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theexleynatureblog · 4 years

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The Bundy Group

So I just learned something startling I thought I should post: In Jan 2016, a group of extremists seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The act was in protect to the incarceration of two ranchers who purposely set fire to their land, which spread onto the refuge. Untimely, the acts were rebellion against federal control of land. Below are some quotes from the protestors. primarily from the Bundy brothers who orchestrated the assault:

"All comfort, all wealth ... comes from the Earth, and we cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point where it puts us in poverty."

"I will say this refuge from its very inception has been a tool of tyranny."

“This refuge here is rightfully owned by the people and we intend to use it.”

“The best possible outcome is that the ranchers that have been kicked out of the area, then they will come back and reclaim their land, and the wildlife refuge will be shut down forever and the federal government will relinquish such control.”

While protesting in a nearby town, a small but armed group split off and occupied the Malheur NWR center. The standoff lasted 41 days with the occupants saying they wouldn’t leave until they regained their rightful land. The occupancy resulted in property damage to the building, land damage from unauthorized excavations (trenches used for toilets), broken fences, fights with conservationists, neighboring tribe members, and law enforcement. One confrontation resulted in several arrests and one protestor fatality who apparently threatened police. The final days of the occupancy was with four people who protested the shooting until they were seized by police.

Now, on the surface this may seem like a ‘noble’ display of patriotism and rebellion, but let me inform y’all what a wildlife refuge actually is.

Map of the current refuges in the US.

The first wildlife refuges were created by Theodore Roosevelt, who was an active sport’s hunter and a member of the Boon and Crockett Club - a rich-person’s sporting club. Roosevelt’s goal was preserving North America’s ‘big game’ for future generations to enjoy.

Wild spaces were not created out of concern for the environment, but preservation for human use. When colonizers came to the America’s, they disregarded the thousands of years of management for wildlife by native tribes. A mixture of market hunting (commercially hunting to stock restaurants and stores) habitat loss, and introductions of invasive species changed the landscape and its animals drastically, sometimes to a point beyond repair. The recognition of the loss of timber and water sources sparked the designation of national parks and refuges for the identical reason - preservation for human use.

President Theodore Roosevelt on Pelican Island, casually allowing one of the islands inhabitants devour his hand.

Pelican Island was the first Wildlife Refuge created in 1903 by Theodore Roosevelt, who would later add many more designated wildlife areas. Despite the purpose of the refuges being anthro-centric (and further, only accessible to upper-class white society), the refuges served an important function to wildlife. As regulated hunting laws were still in development or lacked enforcement, it gave animals a place to escape hunting pressure. The actual shooting is only one factor - the influx of foot and vehicle traffic, noise from ammunition, startled herds and flocks, human camps, and later-on effects of pollutants from lead shot all contribute to stresses that impact individual survival. These refuges were not open to hunting or any resource harvest at certain times of the year or in certain sections.

The Malheur Refuge was one of the original areas designated by President Roosevelt himself. Many of these refuges were focused on protecting birds, victims of the millinery trade. Feathers of adult birds (mainly targeted during breeding seasons) and sometimes entire birds were used to decorate woman’s hats. This attack on the breeding population led to a sharp decline that alarmed outdoor enthusiasts and bird-watchers alike. Read more about the Feather Hat Trade.

Today, the refuge has multiple uses. A stop along the Pacific Flyway, it is an important space for migrating waterfowl. Besides biology, refuge also is used in studying geology. Having once been inhabited by native tribes, the refuge provides members of the Burns Paiute Tribe to continue cultural traditions and hunting/fishing practices.

Map of habitats.

The refuge does important work for wildlife, but it comes at a cost. Roosevelt designating ‘wild’ areas to be free of human contact also meant native tribes had no access to the resources they depended on. Today luckily, some of that is changed, and tribal members play an important part of managing in some of the refuges.

Read some of the Tribal Wildlife Conservation success stories!

The loss of access also sparked problems with ranchers. In the Western US, large expanses of grazable land were claimed by farmers ready to make money on their stock. The history of homesteading ranchers is messy, often colliding with native groups, conservationists, and others.

All human activity has environmental impacts, and ranching is no exception. Whether those impacts are good or bad depends on the responsibility and knowledge of the rancher. For example, grazing in an important management technique that can both reduce grasses and spread them. A herd of cattle can save a grassland from desertification or cause it. Its all on the rancher to be environmentally caution - but caution is often more expensive and risky.

For the past centuries, fragmenting the landscape with barbed wire, fences, and roads and rails that have caused problems for wildlife also cause problems for ranches trying to move their herds. National Parks with grazable (or even in some cases areas that were sensitive to grazing but used anyway) areas became available for livestock owners to rent. But still remained constant competition with multiple interests - mining, development, hunting, and conversation efforts.

The events from the Malheur Occupancy seemed to stem from these kinds of frustrations.

Now here comes the part where I make people aware of my personal opinions and biases, because I believe its important to understand what I am trying to say. My biases lean towards environmentalism based in western scientific technique. This is because I have a passion for wildlife and a drive to protect it. So far, I have acquired most of my knowledge from institutes that teach the important of science - mostly from western sources, though I do hope to learn from other parts of the world as well. To be bluntly honest, I don’t give a darn about ranchers, especially in light of the historical impacts of grazing in the Western US - that being said, I do try to understand their position. I can understand the lure of working with animals and the outdoors. Its also important to understand that this kind of work requires a lot of time and a specific skillset. If you donate your time to mastering a career like this, odds are your haven’t mastered much else. You can’t afford to ‘just change jobs’. If you livestock or crop fails, you’re screwed financially. This is why some farmers just can’t risk going organic, or not expanding their fields. They can’t always consider the environmental impacts. A farmer/ranchers whole life is quite literally tied to the land they have to work on. This is why they feel so strongly about federal lands.

I really hate that sometimes it comes down to farmers versus wildlife. It shouldn’t be this tug-o-war, we should all be working together to do what’s best for the land that so many different people and animals have to use. Land managers have to consider farmers, wildlife, and public interest when planning lands for use. Each of us should also have consideration for each other.

The occupation of the facility costs approximately $6 million in damages and facility security. That is money that could have gone to wildlife projects. There was also the damages of mental trauma, emotional trauma, and damages of Burns-Paiute cultural artifacts desecrated.

The Malheur refuge was also working on an important Invasive Carp Control project. These fish, introduced from Eurasia, caused big problems for native fish, plants, and even birds. They are known for muddying water quality, which inhibits the functions of plants and fish.

"Carp are so hard to eradicate because they're the perfect invasive species," Beck said. "They're kind of like the feral pig of the waterway."

The project has gone on for many years with many different methods tested, from dynamite to robotics. Controlling invasive species is a time-sensitive operation. There are moments - spawning/migrating - that occur only a few weeks out of the year that are prime for removing large numbers of individuals. Work is also non-stop. Fish like carp are prolific breeders. A few days rest could result in a few hundred extra.

The occupancy of Malheur made the carp project and other work come to a total halt for months. This has ultimately set the projects back by decades.

In Oct. of 2016, the leaders of the standoff, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were Pardoned by the Trump Admin.

In regards to how this whole thing started, I sincerely can’t say whether who was in the wrong. The ranchers claimed to be practicing brush control by fire, but Federal investigation suspected the fires were set to hide evidence of poached deer. Whether it was in the right or not, the fires spread onto Refuge land, which put the farmers in violation. Burning private land for management purposes was legal in this case, but it is the manager’s responsibility to keep the fire under control. Fires should be kept low to the ground with bounders (roads, rivers) to prevent it from spreading. Wind direction should be constantly monitored, and there should be a small team of people at the ready in case the fire gets too big. There’s no evidence to suggest the group took the proper precautions.

While the street march and protect was entirely within the group’s rights, I believe the occupation of the Malheur refuge was unjustified. There was no reason for the protestors to be armed, and the individuals acts of desecrating the building, grounds, and cultural artifacts went well beyond what the group stated to be their original purpose. The occupancy had no regard for the safety of the workers or surrounding residents, and certainly no regard for the conservation work currently taking place.

The group wanted to protest the Federal authority over land they believed was theirs, and they did so by damaging the refuge and threatening the workers there.

I believe all action taken on lands should be done with environmental and ecological impacts considered, which was not the case in this instance.

Sources:

The NY Times

NPR

The Washington Post

Reuters

Fish and Wildlife Service

KGW8

The Oregonian - events timeline

#science #enviromentalism #history #nature #animals #national parks

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dandymeowth · 4 years

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Many of the landholders are newcomers from out of state, though some old-timers remain—families that earned their deeds generations ago, the principal paid by ancestors who shivered through pitiless winters in tar-paper shacks. Wilson has been hiking and hunting the Crazies since he was a little kid, but only in the past year or so, he says, have the private ranchers seemed more like obstacles than neighbors. “They could shut down pretty much the whole interior of the Crazy Mountains, as far as I can see,” he says.

He trudges up a rooty slope and, after a blind bend, sees something straddling the trail that stops him cold. It’s a padlocked metal gate. He hiked this trail a couple of weeks before, and the fence wasn’t there. A sign on it reads, “Private Property: No Forest Service Access, No Trespassing.” It’s exactly the kind of sign he’d been bad-mouthing a few minutes earlier, but he wasn’t expecting to see one here. The locked gate feels like an escalation, a new weapon in an improvised war.

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A debate is taking place across the country over preserving land for recreational public use, but most of the attention is focused on vast swaths of historically or scientifically significant terrain that Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush protected under the national monument designation—for example, Bears Ears in Utah and Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine. These disputed trails leading into the Crazy Mountains represent another front in the escalating battle over control of federal territory, and the fighting here is just as contentious as over the monuments. Historic settlement patterns in the American West created a checkerboard pattern of landownership: Public properties are often broken-up plots, resulting in numerous access disputes. According to a 2013 study by the Center for Western Priorities, that dynamic has effectively locked the public out of about 4 million acres of land in Western states; almost half of that blocked public land, or about 2 million acres, is in Montana, according to the study. The push to end public thoroughfare is either an overdue reassertion of private property rights or an openly cynical land snatch, depending which side of the gate you’re standing on.

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In late October 2-16, in the dying days of the Obama era, a U.S. district judge issued a verdict that seemed to set a precedent for paths like this one. The Texas-based owners of a Montana property called Wonder Ranch, about 100 miles southeast of the Crazy Mountains, had sued the Forest Service after the government filed a statement of interest claiming an easement—a legal agreement to use a portion of someone’s land for a specific purpose—on a trail that ran across the ranch’s property before reaching the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The Forest Service said the trail had been routinely used as an access route to the forest by the government and the public for decades, and therefore it should be considered public because of historical use. The owners’ suit argued that the government had no right to an easement. The Department of Justice countersued, producing evidence dating back more than a century showing that the public and the government consistently used the trail for packhorses and hike-ins. The Forest Service won the case.

Had the landowners been able to show that the trail had been used for at least five consecutive years only by those who’d received their permission, their claims of private control might have held. That helps explain why Alex Sienkiewicz, the forest ranger overseeing the district that includes the Crazy Mountains, every year sends an email to his staff reminding them never to ask landowners’ permission to use trails that the government already considers public. “By asking permission,” he wrote in 2016’s reminder, “one undermines the public access rights and plays into their lawyers’ trap of establishing a history of permissive access.” That didn’t mean anyone could veer off the trail and slip onto the private property—that’s trespassing, no question about it—it just meant the trail itself should be considered a public throughway.

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For a while, it seemed that attitude might be one of the rare Obama positions that President Donald Trump could live with. In a pre-election interview, Trump told the magazine Field & Stream he didn’t like the idea of transferring the land to the states, suggesting such transfers could erode public oversight of them: “I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do,” he said. “I mean, are they going to sell if they get into a little bit of trouble? And I don’t think it’s something that should be sold. We have to be great stewards of this land. This is magnificent land.”

Public land advocates smelled a contradiction, since the new president was positioning himself elsewhere as a champion of private property rights. And regardless of what he said, Trump’s campaign had tapped into a very deep well of antigovernment sentiment, the sort that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy appealed to when he occupied public territories and led armed standoffs against federal agents in 2014 and again in 2016. The co-chair of a state group called Veterans for Trump pleaded guilty to helping organize the ad hoc rebel militia, and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, has been one of Bundy’s most vocal supporters. Immediately after the election, whether or not the results had anything to do with their actions, the Crazy Mountains landowners launched a collective blitz to take control of the trails leading to Forest Service property.

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Gregoire decided to go for it. When the trail veered through a private plot called the Hailstone Ranch, he spotted a No Trespassing sign that read, “The Forest Service Has No Easement Here.” He ignored it, consulting his GPS to make sure he never strayed from the path onto the private ranch land. The landowner somehow detected that he was using the trail (“I think he had an alarm or something,” Gregoire later speculated) and called a sheriff’s deputy, who was waiting for Gregoire to return at the end of the day. The deputy charged him with criminal trespassing.

Shortly after that, the owners of nine ranches neighboring the Hailstone went after Sienkiewicz. Back on July 20, 2017, a volunteer at Public Land/Water Access Association Inc., a Montana nonprofit that supports open public access to federal lands and waterways, had gotten hold of, then posted on its Facebook page, Sienkiewicz’s most recent annual email reminder to his staff advising them never to sign visitor logs for trail access or ask permission. The property owners apparently assumed that Sienkiewicz had posted the item himself—proof that he was behaving as a political activist, not a public servant. The ranch owners sent a letter to U.S. Senator Steve Daines, a Republican representing Montana, saying in part, “As a direct result of this inflammatory Facebook post, we have many questions about the FS position regarding access across our private property.” Several of the ranchers who signed the letter have also been listed as contributors to Daines’s political campaigns in the past five years.

In May 2017, Daines echoed the landowners’ complaints—and forwarded a screen shot of the Facebook post—in a letter to Thomas Tidwell, then the chief of the Forest Service, and to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose agency oversees the Forest Service. Less than two weeks later, Representative Pete Sessions (R-Texas) got involved, firing off a similar complaint to Perdue and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has a long history in Montana. An avid hunter and fisherman, he was born in Bozeman, about 40 miles from the Crazies. He was also a Montana congressman, filling the seat Daines had occupied before he moved to the Senate. (At least one of the ranchers donated to Zinke’s campaign.)

In his letter, Sessions described the Forest Service’s approach to public access as part of “the war on private property owners conducted by the Obama administration.” The Wonder Ranch owners hadn’t been among the nine who signed the initial letter, but they were the link that got Sessions involved. One of the co-owners, a Texan named Chris Hudson, lives in Sessions’ district, and Sessions proposed that Hudson and Perdue meet. Sessions also recommended that the Forest Service issue a nationwide directive to prevent rangers or individual districts from declaring paths and roads public based on historic use.

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Defenders of Sienkiewicz and Gregoire—a group that included land access advocates, proprietors of recreation businesses, wildlife groups, and individuals—cast the developments as evidence of an under-the-table assault on public lands that the Trump administration appeared to endorse, if not initiate. In spring 2017, Trump requested that Zinke’s Department of the Interior review national monuments, designated or enlarged since 1996, and possibly downsize them, a step he said could rectify what he considered a “massive federal land grab.” Several politicians from Utah, such as Orrin Hatch, Rob Bishop, and Jason Chaffetz, had led the downsizing push, and for years they’d been advocating turning such lands over to the states—the strategy Trump had earlier declared would result in a selloff to the highest bidder. The department eventually suggested downsizing six of the 27 monuments under review, but the ultimate fate of those lands and waters remains in limbo; the matter will go to Congress, and the conservationists have said they will fight the new boundaries in court.

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Anderson has carved out a field for himself in something called free-market environmentalism. Along with his job at PERC, he’s a professor emeritus at Montana State University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a libertarian-leaning think tank. In op-eds published across the country, he’s an evangelist for limited government and private property rights. He views many environmentalists with undisguised contempt, and they generally return the favor.

Like many nonprofits, PERC doesn’t disclose its funding sources, but Greenpeace International has posted records showing that they’ve included Exxon Mobil Corp. and the industrialists Charles and David Koch. Anderson probably wouldn’t worry too much about how that looks: He believes the private sector, in most cases, is a better steward of nature than the government.

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Quilici’s plan was seat-of-the-pants. He thought he might spend three or four days hiking to an exit point on the far side of the mountains, but he didn’t realize that the most direct trail was blocked by the gate Wilson had confronted. Other possible paths were also contested. When I told him this, he redirected his criticism away from the parking lot and toward the landowners. “I bet they have some lobbying power,” he said. “They just want to keep everything like it’s their own private reserve.”

Herein lies the big challenge for the landowners and their defenders: Survey after survey has shown that the public hates the idea that someone can lock taxpayers out of public land, and that they’re suspicious of transferring control of such tracts to private enterprise. Nevertheless, Anderson and PERC deny that their position is out of step with public opinion, even casting it as pro-access. Their rationale is oblique: If the Forest Service insists the public has a right to use the trails, they say, private landowners will naturally rebel; numerous court battles will ensue, tying up the trails in years of litigation and costing the government millions of dollars. And as the cases proceed, the landowners will take steps to secure their property rights, blocking traffic on the trails until the mess is sorted out.

“In the places where now there are signs,” Anderson predicts, “you’ll see a locked gate.” His comment is an informed one. He counts several of the landowners involved in the Crazy Mountains disputes as friends, including the owners of the Rein Anchor Outfitting and Ranch, who operate a hunting lodge and signed the letter against Sienkiewicz. PERC’s affiliation with politically connected outfitters that stand to profit if trails are closed bolsters the sense, to Wilson and others confronting locked gates, that a void in coherent policy about public land management is being filled by cronyism that rewards wealth and connections above all else. Another co-owner of the Wonder Ranch, Frank-Paul King, a friend and former student of Anderson’s, served on PERC’s board. Hudson, the man who got Representative Sessions involved, is King’s brother-in-law, and he’s also a board member and the former president of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that made national headlines in 2014 when it auctioned off a trip to Africa to hunt an endangered rhinoceros. (The winning bidder, who paid $350,000, traveled to Namibia and shot a black rhino bull, an animal the club said had threatened the rest of the herd.) The Dallas Safari Club has granted PERC funding for, among other things, a study on “private conservation in the public interest.”

In 2016 the Dallas Safari Club hosted a fundraiser featuring the big-game hunting enthusiast Donald Trump Jr. that netted $60,000 in campaign donations to the Republican National Committee. “The candidate’s family connection to hunting and its legacy gives DSC a huge opportunity to have the right people in place as advocates for our mission,” the club’s newsletter stated. After Trump was elected, Hudson was listed as an organizer for a post-inaugural fundraiser called “Opening Day 45,” which featured Eric and Donald Trump Jr. as co-chairs. It was canceled after TMZ published an early draft of the invitation in December 2016, promising personal access to President Trump, along with a multiday hunting excursion with his sons, to anyone who donated more than $500,000, sparking criticism that the sons planned to peddle access to their father.

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The trail access issue was extremely sensitive inside the Forest Service, she explained, and potentially costly, too. The Trump administration was proposing a 73 percent cut in the Forest Service’s capital improvement and maintenance budget and an 84 percent reduction, from $77 million to $12 million, in its trail program budget. The Wonder Ranch case, she observed, had cost the government “in the millions of dollars,” and it wasn’t over yet—the landowners were appealing the decision, and it now sat with an appellate judge. “I’m not saying we’re never going to go to court, but the Forest Service is going to be careful about when we go to court and make sure we’re going to court on cases we can win,” she said.

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The agency in mid-October announced it was giving Sienkiewicz his job back. But Gevock’s frustrations spoke to an unresolved question underlying all of the disputes: Who, exactly, is the Forest Service supposed to serve? On the agency’s website, former Director Thomas Tidwell wrote that its guiding principles were clearly established by Gifford Pinchot, the service’s founding chief, during the Gilded Age—“a time when the nation’s resources were being exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few,” Tidwell stated. “The national forests were based on a notion that was just the opposite—that these lands belong to everyone.”

The public access advocates say they’re not sure they trust the spirit of Pinchot’s original message has survived intact. The mixed signals coming from the Trump administration mean everything rests on how those sometimes conflicting messages are interpreted. Zinke has repeatedly insisted, without offering specifics, that he is pro-access, and on his first day in office he pledged to fight against the “dramatic decreases in access to public lands across the board” that he said were plaguing America. “It worries me to think about hunting and fishing becoming activities for the landowning elite,” he said.

But in July 2017, while public land advocates were protesting the Interior Department’s pending move to downsize the national monuments and hikers were cursing the new No Trespassing signs in the Crazies, Zinke traveled to Denver to speak at the annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. The group, a conservative lobbying coalition that helps lawmakers draft legislative proposals, has energetically pushed for the potential transfer of federal lands to the states. Whether Zinke’s speech clarified the government’s general, overarching philosophy on public-vs.-private control of lands that are currently federal, only members of the lobbying group can say for sure. Unlike several other speeches delivered at the conference, Zinke’s wasn’t transcribed or published, and it was closed to the general public.

#environmentalism #conservation #national parks #long post -#public lands #republicans #classism #capitalism #eat the rich

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trueconservativepundit · 7 years

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Bundy Ranch Update: Surveillance, Wiretapping, Bundy Threat Assessments, and a Hit List

By Lyle Rapacki

STAND OFF AT BUNKERVILLE:

The events associated with the stand-off in Bunkerville, Nevada in April of 2014, supporting the protection of sovereignty came seriously close to the U.S. Government agencies gathered there opening fire on their own citizens; yes, citizens of the United States. Among the citizens present and supporting a “cease and desist” against infringement upon…

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#“Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot”#Bundy Ranch mistrial #Bundy Ranch trial #Bundy Ranch trial laptop missing #Christian news #Dan Love Bundy Ranch #news #Politics #snipers at Bundy Ranch #the Bundy Ranch standoff #wiretapping at Bundy Ranch

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gehayi · 6 years

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In a press release, Donald Trump announced full pardons for Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond. The pair have long been the focus of right-wing extremists who rallied to their side, including Ammon and Ryan Bundy who organized their supporters to take over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. The standoff lasted roughly five weeks before the last of the supporters were convinced to lay down their weapons and surrender to the FBI.

Dwight and Steven Hammond have a history of arson in Oregon, setting fires to nearby properties to allegedly help their own ranch, despite being repeatedly warned against such action by Bureau of Land Management firefighters and law enforcement. They are known to have started at least five major fires in Oregon: the Hardie-Hammond fire in 2001 (which was set to cover an illegal deer slaughter and endangered three hunters in the area); the Fir Creek fire in 2005; the Krumbo Butte fire in 2006; the Lower Bridge Creek fire in 2006, and the Grandad fire of 2006. The Hammond’s claimed they were ��controlled fires,” but they most certainly were not and in the case of the 2006 Krumbo Butte fire, Steve Hammond ordered his nephew, Dusty, to start a fire that Dusty barely escaped. Making matters even worse, four Bureau of Land Management firefighters were trapped in the raging wildfire, also barely escaping with their lives. Their testimony and eventual pleas prove they knew everything they were doing was dangerous and illegal. From Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2012:

“Light the whole countryside on fire,” Dusty said his uncle told him. “I started lighting matches.”

Afterwards, he said, over lunch his grandfather and uncle instructed him to “keep my mouth shut; nobody needed to know anything about the fire.”

Despite the threats, Dusty ended up testifying against his uncle and his grandfather, who were also violently abusive to the teen. In 2004, Dusty used a paper clip to scratch his initials into his chest, upsetting his grandparents who had custody of Dusty. They called in Uncle Steve, who said raising kids was similar to raising cattle or dogs, to discipline the boy and Steve cruelly used sandpaper to sand off the initials on the boy's chest.

From abuse investigation in 2004:

The report continues, “Dusty stated that Steve told him that he was not going to let Dusty deface the family by carving on himself. Dusty stated that Steve then took him and began to sand the initials off his chest… Steve sanded on each side of his chest for at least five minutes… Steve used a very coarse sandpaper to sand off the initials.”

The report goes on, “Dusty told me that the process was very painful, but that he did not cry because he knew that Steve would continue the process for a longer period of time.”

Steve vowed to “filet” the initials off if the sanding didn’t do the trick. That wasn’t the only documented abuse.

The report describes Steve as 35 years old, 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds. The report says that when Dusty was caught with alcohol, Steve had driven him at least 10 miles from the ranch “and made Dusty walk back.”

The report further states that when Dusty was caught with tobacco, “Steve made him eat two cans of Skoal Smokeless tobacco, then again drove him 10 miles from the ranch and made him walk back.”

In 2012, a jury found the Hammonds guilty of starting two fires. In 2015 they were finally sentenced to five years in federal prison and ordered to pay the $400,000 in restitution. Their conviction and sentencing became a flash point for anti-government extremists and the Bundy family in particular. Fresh of their consequence-free armed standoff in Nevada, brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy led the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, demanding the Hammonds be freed from prison. Militia types from all over the country brought their guns and supplies to hole up in the federally managed wildlife facility for roughly five weeks. The takeover came to a close after standoff leaders were ambushed by the FBI and Oregon State Police as they sought to meet with a nearby sheriff who was friendly to their cause. Standoff leader and noted fierce anti-government advocate LaVoy Finicum was killed by police fire after he jumped out of his vehicle and tried to pull his gun on law enforcement.

Like the pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, another militia favorite, Donald Trump is sending clear signals to armed right-wing extremists that he is with them and you better believe if Donald Trump faces federal charges himself, he will demand, and likely receive, their support. This pardon might be one of the most terrifying moves Trump has made to date. He is very, very clearly angling for loyalty from these heavily armed extremists. Look at the absolutely bonkers language issued by the White House announcing the pardons.

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., and his son, Steven Hammond. The Hammonds are multi-generation cattle ranchers in Oregon imprisoned in connection with a fire that leaked onto a small portion of neighboring public grazing land. The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges.

At the Hammonds’ original sentencing, the judge noted that they are respected in the community and that imposing the mandatory minimum, 5-year prison sentence would “shock the conscience” and be “grossly disproportionate to the severity” of their conduct. As a result, the judge imposed significantly lesser sentences. The previous administration, however, filed an overzealous appeal that resulted in the Hammonds being sentenced to five years in prison. This was unjust.

Dwight Hammond is now 76 years old and has served approximately three years in prison. Steven Hammond is 49 and has served approximately four years in prison. They have also paid $400,000 to the United States to settle a related civil suit. The Hammonds are devoted family men, respected contributors to their local community, and have widespread support from their neighbors, local law enforcement, and farmers and ranchers across the West. Justice is overdue for Dwight and Steven Hammond, both of whom are entirely deserving of these Grants of Executive Clemency.

There is only one reason for Donald Trump to pardon Dwight and Steve Hammond: he is doing so to gain the loyalty and support of hardened anti-government extremists and militias. This should frighten each and every one of us.

#the trump administration #a presidential pardon for CHILD ABUSE #and serial arson #what the fuck is wrong with you?

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