Top Republicans have called for President Joe Biden to withdraw his nomination of Tracey Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management, despite her past link to an ecoterrorism investigation and her views on population growth.
Back in 1989, Stone-Manning testified before a grand jury that she sent a letter to the U.S Forest Service on behalf of her former roommate and friend John P. Blount, warning them that 500 pounds of spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length had been jammed in trees in an Idaho forest.
According to the report, tree-spiking is a way to prevent logging and ensure damage to saws. It has even severely injured people, including one mill worker whose jaw was split in two from an exploding saw. It reduces the commercial value of the resulting lumber and is considered a dangerous and violent eco-terrorism act.
“The sales were marked so that no workers would be injured and so that you a–holes know that they are spiked. The majority of the trees were spiked within the first ten feet, but many, many others were spiked as high as a hundred and fifty feet. P.S., You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt,” the letter reads.
Stone-Manning admitted to mailing the letter but said she was unaware of the spiking until reading it. She said she was “somewhat shocked” by the letter but rented a typewriter to write it anyway. She said she “slept on” the idea of mailing the letter and then followed through the next day.
During the criminal trial in 1993, Stone-Manning presented her testimony in exchange for legal immunity. Blount was sentenced to 17 months in prison.
Stone-Manning was nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the Bureau of Land Management and when taking a questionnaire, she said she’d “never been the target” of a federal, state, or local criminal investigation. She failed to mention the tree-spiking trial in 1993, which could’ve charged her with conspiracy if not for the testimony deal.
While mainstream media reports defend Stone-Manning and say that it doesn’t “prove” she is the target of a federal investigation, others point out that she lied to the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee by testifying that she was never the target. She also failed to mention that she had been subpoenaed for handwriting and have hair samples to the federal grand jury in 1989. By doing so, this clearly disqualifies her from being confirmed.
“Tracy Stone-Manning collaborated with eco-terrorists who had booby-trapped trees with metal spikes. She mailed the threatening letter for them and she was part of the cover-up. She did not cooperate with investigators until she was caught,” Sen. John Barrasso said.
Sen. James Risch agreed with Barrasso’s statements, adding that Stone-Manning colluded with eco-terrorists who conducted extremist operations to kill Idaho’s loggers and sawmill workers. He said they cannot ask the Bureau of Land Management employees to serve under a director who aided those who endangered the land workers.
A group of GOP lawmakers led by Rep. Yvette Herrell has also sent a letter to Sen. Joe Manchin encouraging him to oppose her nomination. He has remained silent on Stone-Manning’s nomination and it is unclear whether he agrees with Barrasso’s call to pull her.
Stone-Manning has also talked about controversial views of population control, arguing in a graduate thesis paper that Americans should have two or fewer in order to protect the environment. “The origin of our abuses is us. If there were fewer of us, we would have less impact. We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans,” she wrote.
In 2018, Stone-Manning even touted her husband’s suggestion to let houses caught in forest fires “burn.” He wrote in an article that the feds should commit themselves to refuse to send in the troops to any county that has not taken such measures. He suggested that the solution to houses in the interface is to let them burn and called it a “satisfying justice.” Talk about dangerous and disturbing.
Stone-Manning has been nominated to lead the largest land management agency in America and her overtly partisan past is of concern. She is not fit to lead an agency that is integral to the economic and environmental components of a community, but what else would you expect with a Biden nominee?
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