Michael Boren, the Trump megadonor who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, repeatedly called agency offices, including once in the middle of the night, demanding more aircraft for a seven-acre fire that started near his Idaho mega-ranch, according to two Forest Service officials. A Washington Post analysis of flight paths found aircraft were pulled in from across the West, including a tanker taken off another fire in Nevada, at a cost of about $114,000, at a time when officials were warning that firefighting resources were stretched thin. Weeks earlier, a larger fire elsewhere in Idaho had drawn three aircraft for about thirteen minutes. Boren spent years fighting the Forest Service over that same ranch, an unpermitted airstrip and an unauthorized cabin on national forest land, before Trump put him in charge of the agency.
SourcesWashington Post · Politico E&E News
