AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

“I have a method to my madness,” says Ammon Bundy, America’s uncontested, undefeated, heavyweight champion of armed stand-offs with domestic security forces, winning two for two against multiple agencies of the U.S. government.

With an arrest warrant out for him, Ammon’s giving me the low-down in the shop out back of his home in Emmett, Idaho. I lean in to hear, what with a hefty fan blowing the hot air out and his head buried beneath the dash of a concourse-worthy 1976 Ford F100 (lustrously hued in factory-faithful medium copper).

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We talked on the phone a few times before he reluctantly agreed to meet in person, no doubt burnt by FBI agents having previously pretended to be journalists in an elaborate ruse aimed at getting Bundy family members and supporters to incriminate themselves. Supposedly shooting a documentary about them called America Reloaded, the FBI’s fake “Longbow Productions” crew conducted interviews with supporters and family members at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas and at the Bundy ranch in Bunkerville, out towards the Arizona border. One misfit with a drinking and mouthing-off problem was served beer and a shot at the Bellagio and then duly shot his mouth off on camera — his wild remarks later used as evidence against him in a case that saw him sentenced to 68 years. If I pretend to be an FBI agent to further my goals? Oh no, that’s punishable by up to three years in prison.

“My question is,” Ammon had said when I asked to meet, “is why would SPIN want to come talk to me? I’m not a pop singer.”

Answered your own question, I felt like saying.

Meeting in Emmett was a compromise arrangement, however. Plan A was getting Bundy to stroll the streets of Portland with me so that we could discuss his philosophy of governance while knee-deep in a clear failure of American governance, walking as we would have been amidst human excrement, caterwauling frightbats of meth, multitudinous encampments of festering fentanylites, marauding thieves, Tranq’d-out droopers, and every other manifestation of the squalid drugpocalypse so relentlessly enabled by Oregon’s legions of the Well-Intentioned.

Keeping Boise from sliding down Portlandia’s chute to resembling a Walking Dead set was a comfortable talking point for Bundy, given his 2022 run for governor. His idiosyncratically radical campaign, with its vow to help usher in “a culture of liberty and property in Idaho that will rival early America,” had little impact on votes for Republican incumbent Brad Little, whose wide winning margin was a mere sliver less than four years earlier.

But get this: When Bundy stood as an independent in 2022, his voter support almost halved the Democrat tally, and he came a close third. And he did so while spruiking such policies as abolishing property and personal income taxes, allowing vendors to make sales tax payments to the state in Bitcoin and Ethereum, terminating welfare, terminating government funding of education and health, welcoming immigrants, terminating abortion, legalizing drugs (“if there’s no victim, there’s no crime”), and outright revanchism: taking back for Idaho the 60%-plus of its terrain under Federal ownership—holdings that are unconstitutional and hence illegal, as Ammon sees it.

Ammon did appear tempted to talk the walk in Portland, to become the Mormon cowboy philosopher king wandering a degenerate realm of an ailing Republic, but by now time was in extremely short supply. Even putting aside a recent $52.5 million ruling (yeah, you read that right) against him and a co-defendant, and an arrest warrant out for Ammon for ignoring court orders, he’d been under significant pressure: working non-stop as he does to support his wife and six kids while doing such things as standing for the state’s highest office, protesting COVID restrictions and mandates and sometimes getting arrested, sometimes repelling sheriff’s deputies, and generally living under ominous and accumulating legal woes — oh, plus overseeing the People’s Rights Network.

What’s the PRN?

It’s “Ammon’s Army,” according to in-depth, breathless, back-to-back reports from the Institute for Education & Research on Human Rights. At last count, the IERHR estimated that Ammon heads a 33,000-strong-and-rising network of extremists who “march to a far-right drumbeat of narcissistic rage and insurrection.” The Anti-Defamation League tags Bundy’s network under “Extremism, Terrorism, and Bigotry,” while the Paladin 7 Counterterrorism Group warns in its punchy report, Threat Assessment: US Extremist Group People’s Rights, of having “high confidence [bold in original] that the People’s Rights Network is a domestic terrorist threat to the US.”

The PRN sleeper cell in my red neck of the woods, deep in southern Oregon, meets at Abby’s Legendary Pizza some Saturdays.

But even with goat cheese and extra anchovies, I possess “high confidence” that attending such meetings of folks worshipful of the Holy Constitution would make me regret my choices almost as much as would rocking up to a steering committee shindig of the Eugene Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

I’d rather just talk to the man himself.

Hence last fall, I drive eight hours east, first cruising through the snow-patched, wet, forested ranges of the Cascades before chasing the horizon for hundreds of miles of high-desert clear to the Snake River separating Oregon from Idaho.

“I’ll be working in my shop,” Bundy had told me, and when I cross the border and finally pull into his since-seized homestead at the foot of a stark and scrubby stretch of hills in Emmett, that’s exactly where I find him — installing air-conditioning in the ’76 Ford.

Sitting on a mountain-skirted plain some 30 miles northwest of Boise, the town of Emmett (birthplace of Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul, AKA Jesse Pinkman) will soon experience an overnight population drop of eight when Bundy gathers his wife and six kids and goes on the lam, leaving the netizens of Reddit quivering in his wake about the potential bounty on his head.

But that’s later. Right now the nation’s preeminent steel-nerved, libertarian-syndicalist, fleet-managing, software-developing, Constitutional-fundamentalist, homespun-philosophizing, anarcho-vlogging revanchist Mormon cowboy-clan scion, strip-search-averse solitary confinement inmate, and accused insurrectionist far-right terror-army kingpin is busy working.

To get his melon down into the footwell, one might assume he’s removed his signature cowboy hat, but until I step around for a better angle I shall assume no such thing.

After all, this son of ornery Nevada ranching patriarch and fellow armed stand-off artist Cliven Bundy applied, while on trial in Oregon, for the right of he and his posse to present from their cells in culturally and personally appropriate clothing.

The namby-pamby, court-approved, soft-and-beltless shuffle-wear inflicted on Ammon could compromise the due presumption of innocence, he argued.

Denied. Even Ammon Edward Bundy can’t win ’em all.

He’s irrepressible, though. “I was a very bad prisoner,” he tells me.

“Really?” I say. “Not big on all the regulations?”

“Yeah, and I spent most of my time in solitary because of that. I wouldn’t do all the things they want you to do,” says Bundy.

“Like what?

“I refused to strip for them. So every time I had an attorney visit, or I went to court, they wanted to strip me on the way in, strip me on the way out, strip me in between, and I refused. So I would then spend a month in solitary confinement,” Ammon says, adjusting the supporting sprawl of his legs as he maneuvers in the Ford. “You know who Ayn Rand is? You know Atlas Shrugged?”

“Sure,” I say. It’s been a while since I mixed with anyone who reads much beyond affirmations and meme captions, so even if I don’t particularly care for Rand, it’s refreshing to hear mention of the mid-20th Century amphetamaniacally-driven didactic dystopian porno-capitalist literature of Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум (Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), AKA Alice O’Connor, AKA Ayn Rand.

Should you happen to be at the meme end of lit-awareness (no judgment, of course), just to fill you in: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) is an almost 1,200-page novel about a handful of proud, industrious, freethinking Americans who withdraw from the cesspool that the country is sinking into under a bureaucratic, parasitic, freedom-hating, enterprise-stifling mega-government.

“She says it best,” says Ammon, easing out from under the dash (his hat is on), “when she says: ‘An innocent man is not guilty until he admits guilt that is not his own.’ And I had the right, as everyone does, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And I was an innocent man: What they were accusing me of was false.”

Prosecutors were accusing Bundy of possessing firearms in a federal facility and of conspiring to impede federal officers. The charges arose from a 2016 occupation he famously led of the HQ of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. Bundy and a few dozen supporters — 15 of whom were later revealed to be FBI informants — rolled in to protest the prosecution and imprisonment of members of an Oregon ranching family under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which was drawn up in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The father and son ranchers had set fires on Refuge lands after the family’s permit to graze on trails used since the 19th Century was revoked. And Ammon gets real touchy about ranching rights.

A few weeks into the occupation, Ammon and his brother Ryan set out in separate cars, along with a few other occupiers, to speak at a public meeting in a neighboring county. The FBI and Oregon State Police, meanwhile, had set up a roadblock in a stretch without cell coverage. During the traffic stop, Robert LaVoy Finicum, an old friend of the Bundy’s who was driving Ryan’s car, was shot dead by a State Trooper, while Ryan got wounded in the shoulder. No one in Ammon’s Jeep got capped, but then, unlike good ol’ Finicum, Ammon’s driver was one of the third or more of the occupiers secretly playing for the other team. He was also the only person in Ammon’s car to be packing heat.

The case went to trial at Federal court in Portland in September that year, with a verdict coming down in October.

“They brought in all the bigwigs — heads of the Department of the Interior, which is over the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], and Department of Justice,” says Bundy. “And they lined the courtroom in front of the jury and in front of the gallery with really nice plush black chairs, filling them full of high-level government officials who were there for the verdict. They came out because they were all gonna celebrate that they convicted us.”

But lo, even with the Honorable Anna J. Brown presiding having prevented 12 citizens good and true from seeing the boys stand before them in contemporary cowboy attire, Ammon and Ryan were acquitted on all counts.

The plushie-chaired VIPs “completely lost their minds,” says Ammon. “I’m not kidding you: they lost their minds. They couldn’t … they just couldn’t …” Ammon, a man generally of reserved manner, grins widely. “They were all sitting there happy, and next thing they’re ready to kill us.”

The path of Ammon is a winding one, however, and before he could stride out onto the streets of Portland a free man the judge directed that heand his brother remain in custody due to a hold placed on them by the U.S. Marshals Service, which wanted the Bundys (including patriarch Cliven, who’d come to Oregon to support his boys but been nabbed on arrival) extradited to Nevada to face a slew of new federal charges related to a 2014 armed stand-off at the family ranch (again, over the Federal Government clashing with longstanding local grazing traditions, and again, a case in which the prosecution ultimately failed).

Defense attorney Marcus M. Mumford took immediate and strenuous objection to his clients’ continued detention, demanding to see the paperwork. As he and Judge Brown argued the point, a throng of Marshals advanced from their positions around the courtroom and surrounded Mumford at his table. Judge Brown ordered them to get back from Mumford, but they failed to comply.

“So the Marshals jumped him,” says Ammon. “Knocked him to the ground and Tased him. They were so terrified that he was going to get me released they had to make something up.”

Mumford was charged with failure to comply.

“What was it like when you got Tasered?” I ask, recalling old news coverage from the 2014 family ranch stand-off of Ammon pulling his upper temple-garment down for reporters to see puncture wounds and bruising on his chest.

“It is intense,” says Ammon, taking his eyes off his work for a moment to look steadily at me. He holds a hand up, splays his fingers out, brings them back together, splays them out, and brings them in again. “It’s like a pulsing—voom, voom—even in your mind; in your thoughts—a pulsing.”

“Did you collapse?”

“No. I got Tased three times and never went to the ground.” He touches his shirt front. “I ripped them out, but to do so I had to really hyper-focus on my hand. The video of it’s completely different from my memory,” says Ammon, looking at his arm. “In my memory, I could only move my hand in the middle of a pulsing—it was going voom voom voom voom voom,” he says, jerking his hand forward with each voom. “But the video shows me doing this,” he says, gliding a hand to his chest in a smooth, continuous movement. “It felt almost like I was handicapped—but I pulled it out of my neck while it was pulsing. They hit me once and I back off and get the stuff out of me, and go back and they hit me again, and the same again.”

His wife brings a pear harvested from a grove in their front yard. Ammon lays it in his palm to circle with a knife, handing half to me and eating the other. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” he says.

The ’76 Ford is almost ready, methodically worked on as it has been today in this pristine workshop. But whatever it cost, it’s got to be small beer against the $52.5 million that Bundy and co-accused Diego Rodriguez have been ordered to pay after a local hospital provider, St. Luke’s Health System, won a defamation lawsuit against them for the “robust” ways they and Ammonite throngs objected to Rodriguez’s infant grandson being held against the parents’ wishes over malnutrition concerns. The amount awarded may have been a degree less astronomical had Bundy taken part in his trial, but he limited his involvement to a spicy running critique of it on social media.

“If you were telling the truth, why not turn up and prove it?” I ask.

“I’m not gonna go in there and legitimize their process,” Bundy says.

Hence the contempt of court rap.

Hence the subsequent seizure of the homestead at Emmett.

Hence the disappearance of Ammon.

And hence the jacking of a bond on him up from $10,000 to $250,000.

That sweet quarter-mil bond prompted a Redditor on a Boise thread to write: “Do you need a bounty hunter license in Idaho? I’d go get that fucker.”

The answer is no—in Idaho no government-issue permission slip is needed to track and snatch those who don’t play well with the justice system. The spud realm of the West remains one of the more free-wheeling patches of America, unlike over the state line in narco-Maoist Oregon, where I pitch my tent and which tragically does not allow bounty-hunting. So perhaps Ammon does have a few intrepid bondsmen on his tail.

He certainly has tech-savvy journalistic sleuths gunning for him. Back home my news feed sounds off with “Fugitive US Militant Ammon Bundy Geolocated to Utah,” a breathless tale dished up by a “machine learning researcher and amateur OSINT investigator” filing for the Netherlands-headquartered whizz-bang tech-genius global investigative reporting syndicate, Bellingcat.

Eagle-eyed Bell-ringer Michael Lee, a man “particularly interested in monitoring far-right groups in the United States,” writes of having spotted “a few frames of a school district calendar on a refrigerator” in one of the many video-soliloquies that Ammon posts to social. These few frames were sufficient, writes Lee, “to lead Bellingcat to his location.”

Aping the fastidious wartime geolocation of videos shot by Islamic State forces, Russian military units, and other murderous pariahs, the intrepid Bellingcat detective further pin-points Ammon’s hidey-hole with the aid of mountaineering-app PeakVisor, Google Earth, and Google Street View. Still-images helpfully augmented with “annotation by Bellingcat” help walk the reader along machine man’s evidentiary trail.

I’m not that tech-savvy, so I just ring Ammon.

“Well, it’s a long way for you to come, but if you insist,” he says. “I’m working to put bread on the table, but guess I have to take lunch anyway, so we could meet and talk over lunch.”

“Thanks. I’ll come for lunch.” Before ringing off, I have a question for him that’s been on my mind while skimming the common descriptions and denunciations of him as an extremist and quasi-terrorist. “Of all those think tanks and civil rights outfits that label you like that, have they ever come to see you and ask what you believe and why? Or even just called?”

“Nope,” says Bundy. “Never.”

I think of another lunch long ago. Communist guerrillas in a bamboo forest of the northern Philippines put on a great spread of sardines, eggplant, and rice as we discussed and debated history, politics, and sociology. With a squad of rebels fanned out to watch for army patrols or helicopters, the unit commander and I and a few others talked for four hours. When we were finishing up, I asked the leathery old veteran Commie, who had been waging revolutionary war since the 1970s, if any journalist, academic researcher, or the like had ever hiked up into these hills and asked him why he was rebelling — why he killed police and soldiers and attacked government institutions.

Same answer: “No. Never.”

Much as with Ammon, I didn’t agree with all the leathery guerrilla’s answers to the question of how a nation should be governed, but I respected the worth of that fundamental question and the sharpness and commitment with which he raised it. In the Philippines, the Communists pose crucial questions about poverty and control of resources. In America, Ammon and his army of pizza-chomping rednecks will not stop asking why a nation born in revolution and built thereafter on a Constitution explicitly maximizing individual liberty while minimizing government intrusion seems day by day, ever more, to be getting it all backwards.

Before catching up again with Ammon, I drive to Mesquite, Nevada, to meet for the first time his brother in the struggle, and just plain brother, Ryan, who today is connecting a nifty new dog park to the water mains.

We shake hands. “What’s your publication called?” he asks.

“SPIN.”

“SPIN?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan shrugs like, whatever, and gives an instruction to one of his workers. “Well,” he says, turning back to me, “you’re welcome to hang out with me if you wanna follow me. I gotta run to the store and buy a new gauge.”

“I know SPIN magazine,” volunteers a laborer who’s down in the pit of wet red soil surrounding a pipe-join. “You’re here to interview Ryan? What are you going to ask him?”

“Yeah, what do you want to know?” asks Ryan.

“The ideas behind what you and your brother, your family, do, I guess. But also just some regular stuff like what it felt like when you got shot in Oregon.”

“It stings, but I’ve been shot before. Been shot four times.”

The man in the pit stops digging. “Four times?” He stares at Ryan wide-eyed.

“Yeah. When the FBI shot me they were trying to shoot me in the head, but they missed and got me in the shoulder. It went in right about here,” Ryan says, reaching back and tapping. “Then it traveled down my arm. The bullet’s still in me. “

“What kind of mental state were you in after that?” I ask. “Getting stopped at a roadblock and shot.”

“Oh, fine. I’m pretty stable. I don’t get all shook up.”

Ryan and I jump in his pick-up and hit a few hardware stores for bolts, a gauge, and sundry supplies, while he talks me through what he sees as the unconstitutional way that he, Ammon, their dad, and other co-defendants in the stand-off cases were denied bail. I sit out one of the stores, just for a break from flashbacks of a childhood spent tailing my dad around the aisles of such places, but Ryan comes back and gets me. “These guys are having a customer-appreciation meal. Grab something to eat. I’ll get some for my guys.”

Tables full of the good folk of Mesquite hoeing into burgers line one of the sheds. We get lunch, load it on paper plates, and pick sodas from a bucket. A manager and Ryan exchange pleasantries, the man thanking Ryan for being a good customer and Ryan thanking the man for running a good business.

Back in the pick-up, Ryan picks up where he left off: in jail charged with crimes he was ultimately acquitted of, as happened in Oregon, or which were thrown in the garbage, as happened in Nevada when the judge savaged prosecutors for “flagrant misconduct” including withholding vital evidence that backed the Bundy’ version of events, showed that the FBI privately considered the family reasonable, and declared a mistrial. The judge even barred the government from ever trying it on again with the Bundys over events at the family ranch. In the meantime, however, Ammon, Ryan, and their dad had been locked up for towards two years.

“At one point I was going to have a detention hearing,” Ryan says. “And I wanted to get out. But before the hearing I had a phone interview from the jail with someone like you. And they asked the question of whether I felt a protest was appropriate, and I said, ‘Yeah, protests would be appropriate.’ So a magistrate uses that as an excuse to say that I was a danger, and they held me in for a whole ‘nother fricking year.”

Ryan, a father of eight, is entertaining company, less the somewhat taut figurehead that Ammon presents as and more of a good ol’ boy — just one who happens to be a Mormon militant far right extremist domestic terrorist with a potentially offensively non-trauma-fixated vision of himself.

Anyway, as is Ryan’s wont, he lets rip with a Constitutional verse: “‘Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.’ Know that? It’s the 8th Amendment,” he says. “How’s no bail for excessive?”

He’s just warming up with American Scripture. Inside a minute I find myself guided through a series of textual maneuvers and interpretations which lead to the conclusion that the Federal Government should own no land other than State-approved purchases for the restricted set of purposes set out in Article 1: Section 8 of of the Constitution: “the erection of Forts. Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful buildings.”

If Washington and its multitudinous agencies try to take land for other purposes, or by other methods, they are violating the Constitution, Ryan declares. “That’s what our position is: They have no authority,” he says, looking south to the grand run of the Virgin Mountains, in front of which the Bundy Ranch’s cattle graze.

But take land Washington most certainly has, and according to the Congressional Research Service, Nevada is the state most affected, with about 80% of it owned by the federal government. Its grip on Western states generally dwarfs that of eastern regions. Connecticut, for example, has only 0.3% of its land mass under Washington’s control, while the state of Massachusetts is a mere 1.2% federally owned. In contrast, my home turf of Oregon has had more than half of it taken over by Washington.

It’s time for the free and independent states, who have come together in a Union centered on the primacy of individual liberty, to take back their lands and all the resources and wonders therein, the Bundys argue. And in their own pocket of it, they have. After the 2014 armed confrontation with the Bureau of Land Management and allied security forces saw the government later resoundingly defeated in court, the Bundys, one of the region’s last old ranching families standing, remain in place — not paying the Feds a dime in grazing fees and never giving an inch. Since the stinging defeat in the courts, at which details emerged of government security forces downplaying the Bundys’ legitimate concern for their own safety when federal sniper units encircled the family, Washington and its agencies let the Bundys graze at will and without charge.

“They saw that we are able to oppose them, and they don’t want to have to go through it again,” says Ryan, pulling back into the dog park with plates of burgers for the men and heavy duty bolts to secure the water supply.

Later that afternoon the desert changes moods; the mercury drops and rain comes in hard, but Ryan barely seems to notice. It seems that Ammon, who drove an earth-moving machine past earlier en route to a different worksite, is also disinclined to call it quits for the day.

Mind burned out, I drive to Las Vegas and drink. Come morning, it’s back up the I-15 towards Arizona, eventually taking the Bunkerville exit, crossing the Virgin River and finding the road to the Bundy Ranch.

A sign out front of the farmhouse lists the ranch’s produce: “CATTLE, MELONS & KIDS.” Dogs guide me in, one giving a sharp nip to the back of my leg as Ammon pokes his head out of the front door and says not to worry: “Everyone gets bit the first time.”

He’ll be busy working on a few things, he says, but his father has made time. Cliven Bundy is the source, the center, of the family values, and he steps into the room with his wife, Carol, to shake hands. This is the old man whom a judge has ruled was prosecuted wrongly for how he stood up against the federal government and its paramilitary forces, and whose cattle now graze without interference.

This is Cliven, the 77-year-old progenitor of the resistance, father of seven sons and seven daughters, grandfather of 74, great-grandfather of 21.

“Family reunions must be big events,” I say.

“Both my mother and father came from big families,” says Cliven. “My father’s family has a Bundy reunion on the Arizona Strip, which is about a hundred miles over these mountains back in towards the Colorado River. Every year about 1,200 people from the family meet there — a lot of fun.”

After walking around the ranch we sit, looking at a little shed holding generations of saddles stacked atop each other, in the shade of a tree as Cliven spends some three hours talking me through his history of grazing rights, land use precedents, state power versus the feds, the post-World War II unmooring of America from its Constitution and its pioneer spirit, the insatiable, ever-expanding appetite of the Federal Government for control — for un-freeing the minds, lands, and hands of a nation founded on the liberty principle — the deployment of drones and snipers around his ranch, his anger that county police side with Washington over locals, and more, much more, until finally we arrive at Cliven, then in his late ‘60s, getting arrested at Portland International Airport and thereafter experiencing the full rock ‘n’ roll show of absolute government power.

“When they moved me in Oregon; when they moved me in Las Vegas from the courthouse to the Henderson jail, when they took me out to the jail at Pahrump, they treated me the same as they would’ve treated the president of the United States,” he says.

“Like with dignity?” I ask.

“No. I mean security. Let me tell you about one trip: just between Las Vegas courthouse and the city jail in Henderson.” He takes a sip of water and gathers his thoughts. “I’d have seven armed Marshals on me, and they would hobble me [ankle cuffs chained together], handcuff me, and chain the handcuffs to a chain around my waist. They’d take me to the basement under the courthouse and chain me to a chair, then wait until the public left the courthouse — sometimes quite a while. Then they’d put me in a car, and I would have at least two highway patrol cars and one black Marshal car in front. Then there’d be two Marshal cars and another highway patrol in behind. They’d take me about two blocks, and then turn all their lights on and all their sirens, and they would take me to the freeway,” says Cliven, nodding to a girl coming in the gate and heading to the house.

“Highway patrols would have all the traffic stop on the freeway. And as we come to the on-ramp we’d be over the right side in the parking lane, picking up speed until we’re going pretty fast and then go up atop and right across the freeway — across four of five lanes, with everything all cleared off — and take a 90-degree turn into the fast lane, and they’d take me at 80, 90 miles an hour to Henderson,” Cliven says, chuckling. “At Henderson they had the roads blocked off with highway patrol cars turned sideways and they never stopped at stop lights—we went through them all. Then they’d open the gate, take me into the compound, and seven Marshals would chain me to a chair and then leave.”

On some of his Marshaled movements in Portland, he says he saw what looked like armed soldiers guarding his route, yet until his arrest aboard a plane at Portland airport, “I’d had a traffic ticket but never had a misdemeanor or anything,” says Cliven. “Then I spent 700 days in jail and they spent $300 million on me.”

I ask what he did after the mistrial was declared and he made it back here to his ranch.

“After some family stuff, I got on a horse and went up in the hills,” he says. “I must have went for maybe 10, 12, 15 miles. I just took a big old circle up in the hills and around and then come home.” When we finish talking, and Cliven’s given me an autographed copy of the Constitution, Ammon’s nowhere to be seen.

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