Plodding along seemingly slower than desert tortoises that spawned the dispute between Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management more than 20 years ago, the BLM has finally provided a watchdog group with a few dozen pages of documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.
But none of the heavily redacted documents sheds light on what led to last year’s armed standoff between Bundy’s supporters and federal agents. The standoff occurred after the BLM hired a helicopter firm to round up more than 300 of his free-roaming cows from the Gold Butte range only to let them be released from a makeshift corral on April 12, 2014, as a potentially violent confrontation loomed.
“There’s so little information; we don’t know why it took a year to find 44 pages,” Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. His group requested the documents in late April for an FOIA lawsuit it filed against the BLM in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Continue>>>
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