One local resident who addressed Bundy during the meeting, Ed Brown, said that he agrees 100 percent that the United States has “way too much government”.
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The Joint Information Center in Harney, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said it had no response to Brown’s statement and would not comment on its response to the occupation.
Ammon Bundy went to the airport Thursday in Burns, Oregon, close to where federal officials have set up a staging area. They agreed to speak again Friday, but Bundy left shortly after he arrived because the FBI agent he spoke with said federal authorities wanted any conversation to be private.
The FBI agent, who identified himself on the phone only as “Chris”, listened to Bundy’s well-practiced litany of complaints against the federal government and probed for what it would take to end his occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Friday that people “should be prosecuted” in the three-week stand-off at OR wildlife refuge, but said the federal government should not resort to violence against the group of armed men occupying the area.
Though FBI negotiations are typically held out of public view, Bundy on Thursday went to the FBI command post at the Burns airport.
“I’m a face-to-face kind of guy”, Bundy told the negotiator over the phone, according to the Oregonian.
The Democrat said he hope authorities could peacefully resolve the situation and hold Bundy’s group accountable.
The conversation was streamed online by another of Bundy’s group.
The armed militia has occupied the refuge since Jan 2.to protest a prison sentence for a pair of local ranchers convicted of setting fire to public land.
Bundy even tries to tell the FBI that they should release the Hammonds, a father-son duo that were sent to prison on arson convictions for burning federal land, by way of “magic”.
“We will leave there if those buildings are turned over to the proper authorities… and never used again by the federal government to control land and resources unconstitutionally in this county”, Bundy said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed Thursday that not only is the road built last week by the occupiers new, but it is also within an archaeological site important to the Burns Paiute Tribe.
But that meeting was very short, and he drove directly to the sheriff’s office.
In both cases, “there was an unwillingness to understand who the people were inside the building and what their concerns were”, says Catherine McNicol Stock, a historian and director of the American Studies program at Connecticut College in New London, Conn. “The idea is, if [law enforcement agents] had approached [these groups] taking their religious beliefs seriously, they might have been able to do something that wouldn’t have been the tragedy that happened”.
This signing ceremony “will double the amount of ranchers” standing up for their rights, he said.
“This spectacle of lawlessness must end”, Brown said.
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“For more than two weeks now, these radicals have been allowed to stay unlawfully in the refuge approximately 30 miles to the south of Burns…The unlawful seizure of the refuge by criminals seeling to advance a misguided agenda is in an of itself a strain…”
