The Washington Free Beacon's Elizabeth Harrington appeared on BlazeTV's Real News Wednesday to discuss her story on a two-decades old battle between a Nevada rancher and the Bureau of Land Management resulting in officials with machine guns forcibly removing his cattle.
Harrington said she spoke with Cliven Bundy's family Wednesday and there were no incidents so far today, but the threats, rhetoric and presence of armed officials continues to make the situation tense. Environmentalists have praised the government's actions, which are ostensibly being taken in the name of protecting the desert tortoise.
"They really feel like there's nothing else they can do except get try to their story out there," Harrington said of the Bundys. "They tried it through the legal ends, they tried it through political ends, and now they just feel like they're surrounded and don't have any other recourse. They did not make mention of any plans that they would ever resort to violence at all. That is not the case."
Cliven Bundy, the last rancher in Clark County, Nev., has been fighting a "one-man range war" since 1993, when he decided to take a stand against the agency, refusing to pay fees for the right to graze on a ranch run by his family for centuries.
After years of court battles, the BLM secured a federal court order to have Bundy’s "trespass cattle" forcibly removed with heavy artillery, the family said.
"The battle’s been going on for 20 years," Bundy told theWashington Free Beacon. "What’s happened the last two weeks, the United States government, the bureaus are getting this army together and they’re going to get their job done and they’re going to prove two things. They’re going to prove they can do it, and they’re gonna prove that they have unlimited power, and that they control the policing power over this public land. That’s what they’re trying to prove."
Harrington added there was another BLM incident with armed officers in Nevada two months ago, where there was a disturbance along a state highway and two BLM rangers shot a man to death because he was going into a nearby police car and may be reaching for a gun.
"You have these federal agencies that are armed with weapons," she said. "People question if they have the proper training."