("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MARCH 27, 1995
On March 27, 1995, I interviewed Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts [CCCC] by telephone. The following is my transcription of that interview. Note that in this interview I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or some of the statements of Mr. Skolnick.
-- Brian Francis Redman, Editor-in-chief, Conspiracy Nation
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CONSPIRACY NATION:
You were a reporter in the, for some newspaper, in the 1960s,
right?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
No.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
No!?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
I never worked for anybody.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. I thought maybe that you had worked for Chicago Today or
somethin' like that?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
No.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
But you were an independent journalist then?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
I'm a free-lance journalist -- whatever. I never worked for
anybody.
Our group has, the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts, has been going since 1963. And, as part of our work, I call myself a free-lance journalist. But nobody gets paid, and I'm not workin' for anybody.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
All right, did you cover the 1968 Democratic Convention at all?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... I investigated it, because of the riots and the fact that
I found out that Rennie Davis and others who became what is known
as the "Chicago 7" received hundreds of thousands of dollars from
foundations connected to CIA.
I later wrote a report about it, and I circulated it around. [coughs] I think I sent you a copy, didn't I?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, you did.
It sounds like you got the flu or somethin', right?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
No. Early morning... [laughs] when I'm up too late, sometimes.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
Let me run this by you, okay? Just as a theory of what possibly happened there:
They wanted to get Nixon [elected], so basically, they sent in people to disrupt that '68 Democratic Convention.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Right. And very active in the instigating of the commotions was
Naval Intelligence.
And a person that knew a lot about Military Intelligence admitted things along these lines 10 years later -- 1978.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
And you've got, say, documents and stuff on that?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. We, we traced Rennie Davis' offices in Chicago to a
federally-owned building. And in 1972, I confronted him at a
television station during a live broadcast with him. And I was in
the studio audience, and I got up on my crutches and I started
walking toward him. And I started asking him about this
foundation money. Of course, he refused to answer. And the
moderator on the show refused to ask. And they sent in 18 police
to, to arrest me.
And that became a trial, and I brought up... During, during the trial for "trespassing" on the television station's property, I brought up about the CIA. In fact, I subpoenaed the Chicago station chief of the CIA.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
What TV show was that?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
It was on channel 44, which is a UHF station here.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. Do you recall who the moderator was?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... Offhand, no. It was a woman. And I had her, I called her as
a witness, on the witness stand, about all this.
It was a mistrial, and as a result, they dropped the charges against me. But they had had me in, under arrest for awhile.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
During that '68 convention, I have sort of memories of that, from watchin' it on TV. And they had riots and all. And they brought in federal troops, and tanks, to the streets of the city of Chicago.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh, not tanks. Some uh, heavily motorized vehicles. I don't think
they had any tanks.
But the point is, it was to discredit the Democrats and put in Nixon. That was the bottom line. And because there were other commotions in '68, during the GOP [Republican] Convention there, where people were actually killed, and they were played down. The major thing that got worldwide publicity was the thing in Chicago during the '68 Democratic Convention.
And I was a free-lance journalist for some friends at channel 44 during the '72 Republican Convention, where Rennie Davis likewise led commotions. There I'm not sure what that was all about, but Rennie Davis, at that time (that was 1972), was in with the Secret Service! I tried to point that out, and nobody in the press would really go into it.
And, by the way, in '72 there were more people rioting and arrested than in the '68 commotions.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Goin' back to Rennie Davis, he later teamed up with somebody
called the "Guru Maharaj Ji" or somethin' like that.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. That was some kind of a publicity game.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
All right, so he wasn't authentic? I mean, he was, like, some 16-
year-old kid that was sayin' that he was God.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well he claimed to be a 15-year-old. And I almost got thrown out
of a big meeting where I pointed out that the "Guru Maharaj Ji"
was actually more like 31 years old.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
[laughs] O.K.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Telling the truth costs! You get thrown out of meetings; you get
arrested; you get put in contempt of court. [laughs] I've been
through the whole [laughs], the whole gamut, in 37 years that
I've been active as, you know, a "free-lance commentator", shall
we say.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. And goin' back to those riots in Chicago: there were,
federal troops were brought in, though.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well... National Guard. Yeah... I don't know if you want to call
those "federal troops". National Guard was brought in, you know.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
'Cuz my memory is -- although, this comes from... Abbie Hoffman
made a record called "Wake Up, America" which, it wasn't sold
popularly, but you could get it through the mail. And I remember
I used to listen to that sometimes, when I was younger. And he...
The way he told it, there was also federal troops with bayonets
and all this...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah that probably was true.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
By the way, I, in later years, confronted Abbie Hoffman (who was
not unfriendly to me) during the '72 commotions in Miami, at
the GOP Convention there. We had a van that we were drivin'
around in. And occasionally we would drive Abbie here and there.
And I showed him some of the documents that we wrote about: that
he got mysterious "travel permission", although he was under
criminal prosecution following the '68 riots.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, you talked about this, I think.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. And he would never answer, but instead told obscene jokes
that some of my friends had a good laugh at [laughs].
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, but I want to move on a little, because we had talked about
that, with Abbie Hoffman, before.
But what I'm gettin' at is...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Let me just put it, a summary to this: all these years after the
'68 riots, nobody has (other than us), has written an extensive
report of how the riots were a device to destroy the Democrats
and put in Nixon in '68.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
What I'm gettin' at, though, with, if there were federal troops in the street in Chicago. Because people had said, with this Waco thing, that this was the first time that U.S. federal troops were used against civilians. But, when I heard that I thought, "Well, it seems to me, in '68..."
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well I don't know what you mean by "U.S. federal troops". You
mean like U.S. Marshalls, federal agency agents? There were none
like that in Chicago in '68. You mean like BATF, FBI and so on,
in Waco? That probably was the first time.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
I'm thinkin' more in terms of the Posse Comitatus Act, that says
that you can't use the armed forces against the civilians.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... What are you getting at? In other words, that the Waco
thing was one of the first times they did it? It probably was.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
No. It was...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well if there were armed... I don't know if there were... Well,
the only thing in Waco that might have been armed forces (and I'm
not, I don't claim any expertise on it) were, possibly, the
military helicopters that were used, and the tanks. Although the
tanks were driven by ATF agents. So there weren't... uh, how
could I put it? There wasn't U.S. military in the tanks. In fact,
one of the tanks that knocked down the wall and may have caused
the fire and all that was driven by a Japanese-American agent of
the BATF. That has come out, in various things.
So in other words, those weren't... I don't think, at Waco, they had U.S. military, in uniform, doing any of the things that occurred there. They may have used military equipment. But the military equipment, I believe, was being driven by so-called "civilians".
[...to be continued...]
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