In response to a Freedom of Information Act request I made back in January of 2018, the Department of Interior has released over 5,000 pages related to the Trump administration’s rollback of federal protections for the Boundary Waters. These and other documents have allowed me to put together this timeline, which tells a pretty clear story. From the very first days of the new administration, Interior Department officials and mining company lobbyists worked closely together, and with blatant disregard for science and the environment, toward a predetermined outcome that served the business interests of a foreign mining company, and not the public interest.

The latest release arrived on Friday afternoon. It’s a collection of email correspondence and attachments from Briana Collier, an attorney in the Division of Mineral Resources. These documents are now published here.

An email from Collier included in an earlier release had tipped me off to a previously undisclosed meeting at the US embassy between the CEO of Antofagasta PLC and the Carol Z. Perez, the US ambassador to Chile. Any hopes that this latest release would shed more light on that meeting, or make other equally significant disclosures, were quickly dashed when I opened the PDF. About 400 of the 650 pages included here are redacted, many of them entirely, on the basis of attorney client privilege or deliberative process. Almost all date from December of 2017, when the Office of the Solicitor at Interior was finalizing the Jorjani memo — the memo that cleared the way for Antofagasta PLC to renew its mineral leases in Superior National Forest.

In these documents, we mainly see officials crossing ts and dotting is in the memo before its release. There are some emails exchanged at the last minute regarding the first footnote in the memo, on the Weeks Act, which establishes the Secretary of Interior’s statutory authority for the disposition of minerals. The footnotes for an important section of the memo (pp. 11-13), arguing that BLM previously renewed the leases on 1966 terms, are the subject of another last minute exchange. One footnote in particular, which is number 65 in the draft under discussion (but not necessarily in the final version, given all the last minute changes) “raises issues we do not want to address.” What issues are those?

Twin Metals continues to work closely with Interior. When Bob McFarlin, Government Affairs Advisor for Twin Metals, comes to DC with Anne Williamson, Twin Metals Vice President of Environment and Sustainability. for a “quick meeting” on December 15th with Tony Tooke, the new US Forest Service Chief, he writes to see whether he might arrange a “short visit” while he’s in town with Kathleen Benedetto. Benedetto and Williamson had met — when exactly, we don’t know — during the summer of 2017. McFarlin asks that Mitch Leverette, Eastern States Acting Director, Bureau of Land Management, join them.

There is ongoing concern over coordination with the Forest Service, from the drafting of a letter announcing that BLM will no longer consider the Forest Service’s non-consent to lease renewal valid, to the very minute the memo is released. Correspondence with the Forest Service’s Kathleen Atkinson is almost entirely redacted. And Interior’s efforts to coordinate with Forest Service only add to the confusion around plans for a news release. At what appears to be the direction of David Bernhardt’s office, work was done on a “relatively short” Minnesota-only press release. Even that is eventually cancelled, and it’s decided that Interior will deal with this only “if asked.”

Before that, however, and at the request of Interior Communications, Gary Lawkowski, Counselor to the Solicitor of the Interior and another Koch veteran, forwards a “one-pager of talking points on the Twin Metals opinion” to Daniel Jorjani and Jack Haugrud for review. He has put them together “given [or with an eye to] today’s focus on critical minerals.” (Recall that “strategic minerals” were a central theme of Ivan Arriagada’s April 17, 2017 letter to Secretary Zinke as well.) In a second email circulating the talking points to Deputy Director of Communications Russell Newell, Lawkowski elaborates: “One thing you all may want to note — the Forest Service has indicated that they believe there are potentially cobalt and platinum deposits underneath Superior National Forest….Cobalt and platinum are on the list of 23 critical minerals released by USGS earlier this week.” Eureka.

As I continue to comb through this latest release, I will add more details to the Twin Metals Timeline. If something here catches your eye, let me know in the comments below, or send me an email (my Twitter handle is also my gmail address). And if you have documents that can add color or contrast or depth to the timeline, please get in touch.

You can read all my posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.