All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Sam Jacobs from ammo.com, and he's got this really important article.
It's called The Oregon Standoff, Understanding Lavoie Finnegan's Death and the Management of BLM Land.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, man.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
I'm actually on BLM Land right now.
Oh.
Well, that's good.
Or bad.
I'm not sure.
Are you homesteading it and privatizing it?
No, I'm a vagabond, and I'm currently on BLM Land, which is where I am a lot of the time.
So remind us about the Bundy family, and it really is two different stories here, one 2014, one 2016, but just catch everybody up a little bit about who and what we're talking about here.
Yeah.
So everyone, not everyone, and certainly not a number of your listeners, I'd imagine, but people tend to kind of conflate two different actions taken by the Bundy family.
So the first one in 2014 was the standoff between Clive and Bundy and federal officials in Nevada, which was over passing right fees on BLM Land.
And then there is this, where like, I would argue that the Bundys pretty much won that.
And then in 2016, there's a totally different standoff involving his son, Eamon Bundy, and that was at the National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
And that was the one that resulted in the death of Lavoie Finnegan.
Right.
OK.
So, well, go ahead and tell us.
The reasons for the occupation in Oregon are much more opaque than the one in Nevada.
The Nevada one is very, very straightforward.
He didn't want to pay his grazing fees.
And I don't say that, like, pejoratively, like you should have paid them or anything like that.
It's just you don't want to pay money that the federal government said that he owed them.
And that's pretty much the elevator pitch reason for the standoff.
The reason for the standoff in Oregon is way more complicated.
Well, and on the Nevada one there, real quick, you mentioned that they pretty much won that one.
And that was really, I think people may not know this, but it didn't get nearly as much coverage as the whole standoff and everything.
It was months later, maybe even more than a year later, that the judge ruled that all the charges were dismissed with prejudice because the government had lied about the extremely important fact that they had ringed this guy's property with snipers.
And that was the reason that they had called in the militia in the first place, and that the government had lied about that.
And luckily, they didn't blow anybody's head off, but they had lied to the court about that, I guess.
And when the judge found out about that, she angrily dismissed all the charges completely.
And so, you know, this was kind of, it was a big kind of moment for the culture wars in America, where everybody on the right is supposed to side with them and everyone on the left is supposed to hate them or something like that.
And yet, at the end of the day, a federal judge let them all walk because of the abuses of the federal cops in that case.
Right.
Which is what they always do.
I mean, and you think that, you know, you'd think that at some point they would learn that.
It's the abuse, not the letting them go because of it, right?
Right.
Right.
Well, that's the thing you'd think that they would like, that they would learn at least from the fact that they're not, that they lose over these things or that they get, you know, humiliated in front of Congress or the Senate or something.
I mean, I recently wrote something for Ammo about the Waco, you know, the siege of Waco and Mount Carmel.
And it was like, you know, I'm watching these Senate hearings and it's, you know, these ATF guys are just getting roasted by senators.
So and it's always over the same same sort of thing.
It's like, you know, you lied to us and this is like the thing that you're the one thing that you're not that you're really, really, really not supposed to do.
But yeah, they get caught doing it every every time.
And that's kind of what I what I mean is you think they'd learn is like, you know, you'd think that they'd learn that they're not actually very good at lying, but they don't.
And so, you know, there's no accountability.
Right.
Like the closest you would ever get to accountability is that their target is let go.
But they don't ever have to go to prison for what they've done.
So no, even for lying to a judge's face, there's never there's never any accountability.
I mean, that's the thing that no matter how many how many of these things I write for ammo and no matter how many how, you know, kind of jaded I get about the topic, you know, that I just can't believe that there's that there's like there's no accountability whatsoever.
You know, especially for federal police.
Right.
There was go ahead.
They are the most protected class in this country is federal federal law enforcement.
Right.
A local sheriff's deputy sometimes will be made an example of I mean, it's rare, but it does happen.
But in fact, there was a report by the FBI about how they had justified every single shoot by an FBI agent for the last 50 years.
Something like that.
There were no exceptions.
Well, this is the thing that I get into kind of repeatedly when I do when I do when I go on podcasts is, you know, there there's there's a very sharp difference between federal law enforcement and and county sheriffs in particular.
I don't think that it's necessarily, you know, I think that the difference between federal law enforcement and state and local law enforcement as pertains to what we're talking about now is mostly one of degree.
But, you know, relatively speaking, sheriff's offices tend to have pretty clean hands and tend to be more interested in taking care of their own.
I don't know why.
I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that they're elected.
It's, you know, I mean, it shows up again in this case where the the in the in the occupation in Oregon, you know, the feds are constantly ratcheting up the tension and the local sheriff's department and the state, you know, the state police as well.
But the local sheriff's department are the ones holding town halls are the ones kind of trying to, you know, see what they can do to get to get some kind of peaceful resolution out of this.
And it's, again, a trope that you see again and again and again, when you get into these, you know, X, Y, Z versus the feds thing is, is the local sheriff's departments tend to, you know, actually kind of be representing the people that they're ostensibly designed to protect.
Well, on a sliding scale anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk about this Oregon standoff.
And as you say, it was less clear cut in the first place.
What was even going on there?
It started with an arson case, is that right?
It's a really complicated arson case that, like, you know, is difficult to really make heads or tails of.
There's different there's different accounts.
But I think that kind of the salient fact is that the guys pled guilty to get other charges dropped, which I think that, you know, I don't think that that makes them guilty.
This is a father and son, Dwight and Steven Hammond, right?
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
So I don't think that, like, obviously, if you plead guilty to get to get other charges dropped, you know, you're maybe not quite so guilty as you're being pointed out to be, but you're also maybe not quite so not guilty either.
And what is interesting about this case is that these guys, you know, they serve time.
A judge re-sentenced them, which, you know, I don't really know how that works constitutionally or even in a sort of broader Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence way, like re-sentencing somebody sounds like something else.
Slow down a sec here, because you're saying that this is in the article you talk about how they had been released and then they were re-sentenced and sent back to prison.
Right.
Which is pretty unprecedented sounding anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, like I say, it sounds like something out of, if anybody's seen Midnight Express, the movie from the 80s about the guy who goes to Turkish prison, I mean, it not only sounds alien in terms of, you know, America's constitution, but it sounds really alien in terms of just a longer history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that our legal system is based on.
So what happened then?
And now, sorry, but on the arson case, I forget now, it's been a couple of years and I just hadn't prioritized this, but was there something fishy about the case against the father and son in the first place?
Or you seem to be implying there by your previous statement that you think they actually had started the fire.
Is that right?
You know, honestly, I didn't dig that deep into that because I didn't really think that their actual guilt or innocence was as important.
And I didn't, and I, and I like, you know, wanted to focus on the, on the, the, the occupation.
I got, I got the sense that, all right, so this is the, somebody can correct me, right?
But the sense that I got was they started, you know, doing controlled, controlled burns, but they weren't actually very controlled.
And you know, the issue as I understood it kind of became, it was less that they were doing controlled burns and more that they were not terribly good at controlling their controlled burns that got them into trouble with the feds.
But they hadn't destroyed any private property or hurt any people or any burned out anybody else's cattle or anything like that.
Not as far, no, not as far as I know.
So I mean, that's, that's an important point too, that like, you know, I mean you have to kind of balance these things.
On the one hand, nobody's hurt, you know, where's the crime.
On the other hand, you can't just kind of let people who don't know what the hell they're doing start, you know, burning down parts of, parts of public, public land.
But what it really caused a controversy here was they had done their time, they got out and then it wasn't new charges.
It was just the judge re-sentenced them and put them back in prison.
Yeah.
And that was kind of the thing that I thought was most, you know, that's why I focused on that.
It was, was, was kind of the most interesting thing to me because again, it's like.
And this is what caused all the militia guys to come out and try to intervene, right?
Well, it wasn't all, it wasn't all the militia guys at first.
And it's also interesting because the local, the local three percenters did not join the occupation and there was other local militia groups who did not join the occupation.
They kind of, you know, had the backs of the occupation in a sense, but they were not in favor of the occupation, which I, which I think is an important point.
And I also think that, you know, I mean the, the, the guys who were the father and son who were convicted for arson, like met with, met with Amon Bundy and his group beforehand and basically said, you know, we don't really, we don't really want your support.
Even before the whole thing had started, they had said, we don't want your support.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Right.
They did like before he met with them beforehand and, and, and, you know, they basically said, we don't, we don't want your support.
And you know, I, this is one of those things that like, I feel like people don't like to hear, but these are, these are out of town.
You know, Amon Bundy is not from Oregon and, and, and nor, you know, and, and his, his people largely, as I understand it, and somebody can correct me, are not, are not locals which I think is not an unimportant point in this, in this telling of the story, you know, and, and, and I don't want to go too far in the other direction either and say, well, they're these out of town rabble rousers and they kind of get what they deserve because that's not what I think.
But I do think that, you know, them being for lack of a better term, out of town rabble rousers is not, you know, just kind of a footnote to this whole thing that it's, that it's important.
Well, and it cuts both ways too, right?
I mean, you, and the article saying that essentially what they did worked and that these guys got out of prison, eventually Trump pardoned them because of all this pressure that they had helped to create.
Well, at the same time, it was kind of, you know, could be counterproductive for local politics and all this kind of thing.
But the fact that the local militias didn't want to participate in it would seem to say, you know, probably on first guess anyway, that they really didn't believe in what these guys were doing or think what they were doing was justified.
And you talk about how they were pretty heavy handed with the local population, you know, being as pushy as can be instead of as polite as can be coming from out of town, supposedly to help them and that kind of thing.
So yeah, you know, all parts of the story are important from, from either side.
Right.
And that was the thing that there was reports of was like the, the, the out of towners being very aggressive towards the locals and, you know, kind of demanding in very inappropriate ways they pick a side.
This is an area where people were starting to open carry and, and open carry is not sort of the norm there.
And you know, I, I'm not obviously saying anything bad about open carry, but you know, it says something that the, the, the people in this town who did not feel the need to carry weapons as a, as a general rule, all of a sudden feel like, oh, I need to carry a gun to go to, you know, to go to the supermarket in this little town where, you know, cattle outnumber number people 14 to one.
And I think that the lesson there is less about like, you know, like locals only kind of thing and more about how you should interact with locals when you are not one of them.
You know, I'm certainly not suggesting that any cause that isn't taken up by the locals should just be ignored by people 500 miles away.
What I am suggesting is that if you are an out of towner, you are, it's kind of incumbent upon you to be extra polite, to be extra deferential.
And that, that does not seem to be the case.
I mean, we got a comment on one of the, one of the, the places that this was posted about how, you know, people brought them food and like, I'm sure that that happened.
I'm sure that there were, I'm sure that there are cases of solidarity between the locals and, and the occupiers who are from out of town.
You know, I'm not denying that any of that is that any of that is the case.
But you know, there, there, there are reports of sort of tensions between the locals and the out of town occupiers.
Although people should understand too, though, that unlike the impression they might've gotten from watching CNN about it or something like that, this wasn't a violent takeover of this was a national park facility or whatever it was.
There was empty when they occupied it, right?
Yeah.
It's not like, it's not like, you know, they went and took over the local state park where kids are camping or something.
And held a gun to the local park rangers head and this kind of deal.
Right, right.
Exactly.
And I think that that's the thing too, is I want to be very, very clear that I am in no way saying that any, any of the violence, any of the state sponsored violence that befell the occupiers was something that they had coming.
It is not what I think.
I just am trying to present a more, more sort of nuanced view of what, of what happened there.
And as you said to me in an email, you know, I think that kind of the most important fact to this is that the hostage rescue team are the ones who open fire first.
Yeah.
Well, and so that's actually kind of all I know about it really was I knew that this guy Finnicum had been murdered in this, you know, the incident that had happened on the road there.
And there was video of is a little bit hard to see what had happened in the video.
And then it came out, I think more than a year later that the hostage rescue team sniper and big surprise admitted that, okay, yes, it's true.
He had fired the first shot when the guy got out of the truck.
So that's kind of fast forwarding a little bit, but that to me is sort of the salient point that essentially this guy Finnicum, even if he had been wanted for murder, which he was not, but I'm just saying, you know, made up hypothetical, this is a fugitive.
He gets out of his car with his hands up and the FBI sniper opens fire on him.
And then they say that in response to that, he started reaching for his own gun.
And then the, the cops on the ground near him finished the job that the HRT had started.
So you know that, and I think this is part of one of the reasons this is so important is because at the time, back to the culture war thing, you know, this was the black lives matter movement and all that, instead of seeing themselves in these people were, you know, seeing their opposite number.
And I, I remember arguing with this young lady saying that, listen, the black lives matter ought to be rallying to these people's cause, you know, cause it's all the same thing.
It's we're up against the cops.
And then she sent me a picture of one of these protesters at the Oregon thing with a sign that says down with the BLM, which she thought meant black lives matter.
And that he was saying, you know, we were protesting in Oregon cause we ate black people so much.
And I said, no, dear, that's the cops, the Bureau of Land Management that are oppressing these eating just cause they're white.
They have power.
They don't have power.
They are oppressed by the cops.
Welcome to the USA.
It's all of us.
It's you know, it's the government versus the individual.
That's the fight that's going on here.
And there are so many presumptions and assumptions about who's on whose side and all of that, comes right down to it.
The cops fired first.
Now doesn't that sound like a familiar story, no matter what color you are, what city or state you live in, in this country, it happens all the time.
And so now I'm going to stop soliloquying and let you tell the story of what happened to this guy.
So, so actually I think it's important to kind of, did you mention the Bureau of Land Management?
It's maybe like important to back up a minute and explain where Bureau of Land Management comes from and why it is Bureau of Land Management land.
Just so you know, we've got nine minutes.
Oh, dang.
Okay.
Well, anyway, I'll make it real quick then.
Bureau of Land Management land was everybody knows about homesteading in the United States and you know, what happened to homesteading land when most people didn't take it?
The government just said, this is ours now.
And so there's these kind of like convoluted legal theories about the government doesn't really own it.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to those arguments as arguments, but you know, that and $5 will get you a latte.
You know, the government kind of in a sense owns whatever it says it does because it's the biggest, you know, bully on the block.
And you do have this great map in the article that shows all the federal land in the West and it's the super majority of all the land in the West, right?
Right.
It's the overwhelming majority of all the land in the West, which you know, is, is, there's, I think that there is, there's an important question as to whether or not, you know, the federal government has the constitutional authority to just say, hey, this is ours now.
You know, so that's, that's, that's kind of an important thing.
But in terms of what actually happened, I mean, I think that, you know, what happened to LaVoy, LaVoy Finnegan, I think is, is it's one of the reasons why I had difficulty writing this because it's so difficult to tease out.
We know that he was fired upon first by the, by the hostage response team.
But other than that, you know, it's like we have the, the, the, you know, what the police say happened, which is unreliable is a charitable way of putting it.
And then we have, you know, really grainy dash cam and, and, and, you know, surveillance kind of kinds of footage, which in general, I, I personally just make it a policy to never try and say what happened in footage like that, because I think it's impossible to, to know unless you're, you know, an expert.
And so it's why one of the things that I say is when people watch this video, they tend to see what they want to see.
And I think that that's, that's why I don't, you know, want to make any judgments about what happens on, on videotape, on poor quality videotape.
You know, and people are certainly welcome to watch it and come to their own conclusions about it.
But yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the kind of like short version that we know because they admitted it is that the hostage rescue team guy capped him.
And you know, and he was, and he was fired upon, I want to say two or three times more and two of them hit him.
I may be, you know, on the finer, finer details of this, I may be missing something.
But what I think is kind of even more important than that is that, like you say, he was not, you know, being, being arrested for murder.
He was supposed to be going on his way to a town hall that was going to hope that was being held again by the local sheriff who was attempting to defuse tensions in this.
And we see, this is another thing that runs the thread that runs through, you know, Ruby Ridge and Waco and other kinds of more obscure things, obscure incidents is that the feds tend to always, always, always just want to be turning the thumb screws on these situations that are real powder kegs, you know, and rather than look for some kind of peaceful resolution to it, which, you know, there are a number of ways to do, and there are a number of examples of doing it.
I mean, what is the kind of, you know, to just posit it as an example, what is the downside of just letting these guys hang out in the wildlife refuge for as long as they feel like until they get, you know, until they get tired of it?
They're a thumb in their nose at law enforcement.
Meanwhile, he's on his way to a meeting with the local sheriff.
Right.
That's it.
I mean, they get really, really agitated about, you know, I mean, that's just the thing that another thing that I think is different between the feds and the, and the sheriffs is that the sheriff's sheriff's departments tend to have a peacekeeping, a peace officer model of their law enforcement, where the law enforcement, the feds have a law enforcement model.
So it's about the law, the law, the law, the law, again, on a sliding scale.
And when faced with a bunch of armed men who are willing to fight, you know, right.
Yeah.
And I'm not like, I'm not trying to, you know, glorify the glorify the local sheriff's department.
But I do think that it's much to their credit that especially in this case, the local sheriff's departments is just like, how do we resolve this?
You know, what do we, what, what do we need to do to resolve this, this situation peacefully so that everyone can go home to their families alive?
And the feds tend to tend to be like, you know, well, how do we show off our new, our new toys and make an example out of somebody.
Hey man, you guys are going to love no dev, no ops, no it by Hussein Badak Chani.
It's a fun and interesting read all about how to run your high tech company like a good libertarian should forget all the junk read.
No dev, no ops, no it by Hussein Badak Chani.
Find it in the margin.
It's scotthorton.org.
Hey y'all, here's the thing.
Donate a hundred dollars to the Scott Horton show, and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in federal reserve notes in real time.
It's the future of currency in the past too.
Commodity discs.com or just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here for expanddesigns.com Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building, and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website, go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott and save 500 bucks.
In the interest of the whole story, you really do talk about in the article here, and I'm not sure exactly how clear all this is, but it seems to be certain in your article that this guy Finicum was telling the cops who pulled him over, the state troopers who were pulling him over that you're going to have to kill me and all of this kind of stuff.
So it wasn't like he was meekly, uh, you know, putting, leaving his hands on the steering wheel and submitting to their authority and whatever he, he was being confrontational.
They ran him off the road and he was saying all these things that if you were a cop on the scene, you could infer that first chance he got, he was going to draw on you.
And they had every reason to think he was armed.
People debate whether his arm came down like he was actually reaching, you know, for his gun or not.
But again, if HRT fired the first shot, which I think in my understanding, the first shot hit the roof of the truck or something like that, um, that then at that point he has the right to defend himself.
So, well, there's, I mean, if you'll notice when I, in the article, it's, it's, you know, I say he's reported and according to Oregon state police, so, oh, okay.
I'm not, I didn't, I didn't remember those caveats in there, but all this with a grain with a grain of salt, um, and consider the source, but he, I, he was, I wasn't sure if that was on tape or what, but I'm sorry, go ahead.
He was, he was interviewed on MSNBC, I want to say.
And, and when he was tarp man on MSNBC, um, like I have no idea because I obviously don't watch MSNBC, but, um, he was, I believe it was there that he, he, he said, you know, I have no intention of spending my time, um, in a, in a concrete box or something to that effect.
Um, but you know, dude, like people say a lot of things.
I mean, I, I, to what, you know, people say stuff like that all the time and cops lie all the time too, right?
Exactly.
So like, to what degree he's, you know, trying to, trying to kind of, you know, bully the police around or tough talk the police, like who, who knows?
I mean, it's so difficult.
That's the thing is like, it's so difficult to, to, to tease out, you know, what actually happened versus what the police say versus this versus that.
Um, but again, as you, as you say, like, I think that the important, you know, point is that he was fired upon first by, by the sniper.
Yeah.
Well, and although in this case, unlike Ruby Ridge and Waco, it wasn't Lon Horiyuchi.
It was a different FBI hostage rescue team sniper.
God only knows where that guy is now.
He's probably sitting on a beach cash and checks.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
So, uh, but now what, is there anything, he has any survivors suing or anything in process, anything going on?
There's all kinds, there's all kinds of lawsuits, man.
I mean, there's, there's lawsuits against the state, there's lawsuits against the fed.
There's, um, 20, 27 people are, were arrested, um, you know, on both federal and state charges.
I mean, there's law, there's lawfare going all around.
Have they been convicted?
Have any of the occupiers been convicted and sent to prison yet or already?
Four of them were convicted in, uh, March, 2017.
Um, it was, yeah, it was mostly conspiracy to impede federal workers.
Preventing the staff of the park to show up at their job.
Yeah.
Although in a way it sounds like it could have been worse, but did they get years to say what they were sentenced to for that?
Um, it looks like they were fined.
Okay.
Yeah.
That could have been much worse, but $3,000, $10,000, um, 13 occupiers agreed to pay a total of 78,000 restitution.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry.
We got to run here, but this is such a great piece and a really important history.
I hope people look at it.
The Oregon standoff, understanding Lavoie Finnegan's death and the management of BLM land.
That's at ammo.com by Sam Jacobs.
Thanks again.
Thanks for having me.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APS radio.com antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
