The game warden in Helena, Montana, received a phone call one morning in March 2021 with a request that he knew might not end well for him. His boss and friend at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks asked him to officially record the killing of a wolf, a fairly routine request except for one detail.
The hunter was the state’s governor, Greg Gianforte.
“I said I didn’t want anything to do with it,” the director, Justin Hawkaluk, recalled with a barely audible laugh.
Hawkaluk now says his sense of fear was justified. When the wolf issue was resolved, his superiors had pressured him to lie about the governor’s role, and his boss would be forced to leave the department, he told The New York Times in his first interview about the episode. . He would also leave a job he said he loved.
The story of the governor, the wolf and the warden caused little stir when it was first known. Wolf hunting is legal and quite common in Montana. Mr. Gianforte was recorded as the killer of the animal, an adult black wolf, and received a warning for failing to complete the required trapping course. A spokeswoman for the governor said Gianforte had “immediately rectified the error” in taking the course. A department spokesperson said at the time that the matter had been handled as it would have been for anyone.
But Gianforte, a Republican, is running for re-election this year, and some find the killing of a once-protected species disgusting. The treatment of wolves is in the news again, after a snowmobiler in Wyoming hit one, taped its mouth shut, and paraded it in a bar before killing it.
Law enforcement officials involved in recording the Gianforte wolf, located as number 1155 by trackers in nearby Yellowstone National Park, now say the procedures were typical. They say officials relied on them to book the governor’s hunting partner, rather than the governor himself, as the shooter, in an attempt to avoid giving the governor a citation, and that officials became angry when the director and his boss they refused.
Hawkaluk said he saw it as an attempted “cover-up.”
“I don’t know if the governor had anything to do with this or if he was even aware of it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘Guys, nice try, but no, you’re going to have to take your medicine.’”
The governor’s spokesman, Sean Southard, did not directly address whether Gianforte had been involved in the attempt to impose the wolf hunt on his friend. Instead, he dismissed the director’s account as “far-left fever dreams fueled by desperate partisans.”
Greg Lemon, a department spokesman, said the agency would not comment on personnel matters but that its employees did their jobs “without political calculations or motivation.”
There was nothing illegal about killing a radio-collared wolf that had strayed from the national park and wandered onto private land. About 250 to 300 Montana wolves are intentionally killed each year, some as trophies, others by ranchers who blame them for killing livestock. Since their reintroduction into the wild three decades ago, Montana wolves have been tracked and studied to see how they affect the environment, natural and man-made.
Before the wolf in question was shot, it was caught in a trap on a 213,000-acre ranch outside Yellowstone owned by heirs to the Sinclair Oil fortune. It is not clear who set the trap. Southard said Gianforte and a trapper friend set and monitored trap lines in accordance with regulations.
But one day in March 2021, as regulations prescribe, Montana’s governor called the Fish, Wildlife and Parks hotline to report that he had shot and killed a trapped wolf.
Department staff members received the message the next morning, and the department’s law enforcement chief, Dave Loewen, called Mr. Hawkaluk to ask a favor: Could he go to headquarters and write about the wolf? And, oh yes, Loewen added, the shooter was Governor Gianforte, a man famous for his temper who in 2017 was sentenced to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger management classes for assaulting a reporter the night prior to his victory. seat in the House of Representatives.
Minutes later, department leaders told Loewen that Gianforte’s friend, an outspoken trapper named Matt Lumley, should be blamed for the death, Loewen said. Loewen called Hawkaluk to convey that instruction. The problem: Mr. Gianforte’s name was already in the database as the registered trapper.
“He could read between the lines,” Hawkaluk recalled. “I told him, ‘Whoever you’re talking to there better tell his story, because Gianforte called him the log trapper.'”
“The whole thing felt gross,” he said.
When the director refused to accompany them, Loewen said he and the department’s deputy director went to the department director’s office, where, sitting at a conference table, was Mr. Lumley. Loewen did not hesitate to attribute the murder to the governor. His superiors relented and agreed to give credit for the murder to the governor. They then issued him a public warning for killing a wolf without the required trapping course.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse for Mr. Loewen. Rumors began to circulate of an inappropriate relationship with another department employee, Hawkaluk said and Loewen confirmed. When they were rejected, Loewen was charged with fostering a hostile work environment and placed on administrative leave in July 2022. He strongly denied the charges.
As of October 2022, according to a letter setting out the terms of Loewen’s departure and obtained by The New York Times, Loewen had been released after 22 years at the agency, with $150,000. Mediation fees would be borne by the State. In exchange, Loewen promised not to sue for further damages or disparage his former employers. The State promised not to disparage Mr. Loewen either.
Mindful of that non-disparagement clause, Loewen confirmed the chain of events that led to the warning being issued to the governor, but offered no further comment.
“Yes, that all happened,” he said of Hawkaluk’s timeline.
Southard, the governor’s spokesman, said the confusion over who was responsible for trapping the wolf was understandable. Both Gianforte and Lumley had set traps, and tags attached to the trap that had caught the wolf identified both men as its owner, he said.
“The governor has been cheating for almost 50 years,” Southard said. “Prior to hunting a wolf in 2021, he had been working to hunt a wolf for the past five years, primarily by hunting and, more recently, also by trapping.”
The governor’s spokesman attributed the resurgence of the wolf problem to “former state employees” who “may hold a grudge.” Although the terms of Mr. Loewen’s release from state employment require that “neither shall disparage the other,” Mr. Southard said those former employees fueled that grudge because “they could have been held responsible for violating the law or failing to comply with requirements.” of the workplace”. policies.”
Loewen declined to comment on the governor’s response. Hawkaluk said he was not unhappy when he left the agency in January to become a field consultant for the Montana Federation of Public Employees, and that he was never accused of violating any labor laws or policies.
For advocates protecting the state’s wolves, the governor’s offense was not his lack of studies but the potential cruelty of the killing.
Trapped wolves are so distraught that they often bite their own trapped leg. Montana trapping regulations say that a trapper “must immediately dispatch any uncollared wolf” caught on trap lines, and that those lines must be checked every 48 hours. The same regulations warn that trappers “may release a collared wolf unharmed.” Collared animals are allowed to be killed, but many hunters avoid doing so out of deference to the researchers who study them.
Since the Montana Legislature was in session in Helena, the capital, at the time of Gianforte’s death, wolf experts doubt the governor could have set the trap and then made the 177-mile trip to shoot the wolf. fast enough to comply with designed regulations. to minimize suffering.
“The logistics of this are unrealistic,” said Nathan Varley, whose Yellowstone Wolf Tracker has been leading wolf-watching tours for 18 years. He added: “Although wolves are not popular in the state of Montana, they are loved by so many people that it simply was not good optics to shoot a wolf in a trap. How ugly is that?
Mr. Southard stepped back.
“The far left has sown the seed of rampant rumors about the harvest,” he said.
As for the original warning to Mr. Gianforte, the man who designed the classes the governor had not taken said the infraction was serious. An improperly licensed hunter should have received a hefty fine or lost his license, said Thomas Baumeister, now with the Montana chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
“Law enforcement has quite a bit of discretion; There are few areas where everything is black and white,” Baumeister said. But with a radio-collared wolf outside Yellowstone, it was more definitive. “In this case,” he said, “it’s black and white.”
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