Frederick County Sheriff Charles Austin Jenkins, who has led the agency since 2006, was charged with conspiracy and making false statements to acquire the machine guns, prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland allege announced Wednesday. Robert Justin Krop, owner of the Machine Gun Nest in Frederick, faces the same charges. The indictment also accuses Krop of illegally possessing seven machine guns.
Prosecutors say Jenkins, 66, and Krop, 36, coordinated to “unlawfully purchase machine guns and falsified multiple documents on the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office letterhead requesting machine guns for evaluation and demonstration to the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office.”
The guns, however, were not used at the sheriff’s office for demonstrations — a legal process law enforcement agencies go through to decide which guns they want to purchase for use in the field, according to court documents. Instead, the guns were rented out to Krop’s customers, prosecutors alleged.
“It was the purpose of the conspiracy to acquire machine guns by means of fraud and materially false statements and representations and to rent those machine guns to private citizens in exchange for money,” the indictment said.
Though the letters were signed by Jenkins, the indictment alleges, Krop had asked Jenkins to submit the letters so Krop could obtain the guns and rent them to customers. In 2018 and 2019, the indictment states, the Machine Gun Nest made more than $100,000 in profits from machine gun rentals alone.
Hours after the indictment was announced, the sheriff’s office held a news conference indicating Jenkins will remain in his position for the time being. Jenkins knew about the investigation for about a year, said Todd Wivell, a spokesman for the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office.
Jenkins has been “fully cooperative” with the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for a year, and “absolutely” did not expect to be indicted, Wivell said.
Jenkins, who did not appear at the news conference, and Krop could not immediately be reached for comment.
In one letter Jenkins signed with his office’s letterhead, the indictment states, he asked for a demonstration of various models of machine guns “for possible future purchase and use by our officers in the performance of their official duties.”
But “the machine guns were not ‘particularly suitable for use as a law enforcement weapon, due to cost, availability and its use in day to day patrol as well as special operations,’ because the FN M249 SAW was a belt-fed machine gun suitable only for use in combat,” according to one example the indictment lists of an alleged false statement the sheriff made in a request for a firearms demonstration.
In a statement announcing the indictment, prosecutors said that “Krop’s business offered political support to Jenkins in recognition of his support for the business.” In the indictment, law enforcement officials cited a series of emails between Jenkins and the business in which the sheriff was praised for his support of them and the Second Amendment. In the emails from May 2022, the business offered to help the sheriff in his upcoming campaign for reelection, according to court documents.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Frederick County government directed questions about the investigation to federal authorities and questions about the sheriff’s duties to the Maryland Office of the Attorney General.
“The Sheriff is a duly elected official, serving in a role established in the Maryland Constitution,” the statement from Vivian Laxton said. “The County Executive and County Council play no role in the operation of the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office beyond funding the division, according to the Frederick County Code and Charter.”
Frederick is Maryland’s largest county by geographic size and sits along the Pennsylvania border about 50 miles north of D.C. Jenkins was first elected sheriff in 2006 and was most recently reelected last year. The Frederick County Sheriff’s Office is the main law enforcement agency for the Maryland jurisdiction of roughly 270,000 residents, according to the department’s website.
This story is developing and will be updated.
