Part time Trump advisor Roger Stone spoke at a rally Saturday evening in Las Vegas, Nevada, where hundreds of supporters for rancher Cliven Bundy and his sons gathered to hear speeches from Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore and members of the Bundy family, and demand federal government intervention with Bundy’s case.
Clive and Company in April 2014 were involved in an armed standoff between what they claim are individual rights activists against Bureau of Land Management agents, who came to Bunkerville to seize Bundy’s cattle from public land over unpaid grazing fees.
The speeches capped of a day of earlier protests when several dozen people rallied peacefully in front of the federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas in solidarity of the Bundy family as a new trial begins for some of the defendants. www.reviewjournal.com/…
Michele Fiore, recently winning election for Las Vegas City Councilwoman in Ward 6, may best be remembered for a photo of her and her family posing with guns for a Christmas card. Fiore was stripped of her leadership positions in the Nevada state assembly because of tax issues in 2016. She has been a vocal supporter of Cliven Bundy since the 2014 standoff, and she intervened to help end the Bundy’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon, when she won a lot of broadly positive attention for her role in negotiating the occupiers’ surrender. As a recent Politico article about Fiore pointed out, “She’s repeatedly appeared on far-right radio shows and webcasts to give accounts of what happened. The passion of the movement that supported the Bundys is now being channeled into “liberating” those arrested in the course of the occupation.” Fiore describes one occupiers death at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, that of LeVoy Finicum, an “assasination”, and there was humiliation of Malheur’s “political prisoners” www.politico.com/...
Roger Stone closed the evening of speeches, by pledging solidarity with the Bundy family and their supporters. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Stone stated that “I am here for one important reason. I stand in solidarity with every member of the Bundy family,” Stone said. The crowd responded by chanting, “Roger! Roger! Roger!” Stone ”called out U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not offering direct support to the 17 defendants. Then, he appealed for Trump to “review this case in the name of justice, in the name of mercy … pardon every member of the Bundy family.” Stone added that “he plans to post a petition on the InfoWars website, urging the president to review the Bundy case.” www.reviewjournal.com/…
I’m going to paraphrase the Politico interview with Fiore and add a little of my own take on this story. They two of them, Stone and Fiore, are playing a dangerous game. The American militia movement over the last few decades has periods of relative silence, in which the groups stew over past grudges, and then there’s a flashpoint. If that anger boils over down the road, Stone and Fiore will have had a hand in it.