PrairiePundit

 Newsmax: Montana might not be a battleground state for November's presidential election — Donald Trump carried it by 16.37 percentage points in 2020 and by nearly 21 in 2016 — but it sure could decide which party gains control of the Senate. Trump was in Big Sky Country on Friday night to campaign for former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, who is trying to oust three-term Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat anomaly in a deep-red state. Trump campaigned to oust Tester in 2018, but Tester narrowly defeated Matt Rosendale by 17,913 votes. "We are going to defeat radical-left Democrat John Tester," Trump said in front of a capacity crowd at the Brick Breen Fieldhouse in Bozeman on the campus of Montana State University. "He's terrible. And send Tim Sheehy to the United States Senate." Sheehy has been surging ahead of Tester in recent polls, although the Cook Political Report calls the race a toss-up. An Emerson College poll released Thursday showed Sheehy ahead 48%-46%, and a p...

 Fox News: The state of Montana filed a legal motion against the Biden administration over its decision to permit a billionaire-backed organization to lease large swaths of public property for non-agriculture uses. In a motion for summary judgment filed with the Department of Interior's Office of Hearings and Appeals late last week, Montana alleged a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rule issued in 2022 unlawfully prioritizes non-production "conservation herds" over livestock production and the state's rural ranching communities. In July 2022, BLM granted a request to the American Prairie Reserve (APR) to graze bison across leased federal lands. "The BLM’s final decision granting a general use permit to graze bison is a direct attack on rural communities — attacks that have become a hallmark of the Biden Administration," Knudsen told Fox News Digital in a statement. "The BLM has bent over backward to circumvent the law and approve APR’s plan to turn hun...

 Real Clear Investigations: ... Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on Jan. 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office. The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov. 3, 2020, general election. Its conclusions were troubling: 4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes— 6.33% of all votes. Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter's signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes. What’s more, according to auditors, county employees claimed that during the post-election audit, some of the envelopes may have been double-counted, possibly indicating an even higher numbe...

 Epoch Times: A coalition of states has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and his administration over the president’s decision to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Led by Texas and Montana, 21 states have jointly filed a lawsuit against Biden arguing that the president didn’t have the authority to unilaterally change an energy policy that Congress had set when he revoked the permit on his first day in office. The lawsuit argues that only Congress has the power to regulate interstate and international commerce, including granting or rejecting permits for oil pipelines that cross an international border. “Since his first day in office, President Biden has made it his mission to undo all the progress of the previous administration, with complete disregard for the Constitutional limits on his power. His decision to revoke the pipeline permit is not only unlawful but will also devastate the livelihoods of thousands of workers, their families, and their communitie...