This morning, after some prodding, Interior sent the 18th supplemental production of records in my Boundary Waters FOIA case. This release numbers only 108 pages. I reviewed the documents this morning in this Twitter thread.

At the moment, the biggest takeaway for me is that we still don’t know nearly enough about coordination among the Department of Interior, the Trump White House, and the USDA, and how politics — and pressure from the mining company — played into the Trump administration’s decisions around Antofagasta’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters.

Today’s release shows that legal memoranda from the mining company on the mineral withdrawal circulated at Interior just days before Solicitor Daniel Jorjani met with David Bernhardt’s close associate Michael J. Catanzaro, then with the Executive Office of the President, and Stephen Vaden, an attorney at USDA who seems to have been charged with keeping Sonny Perdue apprised of developments on this front.

Perdue had promised Representative Betty McCollum in May of 2017 that “we are absolutely allowing [the mineral withdrawal study] to proceed.” By August of 2017, the mining company had offered a whole host of legal arguments that would help Perdue move away from that declaration. But remarkably enough, he didn’t take that route. Instead, in September of 2018, after a year-long pressure campaign, he abruptly cancelled the two-year mineral withdrawal study, then in its eighteenth month, and declared the Rainy River Watershed open to new exploration. Why? Probably because Trump had publicly fingered him, on a May 2018 visit to Duluth: “It’s now up to Secretary Perdue, and I know he’s looking at it very strongly.” It was clear enough what Sonny Perdue had to do. Where legal arguments had failed, coercion succeeded.

I still believe Secretary Vilsack ought to ask the USDA Inspector General to look into the matter, because there’s pretty clear evidence that Perdue acted corruptly, or at least arbitrarily and at the caprice of the president, but it’s seeming less likely Vilsack will do the right thing. Secretary Vilsack has steered clear of making any comments about mining near the Boundary Waters, citing ongoing litigation in Wilderness Society v. Bernhardt and the review of the matter that Interior is undertaking in connection with that litigation — which is now supposed to be completed by October 22, according to court filings. But as I have said repeatedly, the Secretary as head of a federal agency has an independent obligation to the American public and does not need permission from another agency to investigate corruption at the one he leads.

The new records are here.

And all the Boundary Waters FOIA records I’ve obtained to date are here.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.