Pres. Trump Must Pardon Tate Adamiak!

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]In 2022, during the Biden administration, federal agents arrested Patrick Tate Adameia, a US Navy sailor with no violent history or criminal record. Tate's crime, he was a firearms enthusiast. If that sounds like an exaggeration, it's not. Biden's weaponized DOJ charged Tate with violations of the National Firearms Act for having collectible firearm parts at home. Importantly, none of these items was an actual firearm under the NFA. at least not until ATF agents tampered with evidence before trial, leading to one of the most unjust convictions we've ever seen. Today, we're taking a closer look at United States v. Adameia, a case that everyone should be talking about. That's because right now, Tate is languishing in federal prison, serving a ridiculous 20ear sentence that is longer than sentences received by most violent criminals. And to make matters worse, the US Supreme Court has just declined to hear the case. That means if DOJ doesn't ask that Tate's sentence be reduced at an upcoming hearing, then a presidential pardon is Tate's last shot at freedom. We're calling on the Trump administration to do the right thing and reverse this Biden era miscarriage of justice. I'm Phil and you're watching Law and Ammo.

[00:01:30]But before we get into the video, I want to take a second tell you all about goals, GOA's annual convention. The gun owners advocacy and leadership summit will be held on August 1st through 2nd in De Moine, Iowa. Come out and see your favorite firearms companies and hear from top voices in the Second Amendment community. And the best part is that it's free for Goa members. So sign up at gunowners.org/goals and I'll see you in De Moine. The story of Patrick Tate Adamak begins well before his 2022 prosecution and it's worth telling here. From an early age, Tate was fascinated with firearms and he was as patriotic as they come. At the age of 17, Tate enlisted in the US Navy and eventually became a master at arms, the Navy's equivalent to military police. And by the time he was 27 years old, Tate had been accepted to Buds, the selective training program to become a Navy Seal. Throughout his young adult years, Tate began amassing a collection of firearms and historic military memorabilia. At the height of his collection, Tate owned around 150 firearms, and his goal was to one day open up a military themed museum.

[00:02:38]Unsurprisingly, Tate easily turned his hobby into a side hustle during his time in the Navy. He formed an LLC, Black Dog Arsenal, and soon became a top 500 seller of collectible firearm parts on Gunbroker. His specialty was inert nonfunctioning military arms and replicas, including what are known as demilitarized or demilled parts kits.

[00:03:02]That's worth repeating. Nothing Tate possessed was an actual working machine gun. To the extent Tate had any firearms parts, they were frames or receivers in a destroyed, cut up state, significantly and permanently modified not to function as firearms, appealing only to collectors. In other words, Tate sold nonfunctioning gun parts, which federal law does not regulate. But that didn't stop Biden's anti-gunners from trying to ruin Tate's life. And during the Biden years, they found their opportunity. In 2021, ATF paid a 20time felon $8,000 to act as a confidential informant and helped secure a conviction against Tate.

[00:03:43]This confidential informant was working off his own firearms felonies.

[00:03:47]Apparently, Tate's business success had caught ATF's eye, and they wanted to charge him with something, anything.

[00:03:53]This wasn't a one-off prosecution. In fact, it sounds eerily familiar. We've seen precisely this sort of anti-b businessiness weaponization by Biden's ATF before. Remember Tim Durkin? In a previous video, we covered the story of how the Biden ATF targeted a successful entrepreneur and GOA member all for helping rural gun dealers stay afloat during COVID. And in Tate's case, the ATF's confidential informant tried to purchase a machine gun from Tate, repeatedly asking him to break the law, and each time Tate refused, explaining that he did not have a federal firearms license, so he could only sell parts.

[00:04:31]Unfortunately, Tate's interactions with ATF's confidential informant did not end there. Despite Tate following the law, ATF realized that if they were going to charge him as a criminal, they had to make him one. Ultimately, Tate ended up selling the informant cut up receivers of firearms that once had been machine guns. Of course, these saw or torch cut items could not accept parts to fire fully automatically. They couldn't fire at all. They were just inert collector's pieces. But that was good enough for the ATF. In an affidavit letter filed in court, one of the ATF agents on Tate's case claimed that each of these cutup receivers was in fact an unregistered machine gun under the National Firearms Act. And ATF's theory was that even though the receivers had been destroyed, they hadn't been destroyed enough.

[00:05:21]That's right. Even though the receivers had been rendered inoperable with a single cut through them, ATF claimed each could be readily made restored into an operational machine gun. And so each receiver legally was still a machine gun. But there's just one problem with ATF's theory. It's found nowhere in the statute that Congress enacted. Let's take a quick look. The National Firearms Act defines a machine gun as any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot or can be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed or intended solely and exclusively or combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.

[00:06:13]and any combination of parts from which a machine gun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person. So the statute covers not only functioning machine guns but also weapons that can be readily restored to fire fully automatically.

[00:06:30]But the statute does not say that a weapon with a single cut through its receiver is readily restorable. In fact, the statute says nothing about how many cuts a receiver must have before it no longer qualifies as a machine gun. Even so, ATF has provided its opinion, not the law, on what constitutes destroying a firearm. In its publicly accessible NFA handbook, ATF states that the preferred method for destroying a machine gun receiver is to completely sever the receiver in specified locations by means of a cutting torch that displaces at least one/4 in of material at each cut location. ATF has published rulings concerning the preferred destruction of specific machine guns. For many machine guns, this preferred method includes three or four receiver cuts. But again, this is just ATF's preference. It's not the law.

[00:07:28]Yet, under Biden's anti-gun administration, it would seem that violating even the arbitrary preferences of bureaucrats is enough to land you in prison. Amazingly, it doesn't even matter that Tate wasn't the one who cut the receivers in the first place. He bought them like that from reputable milsurp wholesalers. Those well-intentioned wholesalers never thought there was a problem and neither did Tate. But under ATF's approach, show me the man and I'll show you the crime, there was no avoiding ATF's vindictive prosecution. Ultimately, based on ATF's subjective, entirely madeup reading of the statue, the Biden DOJ executed a search warrant at Tate's house in April of 2022. There they found Tate's firearm collection and business inventory, including legally imported deactivated World War II relics, surplus military parts, kits, and replica collectibles.

[00:08:21]ATF even seized Tate's money and antique currency collection, claiming it was the proceeds of illegal activity. This is a common tactic by the feds. Seize all your assets so that you can't hire a lawyer to defend yourself or even pay living expenses while you await trial.

[00:08:37]But even more important is what ATF did not find during its search. ATF found no illegal machine guns at all. So in order to make DOJ's charges against Tate Stick, the ATF shipped Tate's inert firearm parts to its firearms and ammunition technology division or FAT.

[00:08:56]there. ATF employees tampered with the evidence, rebuilding and reconstructing Tate's inert firearms into functioning NFA firearms using government-owned components. Let's look at just one example of how the ATF tampered with Tate's firearms. Let's just look at his toy Sten gun, for example. ATF took a non-firing $75 toy and converted it into a machine gun using additional parts ATF acquired. That included forcibly inserting a bolt from a real sten gun into the toy, swapping out the toy barrel for a real one, and manually loading and firing a single round as proof of concept. But even after this malicious fabrication of evidence, creating a gun out of a toy, ATF still couldn't get the Sten to shoot more than one round. How that qualified as a machine gun, which must shoot automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, is anyone's guess. In fact, as one anonymous former ATF official commented, it is egregious to assert that this Sten replica is a machine gun when it cannot accept a magazine. Without a magazine, it can only hold one cartridge at a time, making it impossible to shoot automatically more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger, and therefore impossible to be a machine gun. But the absence of logic didn't stop ATF from using evidence of this so-called machine gun in court. It's like the government searching your house, seizing your car and gun, using all those items to rob a bank, and then charging you with the robbery. ATF also tampered with Tate's two inert RPG7s. Not only were these decorative launchers completely missing their fire control groups, but they also had holes cut into their sides to render them permanently unusable. Yet, just like with the toy sten gun, ATF converted one of these launchers into an alleged NFA regulated item. This time, a so-called destructive device. But in order to do so, ATF patched the hole that had been cut into the side of the tube and then it installed a new trigger group. In other words, ATF simply undid all the steps that had been taken to render the item inert in the first place. And of course, if this is the standard for something to be a firearm, then given enough time and effort by the ATF, every inert firearm could be reconstructed. meaning the only way to destroy one would be to melt it into a pool of liqufied metal or plastic. Even after reconstructing Tate's RPG7, ATF didn't attempt to actually fire it.

[00:11:36]First of all, it's not like anyone could just buy a rocket propelled grenade at a local hardware store. And even if you could, no ATF employee would want to be the guinea pig who drew the short straw and had to fire a grenade out of a launcher with a band-aid on the side. So rather than fire the actual round the RPG7 was designed to fire, ATF decided to try something entirely different. ATF inserted a boltaction rifle training simulator designed to fire 762 round through the RPG. In other words, ATF put its own gun into Tate's inert device and then claimed the RPG itself was a firearm. And at this point, gun owners should expect nothing less from an agency that has claimed that a potato is a silencer, that a sliver of metal is a machine gun, and that an ordinary metal water bottle might in fact be a firearm or even a machine gun. This is the same agency that manhandled a barrel until the extension snapped off and then claimed the firearm was ineligible for import. Even worse was how Tate's criminal trial eventually proceeded.

[00:12:41]After the trial, judge allowed ATF's tampered evidence to be presented. A jury convicted Tate on all counts. Then in 2023, the Biden DOJ triumphantly announced that Tate had been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. All for inherently nonviolent conduct, and the appellet courts were no help. The famously anti-gun US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected Tate's appeal, dispensing with his Second Amendment argument in just one sentence.

[00:13:10]And on May 18th, 2026, the US Supreme Court denied Tate's petition for Cersiari without even asking the government to respond. We couldn't think up of a more unjust prosecution, conviction, or sentence if we tried. But there have been all sorts of people and organizations that have come to Tate's aid. For example, throughout his ordeal, the US Navy stood with Tate, declining to prosecute him under the UCMJ. In fact, the Navy never even demoted Tate and instead allowed him to use personal leave time while in jail, paying him all the way. And once Tate ran out of leave, the Navy gave him an honorable discharge. ExATF agent Dan O. Kelly, Tate's expert witness on firearms, candidly expressed in a recent interview that the ATF needs numbers to justify its existence. Each agent has to produce cases in order to justify their existence. Their training is ridiculous.

[00:14:08]They're only taught about 60% of what they need to know. Make, model, and serial number. If you get into NFA stuff, the agents have no idea what they're looking at. The federal prosecutor was shown the law. Any firearm enforcement officer who testifies to something different than that commits willful falsehood. They are the gun experts of the gun police. They ought to be charged with perjury and jailed, not to mention being fired. This case was the worst. Finally, in a recent interview with Bearing Arms, the current ATF director, Rob Cicada, talked a bit about the case.

[00:14:44]>> He wrote an open letter uh to you. Have you had a chance to read Tada Demiak's letter?

[00:14:50]>> Yes, sir, I have.

[00:14:52]>> And what what what what are your thoughts? Do you have anything that you would like to share with him publicly?

[00:14:58]Um I I think that the challenge uh with uh Tate Admiac's uh letter is uh you know we obviously he has an appeal pending and uh you know uh we are I don't want to be in a position to damage his efforts on his appeal or put the government in a bad uh position with my comments on that. I don't know the case uh you know nook and cranny. I didn't investigate the case. These are areas of the law that are uh you know although they're technicalities uh uh and most people don't understand how these technicalities put them in um in opposition with the law and frankly put them at risk of uh being convicted of a crime. Uh some of these things uh are I believe uh uh need to be clarified for the public. Right. It's it's it's not a game, right? We don't want to see anyone get in trouble or be sentenced to any sort of prison time if there's any lack of clarity of what something is. Uh look, for me, my perspective is this. Uh ATF looked at this. We provided our perspective to DOJ. Uh they're looking at it as well in a review. Uh I don't want to speak uh on DOJ's uh behalf as to what their thoughts would be, but there is a re-sentencing coming up. And uh you know from my perspective uh obviously Tate has an appeal uh that is moving forward and uh uh you know we are not offended by the outcome of whatever happens in the courts. Uh but what we would like to make sure is whether someone is uh convicted or not we want to make sure they are convicted of the of the crime that they actually committed and appropriately sentenced.

[00:16:32]uh you know um when Tate's getting 20 years and we have people that are committing violent crimes and they're not even getting a fraction of prison time like that, there's a big problem.

[00:16:42]>> But later in the interview, while describing his own frustrations with the Biden pistol brace rule, Cicada said this.

[00:16:48]>> I registered them at the time because, hey, I didn't want to run a foul of the law, especially being as a being an ATF agent, but I was pretty upset uh when I was told that I did something wrong. I didn't do anything. I bought a firearm from a federal firearms lency. Did all the paperwork, paid the tax in the state that I lived in in Florida for the firearms I purchased, too. Uh, and then I was told, "Well, you know, you were supposed to pay a uh a tax uh to the NFA uh because of having these short barrel rifles." I said, "Hey, that's BS. Uh, we didn't put out the clear guidance to these folks over the years. I bought these through a legal market, did not attach any accessories on my own, and now you're telling me I did something wrong, and I have to uh actually register and pay a tax. Uh I was very upset uh with the team, and I voiced uh that to uh the prior uh leadership team here and prior council's office. But, you know, hey, I I was in a position where I couldn't sway their decisions.

[00:17:48]Uh but they knew clearly where I stood.

[00:17:50]It's worth mentioning that the exact same frustration that Cicada felt about his own experience with the pistol brace rule is exactly what happened to Tate Adameak. Adamec was following a legal process and did everything he needed to do. He didn't try to bend the rules. He was following the law. The ATF put him in prison anyway. And as of the filming of this video, Tate remains in federal custody. He has now exhausted his appeals and the Supreme Court apparently had no appetite to write this wrong. But here's where you come in. We as a community need to help Tate. That's why we at Gun Owners of America are calling on the DOJ to seek a reduction in sentence in Tate's case. Tate has an upcoming hearing where DOJ could do just that. We also call on President Trump to grant Tate a presidential pardon. After all, under this administration, ATF has entered a new era of reform, pledging to clarify regulations and end weaponization. There is no better place to start than to set tape free. You can call the White House at 202456111.

[00:18:58]Thanks for watching and we'll keep you updated as this situation develops.