Sherriff meets with armed group, asks them to leave

“The FBI is indeed planning on moving on us”, he told reporters gathered here at dusk in a mix of snow and rain. There’s so far been no evident police presence outside the snowy, desolate wildlife refuge, though reporters have come and gone. This came after the group march supporting Steven and Dwight Hammond, two ranchers who have been convicted of committing arson. Essentially, they’re upset that the federal government owns land that comes with stipulations of how the public can use it.

At the emotional community meeting Ward, the county sheriff, said he understood the problems some had with the ranchers’ court case.

He is also the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who led an armed standoff with the federal government back in 2014 and notoriously suggested that African-Americans were better off as slaves.

“It’s warm, it’s comfortable, it’s nice”, he told Greenwire. This is the OR where men often wear cowboy hats and carry sidearms just out of habit. “I’m going to make my bed right here”.

The government claimed that the then 67-year-old Bundy owed more than $1.1 million in unpaid grazing fees and penalties for continuing to let his cattle graze on BLM rangeland some 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas after federal officials in 1993 established the area as a protected habitat for the endangered desert tortoise.

He suggested he’d rather die than be hauled off to prison. “I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box”. “This world is too handsome to spend it in a cell”.

He later added, “Don’t point guns at us and we won’t point guns back”.

Jon Ritzheimer, 32, of Phoenix, warned the other heavily-armed occupiers huddled around a campfire and eating pizza that the feds were coming for Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy, and Finicum.

The meeting is open to the public. Ranchers Thomas O’Toole and his father of Drewsey, Ore., came simply to meet the group and hear what it was all about.

“I don’t really think that their message is necessarily bad”, Leslie Odam, a Harney County resident, told CNN affiliate KTVZ.

“I got insight into what life is like as a federal employee: pretty cush!” “Those individuals illegally occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge need to decamp immediately and be held accountable”, she said. “It belongs to the native people who live here”, Rodrique said.

All the while, militants continued to scan the horizon from atop a fire lookout near the headquarters. They have also threatened to “kill and be killed” if federal agents try to roust them from the building.

Bundy, or someone using his Twitter account, has been tweeting about the situation since the refuge was occupied Saturday.

It’s the second time that Paul has tried to distance himself from Bundy.

“We as a tribe view that this is still our land no matter who’s living on it”, Rodrique said.

“It is our goal to get the logger back to logging, the rancher back to ranching”, Ammon Bundy said Tuesday.

Here’s the real irony of the Bundys’ illegal takeover: The Hammonds say they don’t want their help.

Following Bundy’s press conference on Friday morning a lands right activist opposed to the occupation spoke to the media.