Senate Republicans attacked Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning on Thursday for her involvement in a decades-old tree-spiking case and questioned her ability to lead the agency.
Questions about the tree-spiking case from the 1980s dominated Stone-Manning’s 2021 Senate confirmation. On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and other senators resurfaced them during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee oversight hearing, as Hawley accused Stone-Manning of lying to the committee about her involvement in the case.
The incident occurred when Stone-Manning was a graduate student at the University of Montana, during which time she was associated with two men she later helped convict of spiking hundreds of trees in an Idaho national forest in 1989. Stone-Manning did not spike any trees, but she sent a threatening letter written by one of the suspects to the Forest Service warning that the trees had been sabotaged.
She did not tell authorities she sent the letter until years later and was granted legal immunity in exchange for testifying against the two men who were convicted and sentenced to prison.
