Tracy Stone-Manning, President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, is a tree-spiking eco-terrorist who should not be confirmed, a retired federal criminal investigator says.
In a letter to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Michael Merkley, a former special agent with the U.S. Forest Service, detailed the truth about Stone-Manning. As The New American reported last month, Stone-Manning, who thinks infants are an environmental hazard, was involved in tree-spiking and eco-terror in the Clearwater National Forest in 1989.
Stone-Manning supposedly cooperated with prosecutors and investigators in exchange for immunity, but Merkley — the agent who investigated the crime — says senators haven’t heard the whole story.
Stone-Manning, Merkley wrote, is a nasty, vulgar extremist.
No Innocent Bystander
“Many of the news reports covering the tree-spiking incident in the Clearwater National Forest in 1989 are inaccurate or incomplete,” Merkley wrote to Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso:
They have represented Ms. Stone-Manning as a bystander or a victim, and Ms. Stone-Manning has represented herself as a hero. As the criminal investigator assigned to this case, I believe that I am the only other person, besides Ms. Stone-Manning, who knows the full and complete truth in this case and I feel that it is my duty to present the facts to you.
Contrary to many of the stories in the news, Ms. Stone-Manning was not an innocent bystander, nor was she a victim in this case. And, she most certainly was not a hero. Ms. Stone-Manning was not only a member of Earth First, but she played an active role in the Earth First! hierarchy.
Stone-Manning, as Merkley wrote, typed and sent the tree-spiking threat to authorities. The Earth First! terrorists wanted to stop a timber sale.
[wpmfpdf id=”133555″ embed=”1″ target=””]When Merkley inspected the sale site, he found trees with graffiti and others that were spiked. “Some of the spikes in the trees were plainly visible, but on others, the spikes had been deliberately covered with sap and sometimes even had bark stuck on top of the sap, in deliberate attempts to hide the spikes,” he wrote.
Tree-spiking timber in a federal forest is a major felony.
A search of an Earth First! terror house in Missoula, Montana, where members had been involved in a tree-spiking seminar, turned up “computer disks and other evidence that tied the residents of the house to Clearwater National Forest tree spiking.”
A grand jury issued subpoenas, including one to Stone-Manning, for “hair samples, handwriting exemplars, and fingerprints.”
Throughout this initial investigation in 1989, Ms. Stone-Manning was extremely difficult to work with; in fact, she was the nastiest of the suspects. She was vulgar, antagonistic, and extremely anti-government. She was very uncooperative and refused to provide the hair, handwriting exemplars, and fingerprints as ordered by the federal grand jury. It was not until after we informed her that she would be arrested if she did not comply with the subpoena that she reluctantly provided those samples to me. However, she refused to answer any of my other questions. Eventually, after further investigation, I discovered that she had known all along who had perpetrated the crimes in the Clearwater National Forest.
Three years later, the FBI in Boston put Merkley in touch with an informant who could identify the tree-spikers. “She described how Ms. Stone-Manning typed and mailed the letter to the Forest Service,” Merkley wrote:
She also recounted a conversation she had overheard wherein Ms. Stone-Manning along with other co-conspirators planned the tree spiking and discussed whether to use ceramic or metal spikes in the trees.… It became clear that Ms. Stone-Manning was an active member of the original group that planned the spiking.
Stone-Manning received a “target letter” from the grand jury that said she would be indicted in the tree-spiking, but her attorney cut a deal with prosecutors for immunity in exchange for testimony:
Stone-Manning only came forward only after her attorney struck the immunity deal, and not before she was caught. At no time did she come forward of her own volition, and she was never entirely forthcoming. She was aware that she was being investigated in 1989 and again in 1993 when she agreed to the immunity deal with the government to avoid criminal felony prosecution. I know, because I was the Special Agent in Charge of the investigation.
Death Threats
Merkley’s letter is more proof that Stone-Manning has repeatedly lied about her past. She told Manchin’s committee she was never the target of a criminal investigation in a written answer for the committee’s questionnaire.
Nor are the unindicted eco-terrorist’s lies to the energy panel anything new, Politico reported:
During testimony in 2013 for her nomination to lead Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, Stone-Manning said she had re-typed a letter from one of the men warning that the trees had been spiked and sent anonymously to the U.S. Forest Service to warn of the danger.
In a response to a question for the record of whether she had “personal knowledge” of, participated in, or in any way directly or indirectly supported activities associated with the spiking of trees in any forest during her lifetime, she responded “No,” according to the questionnaire.
H/T: Daily Caller
