Vol. 81/No. 45 December 4, 2017
Frame-up trial of Bundy ranchers begins in Nevada
‘Everything we’re charged with, gov’t is doing to us’
If convicted of the 15 conspiracy and other charges, they could face sentences of more than 170 years.
They have been confined in prison for over a year and a half while government prosecutors have tried to convict others charged in the protest. On the eve of the trial Ryan Bundy won release, but was ordered to wear a GPS tracking device. The judge has repeatedly refused to release Cliven or Ammon.
The charges stem from April 12, 2014, when 200 federal agents, — many of them heavily armed with long arms with telescopic sites — confronted a few hundred protesters in Bunkerville, Nevada, who were demanding release of the cattle and an end to the government’s harassment of the Bundys. The BLM claims Cliven Bundy owes more than $1 million in grazing fees and fines. A small number of protesters were armed, but not any of the four on trial.
The protest ended after federal authorities agreed to leave and demonstrators freed the impounded cattle.
The indictment alleges that Bundy and supporters were “flooding the internet” with false statements “that law enforcement officers were abusing Bundy and stealing his cattle.” In his opening statement federal prosecutor Steven Myhre claimed the cops “were outnumbered. We were outgunned.”
This just isn’t true, Ryan Bundy, acting as his own lawyer, said in his opening statement. “You should have seen all the guns pointed at us,” he told the court. “Surveillance cameras on one hill. Snipers aiming at the house.”
In the days leading up to the April 12 protest a federal cop threw Ryan Bundy’s aunt and his brother David to the ground and stunned Ammon with a Taser three times.
“You want to talk about extortion? You want to talk about violence? You want to talk about pointing guns?” he asked. “Everything that we are charged with is what they are doing to us.”
“There was no conspiracy to impede, to injure, to harm,” Ryan Bundy said. “We’re just trying to protect our life, our liberty, the rights we do own, our livelihood, our heritage.”
Until 1990 there were some 50 cattle ranchers in Clark County, Nevada. Little by little they were all driven out, leaving only the Bundy ranch, as the government restricted grazing rights, supposedly to protect the “threatened,” but not endangered, desert tortoise.
Some 87 percent of the land in Nevada — and nearly 50 percent of all land west of the Mississippi River — is owned by the federal government. The only way many ranchers can survive is by grazing their cattle there.
Cliven Bundy did stop paying grazing fees to the U.S. government in 1993, his lawyer Bret Whipple told the court. But that was only after the BLM cut his grazing permit nearly in half, even though the family had been ranching there since 1877.
Ammon and Ryan Bundy were jailed Jan. 26, 2016, after being arrested for their role in the protest occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seeking to draw attention to the vengeful legal crusade by the government to imprison area ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond. After the Bundys’ acquittal on all charges in October that year, they were transferred to prison in Nevada.
Cliven Bundy, who is 71, was arrested in February 2016 after he flew to Oregon to visit his jailed sons. He has lost at least five teeth while in prison, since “dental care” there is pulling teeth.
Ammon Bundy has been strip searched every time he leaves the prison in Pahrump to go to court, and every time he leaves solitary confinement. On Oct. 25, Judge Gloria Navarro ordered prison authorities to cease “routine strip searches or cavity searches” of Ammon and Ryan Bundy and Ryan Payne unless “there is a safety concern.”
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