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Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an organization of local, state and federal natural resource workers, said Tuesday an analysis of federal records turned up 35 criminal referrals the BLM sent to the Justice Department on April 30, three weeks after agents seeking to round up Bundy cattle about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas were resisted by armed militia supporting the controversial rancher.
The complaints were five times the number of cases the BLM has ever filed in any one month, and exceeded the number of complaints filed by BLM during the rest of the fiscal year. The cases were listed as active and having neither been accepted nor declined for prosecution, according to data PEER cited from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University.
David Burnham, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse program, said it is troubling but not unusual for the Justice Department to withhold details of prosecution referrals, including proposed lead charges and the category of crime committed. The practice is one element of a long-running legal battle between the department and the clearinghouse, he said.
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