
When I stopped watching Helena’s special City Commission meeting last night at 9:40pm, 59 people had provided public comment FOR the anti-ICE resolution, thumbing Helena’s proverbial nose at the state of Montana, and 11 people had spoken in favor of rescinding it. Ultimately the Commission voted 4-1 to rescind the resolution after a lawyer I’m quite familiar with, Natasha Jones, gave a sobering account of the possible consequences Helena could suffer were they to not back down.
Who is Natasha Jones, why did the city of Helena hire her to consult on this matter, and why were there so many self-described lawyers last night publicly pushing Helena officials to continue provoking a legal showdown with the AG, Austin Knudsen? I think trying to answer these questions will give readers a much clearer idea of what last night’s vote was actually about, and it’s NOT genuine concern for immigrants.

First, it’s pretty obvious why Helena hired Natasha P. Jones to consult on this matter. As a partner at Boone Karlberg and the vice-chair of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (where I presented on Sigil Kult this Tuesday), Jones played a critical role in costing Missoula taxpayers $140.4 MILLION dollars so our alcoholic Mayor at the time, John Engen, could buy our city a water company.
Missoula’s eminent domain legal battle to acquire its water company, we were told at the time, would take less than $55 million, with around $400,000 estimated to be spent on legal costs. By 2017, when the deal was finalized, this is what actually happened:
Engen said the courts will continue moving forward on the few remaining issues – Missoula has already won approval to condemn and purchase the water system. In the meantime, the city will purchase and begin operating the utility.
The $140.4 million will purchase the water system, pay the city’s and the water company’s legal fees, finance an initial list of system improvements and provide a cash reserve for unforeseen expenses.
Mountain Water’s purchase price accounts for $88.6 million of the costs.
Was Natasha P. Jones and her law firm, Boone Karlberg, happy with this outcome? Apparently not, since they KEPT FIGHTING by making a losing legal argument that the big corporation they fought were big meanies who didn’t play fair, or some shit like that.
I’m clearly not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure this last attempt, dismissed by a panel of arbiters, was a big, educational slap in the face for one of Missoula’s most influential lawyers:
In separate litigation, however, the city sued Carlyle Infrastructure Partners of The Carlyle Group alleging the equity firm dealt with the city “in bad faith” when it failed to make good on a promise to sell to the city. In December, an arbitration panel of three unanimously ruled in favor of Carlyle and dismissed all eight of the city’s claims.
The arbiters found Engen exhausted the avenues at his disposal to buy the utility, but he never had a promise from Carlyle to sell, as the city argued. In the decision, the arbiters said Carlyle considered the city’s offers, but they weren’t nearly high enough.
“It was likely that the city could not afford to finance the acquisition of Mountain Water at anything approaching market value,” the panel wrote. “As a result of the City’s decision to pursue condemnation and its successful conclusion, it avoided those challenges.”
This context, I think, is important, because Natasha Jones clearly had lots of lawyers in the audience who later demanded, at the microphones, that the City of Helena ignore her dire warning about what could happen were Helena to proceed with its resolution. By my count, 9 of the 59 pro-ANTI-ICE resolution supporters indicated they were lawyers, so, presumably, their opinions mattered more, otherwise why identify as such?
If you listened to the rhetoric for nearly four hours, like I did (only taking brief breaks to record Instagram clips with Pirate Booty), then you heard the word “bully” used over and over, referring to the Attorney General. You also heard the term “sanctuary city” referred to as a “red herring”. Why?
It took a few, more overt statements from public commenters for me to finally realize what was going on. The lawyers in Helena seemed to be anticipating–and trying to preemptively block– Austin Knudsen’s Gubernatorial aspirations, and they were using immigrants and the agitation of ICE/protest violence in Minneapolis to rile up support for their larger, Montana-focused political agenda.
This political agenda, I believe, is mirrored in the covertly partisan “Montanans for non-partisan courts”, which I decoded for readers last month. I even caught the fact one of commenters last night worked for the ACLU, an entity directly involved in supposedly keeping the courts “non-partisan”.
Natasha Jones was most certainly NOT being partisan last night because her role, when representing clients, is to WIN, above all else, and the lawyers who know how to win get the most important thing in all the whole wide world, which any man on his death bed knows is money, right?

One final note about lessons on legal losing that Missoula can provide Helena residents, and that’s a very clear picture of what happened when our virtue-signaling CITY thought they could municipally restrict private gun transactions within city limits, something I wrote would have consequences at the time (2016). What happened is Missoula lost that stupid fight three years later when Montana’s Supreme Court struck it down:
The Montana Supreme Court Tuesday struck down a city’s attempt to perform background checks on people purchasing or transferring guns within its city limits.
The City of Missoula, Montana, enacted an ordinance in 2016 requiring people purchasing or receiving a firearm to pass a national background check.
Three months after the ordinance was enacted, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox issued an opinion that said cities with self-governmental powers, such as Missoula, are prohibited by Montana law from enforcing a regulation or ordinance requiring background checks on firearm sales or transfers.
The city then sought declaratory judgment from a state district court on Fox’s directive. The lower court ruled that the gun ordinance was authorized under state law, which authorizes cities to “prevent and suppress … the possession of firearms by convicted felons, adjudicated mental incompetents, illegal aliens, and minors.”
Fox appealed that ruling to the Montana Supreme Court.
For lawyers and well-meaning useful idiots in Helena, the fight is far from over. That said, don’t let the low turnout on the other side of my tally-count fool you. One woman, for example, submitted a list of 127 names, along with addresses, in support of rescinding the resolution, with the woman at the mic telling a story about an elder Native woman emphatically signing because of what she claimed was happening on the reservations with undocumented traffickers of drugs and humans.
Considering what I wrote about Jim Acosta, Missoula Democrats, and the curious attention of Jeffrey Epstein by his “accountant” to the showdown between Acosta and Stephen Miller in 2017 around immigration, you can bet I’ll continue watching for issue in Helena to reignite as Knudsen’s political aspirations become more obvious, if they aren’t already.
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