SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
Nichols promoted Harney
County’s “culture of
collaboration” and did not
mention Bundy’s name. But that
did not stop Bundy from
targeting him.
Nichols “was working as a
foreign agent to a different
jurisdiction while representing
the people in another
government,” Bundy wrote. “He
did not serve the people in
Harney County well but he did
serve the federal bureaucrats
very well.”
The Facebook post, Bundy
insisted by phone, was not a call
for action against Nichols. “I
don’t know what others would
do,” he said. “I don't think that
that would be the case.”
Calling Nichols an FBI
informant who helped murder
Finicum was not a threat but
“speaking the truth,” Bundy said,
which was not “in any way
condoning or asking or
promoting or anything, any
violence towards him. It’s simply
the truth.”
Bundy said he spoke with
Nichols during the occupation
about Dwight Hammond Jr. and
Steven Hammond, father-and-
son cattle ranchers in
southeastern Oregon whose
convictions on federal land arson
charges helped spark the
Malheur siege. In an act of
comfort for anti-government
militants, President Trump
pardoned the Hammonds last
year.
Bundy claimed Nichols
learned of the occupiers’ plans to
travel to a neighboring county
during those conversations and
shared that information with the
FBI. Finicum was killed during
that trip.
The occupation began on Jan.
2, 2016, and lasted 41 days.
Bundy was arrested outside the
refuge on Jan. 26, the same day
Finicum was killed. Bundy was
acquitted on charges from the
Malheur standoff.
Citing comments from elected
officials, subcommittee
chairwoman Deb Haaland (D-
N.M.) told the hearing that
“extremist ideologies do not
develop in a vacuum.”
Without mentioning Bundy’s
name, she added, “this rhetoric
often turns into violence.”
[email protected]professor. He wrote a book about
the Malheur takeover and was
also a hearing witness last week.
Bundy’s post was “cold and
dangerous... and reckless,”
Walker added in an interview.
“To accuse any individual of
having participated in LaVoy
Finicum’s quote-unquote
‘murder’ pushes the buttons of
anti-government, right-wing
folks, militia folks... in ways
that I think are potentially
dangerous.”
Walker said the post “creates
the possibility that some
of [Bundy’s] followers who have
engaged in violent actions will go
after” Nichols. “It’s a form of
terrorism.”
Reached by phone, Nichols did
not want to talk about theFacebook post. Regarding
Bundy’s accusation about being
an informant who helped set up
Finicum, Nichols would only say,
“I had absolutely nothing to do
with any of that. That was law
enforcement, the FBI. I had
nothing to do with it.”
Ironically, Nichols was a voice
of understanding at last week’s
hearing, making points that
would probably please Bundy’s
crowd.
While he described the
takeover as creating “total
anarchy in our community,”
Nichols also said “rural
Americans, especially in the
largely federally owned and
managed 11 western states, are
not being listened to, much less
heard.... Much of what is often
described as anti-government is
really coming from a place of
feeling excluded or being on the
losing end of unbalanced natural
resource management.”The House
hearing was called
to examine
threats against
federal land
management
employees, but it
was a former
elected official
from rural Oregon
who was put at
risk.
Dan Nichols, a hearing witness
and a former county
commissioner in sparsely
populated Harney County,
appeared last week before
the House Natural Resources
subcommittee on national parks,
forests and public lands.
That prompted what reads like
a veiled Facebook threat from
Ammon Bundy, the 44-year-old
anti-government militant who
led the 2016 armed takeover of
the Malheur National Wildlife
Refuge in Oregon. The
occupation started as a protest
about federal land policy.
Bundy accused Nichols of
being an FBI informant who
“helped murder a good man” —
LaVoy Finicum. Finicum was a
spokesman for the occupiers
when he was killed during a
confrontation with law
enforcement officers after he left
the refuge. The local district
attorney said the shooting was
justifiable “and, in fact,
necessary.”
“Dan was a huge part of the
ambush that killed Levoy,”
Bundy wrote on Facebook. He
called Nichols an FBI informant
but, in an interview with The
Washington Post, denied making
any threats.
Nichols is a rancher and was a
Republican Harney County
commissioner for 20 years.
Malheur is in Harney County.
Nothing in the post directly
says Nichols, who visited with
Bundy and others during the
siege, should be attacked. Still,
labeling him an FBI informant
who helped murder Finicum is a
menacing message.
Finicum “has been escalated
to the status of a martyr and
even, I would describe it, almost
as a saint... within the anti-
government Patriot militia
movement,” said Peter A. Walker,
a University of Oregon geography
and environmental studies
blasting witnesses now testifying
against him as part of the House
impeachment proceedings, even
some administration officials he
appointed. The president
slammed Ambassador William B.
Taylor Jr., a longtime Foreign
Service officer who agreed to lead
the Ukraine embassy at the per-
sonal request of Trump’s secre-
tary of state, as a “Never
Trumper” who had hired Trump
enemies as his lawyers.
Trump applied the same moni-
ker to Lt. Col. Alexander Vind-
man, a decorated Army officer
and National Security Council
official who flagged Trump’s call
with Ukraine’s president as inap-
propriate as soon as it ended.
In another parallel to his be-
havior during the Mueller probe,
Trump has engaged in a relent-
less campaign to undermine the
Ukraine investigation itself as
illegitimate. This is partly a polit-
ical tactic seemingly aimed at
persuading his supporters to re-
ject any damaging information
that emerges from the probe as
tainted and unfair.
Trump has called Democrats
leading the process rank names,
accused them of treason and said
they should face criminal investi-
gations for unspecified behavior.
The president also has revived
the same dismissive title for the
impeachment inquiry that he
wielded effectively for nearly two
years against Mueller: “Witch
Hunt.”
Trump also directed the execu-
tive branch not to comply with
congressional requests for docu-
ments or testimony — a posture
articulated earlier this month in a
scathing memorandum to Con-
gress from White House counsel
Pat Cipollone that effectively de-
clared war on the inquiry.
Keeping people from testifying
based on intimidation or a pre-
textual assertion of executive
privilege is the clearest element
of Trump’s obstruction of the
congressional inquiry, according
to Vance, a University of Alabama
School of Law professor. She said
Trump’s obstructive actions have
been obvious yet have not trig-
gered commensurate outrage be-
cause they follow his now-famil-
iar pattern of behavior.
“We’re like the frogs that are
boiling,” Vance said. “It’s hap-
pened so persistently that some-
thing that’s really just blatant and
obvious is obscured.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]country.”
Trump’s treatment of Con-
gress’s witnesses is reminiscent
of his behavior during the Muel-
ler investigation, and Pelosi on
Friday did not rule out including
behavior related to the Russia
probe in articles of impeachment.
During the Mueller investiga-
tion, Trump worked to keep wit-
nesses on his side through a mix
of personal warmth to those who
appeared to remain loyal and
public and private hectoring and
bullying of those he believed had
not.
Trump was especially aggres-
sive with his former personal
attorney, Michael Cohen, who
last year pleaded guilty to arrang-
ing hush-money payments to
women before the 2016 election
and implicated the president in
the illegal scheme. When Cohen
began cooperating with prosecu-
tors, Trump lashed out, castigat-
ing his former employee as a “rat”
and calling for Cohen’s family
members to be criminally investi-
gated.
Similarly, Trump has beenspecial counsel Robert S. Mueller
III’s Russia investigation.
“Impeachment, unlike indict-
ment, doesn’t require that you
prove all the elements of the
crime,” said Joyce White Vance, a
former U.S. attorney in Alabama
during the Obama administra-
tion. “Congress is charged with
determining high crimes and
misdemeanors, not with viola-
tions of the federal code.”
Barbara McQuade, another
former Obama administration
U.S. attorney from Michigan, said
there is no standard for impeach-
ment.
“Impeachment is anything
Congress says it is for charging
purposes in the House and for
conviction purposes in the Sen-
ate,” said McQuade, a professor at
the University of Michigan Law
School. “There can be some
crimes that are not impeachable,
like littering or jaywalking, and
then there are some that are
impeachable but not criminal,
such as abusing one’s power for
personal purposes as opposed to
acting in the best interests of thein the past nor should it expect
now — unless there is a true
impeachment,” said Rep. Mark
Meadows (R-N.C.), a Trump confi-
dant.
“A fishing expedition like this,
where [they’ve] gone on for three
years, hoping they can subpoena
everybody who’s potentially
talked to the president, is not
what congressional subpoena
power is all about, and it certainly
goes against the division of the
branches,” Meadows said.
White House press secretary
Stephanie Grisham proclaimed
Trump’s innocence in a statement
Thursday and dismissed the in-
quiry as an “illegitimate im-
peachment proceeding” that
“hurts the American people.”
Lawmakers have wide latitude
to decide what constitutes “high
crimes and misdemeanors” in
drawing up articles of impeach-
ment, which would be voted on
by the House and, if passed, be
subject to trial in the Senate. The
standard for constituting ob-
struction, therefore, is different
than in a criminal probe, such asison and Alexander Hamilton, for
dealing with an out-of-control
president is a process he is trying
to subvert, undermine and dele-
gitimate. That, to me, is clearly a
high crime and misdemeanor.”
In recent weeks, House Speak-
er Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Intelli-
gence Committee Chairman
Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and
other top Democrats have be-
come more forceful in their ob-
struction language. They have
regularly warned the White
House that any attempt to with-
hold or conceal evidence related
to the Ukraine episode from con-
gressional investigators could be
grounds for impeachment.
Republican lawmakers, mean-
while, have been accusing Demo-
crats of overreaching, despite
their own history of using con-
gressional subpoenas to interro-
gate Obama administration offi-
cials while they held the majority.
“Generally speaking, a fishing
expedition that would offer sub-
poenas for high-ranking execu-
tive officials is not something
that Congress has ever expectedcertain to be introduced as well,
according to multiple Democrat-
ic lawmakers and aides, just as it
was five decades ago when the
House Judiciary Committee vot-
ed for articles of impeachment
against then-president Richard
Nixon. But Nixon resigned before
the full House vote.
“It’s important to vindicate the
role of Congress as an independ-
ent branch of government with
substantial oversight responsibil-
ity, that if the executive branch
just simply obstructs and pre-
vents witnesses from coming for-
ward, or prevents others from
producing documents, they could
effectively eviscerate congres-
sional oversight,” said Rep. David
N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). “That would
be very dangerous for the coun-
try.”
Democrats argue that the
Trump administration’s stone-
walling — including trying to
stop subpoenaed witnesses from
testifying and blocking the execu-
tive branch from turning over
documents — creates a strong
case that the president has in-
fringed on the separation of pow-
ers and undercut lawmakers’
oversight duties as laid out in the
Constitution.
Laurence H. Tribe, a constitu-
tional law scholar at Harvard
Law School who has informally
advised some Democratic House
leaders, said Trump’s actions are
unprecedented.
“I know of no instance when a
president subject to a serious
impeachment effort, whether An-
drew Johnson or Richard Nixon
or Bill Clinton, has essentially
tried to lower the curtain entirely
— treating the whole impeach-
ment process as illegitimate, de-
riding it as a ‘lynching’ and call-
ing it a ‘kangaroo court,’ ” Tribe
said.
“It’s not simply getting in the
way of an inquiry,” he added. “It’s
basically saying one process that
the Constitution put in place,
thanks to people like James Mad-
OBSTRUCTION FROM A
House case
grows likely
to include
obstruction
RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House before departing Thursday for a campaign rally in Mississippi. Democrats say the
president’s stonewalling on the impeachment probe has infringed on separation of powers and undermined Congress’s oversight duties.House witness was complicit in man’s
death, anti-government militant says
Federal
Insider
JOE
DAVIDSON
LaVoy Finicum “has
been escalated to the
status of a martyr
... within the
anti-government Patriot
militia movement.”
Peter A. Walker, Oregon professor,
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