Why is Joe Biden still standing by his Earth First! nominee for Bureau of Land Management?

Nothing to see here??

It's starting to look bad for Tracy Stone-Manning, Joe Biden's nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management.

The latest news is that she lied to Congress about her involvement in eco-terrorism; an Earth First! tree-spiking incident in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest in 1989.  At the time, she wrote a profane threatening letter to "warn" loggers about the spikes and then told Congress she knew nothing about the whole thing and was merely an innocent college kid forced to do it to try to make sure nobody was "getting hurt."  It didn't happen that way, according to various sources.

Normally, a person with any such involvement, lying or not, would be exceptionally unfit to run the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 to 247 million acres of public land, and has 9,000 employees.  Putting her in charge of it would be like putting an embezzler in charge of the Federal Reserve. 

Yet incredibly, Joe Biden continues to stand by her, even as one bad thing after another about her activity now rolls out. 

The Biden administration said Thursday it "stands by Tracy's statements and written submissions."

The White House also said it stands by her nomination, calling her a "dedicated public servant" who is "exceptionally qualified to be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management."

A retired investigator in the incident, Michael Merkley of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, reported that she blocked the investigation itself and testified only in exchange for immunity. 

Merkley wrote that Stone-Manning was among "the nastiest of the suspects" involved in the investigation and "vulgar, antagonistic, and extremely anti-government."  She was not only a member of Earth First!, but also part of the Earth First! hierarchy "and wielded significant influence among its members."

That's very different from what she told Congress earlier, which was that she was this innocent college student who was beset by this scary man who spiked trees who made her write her filthy-mouthed threat letter, which she did, but only to keep people from "getting hurt," being a humanitarian and all.

"I was concerned that if I did not mail the letter, he would not, and I wanted to make sure that someone was aware of it so that no one would get hurt," she said in her reply to the committee. "I recall being disturbed with the whole situation and frightened of (Blount); I wanted nothing to do with it and did not want anyone to get hurt."

Somehow, she never did what normal people do, which is call the cops.

It gets worse.  The eco-terrorist dirtbag she sent to jail with her testimony-in-exchange-for-immunity said she was in on the whole thing, too. 

According to Breitbart News:

John P. Blount, who spiked trees in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest in 1989 and was later sentenced to 17 months in prison for it, said Stone-Manning was complicit in his act of ecoterrorism, E&E News reported Thursday.

"She knew about it far in advance, a couple of months before we headed out," Blount said, according to the outlet.

Stone-Manning belonged to the environmental extremist group Earth First! — members of which committed acts of ecoterrorism during the 1980s and 1990s — while she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula.

And it gets worse still.  Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel did some digging and, in a July 8 column, found even more deception:

Public documents obtained by the Journal tell the real story. According to that 1993 court transcript, Ms. Stone-Manning arrived in Missoula in 1988 and immediately moved into a house occupied by Earth First! members. This was the height of the wilderness wars, and Earth First! had by the mid-1980s defined itself as the tip of the fanatical spear. Its modus operandi was violence and terror, or what it called "monkeywrenching"—spectacular arsons, equipment destruction, and most notably the deadly practice of tree spiking.

She acknowledged in testimony that she helped edit an Earth First! newsletter. One 1989 edition highlighted an article entitled "Who Are the Real Terrorists?" It praises "the fine art of tree spiking." In testimony, Ms. Stone-Manning described the men who were ultimately convicted of spiking as co-inhabitants of her house as well as "friends."

All of these testimonies from very diverse sources somehow come to the same conclusion — that she was in deep and got away with what she did by playing innocent and calling herself a hero.

What exactly is the tree-spiking she was involved with?  According to a 1990 column by Jack Anderson and Dale Van Natta, this was the kind of thing she was involved with back in those palmy days of the Spotted Owl:

George Alexander, a third-generation mill worker, was just starting his shift at the Louisiana-Pacific lumber mill in Cloverdale, Calif., when the log that would alter his life rolled down his conveyor belt toward a high-speed saw he was working on.

It was May 1987, and Alexander was 23. His job was to split logs. He was nearly three feet away when the log hit his saw and the saw exploded. One half of the blade stuck in the log. The other half hit Alexander in the head, tearing through his safety helmet and face shield. His face was slashed from eye to chin. His teeth were smashed and his jaw was cut in half.

Who was advocating this vileness?  Earth First!

"The purpose of tree spiking is not to hurt anybody; it's to keep trees from being cut," said Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First, the most radical arm of the environmental movement.

He didn't care if it did, though.

He published a book, "Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching," and it is an underground best seller. He borrowed the term "monkeywrenching" from the late Edward Abbey, whose book, "The Monkey Wrench Gang," romanticized environmental sabotage.

Foreman's book includes diagrams for tree spiking and instructions on how to cut down power lines, flatten tires, burn machinery, jam locks and set stink bombs. "This is where the ecoteur can have fun," Foreman wrote.

And sure enough, Stone-Manning was in the "hierarchy" of that vile organization, one of the ringleaders.  She has yet to renounce its activities, let alone her involvement, and she has yet to tell the truth about what she was up to, blocking an investigation for years until someone else started ratting out the network and she found herself on the hot seat, same as a Mafia lowlife looking for a plea deal to escape justice.

Someone like this could easily turn America's forest land into an Antifa playground in the name of eco-justice, protecting her pals from real justice, for one.

More to the point, she's a liar, so anything that goes on at BLM on her watch — from corruption, to eco-mismanagement, to putting environmental terrorists into key spots in government — will be something she's very likely to cover for.  She's already demonstrating that she can't be trusted.

This is one of the most unfit people ever nominated by the Biden administration, the equivalent of putting an Antifa member in charge of the Department of Justice.  She's still got street cred among the environmental radicals for sure, and she belongs nowhere near a federal land management agency.  If Congress doesn't scrap her nomination, she will be a disaster.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/why_is_joe_biden_still_standing_by_his_mendacious_earth_first_nominee_for_bureau_of_land_management.html