Trials twice delayed because Donald Trump Sr. was running for president
DENVER, SALT LAKE CITY––Followers of Wade Lemon Hunting and Shaun Buffee Safaris on social media saw on September 19, 2024 that one of their clients, Mike Ingram, 80, had killed a 225-pound leopard in Zimbabwe, believed to be the heaviest on record.
That same day, Eric S. Peterson of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project reported for the Salt Lake Tribune that “Influential hunting guide Wade Lemon,” who might be described as an international godfather of unethical hunting, “was ordered to report this week to a federal prison.”
That was not posted by Wade Lemon Hunting and Shaun Buffee Safaris.
“Consequential for Yes on 127 campaign”
Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle, in an email to ANIMALS 24-7, called the Lemon case “Consequential, given our Colorado Yes on 127 campaign,” meaning the Cats Aren’t Trophies ballot proposition seeking to ban hunting pumas and bobcats, going before voters on November 5, 2024.
Consequential aspects of the Lemon case include that:
- Lemon is a business rival in an adjoining state of the Colorado trophy hunting guides and houndsmen whose business Proposition 127 threatens;
- The Lemon case spotlights unethical and often illegal practices common in trophy hunting;
- and the client in the Lemon case was Donald Trump Jr., son of former U.S. president Donald Trump, now running again for the U.S. presidency, as Republican nominee opposing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, now U.S. vice president.
“Oversight ‘fell short'”
“The longtime owner of Wade Lemon Hunting in Holden, Utah, admitted his oversight ‘fell short’ in two staged hunts,” Peterson wrote, “where paying clients were called in after mountain lions [pumas] had already been tracked and located.
“In a deal with prosecutors,” Peterson detailed, “Lemon, 63, pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor and an infraction for illegal hunts in 2020 and 2021.”
As result of the plea bargain, Lemon is only to serve two months in federal prison, and to refrain for a year from conducting hunts for paid clients on federal land.
Got off easy
Lemon was also fined $10,500.
Lemon is allowed to continue his trophy hunting business on Utah state land, private property, and in other states and nations.
“U.S. District Judge Dustin Pead sentenced Lemon to less than the three months [in prison] sought by the prosecution,” Peterson noted.
“A cougar [puma] hunting guide and houndsman who worked for Lemon pleaded guilty to assisting with a December 2020 canned hunt,” Peterson added. “Kacey Alan Yardley, 47, of Enoch, Utah, was sentenced in July 2024 to six months of probation.”
Despite pleading guilty to the federal charges, “Lemon wants to go to trial in state court,” Peterson continued, “to fight a higher-profile felony charge — which stems from a 2018 hunt in which Donald Trump Jr. bagged a bear on May 18, 2018 and a cougar on May 19, 2018.
Utah case delayed nine times
“That state case has been delayed nine times while Lemon awaited the outcome of the federal prosecution,” wrote Peterson.
Jury selection for the case is currently set for February 10, 2025.
The federal case was initially delayed in part to keep it from resurfacing in national headlines during the 2020 national election campaign, in which then-President Donald Trump ultimately lost to current U.S. president Joe Biden.
One reason cited for the delay in prosecuting both the 2020 federal case and further delay now in prosecuting the Utah state case was, and is, the potential difficulty of seating an impartial jury in Utah, where Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 and is expected to win again in 2024.
“Charging documents allege Lemon used illegal bait — ‘a pile of grain, oil and pastries’ — to lure the black bear that Trump Jr. later shot,” said Peterson.
“Hunter Nation”
Donald Trump Jr. was in Utah on May 18, 2018 “to help launch Hunter Nation, a hunting advocacy group,” Peterson recalled in a 2022 exposé of the case.
“That group would later launch its own super PAC, Hunter Nation Action, which spent $96,997 in ads against Democrats in the 2020 election, according to the campaign spending transparency site Open Secrets,” explained Peterson.
Hunter Nation Action was founded in 2018 by persons including Don Peay, whom Peterson identified as “Utah campaign manager for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.”
Donald Trump Jr. was not named in the Utah state filing against Lemon,” Peterson reported in 2022, “but the Utah Department of Natural Resources confirmed his identity as the person named in the felony complaint as Lemon’s ‘client’ on the hunt.
What did he know & when did he know it?
“Prosecutors have indicated there was no evidence showing Trump Jr. would have known about the alleged baiting that went on during the hunt,” Peterson added.
But concealing baiting and other unethical practices from affluent and politically well-placed clients is an ancient standard practice of gamekeepers, whose job since ancient times has been to preserve the illusion that their clients are mighty hunters, while providing the clients with a smokescreen of plausible deniability if anything goes wrong.
“The charges against Lemon from the Trump Jr. hunt were filed just before the four-year statute of limitations expired,” Peterson continued in 2022.
“The Department of Natural Resources initially investigated allegations of illegal bear baiting on the hunt in 2018 and closed the case later that year.”
Friends in high places
But the Utah Department of Natural Resources reopened the case in 2020, withholding files pertaining to it until after the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The Utah Department of Natural Resources “turned the case over to the Utah Attorney General’s Office,” Peterson reported.
“Utah attorney general Sean Reyes has close ties to Trump,” Peterson observed, “having campaigned for him, even flying to Nevada to investigate the election results after Trump’s defeat at the polls and signing on to a lawsuit claiming ‘unlawful election results.’”
The Nevada case was twice thrown out of court due to lack of supporting evidence.
(Facebook photo)
“WLH” for Wade Lemon Hunting
“The Attorney General’s Office reinvestigated the case against Lemon for alleged poaching for months, then handed it off to the Davis County Attorney’s Office,” Peterson recounted.
The Davis County Attorney finally charged Lemon.
“Charging documents allege Lemon’s outfitters illegally used bait on the bear shot by Trump Jr.,” Peterson said, describing how “The illegal bait was discovered with a trail camera pointed right on it with ‘WLH’ (for Wade Lemon Hunting) written on the side and with Lemon’s own telephone number.
“The charging documents also include evidence from a subordinate confirming Lemon had him place the bait in the location several weeks before the hunt.”
Repeatedly investigated
“Lemon’s hunting business has been repeatedly investigated by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources,” mentioned Peterson.
“In 2009, Division of Wildlife Resources officer Hal Stout reported that on a hunt near Nine Mile Canyon in Carbon County, Lemon’s employees treed a bear by building a fire at the base of it so the bear wouldn’t escape while they tried to rush a hunter to the spot.
“No charges were filed after that investigation.
“Lemon was also investigated for an alleged ‘canned hunt’ involving a cougar in 2011, which also did not result in charges.”
Specifically, “an informant told the Utah Division of Natural Resources that Lemon had a mountain lion treed and that ‘the lion hunter had his own private plane and was flying in tomorrow to shoot it.’”
Bighorn sheep
Lemon in 2016 “was investigated for allegedly taking a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep from an off-limits area on Mount Nebo,” Peterson continued.
“That case was dismissed because the Department of Wildlife Resources had not updated its guidebooks and a Department of Wildlife Resources employee had given Lemon confirmation that he could lead a guided hunt on the mountain,” Pererson said.
“Former Division of Wildlife Resources director Mike Fowlks attended at least one hunt with Lemon’s outfit,” Peterson found earlier.
“In a May 14, 2020, Instagram post from Wade Lemon Hunting, Fowlks is shown posing with a recently killed bear.
“Fowlks,” now retired, “was Division of Wildlife Resources director during the 2018 investigation” of the hunt by Trump Jr., Peterson recalled, “and was also law enforcement section chief during the previous Lemon investigations.
Wolves
Even apart from Lemon going to federal prison, if only for two months, much happened on September 19, 2024 of significance to Rocky Mountains wildlife.
Within Colorado, controversy raged about the recent relocation of the Copper Creek wolf pack, six wolves who in December 2023 were released to reintroduce wolves to the state, but were relocated after preying upon sheep belonging to a rancher who vehemently opposed the reintroduction.
Two of the wolves died soon after being moved.
Black bears are by far the most abundant large predators in Colorado, distantly followed by pumas, but Coloradans, including ranchers, have learned to live with them, even after the 1992 passage of Colorado Amendment 10, forbidding use of hounds to hunt bears.
Blackfooted ferrets
Colorado Parks & Wildlife on September 19, 2024 announced that a blackfooted ferret reintroduction, begun in 2021, had produced wild-born blackfooted ferret kittens.
Blackfooted ferrets, believed to have been extinct until a single colony was discovered in Wyoming in 1981, are voracious predators of prairie dogs, who are simultaneously abundant and threatened by habitat loss and mass poisoning by cattle and sheep ranchers.
“Epic prairie adventure”
Poisoning prairie dogs can divert predators including wolves, coyotes, badgers, bobcats, and young pumas to hunting livestock, but ranching foes of prairie dogs remain slow to understand the relevant predator/prey relationships.
“I am in day 22 of a 24 day epic prairie adventure with my prairie dog soulmates,” Humane Society of the U.S. Prairie Dog Conflict Resolution team leader Dave Pauli on September 19, 2024 posted to Facebook from Badlands National Park, South Dakota, home of the only known self-sustaining blackfooted ferret habitat.
“We have rescued 663 prairie dogs from future poisoning and moved their intact families to protected areas!” Pauli said.
“Prairie dogs, ferrets, pronghorn, rattlesnakes, and bison have filled my days and my heart with magic!”
(Beth Clifton photo/collage)
Wild horses
Back in Colorado, Jennifer Brown of The Trust Project reported, also on September 19, 2024, that “A week-long U.S. Bureau of Land Management roundup of wild horses,” in the Little Book Cliffs region near Palisade, “ended with the capture of about 140 mustangs and three horse deaths,” including a 24-year-old mare who “broke a leg as the low-flying helicopter was driving horses into a corral,” and “was euthanized by a veterinarian after she broke her leg on the last day of the roundup.
“Her foal was sent to a ‘foster family’ on a local ranch,” Brown said, “instead of going with other wild horses to holding pens on prison grounds in Cañon City.
“The other two horses who died were euthanized because of pre-existing conditions,” Brown said.
Wild horses, livestock, & pumas
These included “a 2-year-old mare with a knee injury and a 23-year-old mare with a leg injury and “severe” infection, according to federal land managers.
“About 30 to 40 of the horses captured will return to the range,” Brown added.
Wild horse removals reduce competition between the horses and cattle and sheep for grass and water on land leased by ranchers from the Bureau of Land Management.
Keeping wild horse numbers down, in theory anyhow, also helps to keep pumas out of sheep and cattle grazing habitat.
In late winter and early spring, pumas prey on debilitated older horses and early-born foals, before ranchers return cattle and sheep to the range.
The fewer debilitated older horses and early-born foals there are on livestock grazing pastures when livestock are released, the fewer pumas will be waiting in ambush for the unwary.
Dan Ashe endorses Proposition 127
Finally on September 19, 2024, Julie Marshall and Samantha Miller, promoting passage of Proposition 127, exulted when former National Wildlife Refuge system chief and Association of Zoos & Aquariums president Dan Ashe endorsed Cats Aren’t Trophies in an op-ed column for the Colorado Springs Gazette.
Ashe emphasized the “vital work” of pumas “as a bulwark against chronic wasting disease,” citing an always fatal affliction of deer and elk identified in in 1967, now also epidemic in seven other states to which Colorado game ranches sold ranched deer and elk decades ago.
(See Can guts of wolves & mountain lions purge North America of CWD?)
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