This brought to you by Barack Obama.

The federal government must pay $27.8 million in damages to the state of North Dakota for damages it incurred during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017.

After a bench trial, U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor found that the Army Corps of Engineers unlawfully and negligently announced they had granted protesters a “special use permit” that, in many cases, prevented law enforcement from cracking down on them.

“Essentially, the Corps invited and encouraged the DAPL protesters and their violent and tumultuous behavior on and off Corps-managed land, and North Dakota had to clean up the mess,” Judge Traynor wrote in his strongly worded 117-page ruling. “The state of North Dakota needed the power of the federal government to protect its citizens from danger. The federal government abandoned its duty.”

The groups in attendance engaged in numerous destructive acts such as setting fires, damaging machinery, obstructing roadways, slaughtering animals, intimidating employees, clashing with law enforcement, leading to over 100 arrests and 1 death before North Dakota’s severe winter forced most protesters to abandon their camp.

Following the National Guard’s removal of the remaining activists in February 2017, workers discovered twelve abandoned dogs and removed 21 million pounds of debris from the site during a $1.1 million cleanup effort.

What’s worse, as Courthouse News reveals citing the judge’s ruling, that members of the Army Corp of Engineers aided the terrorists while the Obama administration also emboldened them.

In his ruling, Judge Traynor blamed the U.S. government for “play[ing] both sides against the middle.”

“On the one hand, the government claimed it would abide by a federal district judge’s order granting the easement for the DAPL, but then it aligned itself with a violent minority by issuing the de facto permit,” he wrote. And he didn’t just find fault with the Army Corps of Engineers, writing: “The executive branch disregarded the rule of law and encouraged the protests to continue.”

While the judge’s decision is a welcome outcome, however, a President similar to Obama could regain power in the next few years and restart or encourage ecoterrorism all over again. Environmentalists and their enablers need to be investigated and put down by being subjected to financial investigations on the part of the IRS or subjected to RICO lawsuits similar to what Energy Transfers did to Greenpeace.