Ammon Bundy speaks to a crowd of supporters in 2020 through the COVID-19 lockdown.
Heath Druzin/Boise State Public Radio
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Heath Druzin/Boise State Public Radio
Ammon Bundy speaks to a crowd of supporters in 2020 through the COVID-19 lockdown.
Heath Druzin/Boise State Public Radio
Antigovernment militant Ammon Bundy is scheduled to seem in a Boise, Idaho, court docket right this moment going through costs in a civil lawsuit stemming from a tense protest in 2022 that led to the lockdown of certainly one of Idaho’s largest hospitals.
St Luke’s well being system filed swimsuit towards Bundy final yr after his far-right Individuals’s Rights group staged a protest towards the hospitalization of certainly one of his affiliate’s grandkids. With Bundy supporters stationing themselves outdoors hospital doorways, and a few calling for violence on social media, issues turned tense sufficient that the downtown Boise hospital was placed on lockdown briefly. Emergency providers needed to be diverted to a different facility within the suburbs.
It isn’t clear whether or not Bundy will present up in court docket, as he is spent a lot of the previous yr not responding to the civil case. In February, attorneys for St. Luke’s filed a movement for contempt towards Bundy and are reportedly asking for punitive damages of $7.5 million. A district court docket decide later issued an arrest warrant for Bundy for failing to indicate up in court docket.
That warrant has not been served and Bundy stays free.
The Idaho Capitol Solar quoted a sworn court docket assertion by St. Luke’s CEO Chris Roth from late final yr: “I imagine it can be crucial that St. Luke’s stands as much as the bullying, intimidation, disruption, and self-serving and menacing actions … inaction would sign that one of these conduct is appropriate in our group. It’s not.”
In latest movies posted to social media, Bundy has remained defiant, claiming the hospital is harassing him.
“The folks ought to have tore down the hospital to get that child,” Bundy says in a single latest You Tube video. “If I am improper I would like remedy, I believe. I really imagine folks have the precise to defend themselves.”
The civil case is simply the newest in a string of authorized battles going again to 2014 for Bundy, now a resident of Emmett, Idaho. Then, he helped his father Cliven lead an armed standoff over cattle grazing close to the household’s Nevada ranch. In jap Oregon in 2016, Ammon Bundy led a 41 day armed occupation of a federal hen sanctuary and was later acquitted by a jury on conspiracy costs.
Through the pandemic, Bundy and his supporters have been a frequent presence disrupting public conferences within the Boise space over masks guidelines and different well being orders. In 2021, Bundy was arrested for trespassing and banned from the Idaho state capitol for one yr.
His newest public battle with the hospital has led to issues of yet one more standoff brewing outdoors his rural Idaho residence. A neighborhood sheriff this spring warned Bundy had change into more and more aggressive. In a latest op-ed letter, a number of retired Idaho legislation enforcement officers accused Bundy and his followers of intimidating and defaming law enforcement officials, hospital staff and different civil servants.
“Bundy and his followers recklessly break the legislation after which cry ‘persecution’ when they’re compelled to face the implications of their unlawful actions,” they wrote.
The jury trial is scheduled to start right this moment in Boise.
