opening minute of listening to the tape drains the color from Tanner's face.
Initially I told the OSBI that we would give them two working days to get the search warrants to secure the computers and cell phones so the evidence of child porn wasn't wiped out and witnesses weren't intimidated. Steve Tanner asked for more time and we agreed to put the story on hold for an additional week but were concerned about the safety of our source as she had received intimidation in addition to the brake lines being cut. Gatlin said they couldn't sit on their door step but they would be a phone call away if anything happened and would work swiftly and confidentially. Tanner does say he knows Adam Flowers but that if Flowers was dirty they would take him down for the sake of the program but at this point I was still unaware that Flowers was on a task force overseen by Tanner's department.
Around 3:55 pm the OSBI has been briefed and I am on the way back to work. After getting assurances from Tanner and Gatlin that there is no need to release the name or contact information of my source to the Canadian County Sheriff Office I had given the contact info and name of the person that recorded the accusations from the former co worker. By 4:05 I get a call from my source confirming that the OSBI investigator had set a meeting that night. By 8 pm that night the source had been interviewed, confirming everything that I had given the OSBI that afternoon.
During the initial phone call with Mr. Steve Tanner the question of jurisdiction came up as OSBI usually needs an outside police agency to bring them in. We had bypassed this requirement by going through a House Committee and state representative but just to be certain Tanner asked where the two people were when the call was recorded and luckily one of the people was sitting in McClain County. So that night a McClain County deputy arrived with OSBI investigator David Gatlin and both men taped the interview. Again the source received assurances that her identity would be safeguarded because as Steve Tanner told me in his office "If we burn whistleblowers that come forward no one will ever come forward again."
The next day Gatlin, the OSBI investigator knocks on the door of the former coworker and interviews the woman who corroborates every accusation and allegation and gives even more information including that she remembers some of the cases where she said Captain Adam Flowers had lied either on the witness stand or to the D.A. on polygraph results. Strangely enough Gatlin doesn't leave contact information; we know that because as soon as Gatlin was gone the two sources were on the phone exchanging info.
The next Sunday, the 12th of February, the source calls me saying that a female friend that is married to a Canadian County Sheriff Department employee has called and asked for a lunch meeting, out of the blue, out of ordinary, and refuses to state what the meeting is about. The meeting gets canceled on Monday morning, no explanation is given.
Toward the end of the next week, the 16th or 17th of February my source and the coworker are getting nervous. We are primed to publish the story but OSBI asks for another week. I smell a rat but the source believes David Gatlin so we agree to hold off till the 26th to publish. Everyone is ill at ease on our end, is OSBI actually investigating or are they using the time covering things up?
Early the next week we find out that OSBI has NOT done an investigation after my source calls David Gatlin the OSBI investigator. No search warrant, no computers seized as evidence before they could be sanitized, no deputies were interviewed, and the criminal cases that the coworker had documented were never looked into.
What was done was giving the whistleblower information over to Chris West, the Canadian County Sheriff.
My source calls Steve Tanner, the OSBI head that made the decision and records the phone call. Tanner is claiming they couldn't do a full investigation because they had no jurisdiction, a complete falsehood. He claims they did an "investigative inquiry" and turned over everything to Sheriff Chris West.
If you can't access the MP3 file that means we have overloaded our data quota because the response has gone viral. Respond to this email and we will send you a copy of the audio file.
Not only did the OSBI have jurisdiction through Rep. Bobby Cleveland and his Public Safety Committee, they had the McClain County Sheriff Department as the referring agency if needed AND statutes give OSBI "original jurisdiction" over a series of crimes including computer crimes which prosecutors ALWAYS hit defendants with if a computer was used.
And of course the whistle blower was burned along with the coworker that made the accusations.
Amazing… the OSBI purposely blows the chance to secure the evidence and take down a bad guy that was accused of disseminating child porn to coworkers, something that other law enforcement officers had said was strictly forbidden and was a felony regardless of circumstances if the others weren't required to watch the child porn, but dozens of criminal cases are known to be potentially compromised by Captain Adam Flowers yet the OSBI refused to do anything about it.
On Thursday I took the source down to the Attorney General Office only to be refused and turned away by the receptionist after we explained the circumstances. We were told that we would have to hire a private attorney, that the A. G. office would do nothing on corruption cases.
Well that wasn't going to happen and we weren't leaving till someone talked to us so eventually the receptionist caved in and out came a couple of investigators packing their guns, no doubt to deal with an irate citizen causing problems for the front desk. The story gets their attention at least but they really didn't want to open the can of worms but one of them, Ballard, goes over and comes back with a form from the receptionist for turning in a citizen complaint…. Strange how the receptionist didn't offer that form, probably trained to drive citizens away to keep the A.G.'s workload down. The investigators refused to listen to the recordings or accept a copy of the recordings, adamantly refused and asked if we would leave the building once we completed the form and filed the form with the receptionist. You could tell there was zero interest in investigating this corruption and it was a hot potato to be thrown in the trash as soon as we left the building. If they do otherwise I'll be shocked from the reception we received at the A. G. office.
By Friday my source is getting warnings from friends or the wives of friends that are close to the Canadian County Sheriff Department. Sheriff Chris West has dug up an old situation where the source had been visiting her boyfriend who was a trustee, bringing him and the deputies fast food, home cooked meals for lunch, ice cream, even smokes and once a cell phone. All of which was done in full view and full knowledge of the deputies who had befriended the boy friend through business dealings months earlier. There were times the deputies would let the source know what to bring so things were out in the open.
Then an outside law enforcement officer was visiting and noticed the food and smokes being given to the trustee and raised a fuss. High ranking Sheriff officer sat everyone down, heard the story, not really contraband as it wasn't the jail but the sheriff annex and motor pool where the trustee worked, so wink, wink, nod, nod, all is forgiven.
And the next week the food is requested again and things get back to normal.
There was even a reporter that we had given the story too on Tuesday the 22nd who emailed us later that week saying that he had spoken to the OSBI asking why they would take a case that they had a conflict of interest in only to get a call from Sheriff Chris West who dropped the name of the source. The phone call was of a nature that the reporter felt we needed to be warned and said that Sheriff Chris West was "upset".
Lawyers have told us that both the OSBI and the Canadian County Sheriff Department won't move because to do so on this case would generate Brady materials, meaning evidence that could be exculpatory to the convicted men and require turning over to the defense attorneys. There is no doubt that dozens of cases might need re tried but really if they needed a lying witness to claim a confession had been made then perhaps the case does need re tried.
What to do next? As the A.G. office refused to move on Thursday and Friday the source did contact the local D.A. who turned out to be completely unaware of the OSBI investigative inquiry into Flowers.
The D.A. listened to the facts for an hour on Friday so something might get done. But given the track record of public officials so far we are prepared to generate some public backlash.
We are working on a website named CanadianCountyCorruption.com which is up and will have the information on the child porn dissemination late tonight and a Facebook page called Canadian County Corruption.
What you can do is to forward this email to as many people as you can no matter where they live and post the link to the article on Facebook everywhere you can.
At the top of the newsletter is an archive link, you will find a list of past articles including this one and a link to the online version.
If the OSBI, the Canadian County Sheriff, and the A.G. Office is not willing to deal with this then they need inundated with outraged citizens.
Time to drain the swamp in Oklahoma law enforcement.
