When a group of armed militiamen took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge last weekend, there were no federal employees in the vicinity for them to clash with. As a new report in the Washington Post chronicles, that was apparently on purpose.
Discussions to close down federal facilities near and around Burns began weeks before the standoff.
The U.S. Postal Services ceased mail delivery last week, according to the Post. The Fish and Wildlife Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Farm Service Agency and the U.S. Forest Service also closed their doors and employees were asked to telecommute or fill out their duties in other neighboring filed offices. Some are on paid leave.
Federal officials were monitoring and growing increasingly worried about the tone and tenor of outsiders who were threatening locals, many of them federal employees. According to the Post, federal employees in Eastern Oregon were dealing with “stalking” and “threatening messages on office phones” before an unknown number of militiamen took over the refuge.
“A lot of the rhetoric was aimed at the federal government, and we just didn’t know what might happen,” Randall Eardley, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management, told the Post.
“Some employees reported cars they did not recognize parking on the street outside their homes at night,” the Post story said.
As the federal government has faced pressure to take action to clear the refuge of the militants, the Post report’ reveals that not only are federal government officials taking a non-confrontational approach to dealing with the takeover, they took that approach in how they prepared for a potential confrontation.
