With nothing concerning the investigation to report on and Thomas keeping his own counsel, the gathering of journalists was doing what journalists and commentators do when there’s no real news to report; they began to interview each other or wander about, generating stories. One news team from Atlanta found it charming that GO Thomas’s staff occasionally followed their noon news briefing with a free barbecue picnic in a nearby park. The Governor himself, though reluctant to make any firm statements concerning the Federal government’s handling of the case involving the militiamen, was more than willing to demonstrate his skills as a chef and host.

This did not mean that there was nothing going on. While the people of Idaho went about their daily routine, officials and civic leaders on both sides of the issue were busy behind closed doors. On the fourth floor of the First Interstate Bank in Boise, the FBI was hard at work. There Tim Werner and his special task force were trying to patch together a case in a state where cooperation, at all levels, had all but evaporated. At the Federal Courthouse on the east side of town, Federal prosecutors and members of the Justice Department based in Boise worked and reworked their case for a change in venue against their better judgment. Like the governor of the state in which those men and women lived, they used every trick in the book as they procrastinated in the hope that something would come up and save them from having to make a decision that they knew would generate a firestorm. In the governor’s mansion Thomas’s staff held meeting after meeting with groups from across the state as well as representatives of states where governors dedicated to GO’s states’ right movement held sway, trying to find out who they could depend upon if the courts decided to move the trial and the governor took action to prevent it. And in the dens and living rooms of private citizens, concerned patriots gathered to make their plans.

GOWEN FIELD, BOISE, IDAHO • SEPTEMBER 12