ICYMI: Real Estate Developer Matt Rosendale Gives Up the Ranch Act — and the Actual Ranch

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Friday, October 30, 2020

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ICYMI: Real Estate Developer Matt Rosendale Gives Up the Ranch Act — and the Actual Ranch

Helena, MT – Maryland Matt Rosendale has quietly looked to leave behind his ranch act, after it became an infamous liability in his constant quest for the next rung of the political ladder.

Over the course of his political career, Rosendale has made numerous claims of being a rancher, in his stump speeches, op-eds, paid advertisements, social media accounts, and press releases. But reports and public records showed that he has never owned any cattle or ranched his own land.

Now, it appears that Rosendale is looking to leave the fake-ranch life behind, and has listed his Glendive estate on the market. Perhaps it will return to a real Montana rancher, and cattle will once again roam the 10,000 acres of Eastern Montana land, as its east coast real estate developer owner, in four days, returns from whence he came.

“All hat, no cattle,” said MDP Communications Director Nathan Stein.

Montana Post: Real Estate Developer Matt Rosendale Gives Up the Ranch and the Ranch Act
By: Don Pogreba

Highlights:

Matt Rosendale doesn’t call himself a “real estate developer” for nothing. Two decades after buying a “working ranch” near Glendive for $2.175 million and two years after an embarrassing retreat from his absurd claim that he was a rancher, Matt Rosendale has listed the property for sale at a price of $8.5 million.

The ranch Rosendale has listed for sale is quite something. It’s described by its brokers as a “great working ranch with world class hunting,” an almost 10,000-acre property with four homes. Hardly the place of someone who understands the struggles faced by ordinary Montanans, but perhaps exactly the kind of place someone from out of state who runs a hobby ranch thinks Montana life is like.

It’s worth noting that Rosendale did, in fact, purchase a real Montana ranch back in 2002. A report from the Glendive Ranger-Review on Aug 22, 2002 notes that the property Rosendale purchased was, in fact, a working ranch:
 

Carlson worked with them for 22 years, giving them ideas and encouragement, as they made improvements to their land which included 1.7 miles of river front property, irrigated crop land and pastures, dry land crop land with good soil, and range land with recently added artesian wells, stock pipelines and fiberglass stock tanks…Kniepkamp tried to start the bidding at $2 million, dropped it to $1 million and then to $700 thousand. The bidding opened there and went up rapidly in $50 thousand increments until it reached $2 million. At that point, Kniepkamp stopped to take a breath and get a drink of water, then worked the remaining bidders up to a final bid of $2,175,000…But in the end, it was a neighbor, Matt Rosendale, who made the final bid. Rosendale, his wife Jean and their three boys live on the old Tomalino place adjacent to the Sobotka land.”

That was apparently the last moment the owners of that piece of land worked it.

That didn’t stop Rosendale from riding the story of himself as a rancher as hard as he could. In 2013, he was telling credulous friends back home in Maryland that he was a real rancher. He said the same when he ran for Congress in 2017 and the Senate in 2018 until media reports showed that he had never run cattle on the property and rented it out to other people to work the land. This blog first broke the story, when we uncovered Rosendale telling a Maryland newspaper about his hobby ranch. The best part was when we caught him using a neighbor’s barn for one of his rural life ads.

Despite what should have been a real embarrassment to Mr. Rosendale, he’s suggested the same in this campaign, that he somehow represents and understands rural Montana. His opening campaign ad, with an impressive 960 views, is called “That’s What You Do When You’re From Glendive,” which is not only factually inaccurate about where he is from (that would be Maryland), but where he lives now (that would be Helena and Great Falls).

I don’t begrudge anyone choosing to move somewhere else in Montana, but it is disingenuous of Rosendale to continue to represent himself as something he’s not. He lied about being a rancher because he thought that would win votes. Once that lie was exposed, he pivoted to an identity built on being from rural Montana but hasn’t exactly announced to the world that he’s leaving Glendive and rural life.

That’s an awful lot of lying to get back to the East Coast, where, it seems, Mr. Rosendale belonged the whole time.

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