Nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning

Floor Speech

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Mr. RISCH. Madam President and fellow Senators, I rise today to join the chorus of my colleagues that are urging that Tracy Stone-Manning not be confirmed and, indeed, not even be discharged from the committee that voted to not send her to the floor for confirmation.

First of all, it is amazing to me that someone with this background has been appointed to this position. Now, I understand she has held some positions in the State of Montana for politicians there, and I don't comment on that. That is up to them, who they want the hire to do that.

In Idaho, that has a very, very significant number of acres of BLM ground, we have a different view of how our public resources should be protected and be administered, and this appointee in no way reflects the values we have.

This woman is an ecoterrorist. She participated in a conspiracy to murder people who work in the timber industry for a living. She is a perjurer, very recently. And she is someone who is supposed to put out fires and, as late as 2020, has made very disqualifying statements regarding her desire to do that and, indeed, commitment to do that.

Let's start with the ecoterrorist charge. I want to go a little bit further than what my colleague who just spoke did about using a chain saw to tear down--or to take down a tree in the forest.

Let me explain to you how this works. The prop that he held up was a spike that ecoterrorists put in trees. There is one reason to put a spike in a tree--one reason and one reason only--and that is to kill and to maim the people who harvest that tree.

These are innocent people who are involved in the timber business. They are my friends. They are my neighbors. We have lots of them in Idaho, and they work in a dangerous industry anyway. But for someone to go out and intentionally put these spikes in the trees, as the Senator spoke before me, Senator Marshall mentioned, there can be an injury in the forest when you are actually cutting the tree with a chain saw.

But that isn't the main difficulty with this. The main difficulty is when it hits the mill. They cut these logs up into mill-sized pieces and then run them through the mill, which is cut either with a circular saw or band saw into boards. And when that happens, the log and saw move very quickly through the log and cut up the wood into timber, which is not a problem unless there is a spike in the way. If there is a spike in the way, somebody in that mill will be badly injured and/or killed.

When that saw hits the spike, the saw shatters, the spike shatters, and it sends shrapnel to everybody who is standing within the vicinity. It has happened. It is documented. And it is ugly.

So when ecoterrorists do this, this is not a Sunday school prank. This is an act knowingly, willfully, intentionally with a black and abandoned heart committed in order to murder someone who works in the timber industry. This is wrong.

The person that we are voting on today participated in a conspiracy to do just that. Indeed, she wrote a letter. She claims she just typed it. Originally, she said it was handed to her by some person and asked to type. We now find out, of course, that this was a letter that was composed by a number of people, not the least of which was a gentleman that she lived with; but she is the one who put this together and sent it to the Federal Government as part of this act of conspiring, to take the lives of innocent people in the forest.

She says she edited the letter. But if she did, then it is what it is in front of us. She said she typed this and sent it to the Forest Service.

She said: This letter is being sent to you to notify that the Post Office sale in Idaho has been spiked heavily. The project required that 11 of us spend 9 days in God-awful weather conditions spiking trees. We unloaded a total of 500 pounds of spikes, measuring 8 to 10 inches, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, if she edited this letter, then she properly stated what her participation was in all of this. And there is no question that she admits that she prepared this letter and sent it to the Forest Service.

Today, in Idaho, those spikes remain in the trees. We don't know when one of those logs is going to be cut and going to cause damage, possibly the loss of life, but certainly the maiming of people who attempt to process that log into usable lumber. She says they put 500 pounds total of spikes in those trees.

This is a person whom the administration has chosen to administer the largest chunk of Federal land in the United States of America, possibly in the world. She is going to manage these after she committed this act of ecoterrorism and participated in this conspiracy.

Now, you say: Why isn't she in prison? Well, her coconspirators went to prison because she testified against them. She was found out. The investigators determined what her participation was in the conspiracy. She hired an attorney, and the attorney negotiated a deal where she would rat on the fellow conspirators and she did so and thereby avoided going to prison.

So that is what happened in her prior history. It is important to know those things because somewhere down in the recesses of her heart and her soul, she was prepared to participate in a conspiracy that would cause the death and the injury of innocent forest workers.

Now, more recently than that, she has made statements that certainly call into considerable question how she will be able to do her job. For those of you who don't live in the Western States, as I do and many of us do, when public land starts on fire, it is important that the fire be put out and be put out as quickly as possible. Her husband wrote an article. I wouldn't ordinarily tag her with her husband's view of things, but she took that article; she republished it in 2020 and said this was a ``clarion call.'' Now, if you look up ``clarion call'' in the dictionary, it is an urgent call to require somebody to do something. She calls this a clarion call.

He wrote this article about how people shouldn't be building in the forest around what is called interface land. If you are not--again, we westerners are familiar with interface. We have so much public land that many of our subdivisions, our individual homes, our cities butt up against interface land.

So this is what she said was a clarion call. The solution to houses in the interface is to let them burn. This is the person that the administration is going to put in charge of fire suppression in an interface zone. Let me state it again. The solution to houses in the interface zone is to let them burn is what she said.

Then: How do you feel about that?

She said:

There's a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the House of someone who builds in the forest.

That was in 2020. In 2020, she said that. This is whom the administration wants to take over the Bureau of Land Management.

Well, in addition to that, she lied to the committee. She lied under oath. I will tell you, this is disgusting. She shouldn't be here. She should be charged and standing in front of a jury.

Now, I told you what she did about her participation in the tree- spiking incident, and this was a question that was asked of her under oath as she came to the committee for her confirmation:

Did you have personal knowledge of, participate in, or in any way directly or indirectly support activities associated with the spiking of trees in any forest during your lifetime?

No.

Now, we know she wrote this letter. She admits it. She participated in it because she testified she participated in it when she testified against the other people who were eventually convicted and sent to prison. Yet she swore under oath to our committee this year that, no, she wasn't involved in that. They asked: Have you ever been arrested or charged--they asked her whether or not she had ever been a target of such an investigation. She says:

No, I have never been arrested or charged and to my knowledge I have never been the target of such investigation.

She knew she was a target; she was sent a letter that she was a target; and she hired an attorney to get her out from underneath that mess because she was a target. Yet she said no. So she has perjured herself this year.

Well, look, this is not the right person for this job. It just amazes me that they would even consider a person like this for this job. This is an insult to the thousands of good, hard-working people who are in the Bureau of Land Management and who work day and night to protect our resources on the public lands in the Western States.

Look, I know we are going to lose this. It is going to be a party- line vote. All Republicans are going to vote against confirming her. The Democrats are all going to vote in favor of her. I say to this administration, this is not going to go away. This person's record of perjury, of ecoterrorism, of participating as a person involved in this plot and this conspiracy to actually take the life of Forest Service workers--this is not going to go away during the entire time that she is the head of this Agency. It is going to come up again and again, and it should.

So I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, I say to the President of the United States, who has nominated her for this position, if this is the character of someone who you want us to remember as the legacy of your administration, here she is, a perjurer, an ecoterrorist, a person who has participated in a conspiracy to murder innocent people working in the forest. If that is what you want as your administration, here it is. Vote for it. I suspect that is exactly what is going to happen, but this is not going to go away.

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