Rogue again, DNR must be held accountable
Coming this month: The Sowinski Files, the DNR’s version of Waco and Ruby Ridge
Author’s note: Later this month I will be releasing for premium subscribers a series called The Sowinski Files. You’ve heard of Ruby Ridge and Waco, but they have nothing on Wisconsin’s Sugar Camp and the story of the Sowinski family, potato farmers who were bullied and persecuted by the DNR during the days when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor. In the piece below, I begin a series that will demonstrate that, under Tony Evers, the DNR is beginning to return to the kind of despotic and rogue agency it was under Doyle, when the most egregious acts were taken against citizens. The Sowinski Files shows just what an out-of-control agency can do, and indeed did, and what the DNR could do again if we are not careful.
To briefly sum up, in an investigation against Paul and Alvin Sowinski that began in 2007, the state DNR and the United States Fish & Wildlife Service brought all the legal firepower they could muster, as well some sketchier tricks of the law-enforcement trade, in their pursuit of the Sowinskis for the purported poisoning of wildlife. In the end, they got a confession by each to a single misdemeanor count of illegally possessing a bald eagle—not poisoning—and an acceptance of responsibility for inappropriate predator control practices.
As it turned out, though, the Sowinskis had been on-again, off-again targets of law enforcement for nearly 20 years—Alvin Sowinski was outspokenly anti-government—during which time government special agents tried every trick in the book to catch them poisoning wildlife. They never did. That is to say, they installed secret surveillance cameras in the woods, trained on their homes as well as fields, but captured nothing; they chased uncorroborated confidential source information, endlessly ending in hearsay dead-ends; they sent in an undercover agent to try and lure the Sowinskis into illegal acts (the agent failed); they planted dead animals and fake animal tracks to entice them to set out poison bait piles (they didn’t); they used mapping and aerial imaging programs to track the farmers’ movements; they searched the property multiple times without warrants in addition to executing early morning raids with warrants; and they interrogated the Sowinskis repeatedly in efforts to gain confessions. Finally, they charged onto the Sowinski property with throngs of armed federal and state agents.
With all that, they managed to find one “probably” poisoned bald eagle, as the government concluded, which might or might not have been poisoned at a bait pile, and a video of Paul Sowinski moving a dead eagle that—wait for it— was planted on the property by DNR agents. That was Paul Sowinski’s lone crime. All totaled, in a formal investigation that ranged from 2007 to 2010, law enforcement found seven dead eagles on the Sowinski property, including the one they planted there themselves, but only one was tied to poisoning. That one was found by the DNR in 2007, seven years before any actual charge, after lab personnel “concluded” that the eagle died from ingesting the poison—an insecticide that was legal at the time and commonly used on potato farms, raising the possibility and even the likelihood of incidental poisoning.
Of the remaining eagles, one was planted by law enforcement; two were tested, but the USFWS lab was “unable to confirm the presence of (the insecticide) or any other poison”; and three others—including the eagle for which Alvin Sowinski was charged—were never tested at all. To gain a conviction, and a misdemeanor conviction at that, they had to finagle a deal whereby Paul Sowinski confessed to disposing of another dead eagle he found on the property and Alvin Sowinski admitted poisoning an eagle—some eagle somewhere—with poison bait. That was the sum total of what the government got after spending tens and tens of thousands of dollars and using firepower worthy of Waco and Ruby Ridge—all to confront a man (Paul) and his 78-year-old father Alvin, who politely showed the amassed military force around the property.
If you read and listen just to the mainstream media, you’d think the drama going on lately at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is simply about a scoundrel named Frederick Prehn, the chairman of the department’s policy-making Natural Resources Board, whose term has expired but who has declined to leave the board to make way for a replacement nominated by Gov. Tony Evers.
You would think Prehn is acting illegally or at least unethically, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Prehn cites a 1964 Supreme Court decision that says his term’s expiration does not create a vacancy, and he says he can continue to serve until Sandra Naas, the replacement appointed by Evers, is confirmed by the Senate.
The Senate has made no move to confirm her.
Oh, the legal webs we weave. Environmentalists broke out in Twitter hives over Prehn’s decision to keep serving, and attorney general Josh Kaul scratched the itch by filing a lawsuit against Prehn to try and force him off the NRB.
Only thing is, a Dane County judge dismissed the lawsuit, citing that same 1964 decision. Both sides wanted the Supreme Court to take up an appeal directly, and the court obliged. Briefings are ongoing.
So the legal case is not so much of a no-brainer as liberals thought it was. I will write in-depth about that as the Supreme Court case proceeds.
But the legal case really doesn’t matter! the liberals scream, at least not unless they win. No matter the legal outcome, Prehn is acting unethically, according to the Democratic Party’s mainstream media wing. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel outdoors writer Paul Smith wrote that Prehn had trampled the agency’s legacy, and demonstrated “continued disrespect for custom and decency relative to the board.”
Well, about that. It may be true that honor, decency and custom have been trampled upon, but it’s the department that is doing the trampling, once again (it has a long history of it). The media analysis lacks any fair reporting of the behavior of department bureaucrats.
So, while the legal case proceeds, let’s take a look not just at Prehn’s actions but at the DNR’s, and what that inquiry tells us is that DNR bureaucrats have gone rogue again since Evers’s election, and brazenly so.