Reno Asked To Investigate Forest Service Environmentalists Allege Agency Obstructed Timber Theft Probes

Environmentalists asked Attorney General Janet Reno Tuesday to investigate allegations the Forest Service obstructed government probes into fraudulent logging and timber theft at national forests.

Leaders of 16 groups also said in a petition to the Justice Department that sexual harassment of women is rampant at the Forest Service and whistle-blowers continue to suffer illegal reprisals.

Taxpayers lose as much as $100 million a year to logging companies that cut trees outside boundaries, falsify sale bills and steal wood from public forests, the conservationists said in a report, “Chainsaw Justice.”

Larry Campbell, executive director of the Montana-based Voice of the Environment, accused the agency of obstruction of justice, harassment and corruption.

“The Forest Service is simply too entrenched to reform itself,” Campbell said.

Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas on Monday defended the agency’s efforts to expand timber theft investigations to curtail what he said was millions of dollars of timber theft annually.

“Stealing from national forests will not be tolerated,” Thomas said.

Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society and Friends of the Earth were among those urging a federal probe of allegations the Forest Service looks the other way when preferred clients steal timber and harass law officers who try to stop it.

“Instead of clamping down on environmental criminals as directed by Congress, agency leaders are going after their own law enforcement staff,” said Steven Taylor, author of the 90-page report.

Taylor said the Forest Service has “aided and abetted” the timber industry in stealing the public trees. He said agency managers have tampered with evidence, tipped off agency officials to pending investigations and provided loggers with access to tracer paint used to mark trees approved for harvest.

He said the Clinton administration promised reforms but “caved in … to Western politicians and the influential timber industry and its big PAC money.”

Former Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson created a timber theft task force to address the problems. Thomas expanded the effort and Congress gave the task force more money after successful prosecution of a large timber theft case in Oregon in 1993.

But a lawyer for 14 members of the task force said in a letter to Thomas last September that the investigators felt they had been “paralyzed by harassment from agency managers.”

The situation improved after the letter, but no major theft cases were resolved in 1994, said Jeff Ruch, the lawyer from the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection group.

“In every timber theft case, the United States Forest Service is the unindicted coconspirator,” Ruch said Tuesday.

He said the groups are concerned Thomas may break up the task force and send its duties out to individual regional offices, a move he said would end any chance of effective prosecution.