A March 1, 2019 motion filed in Voyageur Outward Bound School et al. v. United States et al draws on the collection of documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Interior. The motion asks Judge McFadden of the US District Court for the District of Columbia to compel the completion of the administrative record. This is from the declaration filed together with the motion to compel:

During the week of February 11, 2019, Plaintiffs learned of a set of 4,490 pages of documents that Louis Galdieri had obtained from the Department of the Interior in response to a January 2018 FOIA request and had published online earlier that week (Galdieri FOIA Production). Mr. Galdieri is unaffiliated with Plaintiffs. After reviewing those thousands of pages of documents, Plaintiffs identified the documents attached hereto as Exhibits A–J as particularly relevant to the issues in this case.

As it now stands, the record before the court paints an incomplete picture. The Exhibits filed together with the motion include key documents from the FOIA production that now appear in the Twin Metals timeline. These documents show Interior officials working closely with lobbyists from WilmerHale, giving short shrift to environmental advocates and setting scientific findings aside, and meeting multiple times with executives from Antofagasta, Plc and Twin Metals Minnesota.

The FOIA production also offers evidence of coordination with the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, where the CEO of Antofagasta met with the ambassador in late April of 2017, and with the Trump White House, where the Antofagasta CEO and his entourage may have had meetings as early as May of 2017.

Overall, the documents demonstrate clearly that the review of the Twin Metals matter undertaken at the Department of Interior was an exercise in a foregone conclusion. The goal from the outset was to reverse the Obama administration and deliver for the mining company.

The attorneys for the plaintiffs called out a some documents that had escaped my noticed. These now appear on the timeline. One document was not there because I could not figure out where it should fall in the chronology: it is dated  “April XX” of 2017. It is a copy of a Memorandum for the Secretary — namely, Ryan Zinke — from the Office of the Solicitor, heavily redacted on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.

The eight page memorandum is pretty clearly the same memo, or a draft of the same memo that Kathleen Benedetto forwarded to Zinke on April 25, 2017. That memorandum was developed from a Briefing Paper that had been in the works at Interior as early as February of 2017. The memo provides Zinke with “a set of options for reversing” BLM’s decision on Twin Metals before he meets with Representatives Tom Emmer and Rick Nolan the next day . Even though the XX in the date is not a Roman numeral but a placeholder, I’ve dated it April 20th, just to assign it a place in the timeline.

That redacted document helps bring Zinke into the picture. I’ve also added an October 12th, 2017 meeting between the Office of the Solicitor meets and Twin Metals Minnesota. We know about this meeting from an October 27, 2017 email sent by Briana Collier to Karen Hawbecker and Richard McNeer of the Office of the Solicitor. She reminds them that Jack Haugrud expects the Solicitor’s office to produce “Twin Metals M-Opinion Reversal Draft” in “4-6 weeks from when we met with Twin Metals on October 12th.”

This document might help clear up some confusion I had about how many times the Solicitor’s office met with Antofagasta executives. I had counted only the May 2nd and July 25th meeting with Antofagasta CEO Ivan Arriagada, but a March 1, 2019 letter from three House leaders — Alan Lowenthal, Raul Grijalva and Betty McCollum — to Secretaries Perdue and Bernhardt pointed to a third meeting: “Antofagasta met with Jorjani three times in the months leading up to the issuance of his Solicitor opinion in December 2017,” the letter reads. Maybe this October 12th meeting counts as the third meeting. I’ve written to McCollum’s office for clarification, but have not received a reply.

Even with all the redactions, gaps in the record, and unanswered questions, it seems pretty clear that in the Twin Metals matter the Department of the Interior was serving private interests, and not the public interest. At whose direction we still do not know; nor do we know why the matter appears to have been a priority for the new administration.

Interior has not yet provided me with all the documents I requested back in January of 2018. Maybe some fresh answers will come with the release of additional documents.

Update, 22 March 2019. One day after I posted this, on March 15th, 2019, attorneys for the defense filed a brief in opposition to the plaintiff’s March 1 motion.

Writing for the DOJ, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jean E. Williams maintains that documents obtained through FOIA are not necessarily part of the administrative record. These are merely “internal transmittal emails, deliberative documents, and privileged attorney work product” that the plaintiffs “offer…exclusively in an improper attempt to prove the subjective motivation or mental processes of the decisionmaker.” The federal government cites plenty of case law to support this point.

Further,

this Court should deny Plaintiffs’ belated motion because Plaintiffs have not met the heavy burden of overcoming the presumption of administrative regularity that attaches to an agency’s designation of the administrative record and because the this  [sic] Court’s review of any reviewable, final agency action challenged by the Complaints should be limited to consideration of whether the agencies’ stated reasons are arbitrary and capricious.

To the layperson, it would seem that the arbitrary and capricious nature of those “stated reasons” is exactly what the FOIA production suggests. The Jorjani memo appears to have been an exercise in a foregone conclusion, written from a blueprint set out in 2016 by Seth Waxman, the mining company’s attorney. There are those meetings with the CEO of Antofagasta Plc at the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, at the Department of Interior, and at the White House. There is abundant evidence that Interior worked hand in hand with mining company representatives to reach its conclusions.

None of that should enter into determining whether the FOIA production is part of the administrative record, the federal government argues. The court should look at the emails arranging these meetings, and determine only whether they are rightly considered part of the administrative record. The emails were not themselves “considered in reaching the decisions to reinstate the leases,” they assert. Or, as they put it at the end of their brief, the emails were not “actually before the decisionmaker.”

Finally, Plaintiffs’ motion should be denied because Plaintiffs offer these documents for an impermissible purpose. Plaintiffs admit that they intend to use the documents to attempt to show Federal Defendants’ subjective intent in reaching the challenged decisions. But the law of this Circuit is clear that APA review is limited to an agency’s stated justifications, not the mental processes or subjective motivations that may underlie a decision. For this reason, this Court should deny Plaintiffs’ motion because the proposed supplement is irrelevant to the questions before the Court.

The Court is not going to guess at mental processes or motivations, but can it really come to a decision about the arbitrary and capricious nature of the Jorjani opinion without considering what the plaintiffs call “the why and the how” of the Jorjani opinion? Or without taking into account the fact that the CEO of Antofagasta himself was “actually before the decisionmaker,” several times? That is what these documents show.

Update, 23 March 2019. Yesterday, as I was writing the previous update, the Plaintiffs filed a reply to the DOJ brief.

In this latest filing, the attorneys for Voyageur et al. argue that the documents produced by Interior in response to my FOIA request cannot be dismissed on the grounds that they are just “deliberative” or covered by attorney-client privilege. The agency has already redacted these documents to protect deliberative process and preserve attorney-client privilege, and “plaintiffs only seek to include the documents as redacted.”

They also make clear that their real complaint has to do with the Department of Interior claiming that they were merely correcting an error in the M-Opinion issued by Solicitor Tompkins. “Under the banner of error correction,” Jorjani smuggled in a new policy. “The documents…are relevant to establishing whether the stated rationale was pretextual,” in which case, they would be relevant to the plaintiffs’ claim that the agency did not have the proper authority to issue the new opinion.

Finally, they take up the DOJ’s argument that the documents in question were not “before the decisionmakers.” As I mentioned yesterday, this argument essentially amounts to saying that the decisionmakers did not have the emails themselves before them as they worked. Here, the plaintiffs cite case law to the effect that “a document need not literally pass before the eyes of the final agency decision maker to be considered part of the administrative record,” as a 1996 case, Miami Nation of Indians v. Babbitt, reads. But that is not even the major flaw in DOJ’s argument, they say. 

The documents were “to and from” the decisionmakers themselves, “generated by, and circulated between” them; and “agency decisionmakers considered them directly or indirectly” in reaching their decisions. Some of the documents show decisionmakers running their work by the White House and other policymakers. Looking at the Twin Metals timeline, it is hard to deny that “influential officials responsible for domestic and international policy concerns discussed Twin Metals with the agency decisionmakers in the lead-up to the challenged decisions,” as the Plaintiffs assert here.

Still others show requests coming directly from Antofagasta Plc, and internal discussions at Interior about the meeting between CEO Arriagada and high-level officials. The DOJ has already introduced into the administrative record the April 17, 2017 letter from Ivan Arriagada to Ryan Zinke (which I discuss here). So they admit that’s relevant and part of the record. Why admit that and exclude other correspondence that shows the extent of Antofagasta’s influence over the Office of the Solicitor, its meetings with the State Department, or the Trump White House?

If I may venture a summary: this appears to be a case of high-level public officials blatantly serving the private interests of a foreign mining conglomerate, and pretending all the while to be scrupulous about the law.

Update, 8 April 2019. Today, Judge McFadden issued an order denying the Plaintiffs’ motion to admit documents produced through my January 2018 FOIA request. The court relied for its decision on the “strong presumption” that an agency has properly compiled the administrative record. So “the Court finds that the Federal Defendants have compiled the administrative record here in good faith.” This is a setback for the plaintiffs, and, for what it’s worth, a good occasion for me to think about the record I am producing here.

Read other posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.