Lawmakers on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Thursday to move forward President Joe Biden’s ecoterrorist nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning.
Republicans opposed her nomination after she lied to the committee about her role in a 1989 tree-spiking case, wherein leftist environmental activists illegally jammed 8-to-10-inch metal rods into trees that can pose threats to loggers and explode when processed in a sawmill, sending deadly shrapnel through the air. While targeting workers in the lumber industry, the spikes can also injure or kill firefighters.
“She has not taken any responsibility nor expressed any kind of remorse,” Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines said, opposing the confirmation of another Montana native.
Stone-Manning told the committee at the onset of her nomination in a standard questionnaire that she had never been the target of a federal investigation. Subsequent reporting by The Federalist and others, however, revealed Stone-Manning was a primary suspect in the 1989 case in which she conspired to spike trees in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest. Stone-Manning had even complained about the investigation at the time in the local press.
“It was degrading,” she told the Spokesman-Review in 1990. “Yes, this is happening to me and not someone in Panama. And yes, the government does do bad things sometimes.”
She later took a deal with prosecutors for immunity in exchange for testimony against her co-conspirators. She told the court she merely retyped a letter for her friend and former roommate. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Federalist, anonymously warned the Forest Service that 500 pounds of deadly spikes were jammed into trees targeted for timber harvest.
The lead investigator on the case, retired Special Agent Michael Merkley, sent a letter to the committee last week that expanded the scope of Stone-Manning’s involvement, including an active role in the terrorist planning.
“Contrary to many stories in the news, Ms. Stone-Manning was not an innocent bystander, nor was she a victim in this case. And she most certainly was not a hero,” Merkley wrote, pushing back on how Democrats depicted Stone-Manning, who is the current senior adviser at the National Wildlife Federation, for her testimony against her co-conspirators.
“She was vulgar, antagonistic and extremely anti-government,” Merkley wrote, calling her “extremely difficult to work with” and “the nastiest of suspects.”
Stone-Manning’s nomination, however, will now move on for a full chamber vote after she passed committee by a partisan vote.
“She straight-up lied to this committee,” Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who is a ranking member of the committee where at one point he held up a gray metal spike, said on Thursday. “It is hard to imagine a nominee more disqualified than Tracy Stone-Manning.”
The radical nominee also came under scrutiny for her 1992 graduate thesis in which she declared children an “environmental hazard” and demanded a communist China-style child cap.
“The earth is only so big, and we can tap into it only so often. In America, we tap in often and hard,” Stone-Manning wrote. “When we overpopulate, the earth notices it more. Stop at two. It could be the best thing you do for the planet.”
If confirmed, the ecoterrorist tree-spiker will oversee 12 percent of the nation’s land.
Source: The Federalist
