A game warden in Helena, Mont., received a call one morning in March 2021 with a request he knew would never happen. Bosses and friends in the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department asked people to officially record the killing of wolves, a request closer to their actions save one detail.
The hunter is the governor of the state, Greg Gianforte.
“I said I didn’t want to be involved,” the warden, Justin Hawkaluk, recalled with a barely audible laugh.
Mr. Hawkaluk now says that his fears were justified. By the time the wolf relationship is over, the superior has forced him to lie about the role of the governor, and the boss will be forced out of the department, said The New York Times in the first interview about the episode. He will also leave a job he says he loves.
The story of the governor, the wolf and the warden made some waves when it first broke. Wolf hunting is legal and quite common in Montana. Mr. Gianforte was recorded as an animal killer, an adult black wolf, and given a warning for not taking a required trapping course. A spokeswoman for the governor said Mr. Gianforte “immediately corrected his mistake” by taking the course. A spokesman for the department said at the time that the matter had been handled as it would have been for anyone.
But Mr. Gianforte, a Republican, is running for re-election this year, and some of the killings of protected species are unpleasant. The treatment of wolves is back in the news, after a snowmobiler in Wyoming struck one, taped his mouth and showed it in a bar before killing it.
Law enforcement officers involved in recording Mr. Gianforte’s wolf, referred to as No. 1155 by a tracker in Yellowstone National Park, now says the procedure is standard. They said the officials followed him to list the governor’s hunting friend, rather than the governor himself, as the shooter, in an effort to keep the governor from issuing a citation, and the officials bristled when the warden and his boss refused.
Mr Hawkaluk said he saw it as a “cover-up” effort.
“I don’t know if the governor has anything to do with it, or if he even knows about it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘Guys, nice to try, but, no, you have to take your medicine.'”
The governor’s spokesman, Sean Southard, did not immediately address whether Mr. Gianforte had participated in an attempt to foist hunting wolves on friends. However, he dismissed the warden’s account as a “leftist fever dream peddled by desperate partisans.”
Greg Lemon, a spokesman for the department, said the agency would not comment on personnel matters, but that the employees were doing their jobs “without political calculation or motivation.”
There is nothing illegal about killing radio-collared wolves that stray from national parks and onto private land. An estimated 250 to 300 Montana wolves are intentionally killed each year, some as trophies, some by ranchers who blame them for killing livestock. Since their reintroduction to the wilderness three decades ago, Montana wolves have been tracked and studied to see how they have affected their environment, both natural and man-made.
Before the wolf was shot, he was caught in a trap on a 213,000-acre ranch outside Yellowstone owned by the heirs to the Sinclair Oil fortune. It is not clear who made the foothold trap. Mr. Southard said Mr. Gianforte and two fellow trappers set and monitor traplines according to regulations.
But one day in March 2021, as required by regulation, Montana’s governor called the Fish, Wildlife and Parks hotline to report that he had shot and killed a trapped wolf.
A member of the department’s staff got the message that morning, and the chief of law enforcement for the department, Dave Loewen, called Mr. Hawkaluk to ask for help: Can he come to headquarters and write the wolf? And, oh, yes, Mr. Loewen added, the shooter was Governor Gianforte, a notoriously temperamental man who in 2017 was sentenced to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger management classes for assaulting a reporter the night before he won. seats in the DPR.
Minutes later, Mr. Loewen was told by the department head that Mr. Gianforte’s friend, an outspoken trapper named Matt Lumley, should be credited with the killing, Mr. Loewen said. Mr. Loewen called Mr. Hawkaluk to deliver the warning. Problem: Mr. Gianforte’s name is already in the database as a trapper of record.
“I could read between the lines,” Mr. Hawkaluk recalled. “I said, ‘Whoever you’re talking to there, you’d better tell the story straight, because Gianforte referred to him as a record trapper.’
“The whole thing felt icky,” he said.
With the warden refusing to participate, Mr. Loewen said that he and the deputy director of the department went to the department director’s office, where, sitting at the conference table, was Mr. Lumley. Mr. Loewen did not hesitate to link the killing of the governor. The superiors relented and agreed to honor the governor by killing them. Then he gave him a public warning for killing a wolf without the required trapping course.
From then on, Mr. Loewen’s condition worsened. Rumors began to circulate about inappropriate relationships with other department employees, Mr. Hawkaluk said and Mr. Loewen confirmed. When they were fired, Mr. Loewen was accused of creating a hostile work environment and placed on administrative leave in July 2022. He denied the allegations.
In October 2022, according to a letter explaining the terms of Mr. Loewen’s departure and received by The New York Times, Mr. Loewen was released after 22 years at the agency, with $150,000. The mediation fee will be paid by the state. In exchange, Mr. Loewen promised not to seek further compensation or disparage his former employer. The state promised not to humiliate Mr. Loewen either.
Recalling the nondisparagement clause, Mr. Loewen confirmed the chain of events that led to the warning being given to the governor but did not comment further.
“Yes, everything has happened,” he said about Mr. Hawkaluk’s timeline.
Mr. Southard, the governor’s spokesman, said he was confused about who was responsible for trapping the wolves. Both Mr. Gianforte and Mr. Lumley had set traps, and tags attached to the trap that had ensnared the wolf identified the two as the owner, he said.
“The governor has been trapped for almost 50 years,” Mr. Southard said. “Before the wolf harvest in 2021, they have been working to harvest wolves for the past five years, mostly through hunting and more recently through trapping.”
A spokesman for the governor blamed the resurgence of the wolf problem on “former state employees” who “may have a grudge.” Despite the conditions of Mr. Loewen’s release from the state work order that “he shall not humiliate another person,” Mr. Southard said that the former employee suffered such a grudge because “he may have been responsible for breaking the law or not complying with workplace policies.”
Mr. Loewen declined to comment on the governor’s response. Mr. Hawkaluk said he was not disgruntled when he left the agency in January to become a field consultant for the Montana Federation of Public Employees, and that he was never accused of breaking the law or board policy.
For state wolf protection advocates, the governor’s offense is not the lack of course, but the possible cruelty of the kill.
Trapped wolves suffer so much that they often chew on their trapped legs. Montana’s trapping regulations state that trappers “must immediately deliver untagged wolves” caught on traplines, and that the lines must be checked every 48 hours. The same regulations advise that trappers “may release unharmed collared wolves.” Captive animals are allowed to be killed, but many hunters avoid it because they do not respect the researchers who study it.
Since the Montana Legislature was in Helena, the capital, when Mr. Gianforte was killed, wolf experts doubted that the governor could set traps and then make the 177-mile journey to capture wolves quickly enough to meet the regulations he designed. to minimize suffering.
“The logistics are unreal,” said Nathan Varley, whose Yellowstone Wolf Tracker has been leading wolf-watching tours for 18 years. He added, “Even though wolves are frowned upon in the state of Montana, they are loved by enough people, because it’s not good optics to trap wolves. How bad is that?”
Mr. Southard resigned.
“The far left has sown the seeds of rumors about the harvest,” he said.
As for the original warning given to Mr. Gianforte, the person who designed the class that the governor did not take said the violation was serious. Improperly licensed hunters must receive fines refunded or lose their licenses, said Thomas Baumeister, now with the Montana chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
“Enforcement has a fair amount of discretion; there are some areas that are black and white,” Mr. Baumeister said. But with radio-collared wolves just outside Yellowstone, they are more definitive. “This,” he said, “is black and white.”
