> State, public documents show Bullock’s office gave $262K contract to company owned by his brother — and which pays him rent
> ‘Give it back, Steve’ says Ferguson of Bullock’s corrupt funds, ‘The office of governor could become Steve Bullock’s personal piggy bank’
> Documents now in the hands of FBI’s Public Corruption Unit
> Story and documentation will appear in the Montana Statesman, mailed to 120,000 homes

BOZEMAN — American Tradition Partnership turned over to the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit Sunday several state and public documents detailing how in 2010 Attorney General Steve Bullock’s Justice Department steered a $262,017.38 state contract to an “environmental services” business owned by Bullock’s brother, and which pays rent to a building owned by Steve Bullock himself.

“It appears Attorney General Bullock is handing state contracts to his brother’s company which he personally profits from,” said ATP Executive Director Donald Ferguson. “At best using your state position to funnel cash to your brother and yourself is a serious breach of ethics and the public trust.  At worst Attorney General Bullock may very well have committed a crime.  These are the kinds of dealings the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit investigates, and prosecutes.”

Additionally, Montana Code 2-2-105(4) states “a public officer or public employee may not acquire an interest in any business or undertaking that the officer or employee has reason to believe may be directly and substantially affected to its economic benefit by official action to be taken by the officer’s or employee’s agency. ”

“We encourage a robust and thorough investigation of Mr. Bullock, and we call on Mr. Bullock to cooperate with the FBI,” said Ferguson.  “Mr. Bullock could very well spend 2013 and beyond under FBI investigation, or worse.”

ATP will report the story, and release the documents, in this week’s edition of the Montana Statesman newspaper, which is mailed to 120,000 homes in Montana.  The documents will be available online Monday at montanastatesman.com/bullockdisclosure.

“Give it back, Steve,” said Ferguson of any rent paid to him by Pioneer Tech.  “Unless he and his brother divest themselves of the Hermann Building and Pioneer Tech, as governor Steve Bullock would be free to steer contracts from anywhere in the state government to his brother and himself,” said Ferguson.

“The office of governor could become Steve Bullock’s personal piggy bank.”

“For years ATP’s candidate surveys have asked candidates if he or she or a close relative stands to personally profit off any government ‘green’ program,” said Ferguson.  “No wonder Bullock refused to answer that question.  He would have to reveal his corrupt contract scheme.”

“These kinds of corrupt deals have become Steve Bullock’s calling card,” said Ferguson of Bullock, who was admonished in 2009 by the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for using his office to engage in the “petty bureaucratic harassment” of a Helena church and whose campaign was last week found guilty by the Commission on Political Practices of passing 11 illegal checks totaling over $15,000.

State documents show in April of 2010 the Justice Department, run by Bullock, awarded a Natural Resource Damage Program contract to an environmental services company, “Pioneer Technical Services” of Butte.  The total value of the contract, according to the documents, was $262,017.38 for eight months of work.

Also known as Pioneer Tech, it is owned by Bill Bullock, Steve Bullock’s brother.  Steve Bullock can be seen on video during a Sept. 2010 state conference praising his brother for creating Pioneer Tech.

“In 1992, in the basement of a house here in Butte, my older brother started a business, Pioneer Tech,” said Bullock.    The tape of Bullock admitting Pioneer’s ownership may be viewed online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbi16AtVWC4#t=08m15s.

Not only did Bullock direct state funds to his brother, Pioneer appears to rent office space from Steve Bullock himself.

On its website, www.pioneer-technical.com/offices/offices.htm, Pioneer Tech lists its Helena office as “(Hermann Building) 201 E. Broadway.”

Both Bullock’s 2008 and 2012 state financial disclosure forms list him as an owner of the “Hermann Building” at “201 E. Broadway.”

That means Attorney General Bullock is handing state contracts to a company that pays him rent, personally profiting from a state contractor – who is also his brother.

The scandal may be much larger.  That state contract is just one of several paid out to Pioneer Tech, including what appear to be several more from Bullock’s Justice Department.

The information was sent to the FBI via email Sunday, and will be Express Mailed Monday morning.

Once again Montana citizens have been forced to go to federal court to stop attempts by politicians to outlaw dissent.

And once again the Helena establishment’s efforts to outlaw dissent has been struck down as unconstitutional.

“U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull approved a settlement Tuesday in the case of a Billings minister who sued the state after being arrested on trespassing charges while gathering signatures for a ballot measure seeking to amend the state’s constitution to define unborn children as persons,” the Associated Press reports.

“We are very pleased that yet another absurd, anti-free speech Montana election law has been struck down,” said Bozeman attorney Matthew Monforton, who represented Zastrow. “This means that Cal and other pastors have the same right to engage in the political process that everyone else has.”

Attorney General Steve Bullock and Political Practices Commissioner James Murry were named as defendants, adding to the long list of suits filed against them citizens prosecuted for expressing conservative views.

After repeated courtroom losses to American Tradition Partnership and an admonishment from a federal court he was engaging in the “petty bureaucratic harassment” of innocent citizens for having political views different from his liberal one, Bullock did not even try to defend the latest attempt to prosecute citizens for speech.

The AP reports:

County officials did not allege that Zastrow violated the 1913 law on coercion or undue influence that limits the speech of ministers, clergy and churches regarding candidates and ballot issues. But Zastrow’s lawsuit sought to prevent the state from threatening to enforce it.

Assistant Attorney General Michael Black, who handled the case for the state, said he did not believe the statute had ever been enforced.

“Based on our review we chose to allow the court to enter the judgment that it was unconstitutional,” Black said.

Cebull granted a permanent injunction that prevents the state and county from enforcing the statute and prohibits its text from being included on “warning posters” which are displayed at polling places throughout the state, the newspaper reported.

WASHINGTON — American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center filed a federal lawsuit Friday seeking to stop illegal human medical experiments conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The suit, filed in United States District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, describes in detail how six EPA employees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Medical School intentionally pumped what they termed “lethal” amounts of diesel exhaust, specifically small particulate matter termed “PM2.5,” directly into the lungs of human volunteers who were not properly advised of the risks.

“It is difficult to overstate the atrocity of this research. EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building. The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects,” said ATI Environmental Law Center Director Dr. David Schnare.

Dr. Schnare was previously a 34-year EPA attorney and holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Management from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Master of Science in Public Health-Environmental Science from the University of North Carolina, where the experiments were conducted.

“EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.”

Scientific assessments of PM2.5 conducted in 2004 and 2009 by the EPA determined there is no safe level of exposure.  Nevertheless, the EPA pumped it directly into the lungs of humans, including an obese volunteer and a volunteer with chronic asthma.

The EPA violated numerous federal laws by failing to properly inform volunteers of the risks or that the EPA has previously determined their level of exposure to PM2.5 was potentially lethal.  Additionally, the experiments violate federal laws requiring the potential benefits to the subjects outweigh the risks to the subjects.

Also, federal law requires volunteers in medical studies to be fully informed of any “reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts to the subjects. [45 CFR 46.116 and 40 CFR 26.116 (a)(2)]

A review of the consent forms by Dr. John Dale Dunn, a policy advisor to the American Council on Science and Health, confirms subjects were not properly informed of the risks or that their exposure was potentially lethal.

Additionally, federal law prohibits medical experiments on humans imposing risks that are not reasonable in relation to the anticipated benefits. [45 CFR 46.111 and 40 CFR 26.111(a)(2)]  Those laws prohibit including possible long-range effects of applying knowledge gained the research when weighing risks and benefits.

The EPA admits there is no potential benefit to directly inhaling diesel fumes.

Dr. Dunn called EPA’s human experimentation “scandalously unethical and immoral” and said “There can be no further tolerance of this misconduct.”

The suit, ATI v. EPA, names EPA, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson as defendants.  It seeks to immediately halt the experiments, halt any similar experiments, to declare the EPA did not provide sufficient information to victims, to halt expenditures for the study, to suspend use of the UNC Medical IRB unit, to prohibit the EPA from using information from the study and to suspend implantation of any rules under the Clean Air Act to control fine particulate matter until it is ensured they are not based on information gathered from illegal medical experiments.

The American Tradition Institute is an independent 501(c)3 “think tank” associated with, but completely independent from, American Tradition Partnership.  

The American Tradition Institute is an independent 501(c)3 “think tank” associated with, but completely independent from, American Tradition Partnership.

Statement of ATI’s Lead Counsel on American Tradition Institute v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

(US District Court, Eastern District of Virginia No. 1:12-cv-1066)

There are few occasions in life that emerge directly from the core of an individual and almost never are those memorialized in a law suit. On Friday, September 21, 2012, I took five copies of a complaint to the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, filing one of them with the court and having each of the rest stamped and then sent to four senior government officials, Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton. I sent them summons to appear and defend themselves in part because of my first name.

I was named after David Steiner, a man who died of starvation in Buchenwald concentration camp on May 3, 1945. Tattooed on his body was the number 59059. He was witness to horrors that, today, we have a hard time even contemplating, something that I thought would never exist on this planet again – the abhorrent practice of giving human subjects poisons in order to determine what subsequently happens to them.

I have always been deeply affected by the circumstances of my great-uncle’s death. It is a heavy burden to carry the name of such a victim. As I matured, I committed my life to giving to our civilization that which David Steiner was never able to give himself. I have given 37 years of service to the United States, most of that in an effort to protect human health and the environment as a professional at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

I was able to secure a position of responsibility and trust at EPA in large part because the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered me the opportunity to obtain graduate degrees and prepare myself for a career in public service. Until a few weeks ago, I had been a strong supporter of each. Then Steven Milloy asked me to represent him and other members of the American Tradition Institute who have stories much like mine, or otherwise cannot countenance such human experimentation.

Steve’s story is worse than death. His uncle, Zoran Galkanovic, was incarcerated at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Upon threat of death, Mr. Galkanovic was forced to rise each morning and identify those individuals at the concentration camp too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be executed that very day. Because of the inhumanity forced on Mr. Galkanovic, Mr. Milloy has accepted as a family responsibility the fight against any government who subjects its citizens to inhumane treatment. Who knew it would be our government? Who knew it would be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? Who knew that human experimentation would be done on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Who knew it would be an official body of that University that approved this research?

On first blush, I simply could not believe Mr. Milloy. Then I looked carefully at the facts and at the law. This case involves the intentional exposure of human subjects to “fine particulate” matter, also known as PM2.5. EPA obtained their PM2.5 from a diesel truck. It is difficult to overstate the atrocity of this research. EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building. The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects. EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.

Unbelievable as that may seem, consider the additional fact that EPA has officially concluded that this gas is a genotoxic carcinogen and that there is no exposure level below which it can be considered safe. In fact, EPA Administrator Jackson testified to Congress that of all deaths occurring in the United States, 1 in 4 “is attributable to PM2.5.” She told them “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”

Under the law, under EPA regulations and under EPA policy, this human experimentation is strictly prohibited. To conduct human experimentation, the human subjects must be properly informed of the risks they face and these risks must be less than the potential benefit of the experiment. My family knows how that works too.

Few today know the ravages of Polio, but some of us are old enough to remember it too well. Susan Paidar was a childhood neighbor, the same age as one of my brothers. She died in an iron lung. And, she was one of the last victims of this terrible disease, in small part because of the courage of one of my brothers. In 1952, at age 6, my brother Rick was selected to be in the first human test group for the Salk vaccine. He was offered the possibility of never having to worry about polio again. He was a human subject and there was a real benefit from that human experimentation.

In the section describing the mandatory benefit that must be offered to the human subjects, EPA’s PM2.5 “informed consent” baldly states “there is no benefit.” Worse, the form never informs the subjects that they will be inhaling diesel fumes, never tells them the gas is a carcinogen, never tells them about all the other toxic substances in diesel exhaust pouring into their lungs, never tells them that because PM2.5 is genotoxic, it might cause disease in children they might wish to have.

Medical ethicist, Professor John D. Dunn, MD, JD, called EPA’s human experimentation “scandalously unethical and immoral” and said “There can be no further tolerance of this misconduct.” This is not the EPA I knew. This is not the University of North Carolina I knew. This is not the American Tradition of our nation. But, this is why I travelled to the U.S. Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia – to put a stop to it.

David W. Schnare, Esq., MSPH, PhD.

Director

Environmental Law Center

American Tradition Institute.

Read the complaint and declarations here.

For additional details see here.

The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Tuesday an Obama EPA dictate regulating sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions.

“In a 2-1 decision, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA had overstepped its authority by issuing federal pollution standards before states had a chance to develop their own and by calling for emissions reductions greater than the court’s majority considered necessary,” The Los Angeles Times reports.

“Led by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the court vacated the rule and ordered the EPA to develop a new one, leaving in its place a Bush-era regulation.”

Gang Green activists are urging Obama to appeal the ruling and press ahead with his scheme to bypass Congress by imposing rules through regulatory decree.

That’s why American Tradition Partnership and Sen. Rand Paul are fighting for a vote on the REINS Act, which requires all major federal regulations to be approved by Congress and signed by the President before they may be enacted.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and Attorney General Steve Bullock have found a powerful ally in their opposition to the Constitution’s “supremacy clause” and the First Amendment’s guarantees of the rights of free speech and free association.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin-funded, Putin-controlled “Russia Today” TV network has come out in opposition to American Tradition Partnership and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Monday ruling in ATP v. Bullock.

“RT” aired a segment Tuesday with defeated former Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) harshly criticizing the concept Americans can question their government without hiring and attorney and first seeking permission through the formation of a PAC or other body.

The network, dedicated to spreading pro-Russian propaganda in the United States, has firmly sided with Schweitzer and Bullock.  While foreign corporations are prohibited from spending money in American elections and all corporate spending must be disclosed, Schweitzer and Bullock refuse to criticize Putin for spending foreign money on their behalf.

See the video here.

So who do you stand with?  The First Amendment, or Brian Schweitzer and Vladimir Putin?