Yesterday I complained about delays in document production; today a batch of delayed documents arrived. I’ve posted them to documentcloud here.

This appears to be the September production described in the October 6 Joint Status Report, which was held up because some pages required reviews by the White House and the Office of the Secretary. The letter that accompanies this release provides a little more information and tells a slightly different story.

Whereas the Joint Status Report said 6 pages were still awaiting White House consultation, this letter brings that number up to 111 pages. What’s in those pages, and who at the White House needs to review them, remains unclear; but it looks as if when it comes to Antofagasta’s leases near the Boundary Waters, White House involvement with the Office of the Solicitor is more extensive than previously acknowledged.

I’m just starting to review the 583 pages released. They include Gareth Rees’ 2017 calendar, which has already been released; a long list of FOIA requests attached to an email dated July 11, 2018, asking those whose names appear in the requests to review and comment within 72 hours, in keeping with the newly established Awareness Process for FOIA Productions. With the exception of that email, which is of some interest, given the controversy over the Awareness Process, these pages look more like a document dump than an organized and meaningful response to my request. But I plan to go through them and make what additions I can to the timeline.

And even a quick, initial review turns up a few highlights: a list of prohibited holdings (or investments) to prevent conflicts of interest, issued by the Department of the Interior Ethics Office, and which Doug Domenech appears to have greeted with some alarm: “Wow. These lists seem substantially longer than the one that was given to me before. Are they changing?” I posted the list on Twitter just a little while ago. I don’t understand why Antofagasta is not listed along with Duluth Metals and Franconia Minerals.

Doug Domenech counts as a person of interest in my investigation. He is one of the first people to brief the White House on Twin Metals, in June of 2017, just one month after Antofagasta executives fly up from Chile for meetings at Interior and the White House. He does not appear to have been in the White House loop in June of 2018, however, as the White House prepared for President Trump’s visit to Duluth, Minnesota. (More on that here.)

The only trace I’ve seen of those preparations is included in this document production: a June 15, 2018 email from Daniel Jorjani to David Bernhardt, forwarding the Twin Metals Information Memorandum that the Bureau of Land Management prepared for “the Duluth trip.”

The Information Memorandum is not included in this release; perhaps those are the 5 pages withheld in full. But sometime between June 15 and June 20, someone in the White House must have worked their way through it and developed talking points for the announcement Trump made on that trip: “we will soon be taking the first steps to rescind the federal withdrawal in Superior National Forest and restore mineral exploration for our amazing people and miners and workers and for the people of Minnesota, one of the great natural reserves of the world.”

The June 2018 Information Memorandum must have sketched out a plan to “rescind the federal withdrawal.” That wasn’t just a throwaway line, but one Trump read directly from the teleprompter to big applause. As we know, the rescission would not officially happen until September of that year, when Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue canceled the two-year scientific study. His explanation that the study had yielded no new scientific information appears to have already been a foregone conclusion for a few months.