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At least 118 eagles, 107 hawks among thousands of birds trafficking ring killed, prosecutors say
Billings, Mont. — A man helped kill at least 118 eagles to sell their feathers and body parts on the black market as part of a long-running wildlife trafficking ring in the western U.S. that authorities allege killed thousands of birds, court filings show.
Travis John Branson is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court on Sept. 18 for his role in the trafficking ring that operated on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana and elsewhere.
Prosecutors say the Cusick, Washington man made between $180,000 and $360,000 from 2009 to 2021 selling bald and golden eagle parts illegally.
“It was not uncommon for Branson to take upwards of nine eagles at a time,” prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Montana wrote in a Tuesday court filing. “Not only did Branson kill eagles, but he hacked them into pieces to sell for future profits.”
Eagle wings, tails, feathers and other parts are highly sought by Native Americans who use them in ceremonies.
Prosecutors asked Judge Dana Christensen to sentence Branson to “significant imprisonment” and restitution totaling $777,250. That includes $5,000 for every dead eagle and $1,750 for each of 107 hawks investigators said he and his co-conspirators killed.
Prosecutors’ claims challenged
Branson’s attorney disputed the prosecutors’ claims and said they overstated the number of birds killed. The prosecution’s allegation that as many as 3,600 birds died came from a co-defendant, Simon Paul, who remains at large. Branson’s attorney suggested in court filings that the stated death toll has fueled public outcry over the case.
“It is notable that Mr. Paul himself went from a 3,600 to 1,000 bird estimate,” Federal Defender Andrew Nelson wrote in a Tuesday filing, referring to a statement Paul made to authorities in a March 13, 2021, traffic stop.
Nelson also said restitution for the hawks wasn’t warranted since those killings weren’t included in last year’s grand jury indictment. He said Branson had no prior criminal history and asked for a sentence of probation.
Branson and Paul grew up in the Flathead Reservation area. Since their indictment, Paul has been hiding in Canada to evade justice, according to Nelson.
Paul’s defense attorney didn’t immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.
Investigators documented the minimum number of eagles and hawks killed through Branson’s text messages, prosecutors said. Two years of his messages weren’t recovered, leading prosecutors to say the “full scope of Branson’s killings is not captured.”
Government officials haven’t revealed any other species of birds killed.
Eagle, other bird parts in great demand
Bald and golden eagles are sacred to many Native Americans. U.S. law prohibits anyone without a permit from killing, wounding or disturbing eagles, or taking their nests or eggs.
Illegal shootings are a leading cause of golden eagle deaths, according to a recent government study.
Members of federally recognized tribes can get feathers and other bird parts legally through from the National Eagle Repository in Colorado and non-government repositories in Oklahoma and Phoenix. There’s a yearslong backlog of requests at the national repository.
Branson pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy, wildlife trafficking and two counts of trafficking federally protected bald and golden eagles. He faced a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the most serious charge, conspiracy. Under a plea deal, prosecutors said they would seek to dismiss additional trafficking charges.
Federal guidelines call for a sentence of roughly three to four years in prison for Branson, they said.
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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