Walden expects peaceful end to takeover, backs Hammond clemency

Rep. Greg Walden, the Republican whose vast Second District includes Harney County and the occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, said Monday he believes the takeover will end without bloodshed – but was not about to hazard a guess how long that would take, or offer to go there and try to broker a deal.

“I think the short answer is, it will end peacefully,” Walden told NewsChannel 21 in an online-exclusive interview at the KTVZ newsroom in Bend. “That is the goal of everybody involved.”

Earlier, during an on-air interview with NewsChannel 21’s Lee Anderson, Walden said, “Eventually, they’ll have justice served upon them.”

In the meantime, he said, “Obviously, to avoid any kind of confrontation, those in law enforcement have decided to let them be there — there’s no hostage, there’s nobody getting hurt — and try to defuse the situation.”

As for how (or how soon) the standoff should be resolved, Walden wasn’t about to tell the FBI or others what to do: “I’ll leave it in their capable hands. They are the professionals.”

But like others who have tried to separate the message from the method, he acknowledged that many of the issues he and others have had with federal land management in the West for many years are being “raised for the first time at the national level. Hopefully, we can get some help.”

As he did in a recent, emotional speech on the House floor, Walden did not fully defend the actions of ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond that led to a mandatory-minimum 5-year federal arson sentence, though he said a presidential granting of clemency “would be right.”

But he elaborated on his firm belief that the occupiers, led by Ammon Bundy, who took over the unoccupied refuge on Jan. 2 need to pay for their crimes.

“Clearly, these folks have broken the law, continue to break the law. They need to go,” he said. “The community has asked them to leave. They’ve got their own agenda. They’ve given voice to a lot of people who have frustration, certainly. But this isn’t the way to have done it.”

Asked about how some critics felt he was close to justifying the occupation, Walden stressed, “I don’t justify what they’ve done. Peaceful protest is one thing. I have had people take over my office (in Bend), urinate in my trash can. You have people climbing on buildings … That’s America, that’s democracy. People get carried away. This has a different element to it. It’s unacceptable, and they need to go.”

As for the lack of action to end the standoff, Walden made clear he understood why authorities have exercised restraint, despite many residents’ frustration with a situation now dragging into its third week..

“Everybody’s trying, in the law enforcement community, not to elevate it where you do have some sort of confrontation that everybody regrets,” he said.

Asked whether he would go to Harney County to either learn more first-hand or try to help resolve the stalemate, Walden said. “I don’t think it would be appropriate at this point.”

But he repeated a message to the occupiers: The extended occupation may be hurting the cause they espouse regarding federal government overreach.

“I think for those who are out there, you go too far for too long, it actually hurts the cause of those of us that want to see some reform take place in the federal government,” Walden said. “You don’t want to create a backlash, and I think they’re really on the cusp of that.”

And of the group’s demand for turning over the land to local or state government control? Walden was blunt:

“It’s not going to happen.”

Thousands have signed petitions to the White House seeking a pardon or clemency for the Hammonds, whose return to prison sparked the ongoing occupation.

“The sentence they were given is far more severe than justified by the situation – not by the statute they were charged under, but I think that’s a whole other issue,” Walden said, noting the domestic terrorism law was written in 1996, after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

“Anybody who’s been out on the range knows that the government sometimes lights fires on private land when the private landowner is pleading with them not to do so,” the congressman said.

“They (the Hammonds) put the fire out themselves,” he said. “I think we need to change the statute so if there’s no criminal intent, they’re following the rules and the fire gets away, that you’re not sentenced to five years mandatory prison. I just think that’s way over the top.

“That’s the law under which they were tried. That’s the law under which they were sentenced,” he said. “The court already has taken it as far as you can go, as far as an appeal.”

But could the pair get clemency at some point?

“Hopefully, yes.” Walden said. “I think that would be right, in this case. But that’s up to the president, and there’s a whole process involved to do that.

“So meanwhile, we need to change the law under which they were convicted,so that somebody else doesn’t have this problem,” he said.

“Because now, I’m hearing from ranchers who say, ‘Fire is a tool, I use it responsibly, I do everything – but now I’m worried that if I’m burning out a ditch to clean it out like we do or go after invasive species and something goes wrong, even though I’ve notified everybody, are they going to come back at me and treat me as a terrorist and have a five-year mandatory minimum?’ So now there’s all this uncertainty out there.

“And now I’m hearing from people who, the government fighting fires has burned their property and all, and they say nothing happens to them. So there’s just building more and more frustration, and more and more fear out on the ranch.”

In his earlier on-air interview, Walden said landowners complain that government back-burns wipe out a fence and they get no compensation.

“There’s a lot of pent-up frustration over that,” he said. “One thing after another. They feel their own government isn’t there to help them, they are hurting them … There’s just this sense they are getting run over every time they turn around.”

Walden spoke of his earlier stops Monday at Crooked River Ranch, where they “are very concerned about the fire threat,” as a wilderness study area borders their rural subdivision.

“They’d like to get some flexibility on the boundary, work with the BLM to reduce the fuel load,” he said, noting later off-camera that the Bend-based Oregon Natural Desert Association has only said it would agree to that if it gains more wilderness elsewhere.

At a Crook County roundtable in Prineville, Walden said he heard serious concerns about a proposal by Oregon Wild to create a 312,000-acre national recreation area in the Ochoco Mountains, including 30,000 acres of wilderness that brought a turnout of 150 people at a community meeting who are worried that where they go to hunt and recreate will be shut down.

Asked by Anderson about the wild GOP presidential candidates’ race, Walden said he is “not picking sides,” but added, “Clearly, you see a lot of angst among the electorate — on the left and the right.:

“If you think about the rise of Bernie Sanders, the rise of Donald Trump — I mean, there’s a lot of people on both sides who feel like they’re not getting a fair shake by the system we have in place today. They want to see pretty radical change in Washington.”

But Walden was not about to project how the race for the White House will turn out. “Everything that’s playing out this year is completely uncharted territory,” he said.

But if he had to guess, he said, “The likelihood is the people who are ahead now are the people who move forward” to the fall, which could mean a Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton matchup.