A three-day trial has been set in June for Tim DeChristopher, who faces two felony counts arising from his admitted false bidding during a 2008 oil and gas lease auction.

DeChristopher's jury trial will begin June 21 in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, said Melodie Rydalch, spokeswoman for acting U.S. Attorney for Utah Carlie Christensen.

DeChristopher, then a University of Utah economics student, bid $1.8 million on Dec. 19, 2008, for 14 lease parcels in southeastern Utah with no intention to pay. Eleven of those parcels, near Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Dinosaur National Monument, were among 77 that conservation groups successfully sued to prevent the Bureau of Land Management from processing after the auction.

DeChristopher, 28, has said he placed the bogus bids to protest the Bush administration oil and gas policies and to draw attention to the global climate crisis.

U.S. District Judge Dee Benson, who will preside at the trial, has ruled against a lesser-evils, or necessity, defense, forbidding DeChristopher from arguing he tried to sabotage the auction as an act of civil disobedience.

DeChristopher's attorneys now are pushing a selective-prosecution defense, pointing to 24 other bidders the government has acknowledged defrauded the BLM -- and thereby taxpayers -- during the past five years by not paying for their auction parcels. None of the others faced any legal consequences.

DeChristopher's attorneys, Ron Yengich and Pat Shea, the latter a former national BLM director, say they particularly want to see an internal BLM memo about their client.

Benson said the selective-prosecution defense wasn't going to work and that DeChristopher shouldn't rely on government attorneys to do further research for him.

Defense lawyers say they want to expose any political motives or petroleum-industry involvement in the prosecution. The day before the charges were announced, DeChristopher's attorneys found out from a reporter tipped off by an industry lobbyist that their client would be indicted.

phenetz@sltrib.com