This question is just another attempt at the idea in Using international waters to avoid legal punishment. I have someone in a story that wants to commit a pre-meditated crime that others will know he performed, but avoid being legally punishable for it by exploiting nation boundaries.
This time I want to use a micronation like Molossia to commit the crime. Say I'm a US citizen that travels to Molossia (or some other micronation within the US) and commits a crime. I then return to my home in the US and freely admit to the crime. Can I avoid prosecution under the grounds that I was technically not within the US at the time of the crime?
For the sake of this story let's say that the owner of the micronation is willing to support, or at least ignore, the crime performed within their borders. The perpetrator of the crime admits to the crime, possibly even flaunting it in such a way that the public is aware of it and wants to see the culprit punished. Assume the crime is not quite as severe as murder, but is non-trivial; ie it's drawn enough attention and anger that the US definitely wants to prosecute, but not enough to do anything politically extreme to peruse justice.
I have two questions. First, what are the official legal rights of the US purely by the books to prosecute this person for the crime?
Second, assuming that the US doesn't have explicit legal rights to arrest the person for the crime, what could the US do to punish them anyway? For instance if the crime was murder the US could likely arrest the culprit for premeditating murder, but not for performing murder, since the planning of the murder was done within the US even if the murder was not. Are there other legal loop holes or exploits that could be used for non-murder?
Would a government simply stop recognizing a micronation over something that upset enough citizens, seeing as how most micronations only exist because the government shrugged and say "meh, whatever" to their technical existence via some legal loophole or similar nonsense. I assume if a micronation ever annoyed a government enough the government would just say "you know what, were not humoring you any more" and wouldn't face much political backfire for it. If this is a realistic risk, generally how far could one push the government before they go with the "you're no longer a micronation" response.
For the sake of this question assume this is a one time event and the micronation is not housing a "prosecution-free crime tourism" resort or something.