WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho) went to the Senate floor to oppose President Biden’s nomination of Ms. Tracy Stone-Manning to serve as director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Risch has spoken out against Stone-Manning’s nomination before, citing her collusion with eco-terrorists and her making false and misleading statements to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
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Excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity:
“There are 330 million people in America. Almost every single one of those people, including some high school kids, could do this substantially better than she could and would not tarnish the name of the BLM. That is going to happen when she is confirmed as the director of the BLM.”
. . .
“There’s no need for this woman to be in charge of this agency. There are plenty of people who could do this. Today in the Clearwater National Forest, those trees are still there. Some of them will be there for 100 or more years. It’s very possible one of these is going to kill somebody working in one of the mills at some point in time after all of us are dead and gone.
“They’ll ask at that time, ‘How did this happen?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, a woman who eventually became head of the BLM was involved in putting these spikes in the trees here.’ And people will shake their heads and say, ‘What were those people thinking? That is shameful, it’s despicable.’ And yet, that’s what’s about to happen here.”
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“This is wrong. It is a shameful moment for this administration. I can tell you the employees of the Bureau of Land Management are going to have a very difficult time working under a person who is an eco-terrorist and who is a perjurer. She should not be confirmed. Thank you.”
Background: Tree spiking – hammering metal spikes into tree trunks to discourage logging – is considered an act of eco-terrorism because it can gravely injure or kill loggers and mill workers. In 1987, a 23-year-old mill worker had his face maimed when a spiked tree caused his saw to explode.
In 1989, Biden nominee Tracy Stone-Manning — a then-member of radical environmental group Earth First! — typed and sent a threatening, profanity-laden letter to the Forest Service on behalf of her friend and tree-spiking ringleader, John Blount, that Earth First! members had unloaded 500 pounds of spikes into the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho.
On her Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee questionnaire, a sworn affidavit, Stone-Manning said she was never the subject of a criminal investigation, despite discussing being investigated with a local newspaper in 1990, and subsequently receiving immunity in exchange for testimony against the ringleaders of the tree-spiking operation. Stone-Manning again misrepresented her involvement in sworn testimony to Congress stating she had “no involvement” when asked if she did “in any way directly or indirectly support activities associated with the spiking of trees.” Further, the lead investigator in charge of the tree-spiking case refuted Stone-Manning’s claims, Merkley and Blount show her involvement in the tree spiking plot was much more advanced than previously known.
The BLM manages almost 65 million acres of forests.
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