Read below to learn more about Jennifer Fielder’s history of reckless behavior: 

Jennifer Fielder is an extreme right-wing  politician living in Thompson Falls, Montana. She represented Montana Senate District 7 in the State Senate for eight years from 2012 to 2020. She has represented Public Service Commission District 4 since 2021 and is currently Vice-President of the five-member Commission. 

 

As a lawmaker, Fielder has been associated with or has actively supported several extremist groups and right-wing leaders including the Militia of Montana, white supremacist Jason Trochmann, the Oathkeepers (founded by convicted seditionist and rioter Stewart Rhodes who is now serving an 18-year sentence) and the Nevada-based Cliven Bundy.

 

Since 2015, she has been acting CEO of the extremist American Lands Council (ALC), a Utah-based non-profit organization that advocates for the transfer of federal lands to individual states. 

 

A long-time resident of Wenatchee, WA, Fielder has been a property owner in Sanders County, Montana since 2001. Six years after purchasing that property, in 2007, she sued Sanders County Commissioners to stop a developer from building roads near her house. She lost the suit, appealed to the Supreme Court, and lost again. Ultimately, this selfish litigation cost local taxpayers thousands of dollars in time and money.

 

MONTANA STATE SENATE: During her tenure in the State Senate, Fielder focused on natural resource issues. She was frequently at odds with hunters and anglers due to her role at the ALC and her legislative work to facilitate the transfer of American public lands to the state of Montana, a notable conflict of interest.​ 

 

In 2013, she passed a resolution creating a legislative working group to examine federal land management in Montana. Then, in 2015, she passed a bill creating a land-transfer working group, which was eventually vetoed by Governor Bullock. That bill united conservation groups from across Montana who organized a huge pro-public lands rally. The historic turnout at the rally led to a paradigm shift in public lands rhetoric within the political arena, forcing Republicans to flex their public lands bona fides in subsequent races for statewide and federal offices and reassure voters that they would not transfer or sell public lands.
 

Fielder and her colleagues at the ALC were so determined to pass land transfer policies at various state legislatures that they often ignored legislative rules, violated ethics standards, and ignored public records requests. During the 2015 session, Fielder’s legislative aide was forced to resign after it was discovered, through an official ethics complaint, that he was also a registered lobbyist for ALC, a clear violation of legislative rules. Notably, Fielder also  supported domestic terrorists who took over public lands in Oregon. 

 

Then, in 2016, the Campaign for Accountability sued Jennifer Fielder after waiting over a year for her to comply with a public records request related to accessing her senate emails, which are public records according to Montana law. The next year, in March of the 2017 legislative session, members of her political party inserted language in a bill that would have appropriated $100,000, of public money, to cover legal costs associated with the lawsuit. In 2018, the state actually created a new system for storing legislator emails to prevent lawmakers from withholding public information like Fielder did. 

 

In 2018, a conservative dark money group called The Montana Growth Network paid a $30,000 fine to the State of Montana for violating campaign finance laws while trying to re-elect five Republican candidates, including Fielder. The Network spent over $15,000 on Fielder’s 2012 senate campaign.

 

A few years later, in October 2021, Fielder left a three minute voicemail at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena and threatened a lawsuit if a friend and former legislative staffer was not given a treatment for COVID-19 that was not approved by the FDA or CDC. In the voicemail, she identified herself both as a senator and a former senator, triggering a concern from St. Peter’s Hospital that “individuals [had] leveraged their official positions in an attempt to influence clinical care”. 

 

Her efforts and those of then-Montana State Senator Kris Hansen and Attorney General Austin Knudsen to intervene on the patient’s behalf led to a legislative special counsel investigation into whether hospital staff were intimidated by current and former legislators and by Knudsen, who had dispatched a Highway Patrol officer to the hospital. The report that resulted from the investigation officially exonerated Knudsen, Hansen, and Fielder while prompting St. Peter’s Hospital to reassert its allegations of intimidation and inappropriate intervention into an individual’s clinical care by elected officials.

 

PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION: In the 2020 election, Jennifer Fielder beat Democrat Monica Tranel in the race to replace Commissioner Bob Lake. During that race, she said the all-Republican commission, which had been troubled by conflict between commissioners and mired in a series of scandals, needed improvement and pledged to bring a more professional approach to the commission.

 

Shortly after she assumed office, in May 2021, the Legislative Audit Division released a scathing report that detailed an “unhealthy organizational culture and ineffective leadership”, instances of “abuse”, and numerous examples of “deficient or improper” behavior including the falsification of financial documents. The report concluded there was good reason “to doubt the integrity and competence of certain members of management and the commission.”

 

In January 2024, a new audit was completed. This recent audit acknowledged the implementation of new policies and the development of a strategic plan to guide commissioners and staff. It also recommended commissioners create a code of conduct to rebuild public trust and take steps to prevent staff turnover, which has diminished the quality of the PSC’s regulatory work. 

 

Currently, management personnel are still classified as the “personal staff” of the commission, which gives politicians, rather than the public, direct control over the 38 FTE employed at the Department of Public Service Regulation. There probably isn’t a precedent for this arrangement anywhere else in state government, where departments are typically managed by an appointed director rather than elected officials. This structure exposes department staff to the political bias of individual commissioners and provides commissioners with unfair influence over staff members who should serve taxpayers at the discretion of an Executive Director in accordance with state employment policies.

 

The 2024 audit clearly illustrates this problem:

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