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Bundys Go Free, But Their Lawyer is Tazed and Arrested
Remember the Oregon Wildlife Refuge Standoff and the shooting of LaVoy Finicum? Well the verdict was just released and the Bundy brothers, Jeff Banta, Shawna Cox, David Fry, Neil Wampler, and Kenneth Medenbach were found not guilty on all charges by the jury. The government was stunned and did not like the jury’s verdict, so why not take it out on their attorney. When their lawyer asked for his client’s immediate release he was tasered and arrested by federal agents. Oh yes, the federal government is now charging the attorney with failure to comply with a lawful order and disturbance.
And hear from the men who the government tried to imprison:
Published in Law
Wiley, you beat me to it on this one.
There are times when , after despairing at the encroaching leviathan, you see the rebellious spirit of everyday Americans throwing a wrench into the works.
This story has no heroes and is a muddled mess on all sides. However , the BLM has acted in ways that a private organization would be busted on RICO charges. Look at the Malheur Refuge and the last private land inside its borders and check out the efforts of the BLM to force the owners to just roll over and vacate.
Couple that with a trigger happy gaggle of agents at the arrest and they made some fairly off kilter protestors into folk heroes.
To me, the jury may qualify as the heroes of this one. I expect there are some very upset people back in the Department of (Social) Justice in DC.
By the way, the refuge itself is a place we often visit, a place of incredible beauty and solitude. We have been engulfed in a cattle drive, heard the call of migrating birds, seen the beaver at work and had a wild stallion pace our truck along a dirt road to challenge us for his herd.
Same could be said about the other BLM.
Will go to bed happy tonight.
Several leviathan arms were used as instruments of attack. First you have BLM – The Bureau of Land Management (with their own private swat teams) which is in the Department of Interior who started the fight. Then you have the Judicial System who would not allow them pro bono legal representation and incarcerated them in solitary confinement for months. Then you have the US Marshals who are part of the infamous DOJ, who showed their stuff when they tazed the attorney. Then you have the media who have sealed this story air tight for nearly a year. And we can’t forget Facebook and others who kicked supporter pages off their networks.
I suspect the newly freed people will be voting Trump.
We have the stupidity of the desperate versus the intentional malicious behavior of the leviathan. I know which side is more to blame.
The tasered part is what reveals a certain maliciousness. If a charge of disorderly conduct is justified fine, but the simple arrest of an unarmed man outnumbered by six to seven U.S. Marshals should not require that man being tasered. Are they claiming he was on PCP or violently attacking the marshals?
It wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions early but it certainly appears at first glance to constitute excessive force.
In great literature or bible stories, the best heroes are those flawed and imperfect individuals who still accomplish the task.
Yes , but the only thing I see accomplished here is a lawyer got a free defibrillation.
The fellow in the last video is Neil Wampler. You will not convince him nothing was accomplished. But on other levels, whether we are speaking of presidential politics, or doing battle on Ricochet, it is not the most capable but the willing that do the job. There are no heroes, just imperfect people with imperfect strategies who get done what they can.
On that we can agree. I am not sure they have a venue anymore that would get attention to this.
Excellent article in WND
What does ‘a well-regulated
militia’ really mean?
http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/what-does-a-well-regulated-militia-really-mean/
I heard this story covered on NPR today. They interviewed a reporter from Oregon Public Radio, who made a big deal about how it was an all-white jury, and then went on to say that that was too bad, and that if they had gotten a different jury they would have got a better verdict.
Progressives poison everything. A little racism to poison justice.
Michael also posted on this.
I missed that story, but heard their reverent, glowing coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters a couple of days ago. Eww.
Personally, I’m all for this civil disobedience. I don’t know how people in Oregon feel, but my family originally comes from Utah. My ancestors worked very hard to settle that land, and I don’t understand why the federal government owns so much of it. Nor do I understand why Easterners have such a possessive attitude. It’s not their land; it wasn’t their ancestors who settled it.
I am still surprised that the government did not kill more people to make their point. Tasering a lawyer is mild. I suspect more mischief in the future. The government does not lose unless it wants too.
The (federal) trial judge ordered the marshals to stand back. They defied her in her own courtroom.
It might be good to revisit what all this was about. The BLM (Federal Bureau of Land Management) was trying get a ranch free wilderness area in Oregon. BLM purposely set fires during summer grazing season when cattle needed grazing, to drive the ranchers out. In this context, two Oregon ranchers, the Hammonds, were imprisoned for 5 years for doing preventative burns (back burns) to try to save their winter graze area from an approaching larger fire started by lightning. Even though the BLM was starting fires, in true Orwellian hypocrisy, the BLM pursued prosecution against the Hammonds for starting fires which lead to the 5 year prison sentences “under terrorism statutes“!. Perhaps you now understand why the Bundys and others went to Oregon to help resist. The Oregon Farm Bureau was on the Hammond’s side. You see, the Hammond’s ranch was the last holdout of this proposed cow-free wilderness area. That put a target on their backs and false prosecution appears to be the tactic to remove the Hammond ranch. Five years in prison for two ranchers in exchange for a cow-free area? Yeah, I can see a bureaucrat thinking that an appropriate trade.
http://www.thefencepost.com/news/two-members-of-oregons-hammond-family-to-serve-time-in-prison-after-burning-140-acres-of-blm-land/
and http://www.tsln.com/news/18551282-113/story.html
Here is Ammon Bundy expressing his feelings toward the predicament in 2015.
The 2016 standoff in Oregon, is in principle, similar issues to the Bundy Ranch standoff of 2014 in Neveda, which are the same issues which have led to decades of conflicts between ranchers and the BLM. This is a very old war. Here is a good explanation focused on the Bundy Ranch event, but could generally apply to the Hammonds and many many ranchers over decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAwALTdrMZ8
I don’t know how far we want to go down the rabbit hole, but the origin of the problem goes back to how the western states were admitted into the union.
Oi vey. What sorts of non-white people were they imagining, I wonder?
I guess he’s never been out to eastern Oregon.
The reporter was a woman from Portland. This point must have been going around in the Portland bubble, because I easily discovered the information that the defendants were almost all white; one guy is Asian-American. I bet all the lawyers are also white. I thought that was an odd thing to bring up. I think it reveals Leftists going down there list of usual narratives, looking for one that sort of fits the circumstances. My own opinion is that bringing up this point only reflects a poverty of thought on the Left.
I lived in eastern Oregon. There weren’t any black people, and no Indians that I saw.
If so, I’m surprised they weren’t held until after the election. Just to show them who’s da boss.
The Bureau of Land Management has a Swat team? So individual citizens owning semi automatic weapons…BAAAD. Every government agency owning military grade weaponry with trained assault teams whose sole purpose is to attack citizens…GOOOD.
My liberal and very smart nephew was astonished that anyone would object to the Federal licensing requirement for individual citizens to own guns. How can that be bad, he asks incredulously? I replied that the Constitution doesn’t include the 2nd Amendment simply for citizens to defend themselves against each other, but as importantly, to defend ourselves against our own government. If the Federal Government knows where and who has their own weapons, what is to prevent them using their Swat teams to retrieve those weapons?
I suspect that is because the reporter thought BLM was Black Lives Matter and not Bureau of Land Management so race became a thing. Reporters are usually not very bright.
So the US Marshals assaulted an attorney inside a court room, disobeyed a direct order from the presiding Federal judge, and the lawyer is charged with “disobeying a lawful order” rather than the Marshals?
Who pressed the charges? Not the judge, he would have just held the attorney in contempt. What lawful order was disobeyed? Are the Marshals claiming that their authority supersedes a judge’s authority inside his own courtroom?
It doesn’t sound as if the attorney had received a lawful order, which would make it rather impossible to disobey one. So what lawful order was actually given?
Why did the judge deny his own jurisdiction over another Federal case, then agree to hold the defendant based on a case outside of his jurisdiction without being able to produce an order to do so from the court where the other case was brought?
Did anyone ever produce the document, or were the Marshals detaining him without a valid order and denying the defendant due process?
Why are the journalists not asking these questions?