Congratulations to President Trump for heeding my call, and the calls of other westerners, farmers, and ranchers, to pardon the Hammonds. Neither he, nor his appointees, nor bureaucrats, however, should rest on their laurels. There are many agency vendettas and prosecutorial abuses to undo, and many innocents to be made whole. One of those victims is Pastor Victor Fuentes of Nevada.
Dwight and Steven Hammond are a father-son ranching duo from Oregon. They were prosecuted under a terrorism statute and sentenced to five years in prison in 2015, punishment for arson charges that stemmed from controlled burns started on their ranch that spread onto nearby public lands. Trump pardoned them on July 10. In a congratulatory commentary on the pardon, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board reported that in its efforts to “drive out [the Hammonds and other ranchers],” the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service “mismanaged water to let ranchlands flood.”
The Hammonds are not the only westerners wronged in a case of “theft by flooding.” So, too, was Pastor Fuentes, who fled Castro’s Cuba and whose church — a small, mostly Spanish-speaking congregation — built a 40-acre refuge in the Nevada desert for troubled youth.
Unfortunately, like the Hammonds’ ranch, Pastor Fuentes’ church is surrounded by a Fish and Wildlife Service refuge. Its officials, lawyers, and high-priced hired guns want him gone. So they diverted a stream that once flowed tranquilly across his land, co-opted his Nevada-approved water rights, and channeled his water onto federal land. Incompetent as they are criminal, their diversion failed, and four times over 5.5 years, water overflowed its new banks and cascaded across the church’s land. It destroyed property, washed away fertile soil, and created gullied and dusty badland where there was once a beautiful oasis.
Represented by Mountain States Legal Foundation, Pastor Fuentes and his church are in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the government seized their property without “just compensation.” Days ago, discovery closed and Mountain States Legal Foundation and Pastor Fuentes are now preparing for a full-blown trial, although it is expected the agency will assert that there are no facts in dispute, and they should win instantly. In doing so they will rely — as we discovered in recent depositions of agency’s witnesses — on “experts” and their reports, which cost hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars, to justify the government’s theft of water and intentional flooding.
For those Americans who were shocked by the sneering, smirking, stupefying preening of FBI agent Peter Strzok in his appearance before Congress, meet Tim Mayer, the unlicensed “Supervisory Hydrologist” at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland, Ore. Mayer is the unbridled bureaucrat who green-lighted the scheme to steal the water of and flood a church camp. Mayer and his agency intentionally turned Pastor Fuentes’ church camp into a living hell, just to force these Christians off their property. Though Mayer is neither a lawyer nor a historian, he admitted he routinely provides legal advice and counseled the agency that it was lawful to steal the church’s water.
Another government “expert” brags unabashedly that he “majored in science in high school,” but admitted he lacks the expertise to say whether the agency’s water diversion project was constructed negligently. A third deponent — one of five woefully uninformed but very well-paid experts ($440 an hour for one) — opined the damage was the result of a “one-hundred-year flood,” but despite being a meteorologist, could not explain why four such floods in 5.5 years did not invalidate his theory. Federal lawyers should refuse to put these so-called experts on the stand at trial. Instead, they will fight zealously to destroy the hopes, dreams, and years of sacrifice of Pastor Fuentes, despite the fact that a federal agency made a moonscape out of his church’s land. If past is prologue, and federal courts being federal courts, the Fish and Wildlife Service may very well succeed.
Trump said wonderful things about beleaguered westerners in pardoning the Hammonds, but those seeking to grind Pastor Fuentes into the dust did not get the message. Trump needs to tweet Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke before it is too late.
William Perry Pendley is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, has argued cases before the Supreme Court and worked in the Department of the Interior during the Reagan administration. He is the author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today.
