A conservative sheriff overseeing Maryland’s largest county, who was indicted on federal charges last week for allegedly defrauding regulators to obtain machine guns, has long-running ties to right-wing and anti-immigration causes, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Charles “Chuck” Austin Jenkins, the sheriff of Frederick County, Maryland, was charged on Wednesday with submitting false paperwork to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on behalf of a local gun dealer claiming to be acquiring machine guns to demonstrate to law enforcement.
In reality, according to federal prosecutors, with the sheriff’s assistance, the owner of the Machine Gun Nest gun store was raking in upwards of $100,000 renting the military weapons to customers.
“At the advice of my attorney, and out of respect for the justice process, I am not providing any comment at this time,” a sheriff’s office spokesperson said on behalf of Mr Jenkins following the indictment.
The sheriff remains in office while the charges are pending.
“He feels like he can still support the role of sheriff for Frederick County,” the spokesperson added, according to the Washington Post. “We all, as an agency, believe in him. There are a lot of people in this county who believe in him as well.”
The federal indictment is not Mr Jenkins’s first brush with notoriety.
The Maryland sheriff has long been a vocal backer of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, a right-wing group of local law enforcement officers who claim they don’t have to enforce laws they believe are unconstitutional.
In 2014, he signed onto a resolution from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officer Association, arguing for abstention from federal firearms registration or confiscation provisions, as well as claiming federal arrests required the consent of local sheriffs, according to the SPLC.
Constitutional sheriffs have been part of efforts to oppose Covid rules, gun regulations, and further election-related conspiracies in states across the country, as The Independent has reported.
The SPLC found that Mr Jenkins has appeared at a Covid reopening event alongside former officials from the Center for Security Policy, “a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the anti-Muslim movement in the United States,” and presided over a sheriff’s office that has settled multiple lawsuits from undocumented people alleging racial bias.
Mr Jenkins also collaborated closely with both the staunch anti-immigration group FAIR and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on a programme deputising local law enforcement officers to conduct immigration investigation and detention, according to the SPLC report.
“I am very comfortable working with that group,” Mr Jenkins said in 2021 of his contacts with FAIR, which included trading information about the potential immigration status of various accused criminals, in an interview with The Washington Post. “I make no secret about it whatsoever...I am not different than any other elected official who has a belief or an ideology, a strong one,” he said. “... I know who I am. I’m comfortable in my beliefs and decisions.”
The Maryland sheriff was also a guest of the Trump White House.
