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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: The Bizarre Story Behind the FBI’s Fake Documentary About the Bundy Family RYAN BUNDY SEEMED uneasy as he settled into a white leather chair in a private suite at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. As the eldest son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had become a national figure for his armed standoff with U.S. government agents in April 2014, Ryan had quite a story to tell. Eight months had passed since Cliven and hundreds of supporters, including heavily armed militia members, faced off against the federal government in a sandy wash under a highway overpass in the Mojave Desert. Now, here in the comforts of the Bellagio, six documentary filmmakers trained bright lights and high-definition cameras on Ryan. They wanted to ask about the standoff. Wearing a cowboy hat, Ryan fidgeted before the cameras. He had told this story before; that wasn’t the reason for his nerves. After all, the Bundy confrontation made national news after armed agents with the Bureau of Land Management seized the Bundy family’s cattle following a trespassing dispute and the accumulation of more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. But the Bundys, aided by their armed supporters, beat back the government, forcing agents to release the cattle and retreat. Images of armed Bundy supporters with high-powered rifles taking on outgunned BLM agents circulated widely on social media. As a result, the Bundys became a household name, lionized by the right as champions of individual liberty and vilified by the left as anti-government extremists. But something seemed off to Ryan about this interview in the Bellagio. While the family’s newfound fame had attracted fresh supporters to their cause, it had also inspired suspicion. With a federal investigation looming, who among these new faces could they really trust? Among the more recent figures in the Bundy orbit was this mysterious documentary film crew. The director, Charles Johnson, was middle-aged, with a silver goatee, slicked-back hair, and a thick southern accent. His assistant, who identified herself as Anna, was tall and blond. A website for their company, Longbow Productions, listed an address in Nashville, Tennessee, but the Bundys could find no previous examples of their work. An excerpt from an interview that the purported Longbow Productions film crew conducted with Ryan Bundy, obtained by The Intercept. As the cameras recorded, Ryan’s skepticism was plain. At times, his right eye rolled back into his head, the result of a childhood accident that paralyzed half of his face, and his gaze shifted to figures outside the shot. “There’s been a lot of red flags in the community about Longbow Productions,” one of his companions explained to the film crew. “No bullshit, straight talk. … It’s almost like you’re trying to make us incriminate ourselves.” With a conspicuously placed copy of the U.S. Constitution poking out of his left breast pocket, Ryan turned his gaze to Johnson. “We really do want to work with you, if that’s really what’s going on,” he said. But his family needed to know, “Is this just a mole project to garner information that will then be given to the feds?” Johnson insisted the project was a legitimate endeavor. “I want a truthful documentary.” “Alrighty,” Ryan said. “Let’s proceed.” “Quiet on the set,” Johnson told his crew. Ryan should have trusted his instincts. Johnson and his colleagues were not documentarians. They were undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers. By the time they sat down with Ryan, Johnson and his team had spent eight months traveling to at least five states to film interviews with nearly than two dozen people about the Bundy standoff, all part of an FBI effort to build criminal cases against the Bundys and their supporters. The story of the FBI’s fake documentary crew, revealed in more than 100 hours of video and audio recordings obtained by The Intercept, offers an unprecedented window into how federal law enforcement agents impersonate journalists to gain access to criminal suspects. The raw material produced by the FBI was presented under seal in the U.S. District Court in Nevada, where Ryan Bundy, his father, Cliven, and his brothers, as well as more than a dozen supporters, were charged with conspiracy, assault, weapons offenses, and other crimes related to their standoff with the government. An excerpt from an interview with Cliven Bundy, produced by undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers and obtained by The Intercept. THE BUNDYS CONSIDER themselves true men and women of the American West. Cliven Bundy, a Mormon patriarch with 14 children and at least 60 grandchildren, operates a cattle ranch with his family 80 miles east of Las Vegas that was settled by Cliven’s ancestors in the 1880s. “The ranch has been home for me most all my life,” Cliven told Johnson and the other undercover FBI agents, believing they were making a documentary about his life and the standoff. Cliven and his family aren’t wealthy ranchers, and their land has only offered a subsistence lifestyle at best. As generations of western ranchers have done, Cliven’s family built a home near a water source on private property and then allowed cattle to graze freely on surrounding lands owned by the U.S. government. A dilapidated semi-trailer, broken-down cars, old tires, and wooden shipping pallets litter the dirt road leading into the Bundy property. The ranch is set up like a wagon wheel, with the Bundy home at the center surrounded by irrigated fields of alfalfa and melons. From there, the ranch then extends out in every direction, covering more than 600,000 acres, counting government land, where Cliven’s 400 head of cattle graze. The Bundy family’s dispute with the federal government began nearly 30 years ago, when conservation officials declared the desert tortoise an endangered species, resulting in severe restrictions to grazing rights for ranchers in Clark County, Nevada. Some of Cliven’s neighbors fought the government in court, but in time, all but Cliven abandoned their ranches. Cliven took another tack, refusing to renew his permit for grazing rights. He continued to allow his cattle to graze federal lands, damn the consequences. As far as Cliven was concerned, the land was public and no one was using it anyway. The government hauled Bundy into court, and in 1998, a U.S. District Court judge issued an order prohibiting Cliven from using the lands. Cliven refused to comply, and his unpaid grazing fees piled up, reaching more than $1 million. In July 2013, another District Court judge issued an order demanding that Cliven not trespass on federal lands. And then in April 2014, the Bureau of Land Management, with the help of so-called contract cowboys, began to round up Cliven’s trespassing cattle. The roundup set off a storm of rumors among the Bundys and their local supporters — that the cattle were being mistreated, that they were dying or being killed intentionally, and that the government was burying them in mass graves. On April 9, the Bundys and other locals intercepted a convoy of contract cowboys protected by BLM agents. The crowd stopped the line of trucks in an attempt to see whether they were transporting dead cattle. A confrontation ensued. Cliven’s 57-year-old sister was thrown to the ground by a BLM agent. Cliven’s son Ammon kicked a BLM dog and was tased twice as result. All of it was captured on camera. One video in particular, shot by Pete Santilli, blew up online and would later be referenced repeatedly by subjects in the FBI’s undercover documentary production. The clip, which has now been seen more than 1.8 million times on YouTube, turned Cliven’s story into a cause célèbre among rural conservatives, right-wing groups, and anti-government militias, who viewed the cattle roundup, and the force used during that confrontation, as an abuse of government power. Cliven, who had appeared on Santilli’s radio show the day before the clash describing how hundreds of contract cowboys protected by hundreds of armed federal agents were taking over his ranch, won a massive audience of fired-up supporters from around the country. “They have my home surrounded,” Cliven said. The news quickly spread through social media, fueled by photographs that appeared to show federal agents aiming sniper rifles from a hilltop. Sean Hannity soon interviewed Cliven on Fox News about the situation. Cheered by Tea Party conservatives, the Bundys garnered public support from Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Dean Heller of Nevada. That support later faded after Cliven was caught on video making racist comments about “the negro” and suggesting that African-Americans would be “better off as slaves.” There was no question that the Bundys energized some devout bigots. Stanley Blaine Hicks, aka Blaine Cooper, a propagandist for the family’s cause, once filmed himself smearing a Quran with bacon, setting its pages on fire, then shooting it with a bow and arrow (he boasted about the stunt in a secretly recorded conversation with the FBI). At the same time, however, the family’s supporters were not a monolith. For many, the Bundys’ high-profile battle with the federal government became symbolic of economic and cultural losses that resonate deeply in western ranching communities. Hundreds of people, including militia members with assault rifles, began to arrive at the Bundy ranch. “We need guns to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government,” said Jim Lordy, from Montana, in an interview with a Las Vegas TV news crew. Local authorities, in a poorly planned attempt to corral protesters into designated areas, set up zones marked by signs that read, “First Amendment Area.” The signs only inflamed perceptions that the government was overstepping its constitutional authority. The protests grew so large that the Bundys’ supporters blocked a stretch of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. The situation came to a head on April 12, when scores of protesters confronted the BLM in a wash outside the Bundy ranch, as gunmen took up positions on the hillsides and overpasses around them. While the authorities had already set in motion plans to release the cattle the night before, the presence of so many armed militiamen, armed federal agents, and unarmed civilians escalated tensions dramatically. In its indictment against Cliven and his followers, the government would later describe the standoff as a “massive armed assault.” Fearing for the safety of its agents, and envisioning another violent showdown like the Ruby Ridge incident of 1992, the BLM released Cliven’s cattle that day and withdrew from land near the Bundy ranch on April 21, 2014. Cliven had beaten the government, or so he thought. What he didn’t realize was that an undercover FBI investigation, intended to build cases against the Bundy patriarch and his supporters for what happened during the standoff, was about to begin. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
I will say this again and again. The Bundy's are thugs. They owed the American tax payers $20 MILLION in back grazing fees. The went to OR, told not to come, took over a federal facility, they were armed and destroyed the facility. Now they are cry babies. They have 5 government loans to run private businesses. They are cry babies, they did not get their way. YES BLM did not handle the situation very well, the BLM should have gone through the courts. BUT the Bundy's had connections with elected people and the great mormon church.
#2. To: Darkwing (#1)
The were acquitted in court.
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