The truth hurts.
Via NBC News:
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Tuesday in part blamed “radical environmental groups” for contributing to wildfire conditions.
Zinke, in a conference call on Tuesday, said “every time there is a thinning project out, who’s suing?” when he was asked about President Donald Trump’s much-derided tweets and comments about “forest management” made as the deadly Camp and Woolsey fires raged and during a visit to the state last weekend.
“When lawsuit after lawsuit by, yes, the radical environmental groups that would rather burn down the entire forest than, than cut a single tree or thin the forest,” Zinke told reporters. “And it’s easy to find who, who is suing, and who promulgates these destructive policies.”[…]
But after the secretary’s comments on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Department of Interior, Heather Swift, said Zinke was speaking about the larger national issue of environmental groups suing over timber management and prescribed burn projects — not necessarily the two fires currently burning in the West.
She said “that is not a California-only problem, we have seen this over and over again across the West,” and highlighted objections to timber sales in Oregon.