[Townhall] WASHINGTON -- As Washington conservatives question whether partisan FBI officials working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller have stacked the deck against President Donald Trump, a criminal case in Las Vegas points to the sort of federal prosecutorial abuses that give the right cause for paranoia.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the infamous 2014 Bunkerville standoff case against rancher Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and co-defendant Ryan Payne, on the grounds that federal prosecutors improperly withheld evidence.
The standoff, in which both sides were armed, was a national news story that pitted a Western rancher against federal officialdom. Bureau of Land Management officials had tried to seize Bundy's cattle following a decades-long dispute over grazing fees. The rancher had stopped paying federal grazing fees in 1993 to protest a BLM directive that he cut back on cattle grazing in order to accommodate the threatened desert tortoise. |