In response to my Boundary Waters FOIA case, the US Department of the Interior today released another 446 pages. I put them online here.

This release includes the 2017 calendar of Timothy Williams, a political operative who came to the Department of Interior via the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and Trump’s 2016 campaign in Nevada. “Although Williams doesn’t appear to have experience working on issues that fall within the purview of Interior,” notes the watchdog Department of Influence site, “the department’s press release announcing his hire advertises that Williams is an ‘avid sportsman and accomplished hunter and fisherman.'” Williams is now Principal Deputy Director at the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs at the Interior Department. Last year he was the subject of an ethics complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center.

According to an email accompanying it, Williams’ calendar was scheduled to be released and posted (presumably to the Department’s calendar site) on August 31, 2018, but I don’t see it there and can’t find it elsewhere online. Maybe its release was held up for some reason. In any case it’s new to me, and even at first glance, Williams calendar will allow me to make some additions to the Twin Metals timeline. For example, a June 22, 2017 meeting Williams had with Chad Horrell of the DCI Group (on behalf of Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters) and a “quick huddle” on December 21, 2017 to discuss the Solicitor’s reversal of the M-Opinion along with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the signing of a Secretarial Order.

Taking a broader view, what I said the other day about the last release can also be said of this one: this looks more like a document dump than a meaningful and organized response to my request. The release includes another multiple page spread sheet of FOIA requests sent out for review by Justin Wilkinson from the Secretary’s FOIA Office under the FOIA Awareness policy. The only noteworthy thing about this item might be that it demonstrates, once again, that the claims about custody and control advanced by Interior in the initial stages of this case are claims of convenience, and the firewall between the Office of the Secretary and the Solicitor’s Office is a lot more permeable than they pretended.

The Office of the Solicitor is withholding 16 pages in full. It’s possible from the emails included here to guess what some of those documents are: for example, a “proposed agenda” attached to an August 28, 2018 email from an attorney at the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division is probably among the withheld documents. But I can’t be sure, of course, because the letter from the FOIA office specifies only that some documents are being withheld, not which documents. I’m also unsure whether these documents or other redactions and documents withheld under Exemption 5 will be covered by the Supreme Court’s pending decision in US Fish and Wildlife v. Sierra Club; and from what I am reading, it’s likely that decision will protect deliberative process at the cost of greater transparency.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.