Police Say Ban Fracking Activists “Staged” SUV Hitting Protester At Last BLM Rally

 As national ban-fracking organizations prepare to deliver a letter to a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in Lakewood Colo. tomorrow morning urging federal officials to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” a Washington, D.C. publication has just exposed that these very groups apparently faked getting hit by an SUV at their last protest at that same BLM office.

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) recently demanded in a letter that the BLM investigate what they are calling a use of “violence and intimidation to retaliate against members of the public for the exercise of their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly.”

But a spokesperson for the Lakewood Police Department, that investigated the incident, says that “there really never was a case” and that “this incident appeared to have been staged.” As E&E News reports:

“The auctioneer was leaving [the parking lot] at about 2 mph, I’m told, and one of the protesters ran out in front the vehicle and obviously just laid down and started making the accusation that they were hit by the vehicle.”

EID has been busy over the last few months attending all the recent “Keep-it-in-the-Ground” protests and stunts, organized by out-of-state groups pretending to be “local” concerned citizens. Turns out that’s not the only pretending they’re doing.

As EID previously highlighted, these groups descended on the BLM office in Lakewood, Colo. this past November to protest the lease auction of 90,000 acres for oil and gas development in central and eastern parts of the state. And during the demonstration put on by 350.org, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch and the Rainforest Action Network among others, a group of protestors even took the extreme approach of  blocking the entrance to the government office’s parking lot (despite being asked to move by BLM staff and law enforcement agencies) which is when the non-incident took place.

But with a recent poll of Coloradans finding that “majorities of Republicans (95 percent), Independents (84 percent) and Democrats (69 percent) say that producing more oil and natural gas here in the U.S. is important to them,” it’s pretty clear that their extreme anti-fossil fuel agenda isn’t going over that well. Guess they’ll just have to keep faking it.