Ammon Bundy’s lawyer Wednesday played for jurors a January call between his client and an FBI negotiator stationed in Bend, Ore., but the lengthy conversation may have helped the prosecution’s case.
“The last thing we want to do is leave the refuge,” Bundy told Agent Christopher Luh on Jan. 21.
If he and his supporters were to leave the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Bundy said, “Those people who are doing this will go right back into the refuge, the BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and put the chains right back onto the people.”
Lawyers for Ammon Bundy, the leader of the refuge occupation, and six co-defendants have repeatedly argued in court that their clients never intended to prevent the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Bureau of Land Management from doing their work — the thrust of the federal conspiracy charge they face. They’ve even argued that defendants haven’t talked about workers from those federal agencies.
Instead, they’ve said that they were engaged in a political protest, and intended to stake claim to land they didn’t believe that the federal government should control.
The phone call between Bundy and the federal agent was played as defense lawyers started their case in the federal trial. Bundy called the refuge the “primary tool” for the persecution of Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steve Hammond, and argued that the federal government didn’t have authority to control the land.
The agent’s testimony followed contentious testimony by an elder in the Siletz tribe, Sheila Warren, who visited the refuge for about two hours on Jan. 24 and was clearly a fan of the occupiers. Repeatedly, the judge instructed Warren simply to answer the questions asked, and not volunteer information.
Warren, a registered nurse who worked for Indian Health and Veterans Affairs, said she visited the refuge on Jan. 24 “to get to the bottom” of whether the artifacts that belonged to the Burns Paiute Tribe had been harmed in any way, as she had heard on the news.
“I was trying to get a feel for the place so I could tell what was true and what was not,” she said.
She described the dozen people she met at the refuge as “very friendly,” “very open,” and “respectful,” and said she didn’t notice any firearms there.
“They were not tearing things up. I noticed a lot of areas that had been cleaned,” she testified.
She said the artifacts were “dirty, and they were dusty,” and they had rodent droppings on them, but they were in tact and not damaged.
Defendant Ryan Bundy, who is representing himself, asked if she ever heard people at the refuge talk about preventing refuge employees from coming to the property.
“Just the opposite. They said they were not threatening or hurting anyone,” Warren said.
During cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight established that the Siletz Tribe disavowed Warren’s visit to the refuge.
The defense has indicated it plans to call several FBI agents and Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward to testify Wednesday. Ammon Bundy also plans to testify at some point in the trial his own defense.
If any of the defendants who are representing themselves plan to testify, they will be questioned by another lawyer, the judge said. It would be hard for jurors, she noted, to keep “a straight face,” if a defendant posed their own questions and then answered them on the stand.
