Pollak: Democrats Can’t Complain About Capitol Riot After Confirming Alleged Terrorist to Lead BLM

Tracy Stone-Manning listens during a confirmation hearing for her to be the director of th
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

I never want to hear Democrats mention the Capitol riot again, after they voted unanimously in the Senate to confirm Tracy Stone-Manning, an alleged ecoterrorist, to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in President Joe Biden’s administration.

As Breitbart News noted:

Stone-Manning was a member of the environmental extremist group Earth First! while she was a graduate student 30 years ago at the University of Montana in Missoula, a hub for environmental activism in the ’80s and ’90s. The FBI identified the group as one of multiple radical groups that posed a domestic terrorist threat to the U.S.

During her time at the University of Montana, the now-confirmed nominee became involved in a tree spiking operation. As Breitbart News reported, in 1989:

[Stone-Manning] mailed a letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of John P. Blount, an individual in her “circle of friends,” crudely alerting federal authorities that trees in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest that were scheduled to be cut down had been sabotaged with metal spikes to prevent them from being harvested. Tree spiking, as this form of sabotage is called, is both a crime and, according to the FBI’s definition, an act of ecoterrorism.

In exchange for immunity, Stone-Manning testified in the 1993 trial against Blount, who was convicted for the tree spiking crime and sentenced to 17 months in prison.

Stone-Manning has repeatedly maintained her innocence in the ecoterrorist plot, saying she delivered the letter out of concern that someone would get hurt and that she did not actually know if trees had been spiked. Details that emerged during her nomination process, however, brought new context to the tree spiking chain of events that were damning for Stone-Manning.

Stone-Manning, for instance, was found to have edited a 1991 issue of the Earth First! journal that included an article mocking federal authorities for their inability to solve the tree spiking crime that she herself was involved in. This fact suggests Stone-Manning withheld knowledge about the dangerous crime as it would be another two years before she came forward about it.

Additionally, both Blount, the individual convicted in the case, and retired Forest Service special agent Michael Merkley, the lead investigator in the case, delivered corroborating accounts of the ecoterrorist plot during the nomination process.

After being lectured for months about the supposed “domestic terrorists” in the ranks of Trump supporters, we now have an alleged domestic terrorist at the highest level of government, with the approval of the Democratic Party (and the media).

Whatever moral high ground Democrats had after the Capitol riot — undeserved, after encouraging and participating in months of violent unrest in 2020 — they spiked it by confirming an alleged “domestic terrorist” to the Biden administration.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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