Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is calling on President Biden to “immediately” pull Tracy Stone-Manning’s nomination for Bureau of Land Management director over her link to an eco-terrorist plot.
Every Republican on the Senate Energy Committee already signed a letter Wednesday urging Biden to pull Stone-Manning’s nomination, but now Fox News has learned that the highest-ranking Senate Republican has thrown his support behind the effort to stop Stone-Manning’s confirmation process.
“We now know that President Biden’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management lied to the Senate about her alleged participation in eco-terrorism,” McConnell said in a statement to Fox News. “The White House should immediately withdraw her nomination.” The controversy surrounds Stone-Manning’s ties to a “tree-spiking” operation meant to sabotage logging efforts in the 1980s.
In 1993 Stone-Manning was granted legal immunity for her testimony that she retyped and sent an anonymous letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of John P. Blount, her former roommate and friend. Stone-Manning admitted to mailing the letter for Blount in 1989 after receiving the letter from him but said she was unaware the spiking had occurred until reading it.
Her letter to the Forest Service warned that 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” had been jammed into the trees of an Idaho forest. “The sales were marked so that no workers would be injured and so that you a–holes know that they are spiked,” read the letter previously obtained by Fox News. “The majority of the trees were spiked within the first ten feet, but many, many others were spiked as high as a hundred and fifty feet.” “P.S., You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt,” the note concluded.
During her 2013 testimony for her nomination to lead the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Stone-Manning claimed she had re-typed a letter warning trees had been spiked and sent it to the U.S. Forest Service to warn it. She also claimed she had no personal knowledge of and did not directly or indirectly participate in any tree-spiking incidents during her lifetime, according to reports.
During her Senate confirmation process, Stone-Manning told senators in a questionnaire that she had never been the target of a law enforcement investigation. Forest Service investigator and Army veteran Michael Merkley, who says he was the special agent in charge of the tree spiking investigation, wrote in a letter to the Senate Energy Committee that Stone-Manning was no innocent bystander, but that she thwarted his attempts to investigate the crime and was not forthright about her own role in the plot [FOX].
