OIG on BLM behavior

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently released a report regarding suspected misconduct on the part of a BLM senior law enforcement manager. According to the report, the OIG found that the BLM senior law enforcement manager (not named) had instructed a subordinate employee to remove evidence from the BLM’s Office of Law Enforcement and Security evidence room, which he then gave as gifts to several people, including the contractor who had worked on the evidence room. The evidence in question were several “moqui marbles”—naturally occurring spherical deposits of iron oxide—that had been taken as evidence in a 2012 case. In the 2012 case, BLM law enforcement was investigating allegations of thousands of the marbles being illegally removed from national parks. The large volume of golf ball-sized marbles held as evidence—kept in over 80 5-gallon buckets—were valued at $160,000-520,000, though the report did not specify the value of the illegally gifted marbles.