Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who led an armed standoff over unfairly manipulated government grazing fees on federal lands, has filed suit against President Obama and officials in Nevada in a bid to get charges against him dismissed, The Hill reported.

Bundy’s lawyer filed the complaint last week against the president; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Reid’s son, former Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid; and U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro. The suit alleges that they violated several of Bundy’s constitutional rights and seeks to dismiss an indictment against him, as well as have him released from solitary confinement.

The Hill noted that his legal team discussed the action last week after a detention hearing in Las Vegas.

Bundy was arrested in Portland, Ore., in February as he made his way to a wildlife refuge that was being occupied by his two sons and others, as a protest against unfair federal land use rules and the re-sentencing of local ranchers for what many believe are bogus charges.

As The Hill reported further:

His arrest was part of escalated efforts by the FBI to end the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Burns, Ore., about a six-hour drive from Portland in the eastern part of the state. 

Bundy came to national attention after drawing scores of armed militiamen to Nevada to ward off federal authorities after a fight over grazing fees.

For years, Bundy grazed cattle on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, which did not own much of the land when Bundy began his grazing operations decades ago. The BLM imposed up to $1 million in fees, which Bundy says were improperly levied because he does not believe the federal government has authority over the land.

As Natural News founder Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported in April 2014, the same month as the Bundy-led standoff in Nevada, the government’s real agenda behind the harassment of Bundy was its interest in leasing the land that he was using to energy companies interested in setting up fracking operations:

This document from the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology(1) shows significant exploratory drilling being conducted in precisely the same area where the Bundy family has been running cattle since the 1870’s. The “Gold Butte” area is indicated on the lower right corner of the document (see below), and it clearly shows numerous exploratory drilling operations have been conducted there.

What’s also clear is that oil has been found in nearby areas and possibly even within the Gold Butte area itself.

Adams further noted that the BLM, prior to the Bundy standoff, had “cashed in” on some $1.27 million in shale fracking leases, demonstrating again that our broke and heavily indebted government uses whatever land it can grab as a means of generating revenue.

Adams noted further:

Once control of the land is established via court order or by bringing armed men with automatic weapons, BLM then turns around and leases the land to fracking companies who proceed to exploit the land using hydraulic fracturing techniques that inject toxic chemicals into groundwater supplies (and have been linked to earthquakes). The money collected by the BLM is then used to increase BLM salaries and bonuses.

In essence, the BLM is a criminal mafia racket, and Cliven Bundy just happened to be in the way of their next target, the Gold Butte area of Nevada. That is why they brought hundreds of heavily armed men to a “save the tortoise” operation.

As for the Oregon fracas, that began about 14 years ago, Dwight Hammond, now 70, and his son Steven Hammond, now 43, set a fire on the BLM land, for which they had grazing permits, to clear underbrush in a common practice that revitalizes land. Though a court ruled that the fire helped improve productivity on the land, the father and son were tried and convicted in 2012 under the “‘Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996’ for arson on public land for the 2001 fire and a similar fire in 2006,” states the Bundy Ranch blog spot.