Ten Senate Republicans have asked President Biden to withdraw his nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning to head the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) based on her history of environmental activism and what they call her false statements in sworn testimony.
To support the seriousness of their request, on July 15 they released a letter from a former US Forest Service criminal investigator who detailed what he considered to be Stone-Manning’s active role in planning dangerous sabotage of federal property in 1989.
BLM serves as the Interior Department’s leasing agency for federal onshore oil and gas operations as part of its management of 245 million surface acres and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate. The BLM director must balance competing uses of federal lands for energy development, timber harvesting, grazing, recreation, wildlife habitat protection, and more.
Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee sent Biden a letter July 14 telling the president, “We believe that Ms. Stone-Manning’s false and misleading statements, as well as her extremist activities, disqualify her from serving as director of this important agency.”
Democrats still could force the nomination through, but in at least a few cases in recent months they have refrained from advancing especially political or ideological candidates. Notably, the nomination of environmental attorney Elizabeth Klein to be Interior deputy secretary was dropped in late March.
‘Nastiest of the suspects’
The letter to Biden from the 10 members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee asked the president to withdraw the nomination and provided an appendix with supporting information to buttress their concerns.
Stone-Manning worked for the activist group Earth First! when the group engaged in “tree spiking” in 1989 to obstruct a federal timber harvest in Montana. Spikes were driven into trees not only to reduce their timber value but to create the risk that a logger or sawmill worker would be injured when a power saw broke or rebound upon hitting a spike.
Retired Forest Service investigator Michael Merkley, in his letter to the committee, described how Stone-Manning not only had been investigated because of a tree spiking plan but had been extremely uncooperative and “the nastiest of the suspects” until she was threatened with indictment on criminal charges and agreed to testify against other suspects.
After Biden nominated her as BLM director, she submitted to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee a sworn affidavit in which she said that, to her knowledge, she had never been the target of an investigation for a violation of law, regulation, or ordinance.
Her statement “constituted a material false statement to the committee,” said the supporting information with the letter to Biden.
Stone-Manning is a senior adviser to the National Wildlife Federation. During the committee’s hearing June 8 to consider her nomination, her own past harsh rhetoric was a prominent spur to questions about her nomination (OGJ Online, June 8, 2021).
