561: Biden's commutation of North Dakota man 'despicable' says prosecutor

McLean County State's Attorney Ladd Erickson has not been mincing words in his reaction to some of President Joe Biden's pardons that impact our region. He's called them "ridiculous" and "despicable," though he wants to be clear that this didn't have anything to do with politics.

"Some of the stuff that President Trump said he's going to pardon is despicable," he said on this episode of Plain Talk. But at least one of Biden's pardons is very, very personal to him.

Erickson was involved in bringing Hunter Hanson to justice. Hanson defrauded dozens of people to the tune of about $11 million, but as Erickson explained to us on the show, his victim pool is larger than that. Whole businesses, some of which were the pillars of their small, rural communities, collapsed as a result of Hanson's actions.

And President Biden commuted his sentence. Why? "I have no idea," Erickson told us, "and that's one of the frustrations."

Also on this episode, Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, weighs in on the controversy over the proposed Maah Daah Hey National Monument. A group of activists are pushing hard to get President Biden to create this monument with an executive order on his way out of office, but Patten says it's far too big a decision to be made unilaterally in Washington D.C.

"This is 140,000 acres," he said. "This is twice the size of Theodore Roosevelt National Park."

He also said that Biden using the authority of the Antiquities Act would be in appropriate. "It's a circumvention of congressional intent when wilderness is declared a national monument."

Patten said his criticism of the project isn't political. "As the proposal sits, I don't care who the president is, there would be opposition." He would prefer that local stakeholders in North Dakota -- from agricultural interests to industrial interests to tribes and all levels of state and local government -- work together on a plan to address whatever protections these lands need.

"Do we need to include the federal to do that? No we don't," he said.

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