JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Prosecutors who last year charged a Clay County man with selling illegal machine-gun conversion devices are now also going to court against a Wisconsin gun dealer who raised money for his defense.
A new federal indictment accuses Kristopher “Justin” Ervin of Orange Park and Matthew R. Hoover of Coloma, Wisconsin, of conspiring to illegally distribute unregistered conversion equipment, which the indictment equates with distributing machine guns.
The list of charges from a federal grand jury in Jacksonville replaces one filed last spring against Ervin alone, detailing new claims from investigators’ probe of his online sale of credit card-sized metal strips under the product name Auto Key Card.
The 17-count indictment says Ervin’s sales took off because of publicity he received from Hoover, 38, who regularly posts videos on a YouTube channel about guns and shooting that this month counted 134,000 subscribers.
The indictment lists 10 dates between November 2020 and February 2021 when, it says, Hoover promoted Ervin’s product in videos and referred to autokeycard.com as the videos' sponsor.
"Mr. Ervin was paying Mr. Hoover for the advertisements," Jacksonville-based Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Cofer Taylor told a judge in Milwaukee Friday. The indictment identifies Hoover as operating Coloma Resale, a store which is a federally licensed firearms dealer, but in court attorneys said much of Hoover's income comes from his YouTube postings.
The decision to charge Hoover enflamed gun-rights supporters who by Monday had contributed about $110,000 through 2,700 donations to a GoFundMe page created to cover Hoover’s legal costs.
“This is really a travesty of justice and it shows that tyranny is alive and well in the country,” John Crump, a self-described firearms journalist in Virginia who also posts on YouTube and other social media, said in an announcement about Hoover’s arrest that was placed on both men’s channels.
AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles similar to the one in this 2016 photo are sometimes turned into machine guns with conversion devices called auto-sears. Kristopher Ervin of Orange Park has been indicted on federal gun charges for mailing hundreds of items that prosecutors say work like auto-sears.
Supporters cast Thursday’s fundraising effort as a step toward protecting gun rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.
“I've donated and I don't really care for Matt,” one viewer wrote in a message to Hoover’s channel, operated under the name CRS Firearms. “Something needs to be done about this out of control government/agency. This goes beyond personal feelings and every 2A supporter should also donate.”
Hoover was arrested Thursday, but after an online hearing Friday a federal magistrate in Milwaukee ordered him released on the conditions that he wouldn’t have contact with witnesses from his case or promote auto key cards, silencers or legally questionable firearm products in his videos while his case was pending.
During the hearing Friday, Taylor told U.S. Magistrate Stephen Dries that Hoover had been important for spreading awareness of Auto Key Card products.
“’They’re awesome because they’re stupid cheap’,” the prosecutor quoted Hoover saying in a video she said had been viewed 800,000 times.
AutoKeyCard.com, a website Ervin used before it was taken over by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and postal officials, marketed metal items priced from around $80 to $139 resembling things like a business card and a pen holder carrying an etched pattern.
The items could hold one to three etchings, each the same pattern.
Court filings said an ATF agent used a Dremel cutting tool to follow the pattern and cut from the metal an item that he inserted into a semiautomatic rifle to enable him to fire the weapon fully automatic — as a machine gun — with just one pull of the trigger.
Sold without any government licenses, the items created the potential of owning a fully automatic firearm without the regulation and expense of machine guns like one Taylor told the judge had sold at auction for about $15,000.
Taylor said Friday that Ervin, 41, who had contracted with a machine shop to produce the etched metal, filled at least 1,200 orders from the fall of 2020 until his arrest.
With some orders carrying more than one etching, she said the number of conversion devices involved was “likely in the 2,000-ish range.”
Taylor told the judge that Hoover’s videos referred to a “discreet ordering process” where customers could print order forms and send payments by mail. She said he suggested having the items delivered to the address of an anti-gun relative.
While Hoover described the items being sold as conversation pieces, “he clearly knew what the Auto Key Card was,” she said.
Hoover told the judge Taylor’s remarks included “a whole bunch of inaccuracies,” but the subject wasn’t addressed further before Dries decided to release him to await trial under supervision.
When that trial will be isn’t clear.
Ervin’s case had been scheduled to be brought to a jury in April, but that will presumably be rescheduled as he and Hoover will be tried together and are both entitled to time to prepare their defenses.
Ervin is scheduled to be arraigned on the new indictment Wednesday at Jacksonville’s federal courthouse. An arraignment date for Hoover was unclear.
The new indictment restates most of the charges Ervin already faced but adds on top a claim of conspiracy and six counts where both men are accused of illegally transferring machine gun conversion devices that weren’t registered with the government as legally required.
Those illegal-transfer charges refer to separate instances when Auto Key Card products were sent to buyers who said later they had become aware of Ervin’s business by seeing Hoover promote them on his YouTube channel, Taylor said.
Ervin has been jailed since last year on charges that a defense attorney had tried to get thrown out by arguing AutoKeyCard items didn’t meet the legal definition of machine gun conversion devices, which the law treats as equivalent to machine guns themselves.
U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Morales Howard said in July that was a question for jurors to decide, although Hoover and gun-rights activists treated it as a cut-and-dried case of government overreach.
After Ervin’s arrest, Hoover had publicized a GoFundMe account set up to help meet the Orange Park man’s legal expenses. That account, which lists Hoover as the account organizer, raised about $60,000 in the ensuing 10 months.
Hoover had described defending the case as being important to preventing new restrictions on gun ownership.
“This case is insanely important. We definitely need to support him any way we can,” Hoover said in a March video. “ … He absolutely can’t lose it.”
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