Block the Yosemite land exchange in Interior appropriations

Block the Yosemite land exchange. Attach a rider to the Interior appropriations bill barring any funds for a land swap or easement inside Yosemite National Park, and demand Secretary Burgum’s office produce its correspondence with Kingsbarn Realty Capital. NOTUS reported on August 28 that since spring 2025, Park Service staff have been under orders from Interior’s political leadership to hand a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite to a Nevada developer. Kingsbarn paid $4 million in 2024 for 83 acres outside the park’s western boundary, roughly five miles from a grove of ancient sequoias. CEO Jeff Pori wants a private road connecting it to a main park road. The Bush, Obama and Biden administrations all said no. The previous owner sued to force the road and lost, then lost again on appeal in 2012. Career staff say political appointees berate them for not moving fast enough. Now look at who’s asking. Pori made no federal political donations before October 2024. That month he started giving to Trump’s committee and the Republican Party. In April 2025 Kingsbarn closed a Los Angeles purchase alongside the Newmark Group, chaired by Howard Lutnick until he divested in May 2025, and Hankey Capital, whose chairman also chairs the insurer that underwrote Trump’s $175 million appeal bond. Kingsbarn’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, has not listed the firm on any federal lobbying disclosure. Burgum told the Senate at his confirmation that the parks deserve protection down to every single inch. Trump’s National Park Week message on August 24 promised to protect every acre. Four days later a reporter documented the opposite. Congress may not get a second chance. The Park Service can finish this swap without a vote. Senators Murkowski and Merkley, the chair and ranking member of the Interior appropriations subcommittee, sent Interior their agreed list of Land and Water Conservation Fund projects. Yosemite wasn’t on it. Interior is pushing anyway. A Republican chair and a Democratic ranking member both said no, and the department kept going because a donor’s lawyer asked. That is what it looks like when public property answers to private money. Attach the rider. Subpoena the records if Interior stalls. Then say out loud that no acre of a national park is for sale.