BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
Updated 10:40 a.m., Friday, April 3, 2026, in the fourth paragraph with additional statements from WDFW.
A sitting Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission member and her environmental attorney ally have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against top WDFW brass, claiming they’re the targets of attacks meant to chill their determined bird-dogging of agency management.
Lorna Smith and Claire Loebs Davis allege that they’re the victims of “viewpoint discrimination and retaliation prohibited by the First Amendment” by Director Kelly Susewind and Deputy Director Amy Windrope, and they’re asking a federal judge to declare that their rights have been violated, enjoin the WDFW duo from further actions against them, and award themselves and Davis’s organization compensatory and punitive damages, along with attorney’s fees.
In a Facebook reel posted Thursday evening, Davis colleague Francisco Santiago-Ávila also called on elected leaders “to investigate and to act.”
In an initial statement Friday morning, WDFW Communications and Engagement Director Sam Montgomery said the agency couldn’t comment on “active litigation.” Subsequent to that, Montgomery sent an updated statement that the lawsuit against Susewind and Windrope had been “announced” but “has not yet been served on the named defendants, so WDFW is not prepared to make any statements about this new litigation.”
“WDFW’s staff continue to operate under the Department’s core organizational values of Accountability, Service, Professionalism, Integrity, Respect, and Empathy,” Montgomery also said.
This is just the latest battle in a years-long war as preservationist interests have attempted to wrestle WDFW and critter management away from the heart of the legislative mandate through multiple means, and it comes just as a Governor’s Office investigation into Smith and another commissioner’s activities is scheduled to wrap up and even more questions are being raised out of it.
Indeed, it’s become existential for all parties.
That governor’s investigation was spurred by the so-called “Knoll Memo,” written by a WDFW legal liaison by the name of Thomas Knoll last May and ultimately forwarded to Governor Ferguson, who hired an outside investigator to look into it. It has also become the heart of the lawsuit.
In their suit, which was filed in US District Court for Western Washington, Smith and Davis allege Susewind “carefully curated” a trove of public records for Knoll to go through to see if there was evidence in public records requests of inappropriate conduct by Smith, Commissioner Melanie Rowland and two others.
Knoll’s 10-page memo was first mentioned publicly in a Washington State Standard story in February, which termed it “scathing,” and it was posted in its entirety earlier this week by the Sportsmen’s Alliance and Conservation Coalition of Washington.
Not surprisingly, Smith and Davis’s lawsuit takes a very different view of the memo, saying it “consists of reckless speculation aimed at inflicting reputational harm” on themselves and Davis’s organization, Washington Wildlife First.
They say that Susewind and Windrope’s motives behind the memo were to “produce this document to convey their retaliatory allegations to the governor.”
The suit claims that Susewind has an “obsession” against Davis and her organization – who have sued him and his agency any number of times over the years over predator and hatchery management, put the responsibility of two employees’ deaths in the field on his shoulders, and have otherwise been a thorn in WDFW’s side – and he and Windrope directed agency staffers to pore through former Commissioner Tim Ragen’s laptop “for anything they could use to discredit Smith and unseat Rowland.”
According to the memo, Knoll found evidence of 20 private meetings between Smith, Rowland and Tim Ragen with Washington Wildlife First, Wild Fish Conservancy and other advocacy groups on Ragen’s laptop, as well as a curious group-curated spreadsheet grading potential future commissioners and identifying decoy candidates. Knoll labeled both as evidence of “possible collusion.”
In that Washington State Standard story, Davis parried the collusion allegation by saying her chats with the commissioners were “an appropriate, ethical, and protected exercise of my First Amendment right to speak to government officials on matters of public importance.”
Anybody who’s been reading this blog and Northwest Sportsman Magazine lo these past few years knows that the commission has been a hot mess since late 2019 when Davis and others began to challenge the limited entry spring black bear hunt, ultimately killing it off as it had existed for decades, and in doing so, they struck something of a blow against Susewind’s core hunting memory – his first kill five and a half decades back.
After failing to get any traction on WDFW-altering bills in the legislature, Davis and WWF inserted a proviso into the agency’s budget that ultimately led to the UW-WSU Ruckelhaus Center review, which also didn’t turn out with the recommendation they had hoped for –– folding WDFW under the governor’s thumb. Instead, the commission was called “dysfunctional” by observers, and no small part of that is the fault of Davis, WWF, Smith and Rowland.
Emblematic of that dysfunction, in the very last days of his administration, former Governor Jay Inslee attempted to stuff the commission with more preservationist-oriented members like Smith, Rowland, Ragen and former Commissioner Fred Koontz, but incoming Governor Bob Ferguson struck two from the board and appointed his own people.
That led to howls of protest from Davis and WWF, who have also been campaigning since then to have Susewind removed for a variety of reasons.
Back to the federal lawsuit for a moment.
It claims Susewind “boasts that all his decisions as director are framed by his perspective as a hunter, and he clings to the days when the state wildlife agency was operated by and for the benefit of hunters, anglers, and commercial consumptive-use stakeholders.”
Davis and WWF basically want a WDFW that “prioritizes the protection of fish and wildlife, respects the intrinsic value of wild animals” – it already does that, though not to their far extremes – and they frequently allude to the changing climate, both physical and among the makeup of state residents as the impetus. But they come up against the fundamental core of the agency’s mission, as prescribed by the state legislature: to provide fishing and hunting opportunities.
To tweak US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ phrase this week, “It’s a new world, it’s the same mandate.”
Along the way, the defense of the mandate was joined by the national Sportsmen’s Alliance, which has filed public records requests that have been slow to be fulfilled in part they say due to Smith and Rowland, and they’ve called on Governor Ferguson to remove the pair and two others. Meanwhile, the ending of the spring bear hunt energized a core of hunters to frequently speak before the commission during public comment.
And given the fears of what each side is really up to here, things have spilled well beyond the meetings. They’ve become especially heated online, where everybody’s 10 feet tall.
According to the federal lawsuit, Smith, who should not ever be confused for a meek old lady, has had to endure “a constant barrage of hostility and harassment, accompanied by heightened concerns for her personal safety,” and the allegedly coordinated campaign between WDFW and some hunters has caused her “substantial emotional distress and physical symptoms.”
And the suit adds that as a result of the current atmosphere around the commission, complaints have reportedly been filed against Davis with the Washington Bar Association so as to “damage (her) reputation and threaten her livelihood.”
But they level their most serious claims against Susewind and Windrope specifically:
“In doing the acts of which Smith complains, Defendants’ conduct was intentional, reckless, or callously indifferent to Smith’s federally protected right to be free from retaliation and discrimination for her engagement in activities protected under the First Amendment, and accordingly, Smith is entitled to punitive damages against Defendants Susewind and Windrope in their individual capacities,” reads the suit.
It repeats that language for Davis and WWF.
In a press release, their attorney, Alicia LeDuc Montgomery, said “People in power cannot weaponize the machinery of government to punish citizens for speaking out and advocating for policy change Our complaint alleges that state officials used public resources to target disfavored speakers and stigmatize protected advocacy simply because it did not align with their preferred views. That is not just improper – it is unconstitutional.”
The lawsuit demands a trial by jury.
Meanwhile, more questions from the Knoll Memo are being raised, including about Smith’s apparent filing of compensation claims for working nearly every day as a commissioner between January 2024 and February 2025, which Knoll found “unrealistic.”
The lawsuit denigrates Knoll’s knowledge of how the commission operates. It also claims that Commissioner John Lehmkuhl has “moderated his positions” since the spring bear debacle and that he and Commissioner Barbara Baker “did not pose the same threat to Susewind’s ideology” as Smith, Rowland and Ragen. Commissioners Molly Linville, Jim Anderson, Steven Parker and Woody Myers are mentioned in passing, though former Commissioners Kim Thorburn is called out for pro-hunting actions.
The commission next meets in-person and online in Olympia in mid-April. Things might be a bit awkward and tense the whole way around.
