Two sets of Boundary Waters documents arrived yesterday afternoon.

The first set of documents is the tenth supplemental production — the December production — in response to my FOIA litigation. It includes more records from Briana Collier, 411 pages dating back to 2018 and mainly to do with the fallout from the Boundary Waters reversal: attorneys at Interior prepare for litigation over the reversal and start to gather materials to respond FOIA requests (including mine). I’ve put these materials online here.

The Collier correspondence shows attorneys at Interior searching for and reviewing letters and lease files from 1966 forward to prepare for litigation in the Voyageur case, for instance. In one exchange, the litigation specialist at BLM is apparently trying to reconcile the current lease form with the historical leases. Her questions have been redacted:

This same collection of correspondence also offers a glimpse of attorneys at Interior processing multiple FOIA requests at around the same time that Solicitor Daniel Jorjani was putting the Awareness Review Policy formally in place. There appears to have been some confusion about how to run the records search and how to include custodians who had taken on new assignments, in different departments. At one point, Collier apologizes for the “mess”:

The second set of records in this release includes 126 pages of documents previously withheld until the White House and the Office of the Secretary could review them. These records are now online here. They consist mostly of regular briefings by White House Liaison Lori Mashburn — another political appointee who came to Interior via the Heritage Foundation and the Trump 2016 campaign. These briefings present roundups of news coverage, summaries of schedules and announcements, tweets by Zinke that Mashburn deems “notable,” and the occasional flattering detail — e.g, Zinke’s appearance on the History Channel program Navy Seals: Kill or Capture.

Pages 107-126 of this 126 page document present Daniel Jorjani’s email correspondence and a briefing prepared for “the Duluth trip” (Trump’s June 2018 trip to Duluth, which I wrote about here) by Mitch Leverette, Acting Eastern States Director. The part of Leverette’s memo dealing with “Federal permits, leases, and extension requests” has been fully redacted. The issue was still very much in the works:

One takeaway from these documents is that the Boundary Waters reversal — the Jorjani legal memo of December 2017 — ruled in Antofagasta’s favor but unsettled the regulatory picture for much of 2018. “Questions regarding how to interpret the original lease terms have also persisted,” notes Leverette in his memorandum; and Interior was dealing with other questions as well. An exchange in the December production shows Kevin Baker, Vice President for Legal Affairs at Twin Metals, trying to sort out some “confusion based on the recent approvals” from the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service.

Subsequent actions by Interior and USDA were intended to give Baker and executives at Twin Metals and Antofagasta the results they sought and the clarity they needed to proceed. Now, with the arrival of a new administration only weeks away, things may seem little less settled.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.