Cliven Bundy, 4 others, face federal indictment in Nevada

“Persons who use force and violence against federal law enforcement officers who are enforcing court orders, and almost causing catastrophic loss of life or injury to others, will be brought to justice”.

“His ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not freakish”, it says. Unvaccinated and susceptible to illness, the cattle have little contact with humans and Bundy often has no idea where they are, the government said.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart ordered that the Nevadan be kept behind bars until his trial.

“Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery”, prosecutors said. In the takeover, which lasted almost six weeks, they had demanded that public lands be turned over to locals and that two area ranchers serving sentences for arson be freed.

The indictment charges the four with 16 felonies: one count of conspiring to commit an offense against the United States, one count of conspiring to impede or injure a federal officer, four counts of carrying a firearm in a crime of violence, two counts of assault on a federal officer, two counts of threatening a federal law enforcement officer, three counts of obstructing justice, two counts of interfering with interstate commerce by extortion and one count of interstate travel in aid of extortion. That suggests an indictment may be issued soon, canceling Bundy’s preliminary hearing Friday in Portland, the paper said. According to FBI surveillance reported in the Justice Department memo, there were Bundy supporters with rifles on high ground serving as lookouts, and snipers aiming at federal agents from bridges.

More than 300 million acres of land in 13 Western states is public land managed by the federal government.

The 69-year-old Nevada rancher was arrested February 10 in Portland, Oregon, where his sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, are jailed and accused of organizing the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

But Myhre said if Bundy was out of jail, he would continue to fuel anti-government sentiment. Other than Cliven Bundy, all those charged in the Nevada standoff Wednesday also face charges in the OR standoff.

“That being said, I have every confidence Mr. Bundy will immediately plead not guilty and will welcome the opportunity to have a jury of his peers decide what really happened”, Grefenson wrote.

“[Bundy] has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them”. “The nation’s public lands belong to all Americans”. They go on to describe the cows “getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway…” The latter authorized BLM to impound the cattle.

It took almost took two years for authorities to finally file charges against Bundy because, prosecutors indicated, “the investigation became purely historical in nature”.

The government has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, executed more than 40 search warrants, analyzed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents (mostly from social media), reviewed thousands of pages of phone records and examined hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, prosecutors said.