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an 10 24

Revealed: Bundy collaborator fueled FEMA conspiracy in Hurricane Helene aftermath

Clockwise from upper right: Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox, Pete Santilli, Jon Ritzheimer, Ryan Payne, Joe O'Shaughnessy

Jordan GreenandRaw StoryOctober 14, 2024

Only 30 minutes after billionaire Elon Musk began publicly accusing the federal government of blocking his company from delivering the satellite internet components to the disaster zone in western North Carolina, another extraordinary claim popped up on X.

“NC State Police issue statement that they will start arresting any federal employees trying to hinder rescue operations,” an Arizona man named Joseph O’Shaughnessy wrote on X Oct. 4.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, quickly disputed the claim from Musk, who owns both SpaceX and the social media platform X and would speak at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa. the following day. But O’Shaughnessy’s claim piggy-backing off Musk's post added a new layer to manufactured intrigue: a potential clash between state and federal authorities in a region traumatized by the staggering loss.

The statement is completely false, and it comes from someone with a history of armed confrontation with the FBI and other federal agencies. O’Shaughnessy served prison time for his role in the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and was also charged in the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014.

Prior to his involvement in the Bundy ranch standoff, O’Shaughnessy had been arrested for disorderly conduct, domestic violence and drugs, according to federal prosecutors.

“If you tie back to this guy, you’ll see that nothing reliable comes from that guy,” First Sgt. Christopher Knox, a public information officer for the N.C. State Highway Patrol, told Raw Story. “That’s not a trusted source of information. That information is not true in any way, shape or form.”

Knox pointed out that North Carolina doesn’t even have an agency called “NC State Police.” The claim is even more dubious if one considers that State Highway Patrol in North Carolina is under the command of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, an ally of Vice President Kamala Harris. From a purely partisan standpoint, it is unlikely the two agencies would end up in an adversarial position with one another.

O'Shaughnessy responded to an inquiry from Raw Story by sending an AI-generated GIF of Trump dancing through a direct message on X.

While O’Shaughnessy’s post was quickly shot down by X users who pointed out that no such agency exists in North Carolina, it landed within a matrix of false claims by Trump allies that has created a mutually reinforced narrative, belied by the facts on the ground, that the federal government is abandoning the people of western North Carolina.

O’Shaughnessy’s post was reshared 18,000 times, including Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories despite a professional background that requires an ability to separate fact from fantasy astutely.

Before joining the Trump administration, Flynn held the highest military intelligence position as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, re-shared O’Shaughnessy’s post, writing: “Finally, some good news!”

Flynn, who has persistently used his X account to push apocalyptic messages about the impending breakup of the United States, has also pushed misinformation related to the disaster. During an Oct. 4 interview with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Flynn said there were “reports” about “illegals” raping children, while describing the flood-ravaged region as a “warzone.”

Flynn also could not be reached for comment for this story.

Johnson, who interviewed Flynn on his show, was recently employed by a media company alleged by federal prosecutors to be a front for a Russian influence operation. Johnson and other conservative influencers linked to the company have said they were victims of the scheme. During his interview with Flynn on Oct. 4, Johnson echoed many of the same themes as his guest during his opening monologue for the segment, claiming that the federal government has “chosen” immigrants over Trump supporters.

“Our federal government has left you to die in whatever small, inconsequential town that you come from because you are a Trump voter, because you support MAGA, because you are America first,” he said.

Flynn wasn’t the only one who greeted O’Shaughnessy’s bogus claim about a state law enforcement agency challenging the federal government.

Gianna Miceli, who co-hosts a podcast that promotes sovereign citizen ideology, enthused: “Now we have a jurisdiction war happening! What a great time for people to learn some lessons about who is the government and who is not.”

“Exactly,” O’Shaughnessy responded.

In another reply to O’Shaughnessy’s thread, Miceli falsely claimed: “FEMA is a private for-profit corporation. It is not government.”

O’Shaughnessy’s false claim that a state agency in North Carolina is threatening to arrest federal agents in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election fits a pattern with not only his involvement in the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff and 2016 Malheur occupation, but also the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Bundy ranch, Malheur occupation and Stop the Steal 2020

O’Shaughnessy was described in a federal indictment in response to the Bundy ranch standoff as a “mid-level leader and organizer of the conspiracy who, among other things: organized gunmen and other followers; led gunmen and other followers in the assault and extortion of federal law enforcement at the impound site; organized protection for members of the criminal enterprise; and organized armed patrols and security checkpoints.”

Similarly, federal prosecutors would later describe O’Shaughnessy as a “mid-level organizer” of the Malheur occupation. In a video interview during the occupation, according to the criminal complaint, O’Shaughnessy said: “I’m right now in the process of trying to set up a constitutional security protection force to make sure these federal agents and these law enforcement don’t just come in here like cowboys.”

O’Shaughnessy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to impede federal officers for his conduct during the Malheur occupation, but the government dismissed charges in the Bundy ranch case. O’Shaughnessy was sentenced to time served, and reportedly spent one year and nine months in custody for the two cases.

O’Shaughnessy has described Roger Stone, a political consultant and longtime confidant of Trump, as a “hero and a mentor.” Like Flynn, Stone was pivotal in mobilizing a pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Immediately following the 2020 election, Stone privately strategized with Flynn, the Washington Post reported.

O’Shaughnessy’s Instagram account shows that he was with Stone during a dinner in Florida with Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander in November 2020. Another post shows dated Dec. 11, 2020, the eve of the pro-Trump Jericho March rally in Washington, D.C. includes a photo that shows Stone drinking with InfoWars conspiracy trafficker Alex Jones.

It is unclear what, if anything, O’Shaughnessy discussed with Stone, Jones and Alexander when they met on those two occasions.

A false claim that evolved out of Elon Musk’s dustup with FEMA

In his false post about state law enforcement threatening to arrest their counterparts last week, O’Shaughnessy appears to have taken a cue from Nick Sortor, a right-wing videographer who spent the past week in the Asheville area delivering Starlink terminals while producing media assailing the federal government response to the disaster.

In an Oct. 3 X post, Sortor thanked Musk and SpaceX “for bringing us another truckload of Starlinks. A photo in the post shows an officer wearing a North Carolina State Highway Patrol uniform holding a box labeled “Starlink,” while a video shows police vehicles that appear to be providing an escort for Sortor down a winding mountain road.

The following day, Sortor replied to Musk’s post accusing FEMA of preventing his engineers from allowing him to deliver supplies. In his reply, Sortor appears to reference the State Highway Patrol, while using the same misnomer that O’Shaughnessy would later use.

“Let me know where the blockades are and we’ll have the NC State Police move them out of the way,” Sortor wrote. “Already did it once, which is one reason why we have an escort now. FEMA has zero jurisdiction.

“Trust me,” he added. “They’re not going to win this one.”

Twenty-four minutes later, O’Shaughnessy made his post claiming that the “NC State Police” were prepared to start arresting federal agents.

Challenged to substantiate his claim, O’Shaughnessy responded to one detractor by writing, “Calm down stranger danger, my boys were one of the 1st on-scene to bring aid…. I am the source.”

O’Shaughnessy didn’t identify his “boys” on the ground in North Carolina, but on Sunday he praised Sortor for delivering the Starlink terminals, writing, “And everyone, please follow @nicksortor. He’s the one who made it happen.”

Manufacturing a fake turf war between FEMA and state law enforcement doesn’t help the residents of western North Carolina, Christopher Knox, the State Highway Patrol spokesperson, told Raw Story. Instead of relying on dubious accounts on X, Knox recommended that people seek information about the recovery effort from trusted sources such as the NC Department of Public Safety.

“There’s a lot of people hurting and a lot of people looking for resources,” Knox said. “We hate that there’s stuff out there slowing the response. Getting people to the right sources is a big goal of the state of North Carolina.”

NOW READ: The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters

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U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva and committee member Rep. Katie Porter are investigating an alleged bribery scheme in which they believe a real estate developer donated to a super PAC aligned in support of former President Donald Trump in exchange for pardons for two other men.

The two Democrats wroteto Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Friday, calling on her department to release all documents related to the pardons of Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been convicted in 2012 of setting fires on public lands they had leased after illegally killing deer on the land.The two men were sentenced to five years in prison with time served in 2015, sparking right-wing protests including a 40-day armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Grijalva (Ariz.) and Porter (Calif.) believe real estate developer Mike Ingram—who was the subject of the Natural Resources Committee's first-ever criminal referral regarding another potential bribery case involving a clean water permit for one of his developments—secured the Hammonds' pardons in 2018 with a $10,000 donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.

According to the letter, Ingram's assistant emailed a Trump Interior Department official on May 25, 2018, attaching two articles arguing for the Hammonds to be pardoned. On July 1, a Republican lawmaker who supported the Hammonds tweeted that Trump was "seriously considering" pardoning them.

One day later, Ingram made his donation, and just over a week after that Trump announced he was pardoning the Hammonds.

"Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017-2018 nonpresidential election cycle," wrote Grijalva and Porter. "That donation was the subject of the committee's criminal referral regarding the Villages at Vigneto development [in Arizona]. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committeeon the same day or within just a few days that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram's favor."

"The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds' pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation," they added.

On social media, Porter noted that she and Grijalva uncovered the evidence of Ingram's alleged bribe "while investigating a possible $240,000 quid pro quo scheme between the Trump administration and a developer."

"We're requesting documents to help us get to the bottom of [the Ingram case]," Porter said. "I have zero tolerance for corruption."

ref 1 ltr

december 2, 2022 The Honorable Deb Haaland Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, D.C. 20240

Dear Secretary Haaland: On May 11, 2022, the House Committee on Natural Resources (Committee) presented evidence of likely bribery involving former U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary David Bernhardt and Villages at Vigneto developer Mike Ingram, in the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). 1 The Committee has now uncovered another potential incident of bribery involving Ingram and senior Trump administration officials through its review of documents obtained in that investigation. In 2012, ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson on federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). 2

According to DOJ, the Hammonds informed BLM that a fire they had started on Hammond's private property to burn off invasive species had inadvertently spread to public lands. However, witnesses, including a relative, later came forward and testified that Steven Hammond had instructed companions to drop lit matches on the ground, with the effect of destroying evidence that a Hammond hunting party had illegally slaughtered deer on the BLM lands. By law, arson on federal lands carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.3 The district court in the Hammonds’ case ordered sentences far below this requirement, citing Eighth Amendment concerns, but a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the illegal sentences and ordered the district court to resentence the Hammonds in compliance with the law.4 The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert,5 and on October 7, 2015, the district court imposed five-year prison terms on each of the Hammonds,...

p2

credit for time already served.6

On July 10, 2018, President Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency

(Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.7

Documents obtained in the Committee’s Vigneto investigation indicate that Mike Ingram used his unique

access to high-ranking Trump administration officials to advocate for these pardons. In an email dated

May 25, 2018, Mr. Ingram’s executive assistant sentBen Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for

External and Intergovernmental Affairs, two articles on the topic, including an op-ed arguing for pardons

for the Hammonds (see Attachment 1).

8

On Sunday, July 1, 2018, a vocal proponent for pardoning the Hammonds shared in a tweet that

“President Trump called me to say he is 'seriously considering' pardoning Dwight and Steven

Hammond.”9

This was the first public acknowledgement that a pardon was under consideration.10

On Monday, July 2, 2018, the next business day, the Federal Election Commission database shows that

Mr. Ingram made a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.11 The

America First Action, Inc. Super PAC describes itself as “dedicated to supporting President Trump | We

are the only Official Pro-Trump Super PAC.”12 On Tuesday, July 10, 2018, President Trump signed

Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.13

Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election

cycle.14 That donation was the subject of the Committee’s criminal referral regarding the Villages at

Vigneto development. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal

or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump

Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee on the same day or within just a few days that a

major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.All other donations from Ingram

during this election cycle were $5,400 or less.

House Rule X(1)(m) provides the Committee with jurisdiction over the subject matters within DOI’s

authority. The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns

about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.

notes

6 Department of Justice. (2015, October 7). Eastern Oregon Ranchers Convicted of Arson Resentenced to Five Years in Prison

[Press Release]. https://www.justice.gov/usao-or/pr/eastern-oregon-ranchers-convicted-arson-resentenced-five-years-prison

7

“Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

8 Attachment 1 is also included as Attachment 59 in the Committee's referral to the Department of Justice regarding the Villages

at Vigneto incident, available here: https://naturalresources house.gov/media/press-releases/chair-grijalva-rep-porter-referformer-interior-secretary-bernhardt-villages-at-vigneto-developer-to-justice-department-alleging-criminal-bribery

9 Walden, G. [repgregwalden]. (2018, July 1) Late Saturday afternoon, President Trump called me to say he is ‘seriously

considering’ pardoning Dwight and Steven Hammond. [Tweet]. Retrieved from

https://twitter.com/repgregwalden/status/1013455435502964738.

10 The Congressional Research Service (CRS) completed a search on November 9, 2022 for news reports that indicated the White

House was seriously considering a pardon for the Hammonds before July 2, 2018. They found none.

11 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

12 America First [AmericaFirstPAC]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Twitter. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from

https://twitter.com/AmericaFirstPAC

13 “Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

14 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

To assist the Committee’s investigation of this issue, please provide the following documents and

information as soon as possible, but no later than December 15, 2022:

  1. All documents and communications relating to Dwight or Steven Hammond between all

presidential appointees requiring the advice and consent of the Senate (PAS), presidential

appointees not requiring appointments (PA), noncareer Senior Executive Service (SES), or

Schedule C appointees at DOI or the Bureau of Land Management for any part of 2017 or 2018

and

a. Mike Ingram or Michael Ingram;

b. Any representative ofEl Dorado Holdings,including but not limited to ,

Michael (Mike) Reinbold, Jim Kenny, Dennis Krahn, Eric Hollensbe, Deb Bricker, Chris

Grogan, Linda Cheney, and June Prinz.

c. Any person representing the America First Action Inc. and America First Policies, Inc.

PACs, including but not limited to:

i. Brian O Walsh;

ii. Thomas O Hicks, Jr.;

iii. Roy W Bailey;

iv. Harold Hamm;

v. Jonathan T Proch;

vi. Joseph Ahearn;

vii. Erin Montgomery;

viii. Sean Spicer;

d. Any White House Office personnel;

e. Dwight Hammond;

f. Steven Hammond;

g. Anyone from Lawrence Matasar PC;

h. Anyone from Ransom & Blackman LLP; and

  1. All documents relating to a pardon for Dwight or Steven Hammond.

Please contact the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee staff at (202) 225-6065 with any questions

about this request. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Raúl M. Grijalva Katie Porter

Chair Chair

Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and

Investigations

Committee on Natural Resources

ref 2

12.02.22

Chair Grijalva, Rep. Porter Seek Documents on Another Incident of Potential Bribery under the Trump Administration

Washington, D.C. – House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter (D-Calif.) today sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland requesting documents regarding a second incident of potential bribery between senior officials in the Trump administration and real estate developer Mike Ingram. Previously, the lawmakers sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleging potential bribery regarding a Trump administration decision about Ingram’s proposed real estate development, the Villages at Vigneto in Benson, Arizona.

The full letter to DOI is available :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}:.

In their letter, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter describe evidence that Ingram, a businessman with unique access to high-ranking Trump administration officials, may have unduly influenced former President Trump’s decision to pardon convicted public lands arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond in exchange for a sizeable donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The letter lays out the following timeline of events:

Ingram’s only other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election cycle was the donation that triggered the Committee’s investigation into—and subsequent criminal referral about—the Villages at Vigneto development. As the letter points out, “The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.”

Background on the Villages at Vigneto Criminal Referral

On May 11, 2022, after a years-long investigation, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to DOJ outlining evidence of potential bribery between Trump administration officials, including then-DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, and Ingram regarding the Villages at Vigneto (Vigneto) real estate development.

The Committee’s investigation began in April 2019 when the Arizona Daily Star reported that Steve Spangle, a now-retired Field Supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Arizona office, claimed he was directed by a “high level politico” to reverse the agency’s decision about Vigneto in late 2017. Later reporting revealed that then–DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt was the “politico.”

The investigation found that—shortly after holding asecret breakfast meeting with Dep. Secretary Bernhardt—Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with him, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee. All of the donations occurred on or near Oct. 6, 2017, the same day that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.

Weeks later, on Oct. 26, 2017, Spangle officially reversed FWS’ decision on Vigneto, marking the final greenlight for the development.

Concurrent with standard practice, DOJ has not yet commented on whether they have pursued the investigation.

Press Contact

Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

202-225-6065 | cell: 202-740-4715

https://qz.com/603743/the-man-killed-in-an-fbi-shootout-in-oregon-was-a-rancher-and-foster-parent-to-50-boys/

In a shootout in the US state of Oregon yesterday evening (Jan. 26), the FBI confronted members a militant group that since early this month has occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Authorities took eight people into custody after the shootout, including group leader Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan, who was shot in the arm.

One man, Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, was killed in the exchange. Finicum, 55, was a rancher, foster parent, and frequent spokesperson for the militant group, according to Oregon Live.

8 22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_for_Constitutional_Freedom

citizens for Constitutional Freedom (C4CF), later also known as People for Constitutional Freedom (P4CF), was the name taken on January 4, 2016, by an armed private U.S. militia that occupied the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in the U.S. state of Oregon from January 2 to February 11, 2016.[1][2] The leader of the organization was Ammon Bundy,[1][3] son of Cliven D. Bundy, who engaged in a standoff with the federal government over grazing rights on federal land.[4][5]

Eight of its members, including Ammon Bundy, were arrested on January 26, 2016[6] while a ninth member, Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was shot and killed by law enforcement officers.[7][8] This was followed by a number of other arrests that eventually culminated in the end of the occupation.[2] A total of 27 people were charged under federal law with a variety of offenses, including a single count of felony conspiracy.[9][10][11] Their trials were scheduled to start on September 7, 2016, and February 14, 2017.[12][13]

During the occupation, the militia group claimed that the United States Constitution allows the federal government of the United States to own only a small amount of land, and that the government can acquire land in states only with the state's consent.[14] Such claims have been repeatedly rejected by federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court; the property clause of the United States Constitution grants plenary authority to Congress to manage federal property, including land.[15][16]

Known members[

Main articles: Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Timeline of the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

A total of at least 34 people from 13 states are known to have served roles in the group during the occupation. Some have had a history of criminal activity and prior involvement in right-wing activism.[17] They are:

Indicted[

Blaine Cooper, 2014

Jon Ritzheimer, pictured here in May 2015, was identified as one of the leaders of the militant occupation.

Others[

The following militants were reported as avoiding arrest and prosecution related to the occupation:

Motives for the occupation[

See also: Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge § Background

The motivation for the occupation was the control and use of federal lands, which the militants wanted transferred to private ownership or to Harney County, Oregon, control.[102][103][104][105] There is a long history of conflicting interests between different citizens on federal lands, specifically in this case between ranchers and environmentalists. Ranchers have a long history of using federal lands to graze livestock, which was unregulated until the enactment of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.[106] Overgrazing can damage or destroy habitats for the livestock themselves and for wildlife. Environmental restrictions like the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, intended to protect wildlife and the environment, have been increasing over time, placing a burden on ranchers or even putting them out of business. A specific, relevant example was the case of Cliven Bundy, the father of militant Ammon Bundy. In that case, the government determined that Bundy's cattle were damaging the habitat of the desert tortoise, an endangered species. He was subsequently ordered to greatly reduce the number of cattle on federal rangeland on which he had grazing rights, but Bundy refused and also stopped paying grazing fees. The government began removing the trespass cattle, resulting in the 2014 Bundy standoff. Similarities were drawn between the occupation and the Sagebrush Rebellion and wise use movements.[107]

Ammon and Ryan Bundy are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).[31][108] They and some of the other militants have cited the Mormon scripture as justification for defying government authority. After the occupation began, the LDS Church issued a statement, strongly condemning the seizure and that the armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.[108][109][110][111] Alex Beam describes the Bundys as "Mormon religious fanatics."[112]

Cliven Bundy has frequently made references to the Book of Mormon in his conflicts with the United States government for years. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), during the family's 2014 standoff, Bundy used banners quoting Captain Moroni: "In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children."[113] Ammon Bundy used much of the same language as his father, "mixing Mormon religious symbolism with a disgust of the federal government," according to OPB reporter John Sepulvado. One member of Ammon's militant group refused to give any other name to the press than "Captain Moroni, from Utah"[114] and was quoted as saying, "I didn't come here to shoot I came here to die."[115]

In an op-ed, Chris Zinda of The Independent, published in St. George, Utah, references a relevant work:

Many people do not know that Cliven Bundy, along with his former neighbor Keith Nay, self-published a book titled 'Nay Book' that is a combination of LDS theology and Skousen constitutional theory. Written in the late 1990s, it is the revelatory playbook that Cliven used in 2014 in Bunkerville and that his sons used in Malheur in 2016. It is a vivid example of how his 1950s–80s John Birch Society/Skousen indoctrination formulated his adulthood opinions that have since been passed on to his posterity and beyond.[116]

Before, during, or after the occupation, several militants and a few reported visitors to the refuge espoused connections or used language commonly used by the sovereign citizen movement. Also during the occupation, one visitor, a self-proclaimed judge from Colorado named Bruce Doucette, announced that a "citizens grand jury" would be convened, a common tactic of sovereign citizen groups.[117][118][119] Ryan Bundy's court filings have been noted to contain sovereign citizen rhetoric,[37] while Shawna Cox explicitly claimed to be a "sovereign citizen" in a filed countersuit.[120]

Criminal charges against militants[

As of March 23, 2016, 27 people involved in the occupation have been charged under federal law; of those, 26 have been indicted for a single federal felony count of conspiracy to impede officers of the U.S. from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.[10] A number of those under indictment on the conspiracy charge are also charged with a variety of other counts, some of which incur sentences up to life imprisonment, including possession of firearms and dangerous weapons in federal facilities, use and carry of firearms in relation to a crime of violence, depredation of government property (relating to damaging the site "by means of excavation and the use of heavy equipment"), and theft of government property.[121][122] In addition, several of those under indictment in Oregon have also been indicted separately for their roles in the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada.[123]

The indictees and their initial charges were: [table]

...

petiton to wear cowboy clothes?]

Trials[

Preparation[

The trials for Bundy and six other co-defendants was scheduled to start on September 7, 2016; while a further seven co-defendants were set for trial beginning February 14, 2017.[12][13][145] On August 3, about 1,500 potential jurors were summoned and asked to complete questionnaires that would be reviewed by the attorneys and parties involved in the September 7, 2016, trials.[194] Judge Brown previously said the case would require an unusually large jury pool.[12]

September 2016[

Jury selection for the first set of trials began on September 7, 2016. On that day, eleven of 31 potential jurors were excused for a variety of reasons, such as opinions regarding the occupation and also personal hardships.[195] By September 9, 2016, 62 people were identified as potential jurors.[196] Twelve jurors (consisting of eight women and four men) and eight alternates were selected by the end of the day. Opening statements were scheduled for September 13, 2016.[197]

On September 12, Jeff Banta, one of the defendants for the first set of trials, had to correct Judge Brown's accidental error in leaving out firearms charges while recounting the charges against him. He also said he traveled to the refuge on January 25 to help bring attention to the Hammond arson case, an issue raised by the militants during the occupation's first days. He added that he also wanted to work on the Hammond ranch while Dwight and Steven Hammond were still imprisoned.[198]

On September 13, opening statements were given, with a line of about a dozen people present outside the courthouse.[199][200] The prosecution argued that Ammon Bundy and the other militants were leading an armed occupation of the refuge and not a political protest. The defense argued that the militants were not intending to interfere with refuge activities, but to restore local control of lands in the Western United States, as they were frustrated by the federal government's grazing and water rights restrictions on public land.[199]

On September 14, Sheriff David Ward, who was the lead local law enforcement official during the occupation, was the first to testify against the militants.[199][201]

Sentencing[

On August 16, Corey Lequieu became the first defendant to be sentenced in the federal conspiracy case against the militants. Judge Brown sentenced him to two-and-a-half years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and also ordered him to pay restitution. Though the conspiracy charge carried a maximum of six years' imprisonment, his sentencing was recommended by prosecutors as part of the plea bargain deal he reached, and decided after the government considered the fact that Lequieu was the first militant to take responsibility.[128]

References

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_arson_case

...Cattle ranching in Harney County predates the 1908 establishment of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, with some cattle trails, including those used by the Hammond family, dating back to the 1870s. Disputes between cattle ranchers and the federal government over management of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have gone on for "generations" and the situation has regularly deteriorated to taunts and threats directed at federal officials from ranchers since at least the early 1970s.[11][12]

In an effort to address concerns of neighboring landowners and interests, the completion of a 15-year management plan for the refuge heavily involved various stakeholders, including ranchers, in its development process. The plan was completed in 2013 and won praise from some area ranchers for its collaborative approach.[13][14]

In June 1994, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge manager, Forrest Cameron, notified Dwight Hammond that his permit to graze his cattle and grow hay on the refuge was revoked. Two months later, Hammond and his son Steven obstructed the completion of a refuge boundary fence intended to keep their cattle out of the refuge's protected marsh and wetland, prompting their arrest by federal agents. The fence was needed to stop the Hammonds' cattle from moving onto the refuge after the ranchers had repeatedly violated the terms of their special permit, which limited those times when they could move their cattle across refuge property.[12][15]

Officials also reported that Dwight had made death threats against refuge managers in 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1994, stating, "he was going to tear his head off and shit down his neck,"and that Steven Hammond also made incendiary remarks against them, calling the employees and managers, "worthless cocksuckers" and "assholes." After the arrest, locals were given the names and phone numbers of refuge employees, and encouraged to harass them. One caller threatened to wrap the Camerons’ 12-year-old boy in a shroud of barbed wire and stuff him down a well. Other callers warned his mother that she ought to move out before something "bad" happened to her family. She gathered their four children, one wheelchair-bound, and fled to Bend, 135 miles west. 

The families of three other refuge employees received telephone threats after a meeting held in support of the Hammonds, where the workers' phone numbers were circulated. Businesses in Burns displayed signs warning, "This establishment doesn’t serve federal employees."Voters recalled a pair of Harney County commissioners because they wouldn’t put the county "supremacy" ordinance on the ballot or intervene against the refuge managers.[11][12][15] Oregon's then-Congressional District 2 U.S. Representative, Robert Freeman Smith, protested the arrests to President Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt.[12] In 1999 Steven started a fire, intending to burn off juniper trees and sagebrush, but the fire escaped onto BLM land. The agency reminded him of the required burn permit and that if the fires continued, there would be legal consequences.[16]

Arson prosecutions[

Both Dwight and Steven Hammond later set more fires, one in 2001 and one in 2006, that would lead to eventual convictions of arson on federal land:[17][18] The 2001 Hardie-Hammond fire began after hunters in the area witnessed the Hammonds illegally slaughtering a herd of deer.[19] Less than two hours later, a fire erupted, forcing the hunters to leave the area but also intending to conceal evidence of the deer herd slaughter.[20] Steven's nephew Dusty Hammond testified his uncle told him to "light the whole countryside on fire," and that he was "almost burned up in the fire," having to flee for his life.[16][21] The Hammonds claimed they started the fire to stop invasive plants from growing onto their grazing fields.[22]

The 2006 Krumbo Butte fire started out as a wildfire, but several illegal backburns were set by the Hammonds with an intent of protecting their winter feed. The backfires were set under the cover of night, without warning the firefighters they knew were camped on the slopes above.[20][23] The fires threatened to trap four BLM firefighters.One of those later confronted Dwight Hammond at the fire scene after he had moved his crews to avoid the danger.[20][21] Two days later, Steven Hammond threatened to frame a BLM employee with arson if he didn't terminate the investigation.[22] Following their release from jail on their own recognizance, a rally attended by 500 other cattle ranchers was held in Burns, Oregon in support of the Hammonds. Some charges against the Hammonds were later dropped.[11]

Mid-trial pre-sentencing agreement[

In 2012, the Hammonds were tried in federal district court on multiple charges. During a break in jury deliberations, a partial verdict was rendered finding the Hammonds not guilty on two of the charges, but convicting them on two counts of arson on federal land.[20] Striking a plea bargain, in order to have the four remaining charges dismissed and for sentences on the two convictions to run concurrently, the Hammonds waived their rights to appeal their convictions. This was with their knowledge that the trial would proceed to sentencing where the prosecution intended to seek imposition of the mandatory five-year minimum sentences.[20][24]

Sentencing hearing, appeals of the sentence, and re-sentencing[

At sentencing, the federal prosecutors requested the five-year mandatory minimum under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA).[23][25][26][27] U.S. District Judge Michael Robert Hogan independently decided that sentences of that length "would shock the conscience" and would violate the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. On his last day on the bench before retiring, October 31, 2012, Hogan instead sentenced Dwight Hammond to three months' imprisonment and Steven Hammond to a year and a day's imprisonment, which both men served.[28][29]

In what was described by one source as a "rare" action,[30] the government (represented by the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Oregon, led by U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall) successfully appealed the sentence to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It upheld the mandatory-minimum law, writing that "given the seriousness of arson, a five-year sentence is not grossly disproportionate to the offense." The appeals court vacated the original sentence and remanded the defendants for re-sentencing. The Hammonds filed petitions for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, which the court denied in March 2015.[22][25] In October 2015, Chief Judge Ann Aiken re-sentenced the pair to five years in prison (with credit for time served), ordering that they return to prison on January 4, 2016.[25][29]

Both of the Hammonds reported to Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island in California on January 4, as ordered by the court.[31] A few days earlier, the Hammonds also paid the federal government the remaining balance on a US $400,000 court order for restitution related to the arson fires.[23]

On January 25, it became known that Susan Hammond, the wife of Dwight Hammond, signed a document for participation in a so-called "citizen grand jury" and claimed that the paper would clear her husband of wrongdoing. The author of the paper was Joaquin Mariano DeMoreta-Folch, a Tea Party activist.[32] The self-styled "citizens grand jury" has no legal standing, but is rather linked to the fringesovereign citizen movement, a movement based upon conspiracy theories about the American government[33] which rejects federal authority.[34][35]

Aftermath of re-sentencing[

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ammon_Bundy_%2814722394872%29.jpg)

Bundy in 2014.

**After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Hammonds' appeal in March 2015,** the Hammonds' case returned to federal district court where they were re-sentenced to the statutory minimum of five years, with credit for time served.[29] Meanwhile, the Oregon Farm Bureau circulated a petition seeking clemency from President Barack Obama;[36] it had gathered more than 2,000 signatures by October 2015.[29] Also, the Oregon Cattleman's Association, a trade group representing cattle ranchers in Oregon, established a fund to defray the Hammond's legal fees.[37]

About this time, the Hammonds' case attracted the attention of Ammon Bundy—a former car fleet manager from Phoenix, Arizona;[38] and the son of anti-government protester Cliven D. Bundy, the central figure of a standoff with the BLM in 2014—and Ryan Payne. In November 2015, Bundy and his associates began publicizing the Hammonds' case via social media.[39][40]

Over the ensuing weeks, Bundy and Payne met for approximately eight hours with Harney County Sheriff David Ward to detail plans for what they described would be a peaceful protest in Burns, as well as also requesting the sheriff's office protect the Hammonds from being taken into custody by federal authorities. Though Ward said he sympathized with the Hammonds' plight, he declined Bundy and Payne's request. Ward then said that he subsequently received death threats by email. Unbeknownst to Ward, Bundy and Payne were simultaneously planning a takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. By late fall, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies had become aware that members of anti-government militias had started to relocate to Harney County, and the USFWS began circulating a photograph of Ammon Bundy with instructions for staff to "be on the lookout."[18][41][42]

Despite several early meetings with Bundy and Payne, the Hammonds eventually rejected their offers of assistance, with Hammond attorney W. Alan Schroeder writing that "neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond family."[2]

By early December 2015, Bundy and Payne had set up residence in Burns. The same month, they organized a meeting at the Harney County Fairgrounds to rally support for their efforts. At the meeting, a "committee of safety" was organized to orchestrate direct action against the Hammond sentences.[18] According to that group's website, the Harney County Committee of Safety considers itself "a governmental body established by the people in the absence of the ability of the existing government to provide for the needs and protection of civilized society"[43] (during the American Revolution, committees of safety were shadow governments organized to usurp authority from colonial administrators).[44]

2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge[

Main article: Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

On January 2, 2016, an armed group affiliated with the private U.S. militia movement held a peaceful march in protest of the Hammonds' prison sentences. Afterwards, several members of the group, consisting of Bundy, Payne, Jon Ritzheimer,[45] and armed associates separated from the protest crowd at some point during the day and proceeded to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, 30 miles (48 km) away. The militants settled into the refuge and set up defensive positions.[46][47] The Hammonds were convicted of arson on federal land,[48] sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and sought clemency from the U.S. president.[49]

Bundy said he began leading the occupation after receiving a divine message ordering him to do so.[50][51] The militant group demanded that the federal government of the United States cede ownership of the refuge,[52] and expressed willingness to engage in armed conflict.[53] For a time, the government and police did not engage directly with the militia.[54]

Dwight and Steven Hammond disavowed the occupation of the refuge.[55] They voluntarily reported to begin serving the remainder of their respective prison sentences.[56]

On January 26, Bundy and four other militants were arrested on U.S. Route 395 about 48 miles (77 km) north of the occupation. One militant was lightly wounded during the arrest,[57] and another, Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, was shot and killed by law enforcement officers while he was reportedly reaching for his gun.[58][59] Several other arrests followed,[60][61][62] and on February 11, the occupation ended when the last four militants surrendered to police.[63] A total of 26 people, including Bundy and Payne, were charged under federal law with a single count of felony conspiracy, though more charges may be brought in due course.[64][65]

On October 27, 2016, Bundy and 6 other defendants were acquitted in Federal District Court of all charges of conspiracy and weapons violations. In August 2017, two other defendants were acquitted in Las Vegas district court on most charges, and deadlocked on the remaining charges. On January 8, 2018, a federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed all charges against Clive Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan. Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.[66][67][68]

Presidential pardons[

On June 27, 2018, Oregon's 2nd Congressional District Representative Greg Walden spoke on the House floor, requesting presidential pardons for both Steven and Dwight Hammond. On July 1, 2018, he said he spoke to the president about the case. He remarked that the original trial's federal Judge Michael Robert Hogan said that conferring the mandatory sentence would, "...shock the conscience." The pair had pleaded guilty in a plea bargain after being convicted at trial on two charges, and acquitted on two others, with four charges remaining on which the jury had not come to a unanimous verdict. On July 1, Walden stated that President Donald Trump to whom he had spoken, was considering pardoning the Hammonds.[69] Stephen had been scheduled to be released on June 29, 2019, and Dwight on February 13, 2020.[70]

On July 10, 2018, Trump issued pardons for both men.[4] A release from the White House press office stated, "The Hammonds are...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 (sic) of the charges." According to his spokesperson Sarah Sanders, who read the statement, "The previous administration, however, filed an overzealous appeal that resulted in the Hammonds being sentenced to five years in prison."[4][71]

See also[

References

...

no lnx pix

https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/bidens-interior-dept-rescinds-grazing-rights-from-hammonds/

Biden’s Interior Dept rescinds grazing rights from Hammonds

by: The Associated Press

Updated: Feb 26, 2021

The Hammonds were at the center of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A senior adviser in the U.S. Department of Interior on Friday rescinded a January Trump administration decision to grant grazing allotments to an Oregon ranching family whose members were convicted of arson in a court battle that triggered the takeover of a federal wildlife refuge by right-wing extremists.

The new memo from the Interior secretary’s office found that the Trump administration hadn’t allowed for sufficient time to receive and consider public challenges to the permit for Hammond Ranches Inc. It directed the Bureau of Land Management to further consider the matter.

Trump gives permit to ranchers whose case led to occupation

The Oregonian/OregonLive reports the latest action came just days before the cattle were expected to be turned out on public lands neighboring the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon.

Steven Hammond, co-owner of the ranch, and his father, Dwight, were both convicted of arson for setting fire to range land and sent to prison for mandatory five-year sentences.

That led to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 41 days in 2016. One occupier was shot dead by Oregon State Police. They say he reached for a pistol at a roadblock.

The Constitution and the armed protest in Malheur

President Donald Trump pardoned the Hammonds in 2018, allowing them to be freed from prison. In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, the BLM denied Hammond Ranches a grazing permit renewal, saying it “does not have a satisfactory record of performance” and cited numerous incidents of arson.

FILE – In this July 11, 2018, file photo, rancher Dwight Hammond Jr., left, is embraced by his wife, Susie Hammond, after arriving by private jet at the Burns Municipal Airport in Burns, Ore. Hammond and his son Steven, convicted of intentionally setting fires on public land in Oregon, were pardoned by President Donald Trump. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian via AP, File)

W. Alan Schroeder, the attorney representing Hammond Ranches, declined comment to The Oregonian/OregonLive on Friday’s development.

Four environmental advocacy groups on Thursday sued the Interior secretary and BLM, saying last month’s permit approval on the final day of the Trump administration was “tainted by political influence” and that a “rushed and truncated public process” cut out opportunities for the public participation required by law.

1/21 OPB

eastern Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond’s imprisonment sparked the armed takeover and 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

Environmental groups have vowed to protest a Bureau of Land Management proposal to reissue grazing permits to Eastern Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond. The men’s imprisonment sparked the armed takeover and occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge five years ago this month.

The permit would allow Hammond Ranches Inc. to graze livestock on thousands of acres of public land near Burns. The BLM’s proposal argues that the Hammonds have historically complied with past grazing permits, despite repeated violations that demonstrate otherwise.

“The problem is that the finding is false, and it’s counter to what is known based on the BLM’s own records,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, an environmental watchdog.

“Not only did Hammond Ranches Inc. violate the terms of their grazing permits, they did so in such a flagrant way that the principals went to prison,” he said.

A jury convicted Dwight Hammond and his son Steven of arson in 2012 for fires set on federal land more than a decade earlier. The mandatory minimum sentence for their crimes was five years in prison, but the trial judge gave Dwight Hammond three months and Steven Hammond one year. The men served the time and were released.

the U.S. Department of Justice successfully appealed the initial sentencing decision, which then required the Hammonds to return to prison to serve out the full five-year minimum. The men’s reimprisonment inspired protests that led to the armed takeover and 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County.

President Donald Trump pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond in 2018 after they had served roughly three and four years in prison, respectively.

The BLM then in 2019 attempted to reinstate the family’s grazing permits. The Western Watersheds Project led a federal lawsuit challenging the agency’s actions.

A district court judge blocked the BLM’s decision, saying denial of a federal grazing permit would not excessively harm the Hammond family’s business. The judge also said federal authorities needed to further evaluate the family’s history as stewards of the land before issuing grazing permits.

The agency’s proposed decision now asserts the Hammonds are in good standing and compliance with past permits. The BLM cites the Hammonds’ “extensive historic use of these allotments, past proper use of rangeland resources,a high level of general need.” The agency’s announcement came on New Year’s Eve.

Molvar said his group expects the Trump administration to approve the permits before the president leaves office. If so, the Western Watersheds Project will again consider legal action.

Attempts to reach Hammond Ranches Inc. and the BLM were unsuccessful.

Members of the public can submit comments on the proposed decision in person, in writing or by email until Jan. 15.

https://www.opb.org/article/2021/01/20/hammond-family-grazing-permit/

U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday issued a grazing permit and privilege to two Eastern Oregon ranchers whose imprisonment sparked the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.

With the stroke of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s pen, restoring Dwight and Steven Hammond’s grazing permit is one of the final acts of the outgoing Trump administration. The permit lasts for 10 years.

The Hammonds had their grazing permit revoked after a jury convicted them in 2012 for arson on public lands a decade earlier.

The men went to prison, served time and were released, but the U.S. Department of Justice later ordered them back to prison to finish the mandatory minimum five-year sentence.

that decision inspired protests in Burns, Ore., that devolved into a 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur refuge. A jury later acquitted leaders of the takeover, including brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy.

Then-President Donald Trump pardoned the Hammonds two years later.

The BLM proposed restoring the family’s permit on New Year’s Eve 2020.

The family’s lawyer sent the following statement via email:

“The Hammond family wishes to extend their sincerest appreciation and thanks to the many individuals and organizations who have supported them, their livelihood and the agricultural industry as a whole. They look forward to helping manage the natural resources in a responsible and productive manner. Everyone’s efforts have truly been a blessing.”

Before issuing a permit like the one awarded to the Hammonds, the Bureau of Land Management must evaluate several factors, including whether the applicants have been good stewards of the land and have complied with past grazing permits.

Environmental groups have opposed the reissuance of those permits, saying the arson conviction and previous revocation of grazing permits indicates the family is, in fact, not in good standing with the federal government.

“It’s corruption, down to the fact that they raced through the weekend to get this rubber-stamped before the inauguration,” said Paul Ruprecht, Nevada-Oregon director for the Western Watersheds Project, in a press release.

pardoned by Trump, Oregon ranchers ride home in style on Pence ally’s private jet

BY MATT PEARCESTAFF WRITER 

JULY 12, 2018

A day earlier, ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were prisoners at the minimum-security federal prison on Terminal Island in San Pedro, serving five-year sentences for arson.

But on Wednesday, following a Tuesday pardon by President Trump, the father-and-son pair got to fly home in style to Burns, Ore., on an oil company’s private jet, riding alongside the company’s founder, Forrest Lucas — who used his relationship with Vice President Mike Pence to help secure the Hammonds’ release.

With the massive amounts of pardon requests the federal government receives every year, “It takes talking to someone to be able to get it done, and that’s what happened here,” said David Duquette, national strategic planner for Protect the Harvest, Lucas’ nonprofit advocacy group for ranchers and farmers.

Pence was “very instrumental in helping to get this to the front and getting it out there” for a pardon by Trump, Duquette said.

The Hammonds, who own a ranch in remote eastern Oregon, had been convicted of arson for setting fires that burned federally owned land. Their five-year mandatory minimum sentence drew criticism from ranchers’ groups who have been critical of the government’s stewardship of the nation’s expansive federal lands.

the Hammonds’ case captured national attention after an armed group of antigovernment activists protested their prison sentences by seizing the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 41 days in 2016. Public-lands advocates have criticized Trump’s pardon as a tacit approval of the occupation.

The Hammonds’ ride home with Lucas — whose company owns the naming rights to the Indianapolis Colts’ NFL playing field, Lucas Oil Stadium — illustrates the depth of the lobbying effort that helped secure clemency for the ranchers.

Lucas had taken an interest in the Hammonds after they were sentenced and imprisoned in 2015, and he broached the issue with Pence before the 2016 election, when Pence was still governor of Indiana, according to Duquette, who said Lucas wasn’t available for an interview Thursday.

Lucas, a fellow Indiana native, is a generous donor to Republican candidates, including to Pence, who received at least $50,000 from Lucas and his wife when Pence was running for governor of Indiana.

Lucas also gave Pence two tickets worth $774 to attend a Colts game in 2017 that Pence abruptly left after players on the opposing team kneeled during the national anthem. Lucas was also rumored to be a top choice to become Interior secretary by Trump’s transition team, which was led by Pence.

In the political world, Lucas is also known for his battles against animal-rights advocates, founding the Protect the Harvest activist group.

Protect the Harvest, like other ranching advocacy groups, pressed public officials for the Hammonds’ release. Lawyers for the Hammonds had filed a clemency request with the government during the Obama administration, but only heard back silence.

With Trump’s election, and his increasingly confident use of his presidential pardon powers, the Hammonds’ supporters grew hopeful. Trump “has been very vocal, even publicly on TV, asking for more cases like this, where people know that there was a major injustice [WHITE GREIVANCE? COWBOYS? ]and they need to look at it,” Duquette said.

The Hammonds’ advocates also reached out to Oregon’s congressional delegation. They found little support among the state’s elected Democrats but managed to secure help from the state’s lone Republican congressman, Greg Walden, according to Lawrence Matasar, a Portland attorney who represented the Hammonds at trial and helped file the clemency petition.

“He was very helpful. He said he’d take a look,” Matasar said. “What really happened? I don’t know. It was a black box to me. From what I heard, Walden reached out to Pence.”

Two weeks ago, Walden gave a speech on the House floor calling for Trump to pardon the ranchers, and on July 1, Walden wrote in a Facebook post that the president had called him to say he was “seriously considering” clemency.

Pence’s office did not immediately respond for comment, and the Hammonds could not be reached for comment.

The former U.S. Attorney for Oregon who handled the case, Amanda Marshall, said in an interview earlier this week that the pardon was a “slap in the face” to the jurors who found the ranchers guilty, adding, “There’s no place for favoritism in law enforcement, but that’s exactly what this comes down to in the Trump administration.”

:{matt.pearce@latimes.com:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

Matt Pearce is a national reporter for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce.

https://www:{.buzzfeed:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:news.com/article/annehelenpetersen/forrest-lucas-hammond-pardon-bundy-trump-pence#.syD8RwE3w

no lnx many pix

the last call Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. made before heading to federal prison on two counts of arson in 2016 was to a man he hardly knew. Forrest Lucas, who made his fortune on oil engine additives, promised Hammond that he would do whatever he could to get him and his son, Steven, out of prison.

Early Tuesday morning aboard Air Force One, en route to the NATO summit, President Donald Trump signed an official clemency order pardoning the two men. Lucas — a 76-year-old Indiana self-made millionaire with tight ties to the Trump administration — had fulfilled his pledge.

For nearly two decades, the Hammonds had been engaged in skirmishes with the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that functions as a go-between for ranchers and the federal land they lease for grazing. They pushed back, often threateningly, on regulations regarding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which bordered the Hammonds’ grazing allotment, and they set unpermitted fires on BLM land. After a second fire in 2006, the pair were charged with 19 different crimes, but eventually arranged a plea deal for just two charges of arson on federal land, which carried a minimum of a five-year sentence. The judge declared that such lengthy jail time qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, instead sentencing Dwight to three months and Steven to one year and one day. The pair served their time and returned home. But the federal government successfully appealed the sentence, and on Jan. 4, 2016, the Hammonds were ordered to return to prison.

[US Department of Justice

Steven Hammond (left) and his father, Dwight Hammond, after their arrest.

The verdict brought Ammon and Ryan Bundy — who, along with their father, Cliven, had been involved in an armed confrontation with BLM officials over the management of their grazing allotment in Nevada — to Eastern Oregon. On Jan. 2, Ammon led several hundred people on a peaceful march through Burns, Oregon, in support of the Hammonds. At the end of the march, he made a declaration: Whoever wanted to take a “hard stand” against the government should follow him — thus launching what would become the 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

The Hammonds, however, weren’t there. Nor did they condone what the Bundys and others had done in their name. When the occupation began, they were back on their ranch with Dave Duquette, Lucas’s close associate.When the Hammonds flew back to a hero’s welcome in Burns, Oregon, it was aboard Lucas’s private jet. Lucas, whose company, Lucas Oil, currently holds naming rights for the Indianapolis Colts’ stadium, has made a pro-agriculture, anti-regulation agenda his mission over the past eight years — and had decided that the Hammonds fit into his larger master plan.

To achieve his goals, Lucas has used a nonprofit he founded, Protect the Harvest — devoted to “working to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own pets” — as well as his close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose top adviser is a former employee of Lucas’s. As Duquette puts it, “the access is very good.”

“Most people wouldn’t get involved,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News in early June. “But thank god for Forrest Lucas, because he’s been willing to take on the hard issues.” Among those hard issues: fighting environmental activists, pushing back against regulation, and protecting farmers and ranchers from what they see as federal overreach. That’s why Lucas grew interested in the Hammonds in the first place. “We’re all about affordable food and land use and personal rights,” Duquette explained. The Hammond case “intersects perfectly with the Protect the Harvest mission.”

Protect the Harvest has built a positive rapport with the ag community by sponsoring scholarships and racetracks and film festivals. But the nonprofit has also benefited by inflaming the community’s anxieties that a time-honored way of life is coming to an end — while eliding the fact that its own lobbying on behalf of corporations and against regulations has hastened the destruction of that lifestyle.

For those active in the agricultural world, Lucas has primarily been known for his strong stance on animal regulation, actively opposing attempts to limit or monitor mistreatment of pets and livestock with laws that would, for example, establish minimum spacing for hen cages or veal calf pens, crack down on puppy mills, or prevent intentional mutilation of Tennessee walking horses. A particular target of his efforts has been the Humane Society of the United States — the national organization that has spearheaded the vast majority of initiatives related to animal regulation, and which Lucas has referred to as “terrorists.”

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Ammon Bundy (left), the leader of an anti-government militia, prepares to speak to members of the media in front of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters on Jan. 5, 2016, near Burns, Oregon.

But Lucas’s agenda is hardly limited to cage sizes and puppy mills, as reflected by his support of the Hammonds and, by extension, the Bundys and others opposed to federal control of public lands. And to get what he wants, Lucas has employed a highly sophisticated lobbying and messaging machine, which does everything from funding opposition to municipal spaying and neutering ordinances to orchestrating “range rights” conferences, streamed live on Facebook to an audience of thousands.

Protect the Harvest has spent millions producing web videos and memes that spread across the dozens of Bundy-adjacent Facebook pages that have popped up in the last decade. It also focuses on messaging to children: There are anti-regulatory Protect the Harvest coloring activity sheets, and a pro-ag Protect the Harvest–branded teaching curriculum available for download on their website.In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.

In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.

Lucas’s film and television production studio, the Corona, California–based ESX Entertainment, currently has five films in production — including Stand at Paxton County described as the story of a rancher and his daughter who “face off against state and local authorities who by questionable means relieve local ranchers of their livestock and way of life.”

:{

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After Trump took office, Lucas made the short list of potential appointees for interior secretary. Although Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke ultimately got the job, he has provided an open door to both Lucas and Protect the Harvest. Meanwhile, Brian Klippenstein, who is still listed as PTH’s executive director, now works as senior adviser to Perdue. Pence’s vice presidency has been a boon for Lucas, who, according to a Protect the Harvest spokesperson, has been friends[funder]with Pence since before he took the office of Indiana governor.

In addition to Lucas’s own role as one of Trump’s agricultural advisers, public records indicate that Lucas met with Zinke in April 2017 to discuss wild horses, grazing access issues, and national monument designations. In October, when Pence flew to attend an Indianapolis Colts game, abruptly leaving when players knelt during the national anthem, he first spent time posing for photos with Lucas and Duquette. Protect the Harvest also has ties to former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who was a featured speaker at a Protect the Harvest event in Indianapolis on Jan. 26, 2016.

Protect the Harvest / Facebook

Lucas, the Hammonds, and Duquette on Lucas's private plane back to Burns.

Lucas’s investment in the Hammonds — and the Bundys, who’ve been invited to Protect the Harvest–sponsored forums — is a means to an end. They have become symbols of the way many rural Americans feel they’ve been wronged byfederal overreach, and Lucas, much like Trump, leverages those feelings to build support for one of his overriding goals: wide-scale deregulation of big business.

This is the story of how Forrest Lucas became the behind-the-scenes architect of a multipronged political and propaganda machine — unknown to most Americans, yet with an outsize influence on the current administration and the way millions think of their rural way of life, the industries that shape it, and the government’s role within it.

“This administration has been pretty good at asking for problems,” Duquette explained. “And then addressing them.” The Hammond pardon is the first such Protect the Harvest “problem” that’s been directly addressed on the national stage. But with Lucas’s direct access to multiple wings of the administration, it’s unlikely to be the last.

Dave Duquette /Facebook

Lucas, Duquette, and Ramona Hage Morrison at the Department of the Interior.

To understand why an incredibly wealthy man like Lucas would care about the fate of a pair of Oregon ranchers, you have to consider the concept of “the harvest” as Lucas is using it: a stand-in for everything from actual crop yields to what he views as the fundamental right to make a living as one sees fit off the land. In tax filings, Protect the Harvest describes its mission as educational: “to ensure accurate information is communicated to the general public with the rise of various groups threatening to end modern agriculture and hunting in the United States.”

In practice, this “accurate information” has centered on a cluster of issues that are closely tied to Big Ag’s priorities: portraying animal rights activists and environmentalists as out-of-touch liberals bent on ending the rural way of life; characterizing regulation and federal oversight, particularly on public lands, as a means of curtailing American liberty; and advocating for and providing platforms for public figures — such as the Hammonds — to function as symbols of widespread persecution of the ag community.

That this apparatus was built in just eight years, by a man with little in the way of a visible political profile, is a testament to what a few million dollars can do in our current American ideological landscape. And while Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise, and the obstacles that defined it, go a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.

While Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise goes a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.

At age 76, Lucas has deep brown hair that seems to belie the natural aging process. When he speaks with the press, he tends to wear shirts emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo of his company, or a race car jersey. He’s the sort of man who’d commission a documentary about his own life — titledAmerican Real: The Forrest Lucas Story— show it at a film festival, and then make it nearly impossible for anyone to view it again. He considers himself an embodiment of the American dream: a boy who, as he tells it, grew up without electricity in rural Indiana but then, over decades of hard work and fair dealings, scraped his way to a multimillion-dollar company.

Born in 1942, Lucas grew up on a farm in Elkinsville, Indiana — living, as he put it, “pretty much like people lived in the 1800s.” “Most people now could only read about that,” he said, “but I got to see the tail end of it. Most people think it’s kind bucolic, but it’s actually a pretty hard way to go.” According to Lucas, when he was 9 years old, he got his start as an entrepreneur by going door-to-door, barefooted, selling a supposed miracle cure called Cloverine Salve.

Lucas was, in many ways, a typical farm kid. He’d wake in the morning to take care of the cows and pigs, go to school, and return home to care for them again. At age 15, he left home to work at a cattle ranch in Harrison County, near the Kentucky state line. He graduated high school, then, as he later put it, “went to a long college called hard knocks.” By age 18, Lucas was a married man with a child — and left the ranching life to make a living for his family, hauling dirt, finding odd construction jobs, selling Singer sewing machines, and working a muffler assembly line at night.

But what Lucas really wanted was a semi. “I’d see these guys going down the road,” he said, “and maybe they were going somewhere. I wanted to get into the truck and go somewhere.” At 21, he pulled together enough money to buy his first semi — the first in what would eventually become a fleet. Two years later, the creek that ran near his childhood farm would be dammed in order to power the nearby city of Bloomington. The entirety of Lucas’s hometown of Elkinton was acquired through eminent domain. His childhood farm was gone, superseded by the needs of those in the city nearby.

Lucas didn’t make his fortune on trucks. He made it on oil additives, created using a “secret formula” that Lucas claims to have discovered almost by accident and which, his company claims, has seemingly miraculous effects on the performance of engines: It reduces wear, lengthens engine life, improves gas mileage, and makes motors run quieter, among other things. Lucas Oil is marketed to car aficionados, gearheads, and truckers with aging rigs.

Getty Images; Alamy

In the ’80s, Lucas Oil began putting its logo on race cars as a means of advertising. The Lucases bought a cattle ranch in Cross Timbers, Missouri, that has grown to 15,000 acres, with over 3,000 cattle. They opened an oil processing plant in Corona, California, and a second one in Corydon, Indiana, where they also purchased the local railroad. In 2011, Lucas acquired a television channel, MAVTV, and filled it with races featuring cars emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo. “I realized several years ago that people were starting to [skip] commercials,” Lucas told Autoweek. “We needed to be in the TV show itself, more so than just be on the car.”

Lucas began to acquire the entire means of production: He sponsored the cars, he built or bought the tracks, he owned the broadcasting network, and when the production company he’d employed to make commercials went bankrupt, he bought their gear and trained his loading dock employees to operate it, moving to a dilapidated Sunkist factory in Corona. By 2012, at least 700 different racing teams wore the Lucas Oil logo; today, many of those teams have transitioned to wearing the logo for Protect the Harvest. It’s vertical integration, done the Lucas way: first to promote his oil brand, now to promote his ideological one.

Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

“The thing that’s interesting about Lucas — I don’t think anyone realizes what kind of reach he has,” a correspondent for Speed magazine said in 2012. Apart from the racing, Lucas’s name and brand is broadcast into millions of homes every week via nationally televised games at Lucas Oil Stadium. The $121.5 million gambit, which affixes the Lucas Oil name to the stadium where the Indianapolis Colts play until 2028, launched Lucas and his second wife, Charlotte, onto the radar of the Indiana elite. Suddenly, the farm boy was a person to know.

The Indianapolis elite began actively courting his full-time return from California, where he’d been running Lucas Oil for decades. “Forrest would be a big fish in this pond,” then-mayor Bart Peterson told Indianapolis Monthly in 2007. “He would be somebody who would be noticed, because of his roots, and the fact that he’s proud of those roots.” In 2010, the Lucases purchased a sprawling mansion, known as Le Chateau Renaissance, outside of Indianapolis, with the primary intention to use it for fundraisers and benefits. He added a 220,000-square-foot expansion to his Indiana plant, effectively making it the home base for Lucas Oil operations. Seven decades removed from an electricity-less farm in Elkinsville, Indiana, Forrest Lucas had arrived.

Like many who find their fortunes secure, Lucas decided to throw his newfound influence around. He began donating to political figures — to then-governor Pence, but also to multiple representatives in Missouri, where Lucas ran a cattle ranch. It was there, in 2010, that he took on his first major political fight against Missouri’s Proposition B, colloquially known as the “puppy mill bill.” The bill aimed to limit dog breeding facilities to 50 unspayed/unneutered animals, which would effectively eliminate the “puppy mill” industry in the states where such facilities are most concentrated.

“We’ve got to go on the offense. We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”

For outsiders, regulating dog breeding and preventing abuses might seem like an easy call, but to dog breeders, it felt like a threat to their way of life. The fight over Proposition B became a proxy for a much larger battle, between animal rights activists — and HSUS in particular — and the agricultural industry writ large. Prop B ultimately passed with 51.59% of the vote — only to be overturned by the Missouri legislature. The struggle over Proposition B emboldened Lucas. Together with other ag producers, he constructed a blueprint for a larger organization that would promote the interests of agriculture. “We’ve got to go on the offense,” Erik Helland, then-majority whip of the Iowa House of Representatives, and one of early architects of this organization, said. “We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”

In 2012, Protect the Harvest filed paperwork with the FEC to create a political action committee known as the Protect the Harvest Action Fund.Brian Klippenstein — the son of a longtime Missouri state senator, who’d spent the previous five years as then-senator Kit Bond’s chief of staff— became the group’s executive director. While Klippenstein comes from a long ranching heritage, he has the polish and hairstyle of someone who’s spent decades rubbing elbows in DC. According to his Protect the Harvest bio, Klippenstein has “completed over 50 marathons, including over a dozen 50-milers and four single-day 100-milers…all fueled by a high-protein diet centered around nutrient-dense red meat.”

Source: Pro Publica Nonprofit Explorer

Protect the Harvest expenditures 2012-2016

Between 2012 and 2016, the latest year for which tax returns are available, Protect the Harvest Action Fund has spent close to $4 million on influence and lobbying activities. (All tax filings are available here.) Since 2012, the vast majority of Protect the Harvest’s PAC money has been directed toward supporting “Right to Farm” legislation and combating initiatives, most of them spearheaded by the HSUS, that Lucas’s group sees as infringing upon agricultural liberty. The language of contemporary Right to Farm amendments guarantees farmers and ranchers the right to engage in their livelihoods and produce food for others. If that sounds vague, it’s purposeful: It’s less intended to address a current threat than future ones. In practice, it helps bolster the feeling that an industry is vulnerable.

You can get a sense of that perceived vulnerability in a post in ranching publication Drovers, written by cattle genetics specialist Jared Wareham: “Our industry has plead [sic] for a way to help block and then counterpunch anti-ag initiatives and the well-funded organizations that spearhead those efforts,” Wareham writes. “It is unnerving to know that if left unmonitored, these groups could lead initiatives to change the laws of a state or influence the language of those laws so something we have done for a living could be unlawful. If these organizations can win battles in one state, it could easily open the door to successes in other states.”

And who happens to be defending the industry from this alleged war? Protect the Harvest, which Wareham describes as “the shield of armor we’ve been looking for.”

Protect The Harvest / Facebook

Protect the Harvest’s first foray into the fray came in Missouri, where it offered broad media support for a 2014 Right to Farm amendment, copied from a 2012 version drafted in North Dakota. For that campaign, Lucas enlisted then–state senator Mike Parson, who is now governor, and to whom Lucas has given more than $175,000 in campaign donations. The two men first connected in 2010, during the campaign against Proposition B. After it passed, Parson, whose district included Lucas’s cattle ranch and one of his speedways, sponsored the legislation that effectively defanged the bill. From 2013 to 2015, Parson served as the treasurer of Protect the Harvest, and when Parson ran for lieutenant governor in 2016, Lucas and his wife campaigned alongside him; after he won, he framed a Protect the Harvest poster in his office.

In North Dakota, the Right to Farm amendment had sailed to an easy victory, winning two-thirds of the vote. But in Missouri, it was hotly contested. One public radio story framed it as pitting “farmer against farmer,” leaving little way for small producers to defend against the incursion and growth of larger ones. Protect the Harvest argued, “Our rights don’t come from government. They are God-given freedoms that come with our humanity. However, bureaucrats and activist judges have made it clear that they will not respect those rights unless they are codified in statutes or constitutions.” Together, both sides spent a total of $1.5 million on messaging. The amendment barely passed, eking out 50.12% of the final vote.

A version of the amendment then migrated to Oklahoma, where Protect the Harvest was joined in support by the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, and the Oklahoma Pork Council.Their opposition, led by HSUS, the Sierra Club, the ASPCA, and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, argued that the bill, SQ 777, would make it impossible to act if and when ag polluted or otherwise threatened a water source or the land.

“I work with family farmers from all over the state,” said Adam Price, a representative of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. “And I can say with absolute certainty that SQ 777 was not conceived with them in mind.” The “yes” argument was crystallized in a television ad created by Protect the Harvest: “Have you seen the ads attacking 777? ALL LIES. Paid for by the same out-of-state animal rights groups that oppose the right to hunt and fish.”

In the end, the Yes side lost by 20 points — the first major defeat for the new wave of Right to Farm legislation and Protect the Harvest.Brian Jones, an attorney who spent a year working for the “no” side, links the amendment’s failure to reactivated memory: “Most people in Oklahoma have an agricultural heritage, meaning their grandparents or parents were farmers,” he told BuzzFeed News. “One of the consequences of the industrialization of ag is that fewer and fewer people are involved in it. Most of what is out there, in the market right now, is Big Ag.”

During this same period in the ’90s, there was enormous consolidation in ag production — basically, big farms buying up smaller ones — that marked an end to many farming families’ way of life. “There were some fights about all this back then,” Jones said. “But 777 reraised all these questions: Where did the jobs go? What happened to the people?”

Protect The Harvest / Facebook

In Missouri, Protect the Harvest had effectively mobilized those rural anxieties, papering over the role of larger industrial and legislative forces that had ended that way of life years before. In Oklahoma, that project failed — but their defeat has only served to bolster Protect the Harvest’s argument that outsiders are determined to fight against one’s “right to farm.” (In an email to BuzzFeed News, a spokesman responded to a question about the effects of deregulation on small farms with the following statement: “Protect the Harvest supports all forms of agriculture. Our mission is to educate and inform the public about issues that impact our American traditions, heritage and way of life. There are many overreaching regulations that impact farms, both large and small which ultimately affect the American public as both large and small farms feed our nation.”)

Lucas’s design to “protect” the harvest has largely entailed fighting regulation. Like many conservative operatives, Protect the Harvest views any type of regulation, whether on the hours a long-haul trucker can legally drive or the conditions for raising chickens, as unnecessary and restrictive incursions on free enterprise, but one area of particular interest has been wild horses.

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Back in 2012, Dave Duquette attempted to bring a horse slaughterhouse to his hometown of Hermiston, Oregon, promising much-needed economic stimulus to the area, but local leaders balked at the prospect of the town being equated with a taboo industry. Fast-forward six years, and Duquette is the “equine specialist” for Protect the Harvest.

Duquette, who is rarely without his cowboy hat and a cowboy shirt embroidered with the Protect the Harvest or Lucas Oil logo, has spearheaded Protect the Harvest’s efforts to change the messaging around wild horse management from cruelty to benevolence.

“It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”

“American wild horses are suffering due to overcrowding, which has led to starvation and death,” the opening to a four-part series on Protect the Harvest’s homepage claims. “We have the opportunity and obligation to protect them from long and painful suffering by controlling their numbers.” A 15-minute PTH-produced video, titled “Horses in Crisis,” features an array of sick and starving horses, as well as ranchers and others condemning “horse advocates” for their lack of knowledge about horses on the range. “It’s time to bring facts, reason, and a special perspective to an issue dominated by emotion,” a solemn-voiced narrator says. The overarching message: Those who deal with wild horses on the land should dictate how to manage horses on the land, and not faraway regulators.

That was Duquette’s message in 2015, when he visited Nevada in support of a rancher named Kevin Borba, who had repeatedly and progressively flouted rules governing the treatment of wild horses on his grazing allotment. Duquette posted a picture of Borba in a Protect the Harvest–branded four-wheeler, out to “document” the “lies” spread by Laura Leigh, who was heading up an experimental fertility control program on the horses. Protect the Harvest created a series of videos framing Borba as a victim of the BLM, whose “mismanagement hurts both the horses and the ranchers whose livelihood are being taken away.” According to Leigh, an initial version of the video, later taken down, included her name, prompting immediate harassment. (Protect the Harvest disputes this claim.) “I was getting a dozen death threats with my morning coffee,” Leigh told BuzzFeed News. “It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”

George Frey / Getty Images

Wild horses are held in a BLM holding/adoption facility after being rounded up from BLM land in the western United States on June 1, 2017, in Delta, Utah.

Lucas has repeatedly referred to HSUS and animal rights activists as “terrorists” intent on “passing laws to ruin America” that deliberately impugn the small-time farmer’s way of life. Lucas’s political donations and Protect the Harvest’s messaging around ballot initiatives underlined that ideology. But to make those ideologies even more robust and persuasive required something more effective than political ads. They needed propaganda.

Propaganda is anything from a pamphlet to a television program that attempts to make an argument for a particular political stance, whether on the right, left, or center — but much of it can be heavy-handed, simplistic, or misleading. When it comes to agriculture and animal rights issues, both sides of the issue produce propaganda. But only one side has its own film studio.

When Lucas first started producing television programming for his television channel, the focus was vehicles to broaden his company’s name recognition. “We got into the entertainment business to sell oil,” Lucas once said. “And nothing is more entertaining than fast cars, trucks, planes, and boats.” By 2015, his intentions had expanded. “For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour or fun,” Lucas said. “It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”

“For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour, or fun. It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”

But what sort of “messages” did Lucas want to transmit? Protect the Harvest messages.

Last year’s Pray for Rain, starring Jane Seymour, suggests that corrupt environmentalists, in league with shady gangsters, are prolonging the terrible drought afflicting Central California and threatening the livelihoods of desperate local farmers.Running Wild, also from 2017 and starring Sharon Stone — who also coproduced — depicts a wild horse advocate, whom Laura Leigh believes is loosely based on her, as an evil villain trying to shut down a horse rehabilitation program. The 2016 film The Dog Lover, featuring Lea Thompson, involves a young woman who volunteers with an animal protection group to go undercover at a puppy mill — only to discover that the organization is far more dangerous than the “mill” itself, which, turns out, is actually a kindhearted breeding operation.

ESX films are regularly panned by critics, do not receive theatrical releases, and go straight to video or VOD. But profits, according to Lucas, are secondary. They’re reaching an audience: ag families who don’t feel that their way of life is represented accurately onscreen, and those who may not know a thing about agriculture but will be called upon to vote or think about the issues represented in the films. Watch The Dog Lover, for example, without much understanding of the dog breeding industry, and it’s easy to believe that “puppy mills” are an idea concocted by manipulative animal rights activists who have no idea what they’re talking about.

ESX Entertainment

The feature films are only one arm of Protect the Harvest’s messaging apparatus. Back in 2014, Lucas commissioned a documentary about his life (produced by advertising company MARC USA), which screened at the Heartland Film Festival. (Earlier that month, Lucas’s wife, Charlotte, had drawn national attention for a Facebook post, later deleted, that declared, “I’m sick and tired of minorities running our country! As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think that atheists (minority), muslims (minority) or any other minority group has the right to tell the majority of people in the United States what they can and cannot do here. Is everyone so scared that they can’t fight for what’s right or wrong with this country?”)

The day after the Facebook post, Lucas — who has previously acknowledged that his workforce is largely composed of immigrants — issued a full-page apology in the Indianapolis Star for his wife’s post, explaining that it did not “reflect the feelings in her heart,” and underlining that Lucas Oil “is proud to have employees, friends, customers, and business partners reflecting ethnic and racial diversity.”

Apart from the films, Protect the Harvest maintains a robust Facebook presence: Its page currently has 258,000-plus followersand posts links, petitions, editorials, and memes five or six times a day. The Protect the Harvest website features links to civics workbooks that can be suggested as additions to local curriculum; at the bottom of the first page, a logo declares, “You could be forced to give up your freedom to hunt, fish, and own animals. Learn more at ProtectTheHarvest.com.” For class activities, the workbook suggests observing the judicial branch at work in movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, My Cousin Vinny, or Protect the Harvest’s own The Dog Lover. For kids, there’s a section of downloadable coloring sheets bordered with “PROTECT YOUR PET! PROTECT AMERICA! PROTECT THE HARVEST.COM!”

In Range magazine — an independently owned quarterly publication full of beautiful rural landscapes and essays about how “the U.S. government has inflicted 40 years of abuse on Nevada’s Hage family” — Protect the Harvest now occupies about half of the ad space, promoting Protect the Harvest films and the Hammond pardon. Partnering with Range, Protect the Harvest has helped fund three “Range Rights” conferences — in Layton, Utah; in Bellevue, Nebraska; and in Modesto, California.

The two-day conference was founded in 2015 as a way to harness the energy following the Bundys’ Malheur occupation; attendants include a mix of Malheur devotees and local ranchers. In Modesto this April, the attendance hovered around 40, and half the attendees were speakers themselves — but the real range rights audience was online, where each of the speeches was streamed in full.Rep. Devin Nunes,once part of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, attacked the press; the local sheriff emphasized that his officers knew to look the other way when local ranchers had an unlicensed firearm. The daughter of LaVoy Finicum spoke about the legacy of her father, the rancher who was killed by Oregon State Police in what have become heavily contested circumstances, effectively rendering him a martyr for the Bundy movement. Finally,Ammon Bundy preached the latest chapter in the family’s gospel, emphasizing that environmentalists are “an enemy to humans” practicing their own heretical religion.

The entire event was hosted by Trent Loos, a Nebraska farmer, member of President Trump’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, and one of Protect the Harvest’s most visible activists, united with Lucas in his fierce opposition to HSUS. (When HSUS began using Michael Vick’s role in dogfighting and other forms of animal abuse to make the case for tougher legislation, Loos wrote that Vick was being persecuted for “not ... treating his dog like a kid.”) With his bushy mustache and ranching vest, Loos — who pleaded no contest in 2005 to charges of cattle fraud — looks the part of the cowboy, and will play one in a forthcoming PTH film.In Modesto, Loos took the stage with Nunes. “As a member of the ag committee, we have a certain level of frustration that we haven’t drained the swamp quicker, that we still have old-school bureaucrats in the positions of decision-making,” he said. “So how do we get that fixed? Because obviously there’s a bigger plug in the swamp than anticipated.”

Juice Images Ltd / Getty Images

At that point, Protect the Harvest had been working to “unplug” the swamp for well over a year. When journalist Michael Lewis began investigating the transition officials appointed by the Trump administration, he zeroed in on Brian Klippenstein’s USDA role. In an interview with Fresh Air, Lewis described Protect the Harvest as an organization that sees its job “as essentially trolling the Humane Society,” and is “hypersensitive to animal rights people and tries to respond to animal rights activists wherever it can.” USDA employees found Klippenstein’s appointment odd because, as Lewis put it, “one of the things the USDA does is stand up for the rights of animals in animal-people disputes.”

Dogfighting, circuses, animal slaughter, animal testing — the USDA is charged with documenting and monitoring those operations. In the subsequent weeks, Klippenstein alone took on the responsibilities of a transition team that usually would’ve been entrusted to a team of at least 20. Through his briefings, he became intent on figuring out which of the existing Department of Agriculture employees had been researching climate change and its ramifications.

The request was denied, but Klippenstein made his mark in other ways. He now serves as a senior adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, who has overseen the removal of USDA documents detailing past animal inspections, enforcement actions, and annual reports on 7,800 different facilities. The removal was prompted by a lawsuit, filed during the Obama administration, alleging that a report identifying Tennessee walking horse owners as “violators” of anti-soring regulations impinged on their rights to due process and privacy. To address the suit, Perdue has removed all records.

According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election.

The move was celebrated by Tennessee walking horse groups, but it has broader beneficiaries: practitioners of industrial agriculture, whose husbandry, living, and slaughter practices are also monitored by the USDA. The lack of publicly accessible monitoring records will make it increasingly difficult to prosecute, legislate, or otherwise regulate current agricultural practices.

“We’re lucky with the things this administration has been doing,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “It’s been really good to deal with, and find problems to fix. That’s probably been the best thing to happen for animal agriculture, the pet industry, and the food supply.”

This sort of access and influence helps explain how the Hammonds’ appeal made its way to President Trump’s desk. According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election. When Lucas and Pence had dinner in May, Lucas brought up the case again, making the argument for a commuted sentence. Soon after, the case was moved to the office of Pence’s chief counsel.

“You know, it’s ‘a squeaky wheel gets the grease’ deal,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “And I know the president needs help from people to highlight injustices.” Since late May, Protect the Harvest’s social media accounts have been in overdrive eliciting popular support for the Hammonds’ cause. Protect the Harvest has also moved to distance itself and their cause from the Bundys, who’ve been grouped with the Hammonds since the days of the standoff.

Indeed, Duquette believes that if the Malheur occupation hadn’t happened, the Hammonds would’ve been pardoned long ago. “I don’t disagree with [the Bundys’] issues, but the tactics are...” he said, pausing for a moment. “I understand the tactics because of their frustration with what they’ve had to deal with over the years.”

During the occupation, Duquette and Trent Loos posed for a photo with Ammon Bundy;while a representative from Protect the Harvest has denied offering material support to the occupiers, Todd Macfarlane — a lawyer, Bundy supporter, and standoff spokesperson — blogged that Protect the Harvest had made “its people, resources and checkbook available.” Protect the Harvest counters that a representative “went to Malheur Refuge one week into the occupation to do an interview with Ammon Bundy.”

But as the Hammond petition made its way to the White House, Duquette told BuzzFeed News that he called Ammon Bundy to let him know that Protect the Harvest would be publicly distancing itself from the Bundy family. Still, the Bundys threw themselves behind the pardon petition, posting multiple links to it. When the news was announced, the Bundy Ranch Facebook page’s post alluded to the connection: “Thank you @POTUS for carrying out justice and pardoning Oregon ranchers Dwight & Steven Hammond. Many ranchers in the West have suffered under the heavy hand of the federal government. These men are great patriots.”

Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government are warranted.

Duquette acknowledges that a Hammond pardon will be treated as a win for the Bundys and their supporters. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he said. “The president would have an outpouring of support in the West, and throughout the Midwest, from all the people that are his base for doing this. It would show a good sign of goodwill for all the people out there.”

To pardon the Hammonds is to ratify that their case, like so much of what Protect the Harvest lobbies against, is an example of federal overreach — engineered by ignorant outsiders who resent and misunderstand the people who make American life possible. As Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte phrased it in a public statement, “President Trump’s decision to pardon Dwight and Steven Hammond is a win for property rights and our way of life.”

But like so many of the issues on which Protect the Harvest’s advocacy pivots, the reality is far less stark. The Hammonds were sentenced for committing arson on federal land. An appeals court vacated that sentence because it did not satisfy the mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, and resentenced them for the mandatory minimum for that crime. Apart from the back-burning, the Hammonds have a long history of taunting BLM management and flouting their regulation. Like the Bundys, the Hammonds have long believed that the federal, public land they pay pennies on the dollar to graze should be considered their own, to manage as they please — including setting fires. The federal government, at least for the time being, disagrees.

Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government overreach are warranted — and that Trump will continue to act in a way that acknowledges those fears.

[Protesters on horseback ride above a rally site in Bunkerville, Nevada, April 12, 2014.

All over ag country, Oregon to Arkansas, small schools are closing their doors. Part of the reason is that the consolidation of agriculture — larger farms gobbling up smaller ones to stay alive — has made it impossible for those onetime small farmers to remain. The population of the small town dwindles, and the schools close, which makes it even less desirable for others to move to that town, provide services, attract jobs, or maintain the “way of life” associated with rural America.

When you look at the Protect the Harvest logo, you don’t see a family. You don’t see a way of life. You don’t see a person at all. You see a combine harvester — one of the primary advances in farming technology that led the agricultural industry to the place it is today. “All of their imagery is of big, beautiful tractors churning through a commodity crop, essentially dripping Lucas Oil,” Ryan Bell, a journalist and close observer of fights around the agricultural way of life, told BuzzFeed News.

Protect the Harvest and Lucas Oil logos are displayed at Dover International Speedway on May 6, 2018, in Dover, Delaware.

“But that tractor, that’s what took the community away from ranching. It undercuts a long-term, sustainable agrarian society,” he said. “There’s no need for a big family to work the farm, and no need for the family you have to stick around. Today, a man might have a thousand acres of corn, and he’s tilling it all alone with a $250,000 combine. His kid’s gone. And oddly enough, this is exactly the type of person who’s pretty susceptible to Protect the Harvest rhetoric.”

There are dozens of intersecting reasons for the end of the agrarian way of life. Some of them stem from bad legislation, improper federal regulation, and advocacy from groups with little sense of the larger effects of a disruption in the food chain. There is an impending food crisis in the world’s future. To solve it, however — while also preserving the Earth long enough for our descendants to confront that crisis — all sides of the issue need to spend less time creating bogeymen of the others; less time on “offense” or “defense.”

The production of food may be an industry, but it’s not a game. Whether in the form of government subsidies or a vaunted position within the American imaginary, the harvest has been protected for centuries.

Taken separately, Protect the Harvest’s initiatives — the feature films, the fight against HSUS, the move to root out those studying global warming, the Right to Farm advocacy, the Hammond pardon — none of it seems, on its face, like a means of protecting business interests. It’s only when examined together, as part of a larger, motivating whole, that Lucas’s actual passion becomes clear. It’s not the small-time farmer. It’s certainly not the harvest. It’s not dogs, or hunting, or horses. Forrest Lucas prides himself on his identity as an all-American man. And nothing is more all-American than unfettered industry, and the profits that flow from it.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana.

Contact Anne Helen Petersen at anne.helen.petersen@buzzfeed.com.

Ken Bensinger

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Contact Ken Bensinger at ken.bensinger@buzzfeed.com.

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https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-donald-j-trump-2017-2021

QUESTION: WHO PUT THESE GUYS UP FOR TRUMP PARDON?  //ARPAIO?

an 7 22

it not quite clear what, exactly, former President Donald Trump was doing and privately saying inside the White House during the five long, violent hours when more than 2,000 rioters invaded the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.

It’s a key timeline that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to explore on July 21, 2022 during its latest – and possibly last – public hearing.

At the heart of the issue is Trump’s precise engagement, if any, with the rioters and several fringe nationalist militia groups, including the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, that stormed the Capitol.

Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer in sociology at Vanderbilt University, embedded with militia groups, mostly in Michigan, from 2008 through 2012. Knowing who these groups are – and how they have changed over time – makes it easier to understand the Jan. 6 attacks, Cooter said.

“Fifteen years ago, people thought of these groups as being niche, crazy people. That’s not really what I saw in my fieldwork – I saw people who were just more willing to be open about their political perspectives than maybe more mainstream Republicans were at the time. It seemed to me, both then and now, that their concerns resonate with a broad swath of the population,” Cooter said in a recent interview.

We asked Cooter to explain what drives these groups and their complicated relationship with Trump and the government.

What is your understanding of how Trump is seen by these nationalist groups?

Traditionally, militia groups have been very opposed to the federal government, regardless of whether we’re talking about Democrats or Republicans. However, with Trump, they really found sort of a mouthpiece. Not all of them truly liked him, but they really want somebody who speaks out against immigration and has a nationalistic and isolationist perspective. Trump gave them a sense of legitimacy. But there didn’t seem to be too many formal connections, as far as we know.

How does leadership and hierarchy work within these groups?

Many of these groups present themselves as top-down organizations with centralized leadership and then different state-level structures. But the degree to which that is reality varies enormously, especially with the Three Percenters but also with the Oath Keepers.

There are groups that kind of fit the stereotypical top-down model that make it easy to activate them for action. There are other groups who maybe were completely oblivious to this Jan. 6 plan.

What do you mean by activate? That sounds similar to language Trump used during a presidential debate in September 2020,telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

Militias always see themselves as prepared for action. Usually, this means they’re prepared to defend themselves and their communities in the event of a natural disaster, or some kind of invasion. But as we saw leading up to Jan. 6, some of these groups were clearly planning more than just a defensive stance.

What was Trump getting from these groups, and what were they getting from Trump?

They get from Trump this idea that someone finally represents their interests, someone finally sees the state of the nation as they do, even though not all of them completely agree with him. They see it as an opportunity to push things in the direction that they would prefer.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that Trump sees an opportunity for a private armyfrom them. In 2018, he pardoned the Bundy ranchers, who were arrested for arson on federal land. Not a lot of people paid attention to this, but that was a signal to these groups that he had their back and would expect them to have his back in the future.

I think that Jan. 6 is really kind of proof of that, that he has activated people who in some cases do have military or police experience.

How have you seen these groups evolve over time, since you began researching them?

Before Trump, there had been very clear-cut tensions between different groups. That boundary has broken down substantially, and most groups have been pushed more toward an extreme than used to be true – in no small part because of how Trump and others in his administration legitimized the core fears that different groups had about being invaded.

Since Jan. 6, the groups as a whole have declined in size. Many of these people were really surprised at how Jan. 6 played out and were quite embarrassed –or they were appalled that it didn’t go far enough.

Now, many people have taken a step back even from these groups altogether. But the folks that have stuck around continue to be quite radical, and probably even more radical than they were before. Especially thinking about what is going to happen with the midterm elections, we are going to see a lot of invigoration.

Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ref

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oregon-standoff-trump/trump-pardons-oregon-ranchers-who-inspired-refuge-standoff-idUSKBN1K021Q

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U.S. NEWS

JULY 10, 2018 UPDATED 4 YEARS AGO

Trump pardons Oregon ranchers who inspired refuge standoff

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned two imprisoned Oregon ranchers whose sentencing on arson convictions sparked the 2016 occupation of a wildlife refuge, part of a long-simmering dispute over federal land policies in the U.S. West.

The armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon followed a judge’s ruling that sent Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven, back to prison to serve more time after their initial release. Police shot one of the occupiers dead during the 41-day midwinter protest.

The takeover was another flare-up in a decades-old conflict over federal control of millions of acres of public land in the Western United States. In Oregon, about half of all land is controlled by the federal government.

The leaders of the Malheur standoff, including activists Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were cleared of federal charges for their role in the protest in October 2016.

Ammon Bundy on Tuesday called the pardon “long overdue.”

“We went up there to prevent the atrocity from happening to begin with, and if people would have listened to us, the Hammonds wouldn’t have to have gone through this suffering,” Bundy said in a telephone interview.

The pardons are the latest in a series by Trump that have raised questions about whether he is using the presidential power to reward political supporters.

Trump in late May pardoned Dinesh D’Souza,a conservative pundit convicted of campaign finance crimes.Last August he pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who campaigned for Trump before being convicted in a case regarding racial profiling.

“LAWLESS EXTREMISTS”

Dwight Hammond, 76, and Steven, 49, were convicted in 2012 for setting a fire that spread onto public land after years of disputes with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

The Hammonds said they were using standard brush-control and land-management techniques, but the government said that in at least one instance they were trying to hide evidence of their slaughtering a herd of deer.

A U.S. flag covers a sign at the entrance of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, January 3, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

The Hammonds were set to return by airplane to Oregon on Wednesday morning, the Bundy family said in an email. The pair walked out of a federal prison in California about 6-1/2 hours after the pardon was announced, the Oregonian newspaper reported.

Some conservation groups were dismayed at the pardon.

Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called the Hammonds “lawless extremists.”

“Pardoning the Hammonds sends a dangerous message to America’s park rangers, wildland firefighters, law enforcement officers, and public lands managers,” Rokala said in a statement.

The two men were initially sentenced to less than the legal minimum five-year prison sentence by a judge who thought the minimum too harsh and later released the two, Dwight Hammond after three months and Steven Hammond after a year.

After the government’s appeal in 2016, a different federal judge ordered the pair back to prison to serve the full five years, sparking protests and the refuge occupation.

In a statement on Tuesday, the White House said the decision sentencing the Hammonds to five years in prison was “unjust” and said that the fire had burned only “a small portion” of public land.

“The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges,” the statement said.

As of 2018, Dwight Hammond had served about three years in prison and Steven Hammond had served four, according to the White House.

Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Frank McGurty and Leslie Adler

sierra club

why Did Trump Pardon Two Arsonist Ranchers?

The strange saga of Dwight and Steven Hammond By Heather Smith| Jul 12 2018

On Tuesday, President Trump pardoned Dwight L. Hammond and his son, Steven D. Hammond—two ranchers that very few Americans had ever heard of.

“The Hammonds are multigeneration cattle ranchers in Oregon imprisoned in connection with a fire that leaked onto a small portion of neighboring public grazing land,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, wrote in :{a statement:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:. A district court sentenced Dwight to serve three months in prison, and Steven to a year and a day, but the Obama administration filed an appeal, pointing out that there’s a federal minimum sentence for arson, and it’s five years. That’s what the Hammonds wound up serving when they were pardoned.

None of this answered the question of why, out of the 1.5 million people currently incarcerated in state and federal prison, Trump would pick the Hammonds to pardon. It’s not like there was a groundswell of popular opinion in favor of freeing them—if public-lands-hating ranchers were musical acts, the Hammonds would be an obscure indie band with an obsessive fan base.

A petition started on Whitehouse.gov last May got 8,566 signatures—nowhere near the 100,000 needed to even get a response to your petition from the White House. The Trump administration also shows no signs of acceding to the requests of even more popular Whitehouse.gov petitions (“:{Divest or put in a blind trust all of the President's business and financial assets:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:” had 360,299, and “:{Do Not Repeal Net Neutrality:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:” had 274,905). But on Wednesday, they were :{flying home:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}: from minimum-security prison :{in a private jet owned by oil magnate Forrest Lucas:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;background-color:#ff9900;"):}:.

So why the Hammonds? Here are a few possibilities:

Trump pardoned the Hammonds because he couldn’t pardon any Bundys.

No one is a bigger fan of Dwight and Steven Hammond than Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who claimed that their whole inspiration for carrying out an armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a popular Oregon bird-watching site, was the injustice of the Hammonds having to serve the federal minimum sentence for arson.

The Hammonds did not return the favor and refused to endorse the Malheur takeover. The Bundys meanwhile became famous enough :{to have a whole podcast miniseries about them:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:, while the Hammonds remained—to get all Bette Midler about it—the wind beneath their wings.

To a president whose environmental platform so far has largely consisted of smoothing the path for private individuals to exploit land that belongs to the public, pardoning the Bundys would have been the perfect troll maneuver, in much the same way that pardoning former sheriff Joe Arpaio trolls anyone who thinks that officers of the law:{should be held accountable to the same laws they are supposed to enforce:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:.

But as it is, the Bundys weren’t available to be pardoned: charges against them and their father, Cliven, were dismissed in January of this year after the judge on their case :{declared a mistrial:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:. The Hammonds may have just been the next best thing.

No one at the White House thinks death threats to Fish & Wildlife Service employees is a big deal.

An article written about the Hammonds :{in **High Country News**:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}: back in 1994 describes Malheur officials as already in possession of a “thick file” about the Hammonds, who were allowed to drive their cattle through the refuge on their way to BLM lands to the north, as long as they gave Malheur advance notice.

Not only did the Hammonds not give notice, they also sometimes let their cows wander around in the refuge for days, trampling on habitat restoration projects and wandering into irrigation canals. When Malheur officials told the Hammonds to cut it out, Dwight Hammond didn’t take it well. “Hammond allegedly made death threats against previous managers in 1986 and 1988 and against Cameron, the current manager, in 1991 and again this year,” wrote High Country News.

In 1994, the Hammonds lost the right to graze cattle and grow hay to the north of the refuge, and Malheur decided to build a fence along the refuge boundary to keep the Hammonds' cows out. The article described what happened later that year:

the events of Aug. 3 are outlined in the sworn affidavit of special agent Earl M. Kisler, who assisted in the Hammonds' arrest. On the day the fence was to be built, the crew and refuge officials arrived to find Hammond had parked his Caterpillar scraper squarely on the boundary line and disabled it, removing the battery and draining fuel lines. When a tow truck arrived to move it, Dwight Hammond showed up, leaped to the controls of the scraper and hit a lever that lowered the bucket, narrowly missing another special agent. Meanwhile, said Kisler, Steve Hammond shouted obscenities at federal officials.

:{

}:

Both Hammonds were arrested and released two days later without having to post bail. By the time they emerged, their case had attracted the attention of the American Land Rights Association, which argued that the Hammonds were victims of government overreach. Representative Bob Smith, an Oregon Republican, wrote a letter to then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt arguing that arresting the Hammonds had caused Smith’s constituents “to lose faith in their government.” Shortly thereafter, the U.S. attorney's office in Portland reduced the charges against the Hammonds from felonies to misdemeanors and postponed the hearing on those charges indefinitely.

Trump has no idea just how much the Hammonds were into starting fires.

Dwight and Steven Hammond did more than just start a few fires that got a little out of hand. :{The indictment filed against them in 2012:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}: says that as early as 1999 the Hammonds were already being warned by the BLM district manager about starting fires that drifted into BLM territory.

In 2001, a hunting party passing through the area saw a group that included the Hammonds shoot into a herd of seven or eight deer on BLM land—a move that, given the hunting laws in southwest Oregon, was immediately obvious as poaching. “I saw at least four bucks get hit by bullets,” hunting guide Gordon Choate said at the trial. “I saw one with a leg flopping, running. And basically the herd of bucks just exploded like a flock of quail.” The Hammonds moved on and didn’t try to kill the wounded deer, which further unnerved Choate and the other hunters.

When they realized Choate had spotted them, Steven’s then-13-year-old nephew, Dusty, :{told federal investigators:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}: that Steven passed out matches to the hunting party and told them to walk through the grass, lighting and throwing them to the ground. Dusty, an inexperienced arsonist, accidentally set fire to the grass on all sides of where he was standing, and had to seek shelter in a creek until the wildfire blew over.

In the distance, Choate’s hunting camp looked up and saw a wildfire advancing. The Hammonds had made no effort to warn them. The group hurriedly evacuated, leaving all of their equipment behind. By the time the fire was extinguished, it had burned 139 acres of public land.

Or Trump just really likes fires.

In 2005, Dwight Hammond :{blocked BLM firefighters from crossing through his ranch on the way to wildfires:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}:, and Steven Hammond started a fire that hopped a fence and set fire to the private ranch next door. He asked the local sheriff if he could file a complaint against any BLM firefighters who set foot on his property, but also confided in a local BLM range management specialist that he and Dwight had been setting fires in the area “for years” to keep juniper trees from taking up water that could go into growing more grass.

In 2006, a group of BLM firefighters had to pack up their camp at night and evacuate after three fires suddenly appeared downhill from their camp. :{Steven Hammond admitted to setting the fires, and told a group of nearby firefighters that they should “just clear out:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{.”:(style="background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}: That same day, two BLM officials caught Dwight Hammond near another suspicious fire. When they tried to drive away after confronting Dwight, another fire started in the area where they had left Dwight behind that nearly boxed them in.

These are only a handful of the fires mentioned in the indictment—it requires real endurance to read through the entire list.

Or Trump is holding to an unconventional interpretation of the phrase “family man.”

Wrote Huckabee Sanders in her statement: “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.”

Setting aside the part where the Trump administration has separated family men (and women) from their children for far more minor actions than arson,it’s still clear that this pardon will be reuniting a strange kind of family. When the Hammonds' lawyers introduced a similar “family man” argument during their resentencing trial, :{the prosecution’s response was a sheriff’s report:(style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"):}: written after an employee at the local high school reported that Steven’s now-16-year-old nephew, Dusty, had some strange injuries.

Dusty told the sheriff that, in a fit of teenage experimentation, he had scratched some letters into his chest with a paperclip. When Steven Hammond found out, he held his nephew down and sanded the scratches off with sandpaper, all the while threatening to get a knife and fillet them out if the sandpaper didn’t work.

When the sheriff questioned Steven Hammond about this, Hammond said that Dusty was lucky that he was not at the ranch, because “Dusty would have wished he wasn’t alive.” The sheriff explained to the Hammonds that the state of Oregon was leading the investigation of child abuse, not Dusty. Steven Hammond told the sheriff that he did not agree with the government getting involved in family matters. The investigation appears to have ended there.

But five years later, when federal agents showed up at Dusty’s house and asked him about his uncle, he was ready to talk. He was done, he later said in court, with being afraid.

newsweek

Who Are Dwight and Steven Hammond? Donald Trump Pardons Father and Son

BY JENNI FINK ON 7/10/18

no lnx pix

DONALD TRUMP

PARDON

CLEMENCY

OREGON STANDOFF

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump granted clemency to Dwight Lincoln Hammond Jr., 76, and his son, Steven Hammond, 49, two Oregon ranchers convicted of arson for the 2001 Hardie-Hammond Fire.

The Hammonds were sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 after being convicted of arson for a fire that prosecutors said was committed on federal land where the Hammonds had grazing rights leased to them for cattle ranching. One hundred acres of public land were burned, according to The Washington Post.

The United States government alleged that the father-son duo set the fire in 2001 to reduce the growth of juniper trees and sagebrush, thereby accelerating rangeland grasses for cattle feed, according to The Oregonian.

"Jurors were told that Steven Hammond handed out 'Strike Anywhere' matches with instructions that they be lit and dropped on the ground because they were going to 'light up the whole country on fire,'" the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement in 2015.

The Hammonds' imprisonment sparked armed activists to take over a federal wildlife refuge in protest of their treatment and government land-use regulations, according to The Guardian. Led by Ammon Bundy, protesters occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge from January 2 to February 11, 2016. Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, a key protester according to The Chicago Tribune, was fatally shot on January 26 by Oregon State Police.

Members of an armed anti-government militia monitor the entrance to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters near Burns, Oregon, on January 5, 2016. The federal sentencing of Dwight and Steven Hammond for arson sparked the anti-government occupation.

ROB KERR/GETTY IMAGES

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A trial court agreed with the Hammonds that the five-year mandatory minimum sentence was unconstitutional and imposed lesser sentences, the U.S. Attorney's Office statement said. However, this decision was overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered that the Hammonds be resentenced "in compliance with the law."

NEWSWEEK

In his statement regarding the clemency, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the evidence presented at the Hammonds' trial was "conflicting" and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges.

"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," the statement concluded. "Justice is overdue for Dwight and Steven Hammond, both of whom are entirely deserving of these Grants of Executive Clemency."

aha: story 1 vs 2?

CNN

no lnx

editor’s Note: Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently “Stokely: A Life.” The views expressed here are his.

President Trump’s decision to pardon cattle ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond for committing arson on federal lands in Oregon sends a troubling signal about double standards of justice based on race in America. The Hammonds’ legal troubles dovetailed into the rise of Ammon Bundy, who led an armed struggle to take over federally preserved land that he and his group claimed belonged to the American people.

The Hammonds and Bundy tapped into a longstanding reservoir of anger and skepticism over the federal government’s seemingly capricious use of power. From this perspective, Uncle Sam does not represent a benign symbol of patriotism, but rather the specter of Big Brother ordering citizens to return their guns, land, and liberty in the name of the law.

:{

}:

Historically, the politics of armed insurrection against the US government has elicited tense standoffs between authorities and local movements who each strive to define their actions as patriotic.

The Hammond pardon showcases the double standard of justice the nation still clings to, one that is dependent upon the skin color of armed insurrectionists. White survivalists, many of whom are proud supporters of the President, the NRA, and the symbols (if not substance) of America found in declarations of faith, family, and football are treated as misguided patriots, overzealous citizens whose love of country and hatred of taxes got the best of them and caused them to misbehave.

BUNKERVILLE, NV - APRIL 24: Rancher Cliven Bundy speaks during a news conference near his ranch on April 24, 2014 in Bunkerville, Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management and Bundy have been locked in a dispute for a couple of decades over grazing rights on public lands. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

VIDEO

The history of Cliven and Ammon Bundy

Black insurrectionists who are critical of the government are frequently labeled anti-American terrorists whose willingness to use self-defensive violence should be punished to the full extent of the law. The very presence of the Black Panthers, for example, spurred local, state, and federal authorities to enact new laws (including gun control in California) expressly designed to limit their impact and make it easier to arrest and prosecute them.

The Black Panthers notably protested during the 1960s against the growing and sometimes violent use of authority in black communities, going as far as organizing their own patrols to follow police officers and at times engage in armed conflict with law enforcement officials.

In stark contrast with the Hammonds’ original sentence of five years each, some of the Panthers faced steep legal consequences for their behavior, at times for crimes they were innocent of. Perhaps the most egregious example is the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a former Green Beret turned Black Panther who served 27 years in prison for a crime the FBI allegedly knew he didn’t commit.

50 years later, who are the heirs of the Black Panthers?]

A Philadelphia-based group of black activists called MOVE also famously refused to cooperate with municipal authorities during the 1970s and early 1980s, setting off a period of tense relations that ended in tragedy. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement, under the command of the city’s first black mayor, Wilson Goode, dropped a bomb on 10 square city blocks and let the fire rage in an act of violence that arguably might never have been conceived of had the organization’s members been white.

More remarkable is what both of these groups were actually fighting for. The Black Panthers, for all their shortcomings, were vocal proponents of racial and economic justice. They fervently believed in the best and most resilient aspect of the nation’s founding dreams of liberty and democracy for all and were willing to use bold, at times reckless, tactics in pursuit of justice.

The Hammonds, on the other hand, represent a strain of anti-American insurrectionary politics whose goal is truly another country – one where the federal government exerts virtually no control over the lives of Americans, is unable to right political and moral wrongs in local communities, and political entitlement remains the birthright of white men. Both of these perspectives deserve equal treatment under the law, yet one is considered by many to be more American and less dangerous than the other, based on race and fear.

Mr. Trump’s pardon of the Hammonds continues his intimate rapprochement with his overwhelmingly white base of supporters. The rest of us await the President’s pardon of former Black Panthers and MOVE members who continue to languish in federal and state jails as political prisoners. They deserve nothing less than the empathy, compassion, and forgiveness that Mr. Trump has shown the Hammonds.

note NOT an fbi investigation (but they cc'd wonder if will act)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gop-lawmaker-invokes-trump-impeachment-while-refusing-to-resign-from-washington-state-legislature-after-investigators-say-he-engaged-in-domestic-terrorism/

[trms local sheriff not buying academic nature of plan]

1219 an no lnx

GOP lawmaker invokes Trump impeachment and refuses to resign from Washington state legislature after investigators accuse him of ‘domestic terrorism’

Written by Alex Henderson December 20, 2019

Washington State Rep. Matt Shea is so extreme that he’s controversial even among fellow Republicans and the far-right Tea Party, and both Democrats and Republicans in Washington’s state legislature are calling for his resignation following the release of a report accusing him of participation in an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The 108-page report, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review, was delivered to the Washington House of Representatives on Thursday and was based on a four-month investigation — which found that Shea’s role in the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 amounted to “an act of domestic terrorism against the United States.” The report’s findings are being forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the report states, “was meticulously planned in December 2015 by conspirators that included Rep. Shea.”

Republican J.T. Wilcox, minority leader in the Washington House of Representatives, said of Shea, “He absolutely should resign. His role as a House Republican is over.”

Rep. Matt Shea has been suspended from any role in the House Republican Caucus. He should resign. He cannot use House Republican staff, he cannot meet with the caucus, his office will be moved. https://t.co/AATHOHuO31

— Rep. JT Wilcox (@jtwilcox111) December 20, 2019

But Shea has so far refused to resign. On his Facebook page, the 45-year-old Republican compared calls for his resignation to the impeachment of President Donald Trump — writing, “Like we are seeing with our president, this is a sham investigationmeant to silence those of us who stand up against attempts to disarm and destroy our great country. I will not back down, I will not give in, I will not resign. Stand strong, fellow patriots.”

The investigation of Shea addressed in the report was conducted by the Seattle-based firm the Rampart Group, which was hired by members of the Washington House of Representatives and is headed by a former FBI agent.

In Washington State, Shea is infamous for his Christianistand anti-Muslim views and his support of armed militia groups. And not unlike Islamists who advocate sharia law, Shea has called for the U.S. to become an authoritarian Christian theocracy.

The report noted that in a document titled “Biblical Basis for War,” Shea “advocated the replacement of U.S. democracy with a theocracy and the killing of all males who do not agree.”

==

==

Booktv?

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How the bizarre tale of the ‘Oregon standoff’ explains what happened to America in 2016

Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Salon September 8, 2019

Anthony McCann’s “Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff” is one of those extraordinary books that seems to be about one thing, and turns out to be about almost everything. I raved to people a lot while I was reading it, drawing unwise comparisons to “Moby-Dick” and “Beyond Good and Evil.”

I’m still somewhat OK with those analogies. But rather than going deep on the lit-crit, I would more soberly suggest that “Shadowlands” belongs on the shelf beside Peter Matthiessen’s “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” or Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” as a work of political nonfiction that isn’t really “political,” at least not in the narrow, normative use of that word.

McCann is a poet and writing teacher who lives in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, and was drawn into the now-half-forgotten story of the 2016 “Oregon standoff” by his interest in the geography of the West, Native American messianic spirituality and the way those things intersect with the uniquely American theology of the Latter-day Saints. (Who have officially requested that we no longer call them the Mormons: Everybody gets a safe space.)

I want to let my fascinating conversation with McCann tell most of the story, but let’s just say that whatever you think you know about the Oregon standoff — when a handful of libertarian loons, associated with the notorious Bundy family of Nevada and drawn together by the internet, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the remote desert of southeastern Oregon — is probably wrong. The Malheur occupiers relied on a thoroughly nutty interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and most of them came from the fringes of the far right. But they weren’t white supremacists, mostly weren’t gun-totin’ militia types (except for a few hangers-on), and never resorted to violence or even seriously threatened to do so.

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You don’t have to agree with anything about the occupiers’ understanding of America or God or freedom — and McCann certainly doesn’t — to agree that they were responding to something real: a notionally democratic state that has lost much of its popular legitimacy, and a civil society that often feels unmoored or uprooted. Something else, of course, also happened in 2016, and McCann’s book becomes an inadvertent chronicle of the weird stew of discontent, on social media and IRL, that led to the election of our current president.

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If the Oregon standoff provided an early warning of what would happen in November of that year, it wasn’t exactly in the way you might think.Many of the Malheur occupiers vigorously despised Donald Trump as a statist or authoritarian strongman, and Trumpism wound up dividing their quadrant of the right just as it broke apart the old Republican Party. Ammon Bundy, the movement’s charismatic leader, eventually wound up breaking with Trump’s version of conservative politics entirely, endorsing asylum for Central American refugees and the abolition or devolution of the federal prison system.

Yeah, the deeper you go the weirder it gets, and you’ll want to keep reading “Shadowlands” not just for McCann’s remarkable powers of description and narrative sympathy, but in hopes he can explain not just what has gone wrong in America but why.

I spoke with Anthony McCann earlier this summer by Skype from his office in Palm Desert, California. You can watch our full conversation below. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony, this is such a remarkable account of what happened in America in 2016, in my judgment. Would you agree with my characterization that “Shadowlands” is fundamentally not a book about politics?

Yeah. There’s politics coursing through it, but I think I probably see it more as being about the powerful presence of history and certain forms of political theology, and different kinds of sovereign geographies, and the cultural impasses, and also the political impasses of the presence.

There’s an amazing sense of place in this book. By profession you’re a poet and a writing teacher, and one of the things I found the most compelling about this book is the tremendous evocation of the landscape. Many people may not really remember what the “Oregon standoff” was, but let’s start with where it happened, in southeastern Oregon, which as you point out is one of the most remote areas of North America.

Yeah. Harney County, Oregon, is — there’s one thing that local folks like to point out, which is that in the continental United States, they have the point that’s the furthest from an interstate. The night sky there is insanely bright. It’s a huge county, the size of Massachusetts, but there’s only 7,000 people in it, something that played a really important role in what Ammon Bundy and his friends were able to do there. A good portion of the county is high desert or sagebrush steppe, with a big fault-block mountain. It’s at the northernmost point of the Great Basin, and then the northern part of the county is dry pine forest. It’s a big, big landscape. Not a lot of people, far from a lot of stuff.

So what people may remember about the Oregon standoff is that some guys who were somehow affiliated with the infamous Bundy family — who are from southern Nevada, hundreds of miles away — took over a national wildlife refuge in that county in southeastern Oregon, in the name of some weird, militia-style misreading of the Constitution. That’s partly correct, but it’s really a tremendous oversimplification. Talk us through what actually happened at the Oregon standoff. What was it, and what was it about?

Yeah, there’s so much background. Ammon Bundy, Cliven Bundy’s son, was drawn to Harney County, but he’s not from Oregon, and most of the people who were involved in the standoff were not from Oregon.

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Ammon Bundy had become a charismatic, inspirational figure within a pretty horizontal, interknit kind of community of people who call themselves sometimes the Patriot Movement, which brought together a lot of different movements, like Sagebrush Rebels, anti-federal land people in the West, militia-type people who have been energized by what they call fighting back against the war on rural America — and then some of those people had been part of border militia stuff in the past — and then you also had Ron Paul-inspired anti-police militarization activists, but from the right.

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In that community Ammon had become a very important figure because of the standoff at his family’s ranch in Nevada, when his family had decided that the federal government didn’t have the right to own or manage land, and had discovered an interpretation, a very theo-legalistic interpretation of the Constitution in their Latter-day Saint mode, that proved to them that this was true, by way of a couple clauses in the Constitution they quote endlessly. They responded to a crisis that they were facing in terms of new regulations on federal lands regarding the new priorities in the West, including for environmental conservation and species protection — in this case the desert tortoise down in Clark County, Nevada — which were going to create hardship for them in terms of how they ran cows on federal land.

This all had to do with Las Vegas in the ’90s. There’s so much background to the story. Las Vegas was going to encounter a tremendous difficulty if it didn’t figure out some way to keep building, because it was growing tremendously then, when the desert tortoise was listed as an endangered species.So a way was found to make sure that those investors didn’t lose their money, and that was declaring this Mormon ranching zone a desert protection zone.

Most of the ranchers there eventually accepted the new regime and accepted buyouts of their federal grazing permits. But one person did not, and that was Cliven Bundy, and he discovered that the divine Constitution was on his side, and he refused to accept any deals. Then, 20 years later, after refusing to pay his grazing fees or recognize the federal government, the federal government came to collect his cows, which had been grazing the whole time. A standoff ensued because a video of Ammon Bundy being tased by Bureau of Land Management agents went out on the internet and went viral in that sphere, where all those people had been interconnected through the internet. They showed up, and a lot of them had guns, and in this standoff that ensued BLM decided that it was not worth it. They backed down, and gave Cliven back his cows, and nothing happened with that for two years until the late fall or early winter of 2015-2016.

Ammon Bundy had since moved to Boise, Idaho,and he had begun following this case in Harney County. Boise being the only major city anywhere near Harney County.

And when you say “anywhere near” …

I’d say three or four hours, yeah. Depending on what’s going on with the passes and snow.

People in his community had been following this story of the Hammonds, a ranch family in Harney County who had been fighting the same fight that the Bundy family had been fighting. Some ranchers, when regulations changed, adapted and began to use more ecological practices. The Bundys don’t recognize the right of the government to even do that, and from their faith they think that preservation is ridiculous because the earth is here for human beings to use as they pass through on their earthly sojourn.

The Hammonds aren’t Latter-day Saints, but they’re involved in resisting strenuously any new regulation for a long time, and they’d gotten involved in a case where they were using fire on public land in a way that ranchers had traditionally done, and eventually they got charged with arson, and then they were convicted, and the charges themselves did have a mandatory sentence of five years, partly because they were written toward instances of arson on public land near urban areas.

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There’s a sort of terrorism component [to the law], and the judge in that case ended up deciding to not apply the mandatory sentence. That resulted in the federal government appealing and winning and re-sentencing the Hammonds to prison after they had already served time, which to people in the Ammon Bundy world looked like, here’s another example of the federal government defying the Constitution, this is double jeopardy.

So Ammon Bundy, feeling what he characterized as holy urges, as being guided by the Holy Spirit to this case, began to try to figure out how to save this family from going back to prison. That culminated, after his efforts failed to convince the local sheriff to refuse to allow them [Hammonds]  to be taken into custody, in the takeover of the refuge. And that’s still the short version of the book!

One of the fascinating themes in your book is the question of perspective. OK, you and I can understand why technically that was not double jeopardy, for the Hammonds to be recharged in that case. But from their point of view, or the Bundys’, yeah, this does seem like a pretty harsh exercise of state power. To most of us from the urban liberal contingent, the Bundys and their fans and followers in the Patriot movement may seem crazy. But some of the things they are complaining about are legitimate, right?

Yeah. Some of the things, the way that they talk about them and depending on who you’re talking to — there are people who are pretty articulate and pretty involved in thinking about things, especially with law enforcement, and there are people who are just pure conspiracy all the way.

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I mentioned the Ron Paul, anti-police militarization people, and there’s a strong contingent in that movement, as I learned the more time I spent around them, who have been thinking about law enforcement and mandatory sentencing and prisons for a long time. But from the right, which I think people like us from the left, aren’t familiar with. We’ve been thinking about it more along the Michelle Alexander line.

That’s documented later in the book, where all these people were circling a private prison in the Nevada desert every day, and actually the line of their rhetoric sounded very familiar at that point. They were very well informed on that stuff, and their characterization of the federal justice system as an incarceration machine led to one of their leaders, Ammon Bundy, eventually, while he was in prison, coming out with these public statements basically calling for the abolition of prisons entirely. That’s not something that I think people who have a vague familiarity with him would expect to come out of his mouth at all.

What you capture really brilliantly in this book is that within this fairly small and arguably inconsequential event at the beginning of 2016 — first of all, there was a tremendous diversity of views. It wasn’t all one thing that drew people there. That’s one element of it. Another element is the power of the internet and viral video in organizing all these people, which is a strikingly contemporary part of the puzzle. And then in certain ways that you kind of gradually became aware of, this was an early indicator of how that historic year was going to unfold, right?

Yeah, definitely. I think the internet thing in particular. There’s so much of the book for me that is also about the presence — I think of it as undead history in the contortions of the moment, but there’s an intersection of that with our new privately owned public sphere of the internet, and also the way feeling is automated. The impasse is just continually accelerated, and so much content is just hurled back and forth, a lot of it with historical origins. But the role of the internet, both in terms of political emotion, but also in terms of how it made the occupation possible, is something that was drawn to my attention early on by people in Harney County who watched it happen to their county, and who told me early on, “You got to think about this in terms of Facebook.”

I remember a librarian at the Harney County library just showing me her Facebook feed, and being like, “This is all about Facebook,” and talking about the first town meeting where one of the speakers was a local rancher who got up and just said, “I think Facebook should be illegal. That’s all I’ve got to say,” and sat back down.

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As I began to think about it, and then to watch all these videos, and began to notice just how much the whole thing took place on different layers of the internet, it also became clear how much, as I began to get to know the Bundyites, they were a vast internet friend group across the very alienated West, across communities that are pretty broken down economically, with devastated public sectors.

They had this community of intense feeling of purpose. It’s not an exaggeration to say, messianic purpose, because Ammon is actually offering an opportunity to come forward, and at the occupation he was saying, “Come watch the wonderful thing. Come be part of the wonderful thing the Lord is about to accomplish.” And that includes basically putting humankind on the right track through its vehicle, the United States of America.

But he was able to do all that in this very horizontal, non-organized, instantaneous way, because of the power of the Facebook Live video, the YouTube video,and also the way feeling is automated on the internet and brings people together,and it caused this thing that it feels really important to think through as we move forward. The challenge to sovereignty that they were able to effectuate in that county by virtue of thishorizontal, instantaneous network, in this place that suffers from public sector disinvestment, economic hardship.[ghost dance?]

It’s a county with at most five sheriff’s deputies, that’s the size of Massachusetts. The way they were able to just come in instantaneously, like a flash mob, as one journalist as described them, and challenge sovereignty, seems to me to speak in sort of Ammon Bundy’s Mormon messianic language, a type of shadow of the platforms themselves, and how they seem to operate, and the ways they engage with national sovereignty on a global scale, in terms of the kind of disruption they bring, and have continued to bring.

Despite all the hand-wringing and public apologies, just a few weeks agoFacebook announced that they’re starting their own global currency,a news story that was oddly eclipsed by all the chatter that’s happening continually on the same platforms. They want to start their own global currency with basically a global bank  that’ll basically bypass Wall Street, which also means bypassing what forms of financial regulation are left in existence through the powers and sovereignty of nation-states.

So much of our crisis right now seems to be a crisis in sovereignty and in our understanding of what a nation is, and how that has been undermined. Certainly I see Trump partly as — in the end, it comes down to people in an auditorium chanting, “Build the wall! Build the wall!” and imagining this sovereign geography where, in an embodied way, become the wall. It’s a sort of symbolic performance of the nation still existing as a sovereign power, in a way it seems not to.

That’s a really important set of ideas that may help convey why people should read this book. I feel like you’re wrestling the whole time with the sense that this strange event in this remote place that involved, at most, a couple of hundred people drawn together from the right-wing and libertarian fringes of the internet had a much larger meaning. What was the connection between that, and the election of a president who largely depended on spreading memes, spreading videos and galvanizing the deplorables, people who feel themselves to be on the fringes of society?

Certainly because the whole time I was following the story, the election was happening, I was, like so many people, able to convince myself that this guy would never be elected. In that world, it’s interesting, very few people talked about Donald Trump during or after the election. Some people definitely support him in that world, but it’s a point of contention. There’s a lot of people in that world who despise him, because it’s a very libertarian world, and the reactionary mode that Trump offers is super-statist, right? It’s super about identifying yourself with law enforcement, with power, with ICE, and with the big leader. For a lot of those people there’s a lot of open suspicion of that.

What’s the difference? And I talk about this a lot in book. What’s the difference between the two reactionary positions? There’s the much grander and more successful reactionary position that Trump has taken, and there’s the strange sort of retro-neo-settler position that I was around with all the Bundyite people, and I think a lot of it has to do with the state. Trump is offering classic authoritarianism, you get to be me, and I am powerful, and our power will course back and forth. As you give me your power, and I am engorged, so you shall be powerful, and we’ll be a wall together.

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With the Bundyites it’s this total — again, staged for the internet, again, in thismessianic way — it’s a neo-Jacksonian, small government, going out into the frontier even though there isn’t a frontier anymore, and establishing a maximum-liberty frontier society.But that’s not possible for anybody. So it’s entirely in a world of political fantasy, which leads to one of the things that was the strangest about spending time with them.

You think they’re all these libertarians, and when I talked to them about, “What was the most striking thing for you about being part of the occupation, about being part of this community?”

They’re always like, “The community.” Then they start saying things like, “The best thing was we didn’t use any money.” This one guy even told me, “I was finally outside the war machine,” which is not what you’re expecting to hear from right-wing militants who’ve occupied a national wildlife refuge with the goal of returning all public land to the people, and possibly some of them to private ownership.

There’s a lot of division there. There’s been division since then, since Ammon broke with the Trumpite agenda in his own world over immigration. Ammon supports giving refuge to refugees from Central America, which earned him a lot of hatred in his community.

But to go back out your question about the election year, I think maybe more formally thinking about the role of the internet in mobilizing emotion and disruption, and also in presenting possibilities for different reactionary fantasies and communities of feeling. Definitely that year was full of that, and also full of the unresolved history of the 19th century coming back to bite us.

I think of the Trumpites and the Bundyites — you can see them both descending from Andrew Jackson in a certain sense, except the Bundyites maintain a little bit more of that frontier, limited-government fantasy, which has to be then reduced to political theory, because you’re not going to find a place to homestead anymore. Performatively they were able to pretend they were doing it at Malheur, which led them, of course, intoconflict with the local Paiute group, who had some strong critiques of that whole position, whereas the Trump side has kind of abandoned all that. He has abandoned the small-government part of Jacksonianism for the pure effective — you know, the racism. The whiteness.

I want to grab hold of one last important theme you just mentioned. You write a fair amount in the book about the kind of tormented relationship between the occupiers at Malheur and local Native Americans, the Paiute people in this case. The Bundyites made a semi-good-faith effort to get Native Americans on their side, which didn’t work at all. But when I talk to people in New York or wherever about your book, people who only know about this event from the media, their assumption is that we’re talking about a bunch of wacko white supremacists of the militia variety. Although that wasn’t completely absent, you would argue that’s far too simplistic.

Yeah, I think they definitely see themselves as speaking for everyone in this universal way, while, of course, the universal hero of their narrative still remains a white man. Ammon likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr. whenever he can, probably, to compensate for certain horrible comments of his father’s, which sound like they could come from a speech by Andrew Johnson, or Ronald Reagan for that matter. There’s certainly white priority expressed throughout, but they were not a white supremacist organization. They’re not alt-right in that way, they are this different thing, and very Mormon.

I think people were shocked to find out that Ammon was supporting refugees. I wasn’t shocked at all. It’s entirely predictable within his faith that he would feel that way, it’s just surprising that he decided that he was going to risk alienating a huge amount of people who supported him, and come out and scold them in that way, and basically call them warmongers, and compare their rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany. But, still, within the story, they’re still strongly advancing a white fantasy. Basically, I like to think of what they were doing out there as a neo-settler re-enactment Wild West show, performed for the internet, with all these messianic currents.

They were going to redeem America, and get us back to the proper future in all those ways, but of course any land out they were doing it on what was Native land. It’s a desert marsh, which are very special landscapes, which is why it’s a national wildlife refuge. It was an incredibly important space for the Native people there. It was where winter camps were pitched, full of artifacts and remains. And the local tribe entered into the story very quickly when Ammon was announcing that we’re going to return this to the rightful owners. The Paiutes were like, “Well, hey. You know, we’re here, but we know you don’t mean us.”

They used that as opportunity to tell their story. A story of displacement and refusal of that displacement, and incredible persistence in returning to that place. Their perspective opened up, I think, the nature of the performance that the Bundyites were doing out there, the racialized nature of that.

Very quickly some of the Bundyites, particularly a man named LaVoy Finicum, who ended up being the one casualty of the occupation, and has become the movement’s martyr, he made these videos directly addressing the Paiute, and trying to use the artifacts as kind of a way of beginning a conversation. That didn’t work at all, because his understanding of what the value of the artifacts was is very different from the tribe’s understanding, that relates very much to their conceptions of geography and time and land, and his coming from his libertarian perspective. As the tribal archaeologist, Diane Teeman, explained, the traditional Paiute worldview there is that those things belong back in the earth, where they’re connected to the community as dirt, which already is a temporal pathway that connect to everyone who’s ever touched that landscape in the past.

That clash to me was fascinating. Finicum’s efforts were poignant if ham-fisted, and probably also both genuine and also strategic, with the recognition that if the tribe joined them it would’ve been a very different story. In the media, if it was a bunch of cowboys and a bunch of natives out there, standing against the federal government, you would have had something more like a Wounded Knee situation, which is a history there. That 1973 occupation is something that was very much on the minds of those who are informed about history at all.

Your story is deeply embedded in history and geography, but you’ve really, for the most part, resisted any idea of heroes or villains. Even with someone like Ammon Bundy, you allow yourself to be a little bit seduced by him, or to understand what is appealing about him, without embracing his worldview. Did that just happen organically, or was that kind of what you wanted to do?

It was the tribe’s story that first drew me in, because I was really interested in Native American messianic ideas, particularly from the deserts. And then suddenly the story happened with this very different kind of messianism of Ammon’s coming in. I’ve always been really interested in Latter-day Saint thought and theology, and how the Latter-day Saint dispensation is a strange parallel dispensation to the nation and to manifest destiny or what have you. The political theology that Ammon embodies is fascinating to listen to, because these guys aren’t — it’s important to realize that people like Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy are really smart, but their education is entirely theological,so their whole political vocabulary is political mysticism. When they’re talking about the Holy Spirit guiding them to what they’re doing — the presence of that throughout American history seems so important, and I think it’s a thing that we on the more secular left don’t understand enough, and don’t understand the power of enough.

Watching the effectiveness of it and also the poetry of it and the weirdness of it, definitely drew me in. It became not so hard to present the spell that Ammon was casting over this landscape, with his Latter-day Saint geography, and then bring that into conflict with the other geographies that emerge from other protagonists in the book, including the Paiutes.

https://www.ecowatch.com/up-in-arms-new-book-2638990950.html

Tara Lohan

When armed militants with a grudge against the federal government seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon back in the winter of 2016, I remember avoiding the news coverage. Part of me wanted to know what was happening, but each report I read — as the occupation stretched from days to weeks and the destruction grew — made me so angry it was hard to keep reading.

That's why I picked up John Temple's new book Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement.

I wanted to see what I'd missed. And I wanted to understand the extremist ideologies that continue to dominate many discussions in the American West.

Temple, an author and journalism professor at West Virginia University's Reed College of Media, provides a page-turning account of both the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, that launched scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his family into the national spotlight and the 2016 occupation of Malheur, led by Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan.

"It's obviously an exciting story with cowboys and guns and takeovers and standoffs," Temple told me about the book. "But it sheds light on public lands issues, environmental issues, on questions about how the government should handle these situations and the urban-rural divide in this country."

The book also delves into the history of the Sagebrush Rebellion,a western U.S. movement against federal ownership of public lands that ignited in the late 1970s and has continued to smolder in the decades since.

The Bundys, who still subscribe to this line of thinking, refused to recognize the Bureau of Land Management's authority over the public land where they graze their cattle (or the federal government in general). That ultimately led — after 20 years of federal agencies looking the other way — to an armed standoff in which the FBI attempted to seize the rancher's cattle after years of unpaid grazing fees and mounting fines.

Spoiler alert: It didn't end well for the government.

Temple then chronicles the play's second act, during which the Bundy sons engineered the takeover of the federally run Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for more than a month. The pretense was defending local Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, who were sentenced to jail for federal land arson, but who actually eschewed the Bundys' help. The occupation turned out to be more of a publicity stunt than anything — one that ended in spectacular failure (although the Bundys insist it was a success). In the process they also trashed the refuge headquarters and racked up a $9 million tab for taxpayers.

While Up in Arms gives a detailed view of the ideology that motivates the Bundys, the story is much bigger than them. It's also an exploration of the motivations of some of the most hardline anti-federal militants in the country — not just the Bundys, but the ragbag collection of so-called Patriot movement followers that flocked to their ranch, even when most of them lacked understanding of public-lands issues and the cause they were backing.

In fact, Temple said, he first came to the story of the Bundys researching an unrelated project about militias. As a result there's not much in the book about the underlying environmental issues at the heart of the Bundy actions, including the impact of renegade ranching on public lands.

But Temple writes about the personal histories of many of the supporters who turned up for the initial showdown in Bunkerville and others who joined the occupation at Malheur. He reveals the power dynamics among different Patriot militia groups as they jockeyed for media attention and acolytes.

While the Bundys honed their talking points in scores of interviews about their anti-government rhetoric and their calling from God to act on it, Temple said that most of the other Bundy supporters didn't have much political inspiration or well-formed ideologies.

"I think some of these folks were motivated on a very personal level where they have trouble with authority and that kind of thing," he said. "Every individual seemed to have a different set of grievances or issues that were driving them, but it coalesced around a few things:Distrust of the federal government and the feeling that the federal government was overreaching in its authority, and the Second Amendment."

What could go wrong?

As Temple writes, a lot went wrong on both sides of the confrontation between the government and the militias. This was on full view when the Bundys and their compatriots eventually faced their day in court.

If you've ever wondered, as I did, how the leaders of an armed insurrection that occupied federal property, degraded public lands, and terrorized government workers escaped punishment, it's explained here in great detail. Temple writes about not just the court proceedings that followed the standoffs but the main players on the federal government's team, including FBI leadership involved in Bunkerville. A series of bumbles and missteps ultimately led to the prosecution's ultimate failure.

There's no happy ending, unless you believe divine providence is shining down on the Bundy clan. But Temple's book paints a useful picture of the simmering, ongoing range war in the West and the havoc an unlikely alliance of right-wing groups can wreak when they converge.

That's the most sobering part of the book: It's likely a preview of things to come.

Reposted with permission from our media associate The Revelator.

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Several members of the Three Percenters of Oregon, a group that joined in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover in 2016, chimed in on various social media posts Friday that they were willing to provide Oregon Republican Senators who walked out of the state Capitol “security.”

Oregon’s Republican leadership confirmed Thursday morning that they were leaving the state to avoid providing quorum for a vote on House Bill 2020, a massive climate bill that Democratic leaders have pushing for years to pass.

UPDATE 8:09 p.m.: ‘Militia threat’ shuts down Oregon statehouse

All 11 Oregon Senate Republicans were nowhere to be found Friday morning when Senate President Peter Courtney called the Senate into session, and then – when a quorum was not present – announced a recess.

Oregon’s Republican leadership confirmed Thursday morning that they were leaving the state to avoid providing quorum for a vote on a massive climate bill that Democratic leaders have pushing for years to pass.

Members of the Three Percenters of Oregon, a group that joined in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover in 2016, are offering to will provide the Republican Senators “security” and “refuge.”

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GOODMAN: Kierán Suckling, we are speaking to you in Portland, Oregon. In Yosemite right now, the national park, thousands of people are being evacuated because of terrible wildfires. I want to ask you about something else that happened in Oregon. Earlier this month, Donald Trump pardoned Dwight Hammond and his son Steven Hammond, two Oregon cattle ranchers who were convicted in 2012 of committing arson on federal lands. Prosecutors say the Hammonds set the fires to cover up their illegal deer poaching. Their conviction sparked armed right-wing militiamen, led by Ammon Bundy, to take over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, provoking a 41-day armed standoff in 2016. Can you comment on this and what message President Trump was sending with this, these pardons?

KIERÁN SUCKLING: This is very disturbing, because the Hammonds not only were arsonists who set fire to our public lands, threatening firefighters who were out there, but have a long history of threatening to kill federal officials. And when the Bundy militia group came up to support them when they were prosecuted, they came up there with the message of not just let’s help the Hammonds, but let’s give all of America’s public lands away to industry and state groups.

And so, when Trump is pardoning these people, he’s really signaling—sending a signal to this right-wing base to say, “Hey, anti-government extremism, threats of violence against those you don’t like, against the government, are acceptable.” They’re encouraged. And, in fact, earlier, when he pardoned Joe Arpaio, another very controversial action, well, it turns out Joe Arpaio, Sheriff Joe, was also a supporter of this Bundy group and this radical, violent agenda. And I think it goes along with Trump gearing up this violent undercurrent in America to support him and to drive fear into others.