Zinke and Sheehy pay each other with your money
Ed Berry
In 2017, Zinke stiffed me on my $37,500 invoice for my intensive review of an in-house climate alarmism publication for DOI, while giving millions of dollars to his buddy Sheehy. Nice guy.
The following articles, easily found on the Internet, show how Stinky Zinke had DOI pay Shady Sheehy millions of dollars, and in return, Shady Sheehy contributed millions back to Stinky Zinke’s campaign.
Hey, that’s what friends are for. Seals gotta stick together.
But that is not the end of their conflicts of interest.
A. Ryan Zinke: Out for Himself and his Friends, not Montanans
https://dccc.org/ryan-zinke-out-for-himself-and-his-friends-not-montanans/
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Ryan Zinke’s ethical lapses are once again in the spotlight after he was caught in yet another scandal.
As Interior Secretary, Zinke awarded Tim Sheehy’s company their first federal contract. Ever since, Sheehy has “shower[ed]” Zinke with campaign cash…
HuffPost:
The Interior Department under former President Donald Trump, which was led by now-Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) at the time, awarded Bridger Aerospace its first federal contracts in 2018, The Daily Beast reported…Sheehy has called Zinke a personal friend and donated nearly $50,000 to Zinke’s reelection campaigns, according to The Daily Beast.
Reminder:
Zinke’s time as Interior Secretary was plagued by allegations of corruption, facing 18 federal investigations and using taxpayer dollars to live a life of luxury.
DCCC Spokesperson Mallory Payne:
“Ryan Zinke’s number one priority is using public office and Montanans’ hard-earned tax dollars to fight for himself and his wealthy donors. Working Montana families will remember his self-dealing in November.”
B. Shady Sheehy Is a Rich Out-of-Stater Who Will Change Montana for the Worse
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Helena, MT – While Shady Sheehy is under the microscope this week, here’s a reminder that Sheehy is just another rich out-of-stater who will change Montana for the worse.
Sheehy is a rich out-of-stater who uses his insider connections to get what he wants:
- Sheehy used his business associate to lower his property taxes on his mansion in Big Sky – saving himself tens of thousands of dollars as Montana families saw their property taxes skyrocket.
- Sheehy and his family members poured nearly $50,000 into Rep. Ryan Zinke’s campaign and PAC while Zinke was introducing a bill Bridger Aerospace lobbied for. Zinke, who was a personal friend of Sheehy’s, also awarded Bridger Aerospace its very first Interior Department contract – just months after he became Secretary of the Interior.
- After Sheehy donated $2,000 to Gianforte’s campaigns, Sheehy personally emailed his “close friend and mentor” Governor Greg Gianforte to “introduce a tax cut that would benefit wealthy out-of-state investors” like him.
- Sheehy blocked Montana hunters from accessing his “prime elk hunting land,” but charged rich tourists $10,000 a week to hunt.
Sheehy doesn’t know the first thing about Montana values – he’ll change Montana for the worse:
- Sheehy called to transfer public lands – which would make it easier to sell off Montana’s public lands to multimillionaire out-of-staters like him.
- Sheehy’s “pure privatization” health care plan would decimate health care in Montana. His plan would shutter rural hospitals, eliminate Medicare, and raise costs for hundreds of thousands of Montantans.
- Sheehy’s is backed by, and campaigning with, an organization that has supported closing VA clinics across rural Montana. These clinics are lifelines for veterans, and closing them would force veterans to travel far and wide to seek the care they need.
C: “Swampy” Sheehy Poured Donations into Zinke’s Campaign After Securing Federal Favors
Monday, October 16, 2023
Helena, MT – There is no end in sight for multimillionaire Montana newcomer Tim Sheehy’s expanding list of ethics issues. Today, reporting from the Daily Beast shed light on the cozy relationship between Sheehy, his business, and Rep. Ryan Zinke.
The reporting reveals that Sheehy and his family members poured nearly $50,000 into Zinke’s campaign and PAC while Zinke was introducing a bill Bridger Aerospace lobbied for.
Zinke, who was a personal friend of Sheehy’s, also awarded Bridger Aerospace its very first Interior Department contract – just months after he became Secretary of the Interior.
Read more about the Sheehy-Zinke relationship and why it’s “not what a lot of Americans may consider to be ethical”
D. Daily Beast: Sheehy Has a Swampy Connection to Rep Zinke
By Roger Sollenberger and Jake Lahut
Oct 16, 2023
- Bridger Aerospace, a Montana-based aerial firefighting company which Sheehy founded and still runs, has reaped millions of dollars from the same system that Sheehy has decried as a candidate, according to a review of government contracts, lobbying disclosures, and political donations.
- Years ago, when Zinke was Secretary of the Interior in the Trump administration, his department awarded Sheehy’s company its very first contract. Since then, Sheehy and his family have gone on to shower their fellow Montana Republican with political contributions, while Bridger lobbied to pass industry-friendly legislation introduced by Zinke.
- Sheehy and his family have donated nearly $50,000 to Zinke’s campaigns since last January, all while Zinke has pushed legislation that would benefit Bridger.
- Sheehy could present a potentially novel new conflict of interest: the first sitting senator in charge of a private company that holds millions of dollars in federal contracts […] he has not said whether he will divest from Bridger, which is publicly traded.
- In what is almost certainly a sign of more self-funding to come, Sheehy already cut a $500,000 loan to his campaign, according to the campaign’s first Federal Election Commission filing, released on Sunday. The filing also shows that the campaign has paid Bridger roughly $32,000 from July through September, for expenses listed as office space and flights.
- Bridger, which first registered as a Montana company in 2014, had never received a federal contract in the contract-dependent industry of aerial firefighting until Jan. 2018—nine months after Zinke took over at the Interior Department. That month, federal spending records show, Interior steered a contract to Bridger alias “Mountain Air LLC.” It has since paid out about $2 million […] Bridger landed three other federal contracts under Zinke’s brief tenure as Interior secretary, federal records show.
- Last year, federal clients accounted for 96 percent of Bridger’s $47 million revenue last year, according to its annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- When Zinke launched his 2022 congressional campaign after cooling his heels for three years, Sheehy was behind him. Between January 2022 and June of this year, Sheehy and three of his close family members contributed nearly $50,000 combined to Zinke’s campaign and leadership PAC, according to FEC data.
- Most of it, however, came this year—after Zinke was already elected. And those 2023 donations appear to align with Bridger’s lobbying efforts on legislation that Zinke had sponsored.
- In March, for instance, Sheehy and his wife contributed roughly $15,000 to Zinke and his leadership PAC soon after the congressman introduced a bill that aimed to make fire retardants exempt from federal environmental restrictions. Bridger had retained lobbying firm Collective Strategies the month before Zinke announced the bill, federal lobbying disclosures show.
- [Sheehy and his wife] joined up with Sheehy’s brother and business partner, Matt—chairman of Bridger and Ascent Vision Technologies—to kick another $20,000 to Zinke, all on May 3, per FEC data. (Matt Sheehy’s gift to the leadership PAC exceeded the individual contribution limit, and $5,000 was reallocated to his wife in June.) Bridger paid Collective Strategies $20,000 over the same timeline to lobby for that specific piece of legislation, disclosures show.
- Spaulding, of Common Cause, told The Daily Beast that he couldn’t think of any precedent where a sitting senator owned a private company that held federal contracts. Elected officials should observe “the highest ethical standards,” he said, and argued Sheehy’s constituents deserve to know whether he will cut all ties, including divestiture.
- “As long as he and his family hold a major ownership stake in the company, and the company continues to pursue federal contracts,” Libowitz said, “his constituents will question whether he’s acting purely in their interests or whether he’s using his position in a way to financially benefit himself.”
E. Top GOP Recruit Sheehy has a Swampy Connection to Rep Zinke
Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy is running against the “Washington complex,” but his relationship with Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) appears to be business as usual.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has awarded a “Call When Needed” contract to Bridger Aerospace, Insitu, Pathways2Solutions and Precision Integrated for small UAS services.
Described as a first of its kind for DOI, the contract will allow DOI to obtain “fully contractor-operated and maintained” small UAS that are ready when needed to support a variety of operations, including wildland fire operations, search and rescue, emergency management and other resource missions in the Contiguous 48 States and Alaska.
“This contract reinforces our commitment to partnering with industry to provide our employees with the latest technology in carrying out their responsibilities as stewards of our nation’s public lands while also ensuring their safety is paramount,”
says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke.
DOI, now under Democrats, is still funding Bridger Aerospace Group, LLC
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_140D0424F0210_1406_140D0423D0083_1406
F. Bridger Aerospace is being sued by two former employees for breach of contract.
By Jesse Valentine – July 22, 2024
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tim Sheehy of Montana routinely touts his business experience as an asset on the campaign trail.
Financial reports suggest the company he led is in dire straits.
Sheehy was the founder and CEO of Bridger Aerospace, a producer of aerial firefighting technology. He resigned from the company on Jul. 1. In a statement, Sheehy suggested he was stepping down to focus on his campaign.
“This exceptional team deserves a fully focused CEO during its busy fire season,”
Sheehy said.
“Now that I have won the primary election, it is appropriate for me to allow our leadership team to focus on their duties. I look forward to watching their continued success.”
In recent months, however, Bridger Aerospace has been rocked by financial losses and lawsuits.
The Montana Free Press reported in April that Bridger Aerospace had a net loss of $77.4 million in 2023. The company’s reported assets totaled about $45 million, which is $107 million less than the previous year. Some of these losses have been attributed to increased operational costs that the company says will lead to high revenue in the future.
On July 9, the Bridger Aerospace stock value hit a 52-week low.
In May, the Daily Montanan reported that two former Bridger Aerospace employees were suing the company for breach of contract. The plaintiffs claim they were coerced into selling off their vested stock in the company shortly before Bridger Aerospace went public in 2023. The suit explicitly names Sheehy and his brother as perpetrators of this deceit. The suit does not state how many shares the plaintiffs owned and requests the court’s help determining financial damages.
Sheehy has denied these allegations.
More lawsuits may come.
On July 1, Bridger Aerospace disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had overstated its financial health. This report resulted in an immediate drop in stock value.
Two separate New York City-based law firms are investigating the matter and have asked shareholders to come forward with information.
Sheehy has made his private sector experience a key part of his campaign pitch. He spoke about his business during a candidate forum in March in Frenchtown, Montana.
In a campaign ad, Sheehy claimed his business’ success would enable him to make decisions through an independent, nonpartisan lens.
“I created a successful business from scratch,”
Sheehy says in the ad.
“I created hundreds of jobs. I don’t need the money from lobbyists. I can do the right thing in office because it’s the right thing for America.”
In 2023, Sheehy’s Bridger Aerospace paid Sheehy $2.46 million.
G. Tim Sheehy, GOP Senate hopeful, Double Dips on Climate | HuffPost Latest News
Aug 19, 2023, 08:19 AM EDT
When it came to growing and promoting his aerial firefighting company, Montana businessman Tim Sheehy was, for years, outspoken about the need to combat global climate change, even publicly supporting a major initiative to curb emissions and invest in climate resilience.
But since launching his Republican bid for Senate in June, Sheehy has toed the party line on climate, railing against what he calls the “climate cult” and the “disastrous socialist Green New Deal.”
On one hand, his sudden shift is unsurprising, given he’s seeking the Republican nomination in an increasingly deep-red state. Here’s how Montana writer James Conner recently summarized the political landscape:
“This is what a candidate does to prepare for a Republican primary. Acknowledging that the globe is warming won’t hurt him in a general election, but it will in a primary.”
On the other hand, it is a shameless display of opportunism and partisan rhetoric that comes as the nation suffers rapidly worsening climate impacts — and as Sheehy’s company, Bridger Aerospace, continues to tout itself as a leader in the fight against planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Sheehy and his campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment by press time.
A decorated former Navy SEAL, Sheehy is campaigning for a chance to take on Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in 2024. He is widely expected to face far-right Rep. Matt Rosedale (R-Mont.) in the Republican primary, although Rosedale has not officially announced his candidacy.
Tim Sheehy, founder and CEO of Bridger Aerospace, pauses during a tour of the company’s facility on Aug. 30, 2022, in Belgrade, Montana. Sheehy announced in June that he’ll seek the 2024 GOP nomination to challenge Montana’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.
Sheehy founded Bridger Aerospace in 2014 after retiring from the military. The company has grown exponentially in recent years, with a fleet of 28 aircraft, including several water scoopers, that have assisted in battling fires across the Western U.S. and parts of Canada.
In 2022, the company raked in more than $46 million in revenue — 96% of which came from federal contracts, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Sheehy earned nearly $5 million in salary and bonuses as the company’s CEO last year and owns company stock that as of Friday was valued at $83 million.
Sheehy has continued to serve as Bridger’s chief executive officer since launching his Senate bid, and campaign advertisements have prominently featured the company’s aircraft. If elected to the Senate, he would have oversight over the same federal agencies that have bankrolled his business.
All of this has raised conflict of interest questions, as Bloomberg and NBC News have reported.
Climate change has been a major part of Bridger Aerospace’s marketing and business strategy.
In a presentation to investors this month, the company boasted that its mission is to “directly attack CO2 emissions to combat climate change.”
One slide includes a graphic detailing the “vicious cycle” between increasingly catastrophic wildfires, carbon pollution and planetary warming.
Another notes that “climate change has elongated the active northern hemisphere fire season.”
In a separate presentation this month about its second-quarter earnings, Bridger wrote that
“demand for aerial firefighting continues to grow driven by climate change, population moving to wildfire prone areas and shift from ground to air-based suppression.”
A Bridger filing with the SEC for the 2022 fiscal year features the word “climate” dozens of times, mostly in the context of how climate change could impact the company’s future business.
“We are not able to accurately predict the materiality of any potential losses or costs associated with the physical effects of climate change,” it reads. “We believe that rising global temperatures have been, and in the future are expected to be, one factor contributing to increasing rates and severity of wildfires. Climate change and global temperatures are impacted my [sic] many variables, however, and cannot be predicted with certainty.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the powerful National Republican Senatorial Committee, is among several Republicans who have endorsed Sheehy, citing his experience as a combat veteran, successful businessman and job creator.
But what Daines and others aren’t talking about is how the Republican hopeful made his fortune helping confront a crisis that the GOP has for decades denied and downplayed while working to boost the production of planet-warming fossil fuels.
Sheehy also seems to be distancing himself from that legacy.
Sometime before Sheehy announced his Senate bid, Bridger scrubbed climate language from its website, including a line about the company “fighting on the front lines of climate change,” ABC News reported last month.
A spokesperson for Sheehy told ABC at the time that it was nothing more than a routine website update.
Yet his rhetoric on the campaign trail would suggest otherwise.
Sheehy’s campaign website features an issues page that is chock-full of favorite Republican talking points. In a section on forest management, Sheehy touts having created 200 jobs in the aerial firefighting sector before railing against both the federal government — his company’s biggest client — and “radical environmentalists.”
“I have a unique perspective on what the federal government is failing to address when it comes to tackling wildfires—they need to let Montana start managing our federal lands,”
the website reads, seemingly flirting with a full embrace of the unpopular movement to transfer control of federal lands to states.
“We also need to stand strong against the radical environmentalists who are suing and shutting down timber projects with frivolous litigation. If we can responsibly manage our forests, we can harvest timber, create high-paying jobs, and reduce the threat of wildfires.”
Another section of the website, on the economy and energy, notes that the U.S. must “take a strong stand against the disastrous socialist Green New Deal that would destroy Montana’s economy and jobs and devastate our communities.”
But as recently as two years ago, Sheehy publicly supported major climate initiatives, including a blue state legislative package with provisions that mirror aspects of the Green New Deal, a progressive set of guiding principles to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience.
In March 2021, a few weeks after President Joe Biden reentered the United States into the Paris climate accord, Sheehy published an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune applauding a newly formed, bipartisan wildfire caucus in Congress.
In it, he called for global cooperation to fight climate change.
“There are several explanations for the proliferation and escalating damage of wildfires, and addressing those causes requires renewed attention of local, state and federal governments and — when it comes to climate change — international cooperation,”
Sheehy wrote.
Several months later, Sheehy appeared on CBS News to discuss the growing threat of wildfires in the West and a $15 billion climate package that California had recently passed into law.
In the interview, he discussed the many complex factors driving extreme fire, including climate change and decades of fire suppression that have left forests choked in excess fuels.
“Ultimately what he’s doing is finally bringing the necessary legislative and government focus to the wildland fire issue, which has been plaguing the U.S. for decades,”
Sheehy said of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“And how we’ve addressed it has really been antiquated and an incremental approach that is underfunded, under-resourced, undermanned, and put the entire situation into a category where we’re always reacting to the fires instead of being prepared for them ahead of time.”
“It’s great to see at least one of our state leaders now stepping up and providing the proper amount of funding and resources to address the issue,”
he added.
The California climate package that impressed Sheehy so much contained billions for wildfire, forest and drought resilience.
But it also funded Green New Deal-esque initiatives that have become a target of the GOP’s environmental culture wars, including $3.9 billion for electric vehicle investments and grants for environmental justice projects.
In the weeks since announcing his Senate campaign, Sheehy’s rhetoric has only grown increasingly partisan and bizarre.
In an interview with Fox News last month, he called American fossil fuels “the cleanest form of energy known to man” — a wildly inaccurate statement.
Earlier this week, a Montana judge ruled in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who sued the state in 2020 and argued that state agencies had violated their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment” by approving fossil fuel projects without considering climate impacts.
Sheehy joined Daines and other Montana Republicans in attacking the judge, the young Montana plaintiffs — his would-be constituents — and Democratic climate policies.
“The latest example of a liberal activist judge trying to legislate radical Green New Deal disastrous policies from the bench,”
Sheehy wrote on social media.
“We must fight back and take a strong stand against the climate cult and their job-killing agenda.”
Just not when it involves securing government contracts to confront the threat of climate-exacerbated wildfire, apparently.
H. Montana GOP Candidate Took The ‘Government Fiat’ Money That He Campaigns Against
By Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost
Oct 26, 2023, 06:15 PM EDT
Senate candidate Tim Sheehy has repeatedly decried what he views as wasteful spending by the Biden administration — but it turns out his company benefited from it.
Tim Sheehy, the Montana businessman who is vying to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, received a $210,000 grant from Democrats’ American Rescue Plan — a federal COVID-19 relief package that Sheehy has repeatedly condemned on the campaign trail.
Sheehy is the founder of Bridger Aerospace, a Bozeman-based aerial firefighting company that relies almost entirely on federal contracts. In March 2022, Bridger was awarded $210,000 from the American Rescue Plan’s Workforce Training Grant Program, which provides funding to businesses to train employees.
The grant, part of $1.5 billion in American Rescue Plan funding allocated to Montana, has not been previously reported.
Since launching his Senate bid in June, Sheehy has repeatedly decried what he views as wasteful spending by the Biden administration, including the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package.
In an interview with Montana radio station KGVO shortly after announcing his campaign, Sheehy said COVID taught his state that the federal government “is not the solution to our problems.”
“It’s not the solution to educating our children. It’s not the solution to our health care. It’s not the solution to our economy,” he said. “Because when the government pumps trillions of dollars into the economy, we get inflation, which has had an extremely targeted impact on rural states like Montana.’”
In an interview with Breitbart News in July, Sheehy slammed Biden’s economic agenda, dubbed “Bidenomics,” which the American Rescue Plan is part of.
“Luckily, Bidenomics rhymes with bad economics — ‘Badenomics,’ I guess we can call it,” he said. “If we’re going to pump trillions of dollars of government fiat money into the economy, everyone said, ‘Hey, there’s going to be massive inflation on the back end of this.
No, there won’t. It’ll be transitory, just a few weeks of it.’ No, it’s going to be a fundamental shift in our interest rate basis, because when you literally pump trillions of dollars of essentially artificial currency into our economy, inflation will follow. And sure enough, it did, because it’s pretty basic math when it comes down to that kind of an economic seesaw model.”
Sheehy went on to declare that Democratic policies during the pandemic “made it crystal clear what the Democrats want in their utopia, in their perfect world, when they had complete control with their emergency powers we saw what they wanted.”
He then aired a long list of right-wing, culture war grievances.
Sheehy’s campaign did not address HuffPost’s specific questions about the ARP money, instead providing a statement full of deflection.
“Montana job creator and decorated combat veteran Tim Sheehy knows that Democrats in Washington like Joe Biden and Jon Tester are bankrupting our children’s future with their out-of-control spending,” a campaign spokesperson said in an email.
“While we know the Huffington Post would never ask Jon Tester why he voted for the American Rescue Plan – which didn’t create the 4 million jobs promised by the Biden administration and saddled our country with record high inflation and debt – when Tim Sheehy is in the U.S. Senate, he will be proud to rein in government spending and find areas throughout our bloated bureaucratic budget to slash.”
(This publication is no longer called The Huffington Post. Its name changed to HuffPost as part of a rebrand in 2017.)
It is unclear exactly how the money for Bridger is to be used. The contract simply states that the funding is for “new job training activities.” A Montana dashboard for American Rescue Plan funds notes that the $210,000 has been awarded but not yet paid to Bridger Aerospace.
That Sheehy is benefitting from federal aid that he now argues is driving inflation is just the latest example of him and his company double-dipping on partisan issues.
As HuffPost previously reported, Bridger has repeatedly promoted itself as a leader in the fight against climate change and planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, securing tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts along the way. Meanwhile, Sheehy has toed the Republican party line on climate, railing against the so-called “climate cult,” “radical environmentalists” and the “disastrous socialist Green New Deal.”
He also consistently slams the federal government, his company’s biggest client. As HuffPost reported, Bridger reported revenue of more than $46 million last year — 96% of which came from federal contracts.
That same year, Sheehy earned nearly $5 million in salary and bonuses as the company’s CEO, and his stock in the company is valued at more than $50 million.
In an interview with Fox Business in June, the GOP hopeful said “he’s seen the power of the free market” and that Montanans “don’t want more government in their lives, whether it’s state government or federal government.”
“They want to be left alone to live their lives,” Sheehy said. “The federal government needs to stay in its lane.” He added that government COVID-19 stimulus policies “have really impacted the bedrock of Montana and people are frustrated.”
But in Sheehy’s case, not frustrated enough to not apply for and receive stimulus money.
Dear Skipper Ed Berry!
You won in the San Francisco Bay sailing races with complicated breezes and tricky currents.
You do the same in legal battles for truth in climate science.
Congratulations and thanks from you science admirers and fans.
John Shanahan
allaboutenergy.net