In late October, a jury in Oregon acquitted Ammon Bundy and six codefendants for illegally occupying a building in the federal Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in a remote eastern part of the state. The protest, the subject of national news coverage in January, was in support of local ranchers given egregious five-year mandatory federal sentences for setting a controlled burn on federal land to protect their own property from wildfires. As soon as the acquittal was announced, there were howls of protest. The Bundy verdict was said to be a case of jury nullification. CNN, Vox, and other publications suggested in commentaries that the verdict was an instance of white privilege.
Occupying a federal facility is obviously illegal, even as a form of protest. Perhaps Bundy and company should have been convicted of something. However, the prosecution, which primarily charged the men with conspiring to impede federal workers, simply didn’t convince the jurors. According to one of them, “all 12 jurors felt that this verdict was a statement regarding the various failures of the prosecution to prove ‘conspiracy’ in the count itself—and not any form of affirmation of the defense’s various beliefs, actions or aspirations.” Far from nullification, this seems like a reasonable conclusion given the facts.
And despite the hysterical reaction to the protesters being armed—I grew up in eastern Oregon, and if you see a rancher carrying a gun it’s probably just a day ending in Y—the protest didn’t prove especially violent or unruly, with one big exception. It made national news when a protester was shot and killed by state police and FBI agents at a roadblock. What hasn’t made headlines is that a grand jury has been convened to investigate evidence tampering and misconduct related to the shooting. There are other legitimate questions about whether the FBI overstepped its bounds and acted as provocateurs. There were no fewer than 15 confidential informants among the protesters, and the Bundy defense rested after the testimony of one of the FBI informants that he ran the shooting range that was set up for the protesters.
Meanwhile, there’s a different protest going on in North Dakota that should be cause for much more concern than the Bundy case. This time, however, the federal government is cheering it on. The Dakota Access Pipeline Project will transport 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa, arriving at refineries in Illinois some 1,200 miles away. Over 99 percent of the pipeline will cross private land. Where it doesn’t—the pipeline crosses exactly 1,094 feet of federal land—the company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, has received the necessary permits. To date, the pipeline is about half completed.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe is trying to scuttle the project through disruptive protests in North Dakota on the grounds that the pipeline trespasses on Indian heritage lands. A federal judge looked at the Standing Rock claims and concluded that the tribe had been unresponsive to efforts to accommodate them and became engaged only at the last minute in an attempt to stop all progress on the pipeline. The judge noted that Energy Transfer Partners had extensively consulted archaeologists and cultural surveys and rerouted the pipeline “where this surveying revealed previously unidentified historic or cultural resources that might be affected.”
Despite this, in September, President Obama congratulated the Standing Rock tribe for “making your voices heard.” That’s an odd way of describing arson, vandalism, the killing of livestock, destruction of construction equipment, threatening law enforcement officers, and harassment of local residents. There have been over 120 arrests since August 11. Nearly all of the protesters are left-wing activists from out of state, such as Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who now has a warrant out for her arrest in North Dakota for trespassing and defacing private property. And on October 31, protester Red Fawn Fallis was charged with attempted murder. When cops closed in to move protesters off private property, she allegedly pulled out a .38 revolver and fired three shots at the police.
Local law enforcement is begging for help, but Attorney General Loretta Lynch refused to meet with National Sheriffs’ Association executive director Jonathan Thompson to discuss the situation. The Department of Justice has reportedly told the local U.S. attorney not to intervene. This selective law enforcement by the Obama administration offends every core American belief regarding the rule of law. Ranchers get five-year mandatory minimums for the federal crime of burning scrub brush, but the Justice Department issues stand-down orders while cops get shot at because those protesters are simpatico with the president’s environmental policy.
