He Beat the FBI So Badly They Stopped Chasing Him transcript

April 12th, 2014. A dry wash under Interstate 15, [music] Southern Nevada. Federal agents crouch behind trucks, rifles up. On the overpass above them, civilians lie flat on hot concrete, rifles aimed down at the agents' backs. 400 head of cattle stand penned between the two lines. One trigger pull and this valley becomes a massacre. The government holds two federal court orders and it folds, opens the gate, hands back the cattle, drives away.

But here's what makes this unthinkable. A federal judge will end this story by barring the United States [music] from ever prosecuting Cliven Bundy for this day. Not an acquittal. Permanently [music] unprosecutable. And to weld that door shut, she will have to accuse the United States government from the bench of something federal judges almost never say out loud. Why did the side with the law and the guns walk away?

And what did the government know about this man that it buried for six years? 1993. Bunkerville, Nevada. The town of a few hundred people, 90 minutes northeast of Las Vegas, where the Virgin River cuts through red rock and nothing green happens by accident. Cliven Bundy stops paying his grazing bill. Who looks at the United States government and decides to just stop? A Mormon rancher with 14 children and a drawl so slow that everything he says sounds carved rather than spoken.

He keeps a paperback Constitution in his shirt pocket the way other men carry cigarettes and he'll pull it out mid-sentence to settle arguments with it. Years from now, he'll tell an interviewer flat as a fence post, [music] "I abide by all of Nevada state laws, but I don't recognize the United States government as even existing." He means every syllable. That sentence is the operating system. March 1994. He writes a check, $1,961.47, and mails it not to the Bureau of Land Management, but to Clark County, Nevada.

His argument, the land belongs [music] to the state, so the state should collect. No American court has ever accepted that theory. The county sends [music] the money back. Why mail a check you know will bounce? Because the check is aimed. His family had run cattle in the Gold Butte country [music] since the 1950s, paying Washington the entire time until the desert tortoise landed on the threatened species [music] list, and the rules tightened with every renewal.

Fewer cows, shorter seasons. Bundy did the arithmetic and decided the agency he was paying was [music] quietly regulating him out of existence. So now he'll pay Clark County any day of the week. Washington gets [music] nothing. On principle forever. That aim is about to cost the United States more than any check ever could. The courts hit back twice. A permanent injunction in 1998. Remove the cattle, pay $200 per day per head.

A second order in July 2013, blunter. >> [music] >> The United States may go and impound the animals. By then, the tab has passed a million dollars, and yes, he owed it, every cent, by the ruling of every court that looked at his theory and threw it out, usually in a paragraph. On the law, the word freeloader isn't unfair. None of that is why this story is famous. Here's the part almost nobody asks about. Two federal court orders, 20 years, penalties compounding daily, and in all that time, the United States government does not seize [music] a single cow, not one.

What stops the most powerful law enforcement apparatus on Earth from collecting on an order it already won, twice? And why is the answer sitting in a drawer in Washington? March 2011. Someone at the FBI sits down and writes [music] an assessment of Cliven Bundy. It does not say what you would expect. The documents surface years later at trial. The file rates him low to moderate risk. It notes that his preferred weapons are litigation and media appearances.

Then it goes somewhere agencies almost never go on paper. It recommends the government consider resolving the debt, [music] even waving the fines, specifically to reduce the risk of a violent confrontation. Read that again. The FBI proposing to forgive a million dollars because collecting [music] it might get somebody killed. A second federal assessment the following year is [music] flatter still. Likelihood of violence from Cliven Bundy, minimal.

The file also understands him better than the newspapers ever did. It records the thing that actually drives [music] him. The conviction, hardened by Ruby Ridge and Waco, that one day federal agents will roll up his driveway to wipe his [music] family off the land. He isn't dangerous, the file concludes. He's a man waiting for a siege. And then there's the receipt that proves somebody in the building actually read it.

April 2012. The BLM has a roundup planned. Helicopters have already flown the allotment and counted the herd. Roughly 750 animals [music] scattered across the Gold Butte country. Contractors are staged. The day before it starts, the operation is canceled. Stated reason, [music] safety concerns. Two court orders, one helicopter count, a full plan, killed 24 hours out because the government had concluded its own roundup was the dangerous [music] variable.

That's the answer to 20 years of silence. A standing [music] decision not to poke a hornet's nest the FBI had already measured. Those documents [music] will not reach a defense attorney for six more years. Every claim the government makes from this point forward, in press releases, [music] in indictments, in a federal courtroom under oath, you get to check against a file the jury will never see. Because in April 2014, the United [music] States is about to do the exact opposite of every word in it.

What does the opposite of that file look like on the ground? And what happens when you aim it at a man who has spent 20 years waiting for a siege? The plan has a name, Operation Gold Butte. It is the maximal version of everything the file warned against. The government's own operational document, handed over years too late, describes elevated observation posts positioned around the Bundy residence. Agents in place each evening, night vision, agency rifles carried at all times around the house every evening.

There's also a camera concealed on high ground live feeding aimed straight at the family's home. Then comes the closure, roughly 600,000 acres of public land shut to the public with two fenced enclosures set aside miles from anything and labeled in official signage first amendment areas. Free speech pens in the desert, that's not a joke. It's in the plan. April 5th, 2014, contract cowboys move in with a helicopter. The aircraft pushes cattle out of the washes, riders funnel them into portable pens.

It works. By the 9th, roughly 400 head are collected. April 6th, Dave Bundy, one of Cliven's sons, is filming the roundup from the shoulder [music] of a state highway. Agents take him down on the gravel, cuff him, and haul him off. His only weapon is the camera in his hands. That night, the family starts posting. There are men with rifles on the ridge above our house, they say. >> [music] >> There are snipers watching us.

The coverage writes it up as paranoia, a fringe family with a sovereign citizen legal theory claiming FBI snipers in the hills. Except you've read the operational plan. They're describing their own government's paperwork back to it, almost word for word, and being called crazy for it. April 9th, a different son, Ammon Bundy, stands in the road in front of a truck convoy hauling cattle. An officer tases him. He gets up.

They tase him again. A Bundy sister is knocked to the ground. Phones are recording all of it from four angles, and within hours the footage is everywhere. A man in a cowboy hat, a taser, a K9 unit, a family screaming on a Nevada roadside. One BLM official later described what that video did in the language of weather. A category five hurricane. Because now they come, hundreds of them. Men from Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, driving through the night toward a town most of them had never heard of a week earlier.

Some in plate carriers, some with rifles cased in the backseat. They camp in the sagebrush along the interstate. They set up a stage and a flagpole in the desert. Every single one of them was recruited by the operation itself. And the FBI, the agency that wrote the 2011 file, is watching its own prediction come true on live television. What does the Bureau tell the BLM on April 11th? And what happens at 60 yards when nobody backs up?

April 11th, 2014. The FBI advises the BLM to cease the operation. The Bureau that rated this man low risk three years ago is now telling the enforcing agency to stop. Because the danger it predicted is currently parked along Interstate 15 in lawn chairs with rifles. April 12th, morning. A rally in a field outside Bunkerville. Flatbed stage, flags, a crowd in the hundreds. The Clark County Sheriff climbs onto the platform and announces the roundup is over.

The cattle will be released. The federal closure is lifted. It should be the end. Bundy takes the microphone. He gives the government 1 hour to disarm, to surrender the weapons of the federal agents at the impound site. And the field goes quiet while people work out whether he means it. He means it. The hour starts running. It runs out with nothing surrendered because of course nothing is surrendered. [music] The United States does not hand its rifles to a rancher on a deadline.

And Bundy says the sentence that puts everything in motion, "Let's go get those cattle." Hundreds of people move toward the dry wash under the interstate. On foot, on horseback, American flags out front. Las Vegas Metro officers put themselves into the gap between the crowd and the federal line, which tells you exactly what the professionals think is about to happen. Federal agents fall back to the corrals and take positions behind vehicles.

The crowd comes down the embankment and stops at roughly 60 yd. 60 yd. Less than [music] a football field in desert heat with rifles on both sides of it. Past noon now. Traffic sits dead on the overpass. Heat shimmering off the concrete. A federal loudspeaker cycles the same warning, "Disperse or force may be used." Nobody disperses. Dust hangs over the riverbed. Horses stamp [music] in the gravel. Above it all, on the I-15 overpass, a man from Idaho named Eric Parker lies down flat, wedges his rifle into a gap in the concrete barrier, and sights down at the federal agents below.

Someone photographs him doing it. That photograph will run on front pages on four continents, [music] become the single image the Justice Department builds a prosecution around 3 years later. What is an agent behind those trucks doing while that rifle settles on him? One of them will testify to it later. Praying for his wife, for his children, in full kit behind a government truck. 1 hour at 60 yd becomes 2. The agents on scene keep running the arithmetic, and it comes back the same way every time.

Hold the line and people die. Advance and people die. Arrest Bundy in front of that crowd and people die. There is no version of the next hour that ends with paperwork. So, the order comes down a phone line as plain as an order gets. Get everybody out of there. Let them have the cattle. The gate opens. Roughly 400 head walk out into the desert [music] past the people who came to free them. Federal vehicles reverse out of the wash and drive north while men on the overpass lower their rifles and start cheering.

The BLM's director puts out a written statement citing the safety of employees and the public. And here is the number that gets lost every time this story is retold. Zero shots fired by anyone. Two lines of armed Americans at 60 yards for hours on live television and not one round leaves a barrel. That is what the file predicted. That is what the file was for. On April 12th, 2014, the United States government publicly obeyed a memo it had spent 3 years pretending it never wrote.

But a superpower that folds on camera has to win somewhere. So, how does a humiliated Justice Department hit back without firing a shot? And what could its opponent possibly say into a live camera that hands them the opening? He volunteers it himself. Into a live camera. Nobody has to ask. Late April. The armed men are still camped in the sagebrush and the ranch has turned into a daily talk show. Microphones planted in the dirt, cameras on tripods, Bundy holding court for the national press.

On April 19th, he wanders off the subject of cattle. I want to tell you one more thing I know about and he finishes the sentence about black Americans, speculating aloud about whether they were better off under slavery using a word for them that nobody repeats. The New York Times prints it 4 days later. The collapse takes one new cycle. Sean Hannity spent two weeks building him into a primetime folk hero. Now he goes on air and torches him.

Beyond repugnant, beyond despicable, beyond ignorant. Offered every chance that week to walk it back, Bundy repeats himself instead. Within days the defenders are gone and the political price of destroying him has dropped to zero. The remarks prove nothing about what happened in that wash. What they hand the Justice Department is permission. So, why no raid? The file still holds the leash. 22 months pass without a knock on the door.

And the counterattack, when it comes, doesn't look like law enforcement at all. According to The Intercept, the FBI builds a fake documentary company, Longbow Productions out of Nashville, working title America Reloaded, and sends an undercover agent with a silver goatee to interview the standoff's veterans on camera. Eight months, something like a hundred hours of tape. One participant plied with bourbon until the stories flow.

Another put up in a suite at the Bellagio to describe, on the record, exactly what he did in that wash. A documentary crew that films everything and releases nothing. If you're finding this as strange as I do, subscribe. This story has a lot more buried paper coming. February 10th, 2016, Portland International Airport. Cliven Bundy steps off a flight. He traveled north as the occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge was ending and federal agents take him into custody in the terminal.

Yes, they arrest him. Look at what it took. Two years of waiting, a fake film crew, and an airport terminal one state away. Anywhere on Earth except that driveway in Bunkerville. And hold on to this because it's the spine of everything left. The government is about to learn why the file said don't. This arrest will cost the United States more than the 400 cows ever did. He is denied bail. In its detention filing, the government tells the court he is lawless and violent, while its own locked away assessments describe a man whose weapons are lawsuits [music] and press conferences, whose likelihood of violence is minimal.

Both statements come from the same government. Only one of them is in front of the judge. March 2nd, a superseding indictment, 16 counts, >> [music] >> 19 defendants, conspiracy, assault on a federal officer, >> [music] >> extortion, obstruction. The theory is a massive armed assault on the United [music] States. And that theory has one structural requirement nobody says out loud. The file has to stay buried. How long can the government keep every drawer in the building shut?

And what happens to a prosecution the day one slides open? October 30th, 2017, Federal Courthouse, Las Vegas. Cliven Bundy has been in a cell for 20 months, and his family is keeping the count in days. Remember that count. The prosecution stands up and tells the jury what this case is about. A lie. The Bundys, the government says, transformed a cattle dispute into something else. They told their followers that federal snipers were aimed at their family, and that summoned hundreds of armed men to Bunkerville.

And then the four words the entire prosecution rests on, and that was false. Stay in that courtroom for a [music] second. Every person in that room believes the sentence except you. You read the operational plan in chapter 3. Elevated observation posts around the residence, rifles each evening, a concealed camera on the hill. The United States has just staked 16 felony counts on a claim its own paperwork contradicts, and every one of those documents still exists in a government building in [music] a box with a case number on it.

How long does that stay buried with defense attorneys filing discovery motions every week? Meanwhile, the cost is being paid in Pahrump, Nevada, a detention center in the desert, an hour and a half from home. No bail, no release. [music] He's 69 when the handcuffs close in Portland, a man who has read the weather off a ridgeline every morning since boyhood. And now his entire sky is one fluorescent tube that never rises and never sets.

He turned 70 in that cell. The count his family keeps passes 300 days, then 400, then 500. And the man who once gave the United States a 1-hour deadline learns what government time feels like. Two winters of it, 90 minutes from a front porch he cannot see. Outside the courthouse, Carol Bundy tells reporters that when her husband leaves prison, he will leave a free man. Set that against what the government is holding. 100 hours of covert tape, 19 defendants, and a photograph of a rifle sighted on federal agents.

She has no evidence. She has a certainty. And the government has drawers it is fighting every week to keep shut. Which one gives first? And what does it do to the four words the whole case rests on? November 3rd, 2017. Four days into testimony, and the cascade starts with the thing [music] the defense was mocked for. The Bundys had claimed for 3 years that the government put a camera on the hill and watched their house.

The prosecution had dismissed that as a fantastical fishing expedition. Then the government discloses [music] the records. The camera was real. Live feeding. Aimed at the ranch, exactly where they said. That's disclosure one. The cascade takes 7 weeks. Next comes an FBI report, a 302, the bureau's own interview form, describing an agent named Del Molino. He was on the ground at Bunkerville, dressed in BLM tactical clothing carrying a BLM AR-15 >> [music] >> in an overwatch position east of the ranch, an FBI agent in another agency's uniform in overwatch sitting in a report [music] the defense had asked for and been told did not matter.

Then comes the log, a tactical operations center entry from the FBI's own SWAT team. What's in it? Two words. Snipers inserted. Two words in the government's handwriting in the government's file >> [music] >> describing the exact thing the government told 12 jurors was false while its lawyer stood 10 feet from them and said it and that was false. There's more. Another 302 has one of the government's own people describing a colleague's position on the ridge with the ordinary word for what the man was, sniper.

Then the assessments surface. Four of them. Threat evaluations of Cliven Bundy the prosecution never handed over including [music] the one from 2011. The memo. The one you read at minute five. It reaches the defense six years late. In the middle of the trial it would have blown apart before opening [music] statements. Late November. With the case springing leaks in open court, Judge Gloria Navarro orders Cliven Bundy released to house arrest pending the verdict.

Look at what's on the table, a bed, a door he can open, daylight. After two winters under a fluorescent tube he refuses. >> [music] >> His sons and his co-defendants can't come with him and he will not walk out alone. A 71-year-old man turns down his own release and goes back to the cell. November 27th. Larry Wooten, the BLM's own lead investigator on the case, >> [music] >> sends an 18-page memo to the Justice Department.

Wooten writes that the operations culture was poisoned. Open mockery of the family, a supervisor who talked about wanting to kick Cliven Bundy [music] in the mouth. He writes that the commander kept a trophy record of the mission, >> [music] >> a thing Wooten calls a kill book. The agency denies that one. Nobody denies what happened to Wooten. He complained. And he was pulled off the case. And the commander himself, Dan Love, the special agent who ran Gold Butte, had already [music] been fired by his own agency over an ethics finding involving Burning Man tickets.

December 20th, 2017. Navarro has seen enough. She declares a mistrial. >> [music] >> Her ruling reaches past sloppiness for the most radioactive word available to her. Willful. The failure to disclose was deliberate, and the prosecution's attempts to explain it away were, in her word, disingenuous. [music] The case is dead on the table. But a mistrial is not an acquittal. The government can march back into the same courtroom with a fresh jury.

And this time it knows exactly which documents are coming. On January 8th, Navarro rules on whether it gets to. What is a sitting federal judge willing to call the United States of America from her own bench? And is there any door the Justice Department can't eventually pry back open? January 8th, 2018. Las Vegas. Navarro dismisses the case with prejudice. Two words most people slide past, so here is what they mean. The United States of America may never bring these charges against these men again.

A different attorney general changes nothing. A different president changes nothing. The government [music] did not lose a trial. It lost the right to hold one. And from the bench, she cashes the promise this whole video opened with. The word she chooses is outrageous. Indeed, outrageous. The finding, flagrant prosecutorial misconduct, a due process violation so severe that no lesser remedy can cure it. Strip off the legal wrapping [music] and listen.

It hid the evidence. It hid the evidence on purpose, willful her word, and then dressed the concealment in explanations she called disingenuous. And it cannot be given a second chance [music] at these men because a retrial would be a reward, a second run at the same case upgraded with everything the government learned from the collapse of the first one. Notice who that finding describes. [music] Not a militia. Not a rancher with a pocket Constitution.

The Department of Justice. The old man walks out of the courthouse free. No ankle monitor, no bail conditions. 698 days after the handcuffs in Portland by the count his family kept. His sons and co-defendants walk out with him. Which is the only condition he ever asked for. Carol Bundy called it from the courthouse steps 10 weeks earlier. The mechanism turned out to be her own government's paperwork. One threat survives the ruling.

With prejudice has a single crack in it. A federal appeals court can decide Navarro overreached and hand the government its retrial after all. The Justice Department goes straight for that crack and Bunkerville stays legally alive for 2 and 1/2 more years until August 6th, 2020, when the 9th Circuit affirms. The opinion comes from Judge Jay Bybee, a George W. Bush appointee with zero sympathy for Cliven Bundy and open contempt for what the prosecution [music] did with the evidence, conduct the court calls preposterous and reckless.

The door is welded shut and a conservative panel held the torch. In 2011, the FBI wrote down that it was afraid to touch this man. [music] The one time the government worked up the nerve, an airport terminal one state away, the arrest detonated in its hands and took the whole case with it. Now the fear has a court order behind it. The FBI isn't just scared to arrest Cliven Bundy anymore. It's forbidden. And the desert?

The Bundy cattle are still on Gold Butte, more than 700 head by the family's own count, reported to the Associated Press. Grazing land that became a national monument in 2016. [music] Nobody flies out to recount them because counting is step one of a process nobody wants to restart. The BLM's complete public position is one sentence. The BLM does not have any comment on the subject. The million-dollar bill fossilizes in a ledger next to two court [music] orders nobody will ever enforce.

And the man who was 69 in the Portland handcuffs is closing in on 80 on a porch [music] the federal government will not drive up to. The state's remaining strategy is to outlive an old man. One last thing, >> [music] >> an environmental lawsuit working through the courts could finally force those cattle off the monument. By blind draw, it landed in front of a judge in the district [music] of Nevada. Gloria Navarro. The same judge.

Which leaves the question I can't shake. That file sat in a drawer for 6 years. Quietly deciding that one American's laws would not be enforced. >> [music] >> And nobody outside the building knew it existed until a judge dragged it into the light. How many more files like it exist right now and how many buildings quietly deciding which laws get enforced >> [music] >> and against whom? If this one got you, watch the only gangster the FBI gave up trying to catch [music] next because that time there was no hidden file.

The government just stopped looking for the man.