Idaho militia leader Ammon Bundy is due back in court. But will he show up?

VPM | By Kirk Siegler

Published July 10, 2023 at 9:00 AM EDT

Ammon Bundy speaks to a crowd of supporters in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Antigovernment militant Ammon Bundy is scheduled to appear in a Boise, Idaho, court today facing charges in a civil lawsuit stemming from a tense protest in 2022 that led to the lockdown of one of Idaho’s largest hospitals.

St Luke’s health system filed suit against Bundy last year after his far-right People’s Rights group staged a protest against the hospitalization of one of his associate’s grandkids. With Bundy supporters stationing themselves outside hospital doors, and some calling for violence on social media, things became tense enough that the downtown Boise hospital was put on lockdown briefly. Emergency services had to be diverted to another facility in the suburbs.

It’s not clear whether Bundy will show up in court, as he’s spent much of the past year not responding to the civil case. In February, attorneys for St. Luke’s filed a motion for contempt against Bundy and are reportedly asking for punitive damages of $7.5 million. A district court judge later issued an arrest warrant for Bundy for failing to show up in court.

That warrant has not been served and Bundy remains free.

The Idaho Capitol Sun quoted a sworn court statement by St. Luke’s CEO Chris Roth from late last year: “I believe it is important that St. Luke’s stands up to the bullying, intimidation, disruption, and self-serving and menacing actions … inaction would signal that this type of behavior is acceptable in our community. It is not.”

In recent videos posted to social media, Bundy has remained defiant, claiming the hospital is harassing him.

“The people should have tore down the hospital to get that baby,” Bundy says in one recent You Tube video. “If I’m wrong I need therapy, I think. I truly believe people have the right to defend themselves.”

The civil case is just the latest in a string of legal battles going back to 2014 for Bundy, now a resident of Emmett, Idaho. Then, he helped his father Cliven lead an armed standoff over cattle grazing near the family’s Nevada ranch. In eastern Oregon in 2016, Ammon Bundy led a 41 day armed occupation of a federal bird sanctuary and was later acquitted by a jury on conspiracy charges.

During the pandemic, Bundy and his supporters were a frequent presence disrupting public meetings in the Boise area over mask rules and other health orders. In 2021, Bundy was arrested for trespassing and banned from the Idaho state capitol for one year.

His latest public fight with the hospital has led to concerns of yet another standoff brewing outside his rural Idaho home. A local sheriff this spring warned Bundy had become increasingly aggressive. In a recent op-ed letter, several retired Idaho law enforcement officials accused Bundy and his followers of intimidating and defaming police officers, hospital workers and other civil servants.

“Bundy and his followers recklessly break the law and then cry ‘persecution’ when they are forced to face the consequences of their illegal actions,” they wrote.

The jury trial is scheduled to begin today in Boise.

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Kirk Siegler

As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.

His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.

Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.

Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.

Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.

Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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