Nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, fellow Senators, and the American public, I rise today to underscore a travesty that is about to take place here in about an hour on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I am talking about the BLM matter, the Bureau of Land Management matter, the nominee the President of the United States has made to run the Bureau of Land Management as the Director of the Bureau of Land Management. That person is Tracy Stone-Manning.
I think the facts have pretty well been laid out already in the media. At the same time, there is tremendous outrage, I can tell you, amongst not only BLM employees but among the people who earn their living and recreate on the millions of acres of BLM. It is incredible, it is astonishing, and it is an embarrassment for this administration to nominate a person who is an ecoterrorist and a person who has perjured themselves before the committee that she appeared before on her confirmation and, in addition to that, has espoused a ``let it burn'' philosophy for people's homes that she will take an oath to defend if she becomes head of the BLM, which I believe she is going to before the Sun goes down today.
It is amazing to me that the administration would put this person in this position. 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, which is going to happen when she is confirmed as the Director of the BLM.
So what did she do? Well, she engaged in acts of ecoterrorism. She engaged in a conspiracy to kill other people. She engaged in acts with Earth First! that put her squarely in the target of the U.S. Government, along with her cohorts with whom she lived in a house in Montana at the time. But she got off the hook. She didn't get prosecuted because she turned on the others and turned state's evidence. She hired an attorney, and that attorney negotiated with the U.S. attorney there, and she wound up testifying against the others, so she wasn't convicted. Nonetheless, she was as deeply involved in this as they were.
Let me read for you a letter that she wrote. She admits to writing this letter:
To whom it may concern, this letter is being sent to notify you that the Post Office Sale in Idaho has been spiked heavily.
The post office sale was a Forest Service sale of standing timber in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. She writes this letter regarding that.
The reasoning for this action is that this piece of land is very special to the earth. It is home to the Elk, Deer, Mountain Lions, Birds, and especially the Trees.
She is absolutely correct on that.
The next paragraph describes what she did.
The project required that eleven of us--
Most of whom lived in that house in Montana--
spend nine days in God awful weather conditions spiking trees. We unloaded a total of five hundred pounds of spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length.
For people who don't understand what spiking trees is, and most people in America wouldn't, you think, how could it be harmful in going out and putting a spike in a tree?
This is a spike. It is not a particularly large one, but it doesn't take a particularly large one. What they do is they drive this item into a tree. They drive it in far enough that you can't see it. It then stands there until some unsuspecting logger comes along and cuts the tree down. That logger could be injured, but it is unlikely they will be, but they could be because of the hidden spike that was in the tree.
The tree is then, after it is cut down, cut into length--usually 16 foot--put onto a truck, and hauled to the mill. Once it gets to the mill, it is put in a millpond. It is then pushed eventually into the mill, and when it enters the mill, it goes on a carriage, and the carriage carries it to a saw. The saw may move back and forth, cutting the wood that is on this log in the carriage, or more likely, the carriage itself will move against the moving saw.
There are a couple kinds of saws. One is a circular saw. It could be 5 feet. Depending on the size of the mill, it could 5 feet, 6 feet, 10 feet. But in today's world, more often than not, it is a bandsaw. A bandsaw is a piece of metal stripping that is a quarter-inch thick or so and probably a couple inches wide with teeth, and it circulates in the mill between the first floor, the second floor, even the third floor. As the carriage hits it, it then saws the log into boards.
All is well unless there is one of these in the log. What happens when that saw hits this item in the log? In the best description I can give you, it is much like a hand grenade going off, except that there is no fire explosion, but there is just as much shrapnel that goes out of this at a speed that is very, very fast because all of the moving parts are moving very fast. And what does it do? It kills, and it injures log workers who are right there on the floor.
These are innocent people. They are people who are working to make a living for themselves, for their families, for their children. They are people who go to work in the morning and do not come home because someone knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with a black and an abandoned heart, stuck one of these in the tree. That is the only reason you put one of these in a tree, is to kill and maim fellow human beings who are absolutely innocent and who have done nothing wrong.
She was involved in this. This person whom the administration wants to run the Bureau of Land Management, which manages millions of acres, the largest tracts of land in the United States of America--they want to put this woman in charge of this Agency. They sell timber all the time. She will be in charge of that. There is 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 is 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 will ask at that time: How did this happen?
They will say: Well, a woman who eventually became head of the BLM was involved in putting these spikes in these trees here.
People will shake their heads and say: What were those people thinking? That is shameful. It is despicable.
Yet that is what is about to happen here.
Now, that was a while ago that this happened, but what has happened recently?
She will be in charge of firefighting. Firefighting is absolutely critical on public lands in the West. We need it on Forest Service land; we need it on Bureau of Land Management land. But, like I said, she has embraced the idea that letting fires burn and burning down the houses that are in the interface zones is perfectly fine.
How do we know this? It is in writing. It is absolutely in writing. There was an article written, fortuitously, by her husband in 2018 but which she embraced on September 15, 2020, in a tweet, and I will get to the tweet in a minute. But this is the view that her husband takes of what should happen to houses--perfectly innocent people's houses--that are built near public lands. The idea is, let it burn.
He says:
But the federal government then needs to make fighting wildfires--a social process--subject to a social contract. Perhaps the feds should commit themselves to refusing to send in the troops to any county that has not taken such measures. Perhaps the solution to houses in the interface is to let them burn.
He says:
There's a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the house of someone who builds in the forest.
She embraced this. Just a little over a year ago, she put out a tweet and said:
Not a bad time to revisit this piece from my husband, Richard Manning, from two years ago. [This is a] clarion call.
``Let them burn,'' she says; a clarion call to let people's homes burn.
She put that out on September 15, 2020, just a little over a year ago. This is the person we are going to confirm to fight fires and protect people's homes in the West.
All of us in the West live relatively close to the interface zones, and many people, millions of people, live in the interface zones. She is saying it is a clarion call to let them burn, and, indeed, they will get a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the houses that were built in the interface zone.
You can't make this stuff up. If someone wrote a book about this, someone would toss it and say: That is too ridiculous. This could never happen.
This is the woman this U.S. Senate is going to confirm on a straight party-line vote in about an hour here.
So she comes before the committee, and although we didn't have all of the facts at the time, as has been alluded to by my colleagues here, we were aware that she had attachments to ecoterrorist groups. So some questions were put to her, and as always happens before the committee, they are required to be signed under oath, which she did, and she was asked whether or not she had ever been arrested or charged or been the target of an investigation involving spiking. She says--now under oath after solemnly swearing to tell the truth--``No, I have never been arrested or charged, and to my knowledge, I have never been the target of such an investigation.''
She hired an attorney to negotiate with the U.S. attorney because she was a target of the investigation, had received a target letter, and had been told she was a target of that.
What are we doing here? How in the world can somebody come before a committee, take an oath that they would tell the truth, and then flat lie?
She was also asked: Did you have personal knowledge of--did you have personal knowledge of--participate in, or in any way, directly or indirectly, support activities associated with the spiking of trees in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest on March 29, 1989?
We read the letter she wrote where she admitted that she was involved in that.
Her answer to that: ``I had no involvement in the spiking of trees.'' Under oath, she said that. We know otherwise.
She said, ``Eleven of us [spent] nine days in God awful weather conditions spiking trees,'' and she under oath says, ``No.''
Next question: 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?
Answer: ``No.''
We know better. She admitted to signing this letter where she fessed up to it.
Well, look, I know I am not going to talk the Democrats out of confirming her. I can tell you that this is a shameful, shameful thing for the administration to do. It is a shameful thing for my friends in the majority to confirm her.
What I can tell you is, when she comes before the committee that we sit on, where we have oversight of the BLM--and we have the Director in regularly because we have oversight responsibility--how will we believe one word she says when she has already perjured herself?
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 ecoterrorist and who is a perjurer. She should not be confirmed.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source