Letters to the editor, June 17, 2023

But in my review of that act, it is stated: the act “establishes that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the archivist as soon as the president leaves office.”

The “archivist” of mention is most likely the “National Archives & Records Administration — otherwise known as NARA.

How can anyone claim that provision is supportive of a former president or vice-president taking so called “presidential records” with him?

My guess is that it does not provide any penalty for violating the act. That must be why Donald Trump can flagrantly disobey it and claim it does not apply to him — and, in fact, empowers him to violate it. If there is no penalty for violating a law, then it is a mute law — and therefore, no law at all.

All I want to say to that is if you flagrantly violate a standard to which you agreed to sustain when you took office, then you do not deserve to ever hold that office — or any public office — again. In my mind, it’s called “integrity.” You abide by that to which you agree — or you have no right to claim respect.

Some would argue we can’t hold some to account and not others when those others do the same thing. But the real question should be: are they doing the same thing? Is President Joe Biden and for Vice President Mike Pence also guilty of the same thing when both have been found with “presidential records” in their homes after leaving office?

The question should be: who put them there — and when discovered, did either Biden or Pence resist returning them? We know that Donald Trump knew of what he was taking — and resisted returning them upon request. Time will tell if he not only kept records illegally, but may have also shared them; and such is clearly against the law. Isn’t it?

Francis William Bessler

Laramie

Wyoming’s wild horses

Amber Travsky’s article “Wild (feral) horses create a conundrum” published in the Laramie Boomerang on June 8, 2023, gave her opinion but little else.

I grew up in the very area this reporter is writing about. Wyoming wild horses occupy about 12% of Wyoming’s public lands.

Travsky is smack dab in the middle of a wild horse management area given to the wild horses in the 1971 Wild Horse Act & Law.

So hopefully you will see plenty of wild horses there, by law they are supposed be there.

All Travsky has to do is turn east out of the Wild Horses Herd Management Area and she’ll see zero wild horses and finally arrive in Nebraska. (Though she will see tens of thousands of cattle and sheep).

On her trip she will also pass several hundred thousand acres of public lands that are blocked by ranchers and private landowners who utilize our public lands for their livestock and yet deny public access to our public land.

This reporter remains silent about these several hundred thousand acres of public lands shut off to all Wyoming outdoors people.

Her description of the area puts her in the Muskrat Basin Wild Horse Management Area. By the Bureau of Land Management’s math, there should be around 1,300 hundred wild horses. This area of public and state land is 188,340 acres, at 1,300 horses this is 1 for every 144 acres. This year that same 144 acres will host 45 cow/calf pairs of grazing cattle.

If she is a biologist and worried about the wildlife in the area why would you not bring this up too?

If you truly love the wild horses before you write such nonfactual nonsense, know these two points:

First, know where you are at: You are in one of the last remaining wild horse herd management areas. If you go to the elk refuge in Jackson, do you whine about seeing elk?

Second, we have to remember these wild horse areas are given to them by federal law: You don’t want to see the horses, on the the remaining 12% they’re on? Go to the 88% of Wyoming public lands their not on.

Jim Brown

Casper

Editor’s note: The column by Amber Travsky, a Laramie Boomerang outdoors columnist and writer, referred to by the letter writer was written in a opinionated, first-person style about her casual observations while she was traveling and working in the area as a wildlife biologist. It was not intended as an investigative news story reporting about issues of wild horses in Wyoming. — David Watson, Boomerang managing editor