At 9:28 p.m. the night before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to slash Bears Ears National Monument by 85%, Matt Anderson, a policy analyst at Utah’s conservative Sutherland Institute think tank, sent an email to then-San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally.
Benally, a member of the Navajo Nation, was set to speak at Trump’s proclamation signing ceremony and was one of the few Democrats in the country willing to praise what, along with a 50% cut to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, would soon be dubbed the "largest rollback of public land protections in American history.