Ammon Bundy, the militia member who led the armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, said Friday that a congressional witness is an FBI informant who "helped murder a good man," The Washington Post reports.
Bundy accused Dan Nichols, a former county commissioner in Harney County who recently testified before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, of having "helped murder" LaVoy Finicum, a spokesperson for the militia that was killed by law enforcement in what the local district attorney deemed a justifiable, "and, in fact, necessary," shooting.
"Dan was a huge part of the ambush that killed Levoy," Bundy wrote in a Facebook post calling Nichols, a rancher and the Republican commissioner of Harney County for 20 years, an FBI informant.
When asked by the Post about Bundy's comments, Nichols said: "I had absolutely nothing to do with any of that. That was law enforcement, the FBI. I had nothing to do with it."
Although Nichols described the takeover led by Bundy as causing "total anarchy in our community," he also said that "rural Americans, especially in the largely federally owned and managed 11 western states, are not being listened to, much less heard. … Much of what is often described as anti-government is really coming from a place of feeling excluded or being on the losing end of unbalanced natural resource management."
Bundy accused Nichols of "working as a foreign agent to a different jurisdiction while representing the people in another government. He did not serve the people in Harney County well but he did serve the federal bureaucrats very well."
He later denied that his post was "in any way condoning or asking or promoting or anything, any violence towards him. It's simply the truth."
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