WHO RUNS GOV
http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Ken_Salazar
NOTHING LIKE
AUTOMATION
Dear Ms. Berardo:
Thank you for contacting me about the “Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act of 2009″ (S. 727). I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.
In 2007, the only three horse-slaughter plants in the country were closed, ending the domestic slaughter of horses for human consumption. Unfortunately, these closures led to an increase in exports to Mexico and Canada of horses meant for slaughter. These countries have slaughter policies that are much less humane than our own. Accordingly, the “Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act of 2009″ would effectively ban the shipment, transport, or purchase of horses or horse flesh for the purpose of human consumption. I am pleased to inform you that I am an original cosponsor of this legislation.
The “Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act of 2009″ has been referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. While I am not a member of this Committee, please be assured that I will continue to support this legislation as it moves through the legislative process.
Thank you again for contacting me.
Sincerely,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the euthanasia of wild horses. I appreciate your taking the time to write.
I understand your concerns and opposition to the euthanasia of wild horses on public lands. It is my understanding that private individuals have come forward to help the BLM with the adoption process and my staff has contacted the BLM to raise these concerns. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently proposed a plan to relocate many of the horses and burros to the Eastern part of the United States, and I assure you that I am monitoring the situation as it progresses. I strongly support the adoption of wild horses as a method of regulating their populations on public lands, and your comments are helpful as we evaluate this issue in the Senate. I would also like to encourage you to make your comments known directly to the BLM. To leave a comment with the BLM and to learn more about the National Wild Horse and Burro Program, please visit, http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/wild_horse_and_burro.html.
Again, thank you for writing. I hope you will continue to keep me informed of issues of importance to you and your community.
Sincerely,
JEFF BINGAMAN
United States Senator
Phone: (202) 224-5521
Toll-free in NM: 1-800-443-8658
Website: http://bingaman.senate.gov
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Thank you for contacting my office via email. You are receiving this autoresponse because our computer system was unable to find a Michigan address in your letter. Please rest assured that my staff keeps me appraised of all incoming emails, but because of the enormous volume of mail received daily, I am only able to send responses to my constituents at this time. If you continue to see this message even after including a Michigan address, please visit my website (stabenow.senate.gov) and send me an e-mail through the available online form. Once you have done that once, your email address will be recognized and you will not receive this message again in the future. If you would like a response, please take a moment to contact me via my website at http://stabenow.senate.gov/email.htm. There you will find useful information, including some of my positions on current issues. This is usually the fastest way to contact me. Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me. If ever I can be of assistance to you or your family, please let me know. Sincerely, Debbie Stabenow United States Senator
“I believe that my investigation was obstructed all along by persons within the BLM because
they did not want to be embarrassed,” the prosecutor, Alia Ludlum, wrote in a memo last
summer. “I think there is a terrible problem with the program and with government agents
placing themselves above the law.”
Mrs. Ludlum’s memo is among thousands of pages of grand jury documents in the case
obtained by The Associated Press. Those documents also show that the grand jury foreman was
incensed that federal officials were blocking the investigation and that his requests to indict them
were ignored.
Mrs. Ludlum, 35, formerly an assistant U.S. attorney, is now a federal magistrate judge at the
courthouse in Del Rio, which serves West Texas. She refused to be interviewed for this story, but
she acknowledged the authenticity of documents obtained by the AP.
Spokesmen for the Departments of Justice and the Interior denied that their agencies had done
anything wrong, but they refused to answer questions. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who
oversees the BLM and by law is responsible for protecting wild horses, refused to be
interviewed.
Wild horses and burros, which compete with domestic cattle for forage, have been protected
by federal law for 25 years. The BLM decides how many animals can survive on public lands,
rounds up the excess animals and lets people adopt them for about $125 apiece. After a year, an
adopter can receive a title to an animal, if the BLM finds the animal is receiving proper care.
The law says it is a crime to kill a wild horse or burro taken from public land. It prohibits
anyone who adopts one of the animals from selling it for slaughter.
Mrs. Ludlum wanted to indict BLM officials for allowing horses to be slaughtered.
Recent AP investigations have found that thousands of the horses are eventually sold for
slaughter, and that the whereabouts of tens of thousands of adopted but never titled animals are
unknown. The BLM has attacked the AP’s reports, saying its investigations show that slaughter
“is occurring to a far, far lesser degree than was alleged.”
Although Mr. Babbitt refused to speak, the last person to serve as his chief at BLM said Mr.
Babbitt has known all about problems in the wild horse program for a long time.
Jim Baca, who quit as BLM director in 1994 after a falling out with Mr. Babbitt, said in an
interview that he discovered the program was in turmoil and wanted to take steps to correct it.
He said Mr. Babbitt told him to back off.
“The orders were: ‘Don’t make waves, we’ve got enough problems,”‘ Mr. Baca said, adding
that his efforts to shake up the program went nowhere.
“Babbitt thought it might cause problems and he didn’t want any controversy, he didn’t want to
make anybody unhappy, and so this program just festered,” Mr. Baca said. “When they wanted
me to leave BLM, that was one of the reasons they gave me: ‘Why the hell are you raising
problems about horses?”‘
At the time, Mr. Babbitt attributed Mr. Baca’s departure to “different approaches to
management style and consensus-building.” Meanwhile, the federal investigation in Texas had
begun.
Records show that the grand jury saw evidence and heard testimony that:
BLM agents placed 550 horses with dozens of people who were told they could do as they
wished with the animals after a year, including sell them for slaughter to make money, which is
against the law.
The BLM ignored its own regulations and gave the Choctaw Indian Nation 29 newly born,
unbranded colts to sell so the tribe could raise cash to pay the BLM for a mass adoption of 115
wild horses, which is against the law.
A Texas BLM compliance officer, Don Galloway, arranged to keep 36 horses for himself and
told two undercover investigators he planned to sell them for slaughter, which is against the law.
BLM managers pressured employees not to talk to investigators. In one case, a BLM district
manager tipped off the subject of a search warrant that law enforcement agents were about to
visit his house, which is against the law.
BLM officials falsified adoption documents and falsified computer records of brand
identification numbers used to track adopted animals, which is against the law.
“We want these charges filed and we want to be notified of what was done, regardless of who
these people are, please, ma’am,” the grand jury foreman told Mrs. Ludlum, according to
transcripts.
When the BLM in Washington realized the case was pointing in its direction, agency Law
Enforcement Chief Walter Johnson wrote a letter to the Interior Department’s internal watchdog,
the inspector general, to register his concern.
“As the investigation continued, the scope and complexity … increased to include scores of
individuals including allegations against private citizens, and middle and upper management of
the BLM,” he wrote.
Mr. Johnson also sought assistance from the FBI’s public corruption unit. FBI officials refused
to comment.
The Del Rio case was shut down in July 1996.
The whole affair had begun with an affable old cowboy as its central character: Mr. Galloway.
Federal law restricts horse adoptions to four per person, per year. With his managers’ support,
Mr. Galloway was approving adoptions of more than 100 horses at a time by having one person
gather signatures from family, friends and neighbors.
Using this technique, Mr. Galloway had placed more than 5,000 horses with adopters over
about seven years. His work was commended by his superiors.
“I was doing my job, I was moving horses. I followed the law,” Mr. Galloway said in a
telephone interview from his home in Colleyville, Texas.
People within the program carefully skirted the issue of what would eventually happen to the
horses, Mr. Galloway said. “Intent. That’s the big word. I didn’t know anybody’s intent.”
Mr. Galloway figures nearly all the horses he found homes for have been slaughtered by now.
“We’d wear out a new car looking for those horses and not find but 10,” he said.
Bill Sharp, who worked for the BLM with Mr. Galloway before retiring in 1994, denies any
wrongdoing but acknowledged in an interview: “If I really was worried about intent then I
probably wouldn’t have adopted out any horses, because I believe 90 percent of these horses go
to slaughter.”
Mr. Sharp said they were working under the direction of Steve Henke, now a BLM district
manager in Taos, N.M. Mr. Henke refused to comment.
In 1992, Mr. Galloway arranged an unusual adoption — for himself. He placed 36 horses on a
Texas ranch. The ranch owner’s daughter said her father told her Mr. Galloway planned to “keep
them on our ranch and then sell them for 60 cents a pound for slaughter.”
Mr. Galloway denied he planned to kill the horses. However, an investigator said in a sworn
affidavit that Mr. Galloway told undercover agents he intended to “get rid of all of them in a
year, probably to the killer (slaughterhouse buyer).”
This evidence, which surfaced in 1992, later launched Mrs. Ludlum’s case, which quickly
broadened when investigators learned Mr. Galloway’s supervisor, Mr. Henke, had alerted him
that agents were en route to his house.
“You didn’t clean out your files?” an investigator later asked Mr. Galloway.
“Well, a little bit,” he replied, according to a grand jury transcript.
Mr. Henke and Mr. Sharp pleaded with Mr. Galloway to keep quiet or “a lot of people would
lose their jobs,” according to an agent’s summary of the case.
Evidence emerged that Mr. Henke had three stallions killed at a BLM sanctuary in 1992 and
faked information on a horse adoption form to make it appear the horses were adopted by
Choctaw Indians. He then ordered staffers to enter false information into the department’s
computer database of horse records.
Mr. Henke later said the horses had to be killed because they were breeding, had undescended
testicles and could not be castrated easily. “Since my involvement with the program, I may be
guilty of poor judgment, but I have never knowingly done or approved any
illegal activity for personal gain,” he said in a memo.
As investigators probed more deeply, they found hundreds of discrepancies
between BLM computer records and the brand numbers of horses the BLM
had on hand. At one point, a top BLM manager tried to obtain investigators’
records to update the BLM’s computer so it would match the records held by
investigators.
Mrs. Ludlum began assembling evidence for a grand jury in 1994. Within
months, attorneys from the Justice Department became directly involved.
They met in Washington to discuss the case. They flew to West Texas to
interview people, study testimony and talk to Mrs. Ludlum.
“The rumor is spreading throughout the BLM that DOJ was called in to shut
the case down,” Mrs. Ludlum wrote in a memo after one meeting.
Mrs. Ludlum became especially concerned that one attorney in the Justice Department’s
Environment and Natural Resources Division in Washington, S. Jonathan Blackmer, wanted her
to limit the scope of her case. She worried in a memo that Mr. Blackmer’s section chief, James C.
Kilbourne, wanted to “solve problems” with Anne H. Shields, then deputy solicitor at the
Department of the Interior.
Ms. Shields had previously worked with Mr. Blackmer and Mr. Kilbourne in the natural
resources division at Justice. She had left Justice to join Mr. Babbitt’s new administration at
Interior. Mr. Babbitt promoted her to be his chief of staff in 1995.
“Something smells fishy,” Mrs. Ludlum wrote to her boss. “I am sure that ‘stuff’ is happening
in Washington concerning my case that I surely don’t know and can never hope to know.”
“I just don’t understand how 36 horses could cause such overwhelming governmental distress
unless there are lots of problems and we are not supposed to find out what the problems are or to
solve the problems. I don’t like what is happening.”
Mr. Blackmer, Mr. Kilbourne and Ms. Shields refused to comment.
In 1995, Mrs. Ludlum’s grand jury issued subpoenas intended to inventory more than 1,200
horses at a BLM sanctuary in Bartlesville, Okla. They were on the trail of discrepancies between
horse brands recorded in the BLM’s computer and the horses actually on the range.
Then an Interior Department lawyer in New Mexico, Grant Vaughn, wrote a letter telling the
prosecutor that his agency could not comply with the subpoenas.
Then a lawyer from the Interior Department in Washington, who worked for Ms. Shields,
became directly involved.
Solicitor Tim Elliott said that while his involvement in such cases is rare, his supervisors
wanted him to help establish who was in charge of the Del Rio probe and to clarify the adoption
law.
“While I was there we did not talk about any of the specifics of the case, who were targets,
who was under investigation,” he said in an interview.
However, in letters to Justice Department officials obtained by the AP, Mr. Elliott argued that
subpoenas should be dropped and he declared which BLM law enforcement agents would be
allowed to assist with the case and which ones would not.
The investigator chosen by the BLM, Greg Assmus, re-interviewed witnesses and violated
instructions from the prosecutor. “I will not deal with agents I do not trust,” the prosecutor
protested.
Mr. Assmus refused to comment.
At one point Mr. Galloway, still the main target of the investigation, was paid by the BLM to
round up the very horses he’d earlier threatened to have slaughtered.
In January last year, Mrs. Ludlum’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Jim DeAtley, pressed Mrs.
Ludlum to bring charges within 30 days. Then, in February, he said to wait while a Justice
Department lawyer in Washington, Charles Brooks, prepared an analysis of the case. Mr. Brooks’
memo, calling the case weak, came in April.
Mr. Brooks challenged Mrs. Ludlum.
He acknowledged that her investigation had uncovered long-standing problems with the horse
adoption program and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to slaughter.
However, Mr. Brooks said, it had already been decided a year earlier — at a meeting of Justice
Department, Interior Department and BLM officials — that the Texas criminal investigation
would be limited to Mr. Galloway and not “other possibly fraudulent adoptions and the
widespread irregularities in the management of the horse adoption program.”
The case against Mr. Galloway alone should be dropped, Mr. Brooks argued. “While the loose
procedures here might be typical of what is happening in the adoption program everywhere, the
particular facts here make this a poor case to make this point.”
Mrs. Ludlum was angry.
“It is obvious that Charles and or his bosses do not want the case prosecuted, period, and will
come up with any excuses to make it go away,” Mrs. Ludlum argued in a memo to her boss.
Mr. Brooks refused to comment.
The U.S. attorney in San Antonio ordered the case closed in July. Several U.S. attorneys from
around the country said that it is very rare for Washington officials to pressure local prosecutors
to close any case.
Justice Department spokesman Bill Brooks would not discuss the Del Rio matter, saying only:
“Any notion that Justice tried to quash a case is just not true. When we have evidence that
supports bringing a case, we bring one.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility began a review of
the way its attorneys behaved in the case after one BLM agent who worked on the investigation,
John Brenna, complained there were conflicts of interest. Justice Department officials refused to
release records of that inquiry, saying the case is still open.
“If you have ineffective enforcement and prosecutions, it’s as if there is no law,” said Steve
Sederwall, a retired BLM agent who also worked on the Texas case.
Earlier news reports about the Del Rio investigation, based on occasional leaks, have
understated its size. It also was not unique. Other records obtained by the AP show that criminal
investigations involving horse adoptions have been dropped across the country:
In Nevada, cases were dropped against two defendants suspected of shooting some 600
mustangs. Prosecutors said they “underestimated the difficulty” of prosecuting.
In Oklahoma, prosecutors dropped a case against an adopter of 18 horses and burros, even
though he had told inspectors he planned to “fatten ‘em up, slaughter or sell ‘em for rodeo.”
In Alabama, a case was shut down even though a family there sold eight horses for slaughter
just days after receiving titles on their pledge that they’d be used for pleasure riding. Why no
prosecution? In the midst of the probe, officials say, a BLM representative offered them more
horses.
And with the closure of the Del Rio case, the slaughter continues.
The Choctaw Indian Nation claimed title to its wild horses a few months ago. Jack Ferguson,
who handles tribal herds, said he sold about a dozen of them to be killed.
“We honored our part of the bargain,” he said. “We didn’t dispose of them until we had title.”
Associated Press national writer Christopher Sullivan and News Data Editor Drew
Sullivan contributed to this report.
I would post a comment, but I’m speechless. Is there anyone at all that we can trust?
When it comes to money no. There is money in horse slaughter, mining, and drilling . I trust none of them, since I found out about horse slaughter and what’s happening to our wild. There is self interest people in our Gov. and it seems that Obama don’t care. He put Salazar in charge and he is a breeder and rancher. That said it all to me.
this is a fact from the blm own homepage:
Out of the 12,000 Wild Mustangs rounded up and “incarcerated” last year Y2010;
out of 12.000…ONLY 400 MUSTANGS WERE ADOPTED ! A FARCE