David Bernhardt is aiding and abetting seditionists
Trump’s Interior Secretary is taking official steps to help the insurrection on his way out of office
In the days following the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Center for Western Priorities and others highlighted the straight line that exists from the anti-government extremists at the Bundy Ranch and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to the violence in Washington that was encouraged by President Trump and his administration. It’s now clear that the events at Malheur were a dress rehearsal for the deadly violence at the Capitol.
Aside from Trump himself, no one in the cabinet is more responsible for encouraging these armed extremists than Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who has for years been taking official actions to help supporters and icons of the insurrection, and accelerated those actions in his final days in office.
The Hammond handout
In the weeks leading up to the unlawful armed invasion of the U.S. Capitol building, President Trump was encouraging his supporters to come to Washington with the promise that the insurrection “will be wild,” as he tweeted on December 19th. At the same time, the Interior Department was preparing a decision that would reinstate grazing privileges to the Hammond family, the Oregon ranchers convicted of arson on public lands, and who were the impetus for the armed invasion of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.
The grazing order cited the Hammond family’s “past proper use of rangeland resources,” ignoring their arson conviction and presidential pardon in 2018. The BLM field manager for the area made it clear that the decision was made above his head, “at the Department of the Interior level,” according to Western Livestock Journal. Since the de facto head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, is serving illegally, all major decisions are being made by Secretary Bernhardt himself.
In other words, Bernhardt personally gave the Hammond family grazing privileges — despite their history of arson — while the President was simultaneously encouraging the Hammonds’ supporters to violently overturn the Electoral College results the following week in Washington. Bernhardt’s actions sent a clear message to anti-public lands extremists that he was on their side.
Deferring to “constitutional sheriffs”
At the same time that Bernhardt was preparing to help the Hammonds, he was also signing an order pulling the rug out from Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officers whose job is to hold lawbreaking ranchers like the Hammond and Bundy families accountable.
Bernhardt’s order, which went into effect this week, altered the chain of command at BLM, putting the agency’s Office of Law Enforcement and Security in charge of more than 200 rangers across the country, instead of career state directors. The new structure goes against recommendations from career officials who called for the opposite — giving more oversight to state directors who understand the issues and challenges BLM agents face on the ground in each state.
Why does this matter? By taking law enforcement authority away from state directors and giving it to political appointees in Washington, Bernhardt is doing the bidding of so-called “constitutional sheriffs,” a group that falsely believes local sheriffs are the top law enforcement authority in the country, even on national public land.
These extremist sheriffs work hand-in-hand with public lands extremists like the Bundy family; Malheur terrorist LaVoy Finicum was killed trying to reach a “constitutional sheriff” in another Oregon county. Just this month, convicted seditionist Jon Ritzheimer, who served a year in prison for his role at Malheur, proudly posed with the extremist sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona at a “stop the steal” conspiracy event at the Arizona state capitol.
That same day, as the armed mob stormed the Capitol, Ritzheimer called for the execution of elected officials, writing on Facebook that “[t]hey can’t destroy the country if they’re hanging from cherry trees.”
By kneecapping the authority of state directors and BLM rangers, Bernhardt has created a situation where a future administration that is friendly to anti-government sheriffs can defer to seditionists who stage armed takeovers of public land as a matter of official government policy.
Hiring anti-government lawyers
Bernhardt’s penchant for helping anti-government extremists is not new. Early in his tenure as Interior secretary, he hired Cliven Bundy’s former attorney, Karen Budd-Falen, as a deputy solicitor. In addition to representing Bundy in one of his many fights against the Interior Department, Budd-Falen worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a right-wing group that repeatedly sued the Interior Department. In the 1990s, Budd-Falen drafted a land use plan for Catron County, New Mexico that declared the U.S. government to be subservient to the county’s “custom and culture,” suggesting that the Bureau of Land Management had no authority to regulate grazing and logging on national public lands. The plan even called for the arrest of any government employee that the county asserted violated the civil rights of county residents. As recently as 2007, Budd-Falen attempted to sue Bureau of Land Management employees under federal racketeering laws for enforcing long-standing laws on public lands.
Budd-Falen has claimed that she was offered the job of BLM director, but turned it down. Bernhardt infamously gave that job to William Perry Pendley, another extremist attorney — and Mountain States Legal Foundation alum — who once wrote that the U.S. government should “follow the Constitution and sell its western lands.” (The Constitution contains no such requirement, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the constitutionality of national public lands.)
Pendley’s positions were so extreme that the White House withdrew his nomination to serve as BLM director, but Bernhardt kept Pendley on, illegally running the bureau through a series of orders that a judge in Montana called “a matryoshka doll of delegated authorities.”
Bernhardt, who previously served as the top lawyer at Interior and was a highly-paid, well-connected public lands lobbyist, could have easily picked a mainstream conservative to run the Bureau of Land Management. Instead, he doubled down on Pendley’s illegal appointment, and after a judge ruled Pendley could not serve as the bureau’s acting director, Bernhardt took on the job himself, signing orders to help anti-public lands extremists as Pendley implemented them.
From Malheur to the Capitol
The Western roots of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol have been well documented. Extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and III Percenters had a visible presence at the Bundy Ranch and Malheur standoffs and were inside the Capitol this month. Cliven Bundy himself expressed support for the riots, praising President Trump for sending the crowd to the Capitol, but lamenting that the president “blew his trump of retreat.”
Before the Capitol invasion, Trump had signaled his support of anti-government forces for years, starting with the 2017 evisceration of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, all the way up through his post-election pardon of Utah politician Phil Lyman, who was convicted of leading an illegal ATV ride through a canyon in Utah that was home to Native American archaeological sites.
Secretary Bernhardt has done the heavy lifting for the President, placing extremists like Pendley, Budd-Falen, and many others in top positions within the Interior Department. He personally signed rules that would force the federal government to coddle and defer to the organizers of the violent mob that invaded the capitol and attempted to overturn the election.
The insurrection at the Capitol proved to be the final straw for several of Bernhardt’s fellow cabinet members and White House officials. But even as secretaries Elaine Chao, Chad Wolf, and Betsy DeVos resigned, Bernhardt remained mostly silent. He issued a one-sentence tweet saying that “violence and lawlessness” will not be tolerated, while refusing to acknowledge the role he played in supporting and protecting the groups that organized, encouraged, and participated in the riots. His milquetoast response stands in stark contrast to his outraged rhetoric after U.S. Park Police — under his authority — tear gassed a crowd in Lafayette Square in order to clear the way for President Trump’s bible-clutching photo op last June, and his full-throated defense of monuments to Confederate generals.
Secretary Bernhardt’s record is both shameful and indisputable. The only question remaining is whether Bernhardt’s former clients and employers will turn him away when he leaves office this month, or if they will welcome him back with open arms.
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