- A retired criminal investigator for the Forest Service said in a letter Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management was actively involved in the planning of a 1989 eco-terrorism incident.
- The retired investigator said the nominee, Tracy 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.”
- The investigator said Stone-Manning’s refusal to cooperate with his investigation set his case back by many years.
- Stone-Manning received legal immunity from prosecution in 1993 to testify that she mailed an anonymous and threatening letter in 1989 warning that a local Idaho forest had been sabotaged with tree spikes.
- Stone-Manning told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in May that she was never the subject of a criminal investigation.
- The retired investigator said that is not true: “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.”
The investigator, Michael Merkley, said in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation that Stone-Manning was “extremely difficult to work with; in fact, she was the nastiest of the suspects” during the initial stages of his investigation in 1989.
