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Things keep getting worse for Tracy Stone-Manning, President Biden's nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
If confirmed, Stone-Manning would run an agency tasked with managing 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate, according to the BLM.
But her ties to a 1989 tree-spiking plot have led to intense Republican opposition.
She testified, in exchange for immunity, that she retyped and sent an anonymous letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of John P. Blount, her former roommate and friend. The letter told the Forest Service that 500 pounds of "spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length" had been jammed into the trees of an Idaho forest.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and every Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee have urged Biden to withdraw her nomination.
The nominee's written answers to senators have raised questions about her truthfulness.
In her initial round of written answers, she denied ever being the target of a criminal investigation – but her own past statements, as well as the lead investigator on the case, directly contradict that assertion.
"She told the committee she had never been the subject of an investigation and yet complained about being investigated in the press," Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the committee, previously told Fox News.
In her written responses to follow-up questions from senators, which Fox News has reviewed, Stone-Manning said she had no "personal knowledge" of any tree-spiking plot in her lifetime.
But one of the two men convicted in the 1989 tree-spiking plot told E&E News that Stone-Manning did, in fact, have foreknowledge of the plot. The other man convicted in the plot, however, said she did not know in advance about the plot.
In 1989, a few months before the tree spiking, Stone-Manning promoted an environmental festival that included a "tree-spiking contest," according to archives of the Montana Kaiman reviewed by Fox News. That revelation has not been previously reported.
Tree spiking is a dangerous and violent eco-terrorism tactic where metal rods are inserted into trees to prevent them from being cut down. The metal rods damage saws that, in turn, have severely injured people, such as a mill worker whose jaw was split in two from an exploding saw.
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Stone-Manning's views on population control have also raised eyebrows. She argued in her graduate thesis that Americans need to engage in population control to protect the environment.
So far, the White House has stood by its embattled nominee.
Fox News' Houston Keene contributed reporting
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