FBI's visit infuriates irreverent cartoonist

Michael Zinna is loud, irreverent and completely politically incorrect. He is, more than anything, a nasty, extremely irritating thorn in the backside of the very people who have been elected to represent him.
All of which is every reason why you should thank God for him.
He has just gotten off my telephone, my ears still ringing from his screaming louder than I've ever heard him scream. This is saying a lot.
The FBI has just driven away from his warehouse office at Jefferson County Airport, he tells me, having yet again accused him of being a threat to the republic.
The agent has accused him, he says, of lying, adding he might not want to do it again. The stream of bile-laden English that is leaving Zinna's mouth cannot be printed here.
"If I broke the law, charge my a--!" Michael Zinna screams into the phone. "I write a column! I stick it to 'em. Is that a crime now? I will not back down!"
He is a man I have for some time wanted to meet, for no other reason than his name keeps cropping up in news stories - most famously when the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force raided his offices over a cartoon.
More recently, reporters have found and written about him in connection with the recent Marvin Heemeyer rampage in Granby.
Michael Zinna might be just as angry and frustrated with the powers-that-be, but he scoffs at any suggestion that he, like some Marvin Heemeyer, would climb into an bulldozer and take out the town.
It is, though, a bit of an ironic twist that Heemeyer's bulldozer, in a sense, led to this latest visit by the FBI. I'd told him not more than an hour before that he might want to go easy on the bulldozer thing.
So now Michael Zinna, 39, is spitting into the phone, as loud as ever, about how the FBI is trying to intimidate him, how the agent threatened to haul him to jail if he lied to him again, how all he'd done - same as before - is draw a cartoon.
You have to go to the man's Web site to truly understand. The site, jeffcoexposed.com, is as loud, irreverent and full of bluster and bile as the man who runs it.
Its target: Jefferson County officials. "Protecting Honest Citizens from Corrupt Public Officials" is its official motto.
Michael Zinna cannot stand the people who run Jefferson County. And they have little affection for him. So when his Web site ran a cartoon penned by Michael Zinna depicting a mushroom cloud emanating from the Taj Mahal (Jeffco's headquarters), the FBI soon showed up.
He was, Michael Zinna says now, sitting in the audience at a Jeffco commission meeting earlier this spring when an agent sat next to him, and asked if he could come out to his place.
"I've been going to those meetings for six years, and I guarantee you I have a better attendance record than every single one of those commissioners," he says.
He thought the request was odd, but knowing he had nothing to hide, Michael Zinna told the agent OK. He just wanted his lawyer to be present. The agent agreed.
"Two agents show up! Five hours early!" Michael Zinna rages. "Trying to sandbag me! They say they've got more bad guys to catch, that they've got a bomb-sniffing dog on board, that they'll be in and out!"
Bombs?
"I write a column!" Michael Zinna shouted at them. "You want to send in a dog on my a--? I thought this was America!"
The agents ultimately relented, and waited for the man's lawyer. They and the dog swept the place and found nothing.
It has been reported that Jeffco officials contacted the FBI after receiving complaints about the cartoon. Michael Zinna says he filed an open-records request for the complaints, and that there were none. "They totally made it up," he says.
He says it is all payback from a business deal gone sour between him and the county at Jeffco airport. He claims that the county ultimately stole his ideas and gave him not a penny.
"Am I disgruntled? No, I just consider myself a highly motivated citizen, who is exposing the truth, the reality of corruption in the county," Michael Zinna says.
After his lawsuit over the land deal was tossed out, he began his Web site, which he now says overshadows his airport warehouse leasing business.
"I know the FBI coming around is all about payback. But I told them I have nothing to hide. They know where I am. I write. I don't blow things up. What frustrates and disappoints me is the system will attack a citizen because he's mad and criticizes local politicians."
The sadness, the outrage, is that the FBI's visits have made Michael Zinna modulate his outrage. He took down the mushroom cloud from the Web site.
Instead, he substituted it for a little bit of animation that shows a cartoon bulldozer crashing into the Taj - thus, the agent's visit on Thursday.
"I do pause when I write things now," he admits, perhaps the worst thing a watchdog - albeit a loud, irreverent and edge-walking one - can say.
"Next time, maybe they'll come sweep me off to Guantanamo Bay."
Michael Zinna clearly seems to believe this. I can't help thinking, as I listen, that his fears could befall me and others in the writing community.
No, impossible.
"I gotta tell you," Michael Zinna bellows, "when the FBI comes, it does make you nervous."