This week offered some reminders of how little we still know about the Trump administration’s decision to allow copper-sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters.

On Tuesday, Friends of the Boundary Waters filed suit in US District Court in Minneapolis to compel the Bureau of Land Management to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, and made the case that BLM appears to be trying to keep its actions “secret.” The very next day, Representative Alan Lowenthal took up the same theme at a hearing on HR 5598, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act.

Everything the administration has done on this issue raises serious questions. Why was the environmental review cancelled? Why is there a solicitor’s memo that is so at odds with the historical record? Who applied pressure to reinstate the leases? Did it have anything to do with the fact that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are renting a house from the head of the mining company that’s developing the project? This committee has requested documents from both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, in an effort to get to the bottom of this decision-making. But instead of sending us what we requested, we got pages and pages of nonsense, with just a few relevant documents mixed in. I also directly raised the issue at a hearing with both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service last year, and my questions were met with obfuscation and a supposed lack of knowledge on certain details.

Obfuscation is a polite way to describe the behavior of Interior officials at this very hearing. Take, for example, what happened when Lowenthal asked Chris French, Deputy Chief of the National Forest System, why Secretary Perdue had cancelled the planned two-year scientific study in Superior National Forest, after publicly committing to see it through. It’s a full five minutes of French repeating the same bureaucratic non-answer, and then failing to answer when the question is put to him as a yes or no. The video is cued to the exchange.

Just today, in response to my own FOIA suit, the Department of Interior all but admitted that they had failed to conduct an adequate search of records. From the very start, it appears, the scope of the search was deliberately narrowed, in a very specific way, but to what end I cannot say. It turns out their initial search, which produced about 6,000 pages of records, and which they claimed was complete, used only a few of the terms from my original request. Notably, the original search excluded references to Antofagasta Plc, Andronico Luksic Craig, and the Luksic family, as if to keep the Chilean mining conglomerate, its billionaire owner, and the Chilean side of this story entirely out of view. From today’s Joint Status Resolution:

as of February 6, 2020, nearly 22,000 pages have been received using the more expansive set of search terms, with searches still to be run against one custodian (whose records need to be processed by the Interior’s Office of the Chief Information Officer). This page number is therefore subject to change as Defendant awaits the final custodian’s records. The page count will also change, and is expected to decrease significantly, after the FOIA office completes de-duplication within the new search results and cross-checks against records that have already been produced to Plaintiff. The parties have agreed to monthly releases of 750 pages beginning March 15, 2020.

A slow trickle, but I’m cautiously optimistic that these monthly installments will fill in some more details of a picture that remains sketchy. I plan to share them on documentcloud as they arrive.

Update, 7 April 2020: The first of these releases was delayed due to the coronavirus emergency. Interior’s FOIA office began teleworking on March 13th, just two days before the first production was due. According to the Joint Status Report filed today, “two, approximately 700-page productions” are now scheduled for release “before April 15, 2020.”

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.