Category Archives: Lake Superior

Another FOIA Lawsuit? I’m Not Sure

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The latest from the Department of State on my outstanding FOIA requests. I’ve written back asking for clarification on an incorrect case control number used here and in previous correspondence.

Way back in October of 2018, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of State concerning an April 2017 meeting at the US embassy in Chile between Ivan Arriagada, CEO of Antofagasta plc, and Carol Z. Perez, who was then US ambassador to Chile. About a month later, I followed up with a second request for embassy communications regarding Trump’s nomination of Andrew Gellert to be ambassador to Chile.

These documents could help highlight the use of the US embassy in Santiago as a business backchannel for Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project in northeastern Minnesota, and perhaps shed some light on the Trump administration’s (botched) effort to appoint a close Kushner family business associate to be Perez’s successor. With Kushner’s $2 billion deal with the Saudis and the financing of the 666 Fifth Avenue deal under scrutiny, these records might also shed some light on the grey area where Kushner operated, mixing financial and other emoluments with Trump administration policy.

Over four years later, those FOIA requests are still outstanding. After a long delay, several blown deadlines, a denial of my request for expedited processing, then a denial of my appeal of that decision, the Department of State now tells me that I should expect a response to the October 2018 request by November 20, 2023. The November 2018 request is now expected to be completed by May 31, 2024. State complains of a FOIA backlog and setbacks due to the COIVD-19 pandemic, but it’s hard to square those complaints with any reasonable interpretation of the FOIA statute, which stipulates that records will be made “promptly available.” And, of course, these soft deadlines are likely to change again.

A lot has changed in the years since I made these two requests, and with the Republicans now taking the gavel in the House, a lot more changes are coming. The Biden administration restored the status quo ante when it issued a legal opinion saying that Antofagasta’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters had been improperly renewed; the Forest Service completed the withdrawal study that Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, abruptly canceled due to political pressure; and the Bureau of Land Management proceeded with the Rainy River Withdrawal.

As Antofagasta and its Twin Metals subsidiary contest these actions in a yet another lawsuit against the federal government, the mining company has stepped up lobbying efforts.

Republicans now say the administration’s actions leave the US vulnerable and over-reliant on supply chains controlled by China. They say the Twin Metals project and other sulfide mining projects in the Lake Superior region will provide American jobs and help prevent human rights abuses abroad.

It’s clear the Twin Metals project will remain a national political flash point in the 118th Congress and in the 2024 election. But so much has changed over the past few years that it’s hard to say whether the records I’m asking for will be of anything more than limited historical interest. What might they contribute to the larger story I am trying to bring into focus, or the current public debate?

That’s weighing on my decision whether to write another complaint, pay the $400 filing fee, and try to force the State Department’s hand. Any case filed in US District Court now would probably take at least until summer or fall to produce responsive records, at which point the State Department promises, sort of, to have its act together. Or they could just put me off again.

Holding Up Political Props Will Not Uphold Human Rights

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When American politicians like Bruce Westerman talk about mining cobalt in the United States, they are almost always talking about copper and nickel mining. According to the US Geological Survey, the US has only 4 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves; and with the notable exception of the Jervois cobalt mine in Idaho and some unexploited reserves in Missouri, “any future cobalt production” would be a “byproduct” of copper and nickel mining.

Most of that mining would be done in the Lake Superior region. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Lundin’s Eagle Mine has produced cobalt-bearing nickel concentrate. Rio Tinto-Talon Metals already control copper and nickel development from Ishpeming to the Keweenaw. In addition to this massive 400,000 acre land package in Michigan, the joint venture also controls the 31,000 acre Tamarack project in Minnesota, the state where most US cobalt reserves are located.

Even here, the primary target resource is nickel, followed by copper, as Tamarack’s own estimates clearly show. In 2017, Antofagasta briefly floated the idea in its annual report that its Twin Metals project near the Boundary Waters would be a significant source of cobalt, but this looks like nothing more than an attempt to position the mine as a source of critical minerals, and the company abandoned that posture. (Trump’s Department of Interior toyed with the idea, too.)

In light of these basic facts, Westerman’s arguments look specious and his moral posture deeply cynical. It’s concerning to see the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources use the artisanal, small-scale miners of the Congo as a political prop – I use that word advisedly – and trade on serious human rights concerns without any plan to address them. Amnesty International’s Mark Dummet fears this kind of “wholly self-serving” virtue signaling could even harm the people it pretends to protect.

Westerman seems to be taking his cues from Minnesota Republican Pete Stauber, who made the same argument after the Biden administration announced the 20-year mineral withdrawal to protect the Boundary Waters:

Joe Biden banned mining in over 225,000 acres of Minnesota’s Iron Range, and locked up development of taconite, copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum group elements, and more…not even one month ago, Joe Biden signed an agreement [presumably the Minerals Security Partnership] to fund mining projects in Chinese-owned mines in the Congo, where over 40,000 children work as slaves in forced labor and inhumane conditions with no environmental protections.

Stauber has made similar shows of concern about human rights in the Congo in the past. This time, just a couple of days later, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal repeated the talking point: “The reality is that if minerals aren’t mined in the U.S., they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.”

A small correction: the reality is that even if minerals are mined in the United States, they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.**

The focus instead should be on taking steps to raise those standards, as Dorothée Baumann Pauly of the Geneva Center for Business Human Rights argues in a new white paper. Trying to eschew artisanally-mined cobalt from the DRC is tantamount to “denial of market realities,”* she writes:

global companies buying cobalt need to encourage the formalization and responsible extraction of the mineral rather than engaging in a futile attempt to avoid cobalt associated with ASM [artisanal small-scale mining] — an attempt that also ignores the sustenance that artisanal mining provides to millions of poor people.

In the Mutoshi pilot formalization program studied by Baumann-Pauly, mechanically prepared (open pit) small-scale mines improved safety. “Formalization stopped children and pregnant women from coming to the mine site.” Other measures encouraged women to participate in mining. The pay these women miners earned could double household income, and in interviews they said the extra income helped offset educational expenses for their children, who were now in school instead of working at a mine site. (Though the pilot program ended during the Covid-19 pandemic, a local cooperative continues to try to enforce these new standards at Mutoshi.)

None of this amounts to a perfect solution, but there’s clearly an opportunity to build on what this pilot accomplished, and it’s encouraging that Microsoft’s Michele Burlington, who accompanied Baumann-Pauly on her trip to the Congo, called for a “coalition” to address ASM in the cobalt supply chain.

If Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) want to address human rights abuses in the DRC, then they should focus on taking constructive steps. And if they are really concerned about China’s outsize influence in the mineral supply chain, then they might want to take a closer look at China’s ownership stakes in companies like Rio Tinto, the very companies that promise to bring jobs and economic development to their own districts.

*This chart from The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) nicely illustrates the point.

** A briefing from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre also warns against the complacency behind these arguments: “assumptions [that] localisation of supply of transition minerals and their production in Europe and North America will guarantee respect for human rights and a sustainable, ethical provision of these materials are misguided.”

A Newer Map of Lake Superior Mining and Mineral Exploration

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This map helps us imagine what the onshoring of critical minerals production could bring to the Lake Superior region.

This looks like the most recent version of a map I’ve posted before, in 2013. It’s published by the Transportation and Resource Extraction Committee of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

The GLIFWC map appears on page 73 of the 2020-2024 Lake Superior Lakewide Action and Management Plan put out last week by the governments of the United States and Canada.

The report includes lots of information about mining in the Lake Superior region that deserves consideration. The report also notes: “The cumulative impact of mines on the ecological integrity of Lake Superior is not well understood.”

Why I Revised Dan Rapoport’s Wikipedia Page

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Reports of Latvian-American financier and Putin critic Dan Rapoport’s death are rife with contradictions and uncertainties. He fell, or jumped, or was pushed from a building on August 14th in Washington, DC. When Metropolitan Police responded to reports of a “jumper,” they found Rapoport dead in front of his apartment building, wearing orange flip-flops and a black hat and carrying his phone, car keys, and $2,620 in cash.

Entertainment journalist Yuniya Pugacheva was first to report Rapoport’s death, claiming that he had abandoned his dog Boy in a nearby park with a suicide note and some money; Rapoport’s wife Alyona disputes Pugacheva’s account along with the allegation that she and her husband were on the outs and that Dan had been spotted in London in the company of other women.

Alyona is not the only one who doubts it was suicide. Friends of Rapoport have cast doubt on Pugacheva’s account. He was, after all, well known for his criticism of Putin, his support for Alexy Navalny, and his association with other Putin opponents, such as Vladimir Ashurkov, Executive Director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

I share these suspicions but I don’t pretend to have any special knowledge or insights into Rapoport’s death. I can, however, speak to some of the sloppy reporting of the story, especially as it concerns Rapoport’s ownership of a mansion at 2449 Tracy Place NW in Washington DC.

That’s the same Kalorama mansion I’ve written about before (e.g., here, here, and here), in connection with Antofagasta’s plans to mine near the Boundary Waters.

Nearly all of the reporting I’ve seen — not just the tabloids, but publications like the Daily Beast and National Review — claims that Rapoport sold his mansion to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016.

That is simply untrue. And now this untruth has been copied, pasted, translated, and spread around the world.

I wrote a long Twitter thread on the subject. You can pick it up here.

I’ve also revised Rapoport’s Wikipedia page — my attempt to create some kind of buffer against this piece of mis- or dis-information. Here’s the rewrite:

This fact check will not do much to stem the tide of sloppy clickbait journalism, I know, but why let it stand? Reaching for scandal, lazy reporters overlook corruption. They erase the true story of how Antofagasta tried to renew its mining leases near the Boundary Waters, or how the owner of that Chilean mining company purchased a luxury property in Washington, DC right after Trump’s 2016 election, then rented it to the new president’s daughter and son-in-law. They give Antofagasta, Andronico Luksic Craig, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner a pass.

The Kalorama story has worked this way since 2017, as I remarked on Twitter. Even when it gets the facts right, reporting wants to insinuate that something must be amiss at 2449 Tracy Place NW, but it fails to say what, exactly, and it rarely addresses the serious questions about ethics, foreign emoluments, and government corruption this story presents.

Update, 26 November 2022: having completed its autopsy, the DC medical examiner’s office has listed the cause of Rapoport’s “sudden” death as “undetermined.”

What’s Behind Some of the Redactions in my Boundary Waters FOIA Case?

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I guess this is what winning looks like.

The b(5) FOIA redactions I contested back in November have all been released in full. I’ve added these unredacted documents to the collection of records from my Boundary Waters FOIA case on documentcloud.

There are no earthshaking revelations here. The emails sent from David Bernhardt’s iPhone turn out to have been sent from his official email account; I suspected the agency might have redacted them to cover his use of a personal account. The redacted paragraphs in the leasing renewal documents from 1987-2005 concern Forest Service consent (or “no objection”) to the lease renewals, with some stipulations about an unresolved reclamation issue. These were public records of past decisions that were treated as if they held closely-guarded secrets.

Then there is the unredacted version of the Twin Metals Talking Points put together by Gary Lawkowski, Counselor to Solicitor Daniel Jorjani and fellow Koch network alumnus. These Talking Points were to accompany the Jorjani M-Opinion, the legal memo that determined Chilean mining giant Antofagasta plc had a non-discretionary right to renewal of its leases near the Boundary Waters. I talked a little about this redaction in a 2020 FOIA webinar. If there is a showpiece among these unredacted documents, this is it:

It’s worth asking why any of this — the letters, the email address, the Talking Points — was redacted in the first place. In previous posts I characterized these assertions of privilege as heavy handed. Interior misused, or abused, Exemption 5 redactions. Some look like a hamfisted effort to protect political appointees, like the full redaction of Lawkowksi’s Talking Points.

Why were these redacted? The Talking Points position the Twin Metals project as a source of critical minerals, criticize the Obama administration, and argue that the Jorjani reversal is “a victory for the rule of law by affirming that the government means what it says when it enters into contracts.” That last claim may be hyperbolical, but hyperbole hardly merits a coverup, and the Talking Points were written for public consumption. Trump himself would repeat the criticism of the Obama administration when he spoke in Duluth. Arguments about regulatory certainty are common enough and would have gotten a friendly reception in the business press. And as we saw just last week, when President Biden issued an executive order and the Senate held a hearing on critical minerals, there is plenty of bipartisan support for onshoring critical minerals production.

So why the sensitivity around Lawkowski’s arguments? Maybe this is just a case of a FOIA reviewer applying Exemption 5 indiscriminately. But why not roll out these talking points, and try to build public consensus around them? I can only guess that it was some mixture of incompetence, or an inability to coordinate a coherent critical minerals strategy (remember infrastructure week?), and arrogance: a sense that they didn’t owe the public explanations.

There is a world in which this could have been a political win, had the administration taken the time to build public support and rally Congressional allies around mining for the energy transition, or a new energy mix, and — this is the kicker — had it found a more legitimate route forward for the lease renewals. Instead, at every turn, they schemed behind closed doors, and they failed.

A Final Batch of Boundary Waters FOIA Records

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Last week, the Biden administration determined that Antofagasta plc’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters had been improperly renewed in 2019.

Principal Deputy Solicitor of the Interior Ann Marie Bledsoe Downs found that changes made to the Bureau of Land Management’s standard lease form were irregular and amounted to giving the Chilean firm “special treatment.” She also withdrew the “flawed” Jorjani M-Opinion, M-37049; its specious claim that Antofagasta had a “non-discretionary right” to renewal of its leases, she wrote, “spurred the improper renewal decisions.” The Jorjani opinion led the agencies into a procedural and legal morass.

“As a consequence of the Jorjani M-Opinion,” Bledsoe Downs writes, the Department of the Interior ignored or sidestepped the Forest Service’s statutory consent authority. Jorjani all but eliminated this authority and swept aside the fact that the Forest Service did not consent to a renewal of the leases back in December of 2016. That determination was invalid, he claimed, because the mining company had a non-discretionary right to renewal. Not just the Forest Service, but “the United States” itself had no say. The leases had to be renewed; the Forest Service could make some stipulations, nothing more.

A small batch of Boundary Waters documents that arrived last night — the 19th supplemental release of records compelled by my FOIA lawsuit against the Department of the Interior — does not shed much new light on how these decisions were taken. This is probably the last batch of records, with the exception, maybe, of those records whose redaction I am contesting.

These records are almost entirely redacted. Nothing but black. I added them to the collection on documentcloud anyway, here.

The new records include three (totally redacted) drafts of a BLM News Release announcing the reinstatement in 2018 of Antofagasta’s mineral leases.

They also include two fully redacted memos from Mitch Leverette, Acting Eastern States Director at the Bureau of Land Management, to Tony Tooke, Chief of the US Forest Service. Even the dates are redacted on these! But we know that they must have been written between September 2017 and March 2018, during Tooke’s brief term as Chief.

The dates, but not much more than the dates, are not redacted on two DOJ communications from Lisa Russell, Chief of the Natural Resources Section of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. Russell’s July 10, 2018 memo is addressed to Karen Hawbecker in the Office of the Solicitor at the Department of the Interior; this is followed by a 14 page draft litigation report on the Voyageur v. United States and Friends of the Boundary Waters v. BLM cases. Those cases had just been filed. Another report, from Russell at DOJ to Jeffrey Prieto, General Counsel at USDA, dated January 18, 2017, deals with Franconia Minerals v. United States, the lawsuit brought by the mining company in September, 2016, claiming a right to renewal of the mineral leases.

Though their contents have been completely obliterated, these records still tell us a little something. Both Leverette at BLM and Russell at DOJ are consulting with the Forest Service; the memos may simply bring the Forest Service into the loop of the the legal work being done at these agencies; they might well address the critical issue of its statutory authority; and in Leverette’s case, at least, the memo might reiterate the Jorjani argument that the USFS 2016 non-consent determination was invalid. The redactions make it impossible to say for certain.

When it comes to the three drafts of the BLM News Release announcing the reinstatement of Antofagasta’s leases, we have very little to work with. The news release comes from Leverette’s Eastern States division. The headline in all three cases reads: “Bureau of Land Management reinstates Minnesota mineral leases. Consideration of application for renewal also re-started.” All three drafts are marked “for immediate release.” While one of the drafts is dated May xx, 2018, two of the drafts are dated “February xx, 2018.”

The official date of the reinstatement was May 2, 2018, but we know from records I’ve previously obtained that the February draft of the news release caused a flurry of activity at the Department of Interior. For example:

The language requested by Leverette might well have been some legal justification of the reinstatement along the lines prescribed by Daniel Jorjani: Antofagasta’s leases could be reinstated because, due to a legal error, the Forest Service’s non-consent determination was invalid. Consider this paragraph from Leverette’s May 2, 2018 official Reinstatement Decision memo:

Because the BLM’s prior request for Forest Service consent was based on the legal error that the United States had discretion to decide whether to renew the leases, we informed the Forest Service that its December 2016 non-consent determination was not legally operative. The Forest Service has not objected to that conclusion.

This just leads me back to the question I asked on Twitter. Why didn’t the Forest Service object? Why didn’t it stand by its earlier conclusion? Why didn’t it make an effort to protect the integrity of the scientific study then underway? Or was there an objection that took from February to May to settle? Was that the subject of the two memos from Leverette to Tony Tooke? Did Tooke’s resignation in March 2018 help resolve the matter?

Of course, there are other explanations for the February-May delay. The federal bureaucracy is a slow-moving beast. Tooke was under siege in the last months of his career at the Forest Service and in no position to dictate terms. And, as Bledsoe Downs points out in a footnote to her legal memo, the decision to reinstate the leases was “concurred in by Joseph Balash, Dep’t of the Interior Assistant Sec’y for Land and Minerals Mgmt.” It may have taken from February to May of 2018 to obtain that concurrence.

What we do know for certain is that on May 2, 2018, on the very day the Bureau of Land Management reinstated these mineral leases, the CEO of Antofagasta plc met with Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. The pressure only mounted from that point on. Though Jorjani had asserted back in December of 2017 that the US Forest Service had no power to say whether the Chilean mining company’s leases should be renewed, the mining company, the agencies, the White House, and several members of Congress dedicated significant resources over the next year to making sure of that and getting Sonny Perdue to cave to their demands.

You can find all the Boundary Waters records I’ve received to date here.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

Are We Ever Going to Find Out How the Boundary Waters Reversal Really Went Down?

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I can make a few additions to the Twin Metals timeline based on the latest release of records in my FOIA case against the Department of Interior, and I hope to get around to that soon. For those who would like to review these documents for themselves, the 16th supplemental production in Galdieri v. Dept. of Interior is online here; and all the public records concerning the Trump administration’s actions on Antofagasta’s mineral leases I’ve obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests may be found here.

This new set of records dates from the final months of 2017, when attorneys at the Department of the Interior are drafting, editing, and preparing to release the M-Opinion that would reverse the Obama administration’s actions and grant Chilean mining company Antofagasta, Plc “non-discretionary right” to a third renewal of its Twin Metals mineral leases. The emails included here span the period from then-Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt’s briefing on the matter in early October 2017 to the release of the M-Opinion in late December.

We get a little more detail here about the Bernhardt briefing — or, at least, evidence of continued sensitivity around it. For example, DOI has redacted the phrase that Karen Hawbecker used to describe one of the briefing documents. 

Why the redaction? Why should this phrase be subject to Exemption 5?  It refers to a document dated August 9, 2017, and its title is clearly indicated in the list of attachments: “Draft Lease Renewal Scenarios w[ith] comment.” How did Hawbecker characterize these scenarios?* Or could this be a case of sloppy redaction, where the reviewer did not notice the paper title in the list of attachments? If so, why should the reviewer not want to indicate that David Bernhardt was presented with a list of “lease renewal scenarios” prepared in August 2017?

Clearly, legal issues as well as political sensitivities were at play, and still are. In December 2017, the Solicitor’s office brings Ron Mulach, Office of the General Counsel at USDA, into the loop; OGC makes some changes to the letter the Bureau of Land Management will send to the Forest Service, notifying them of the new disposition. Other communications with attorneys at the Department of Justice, most likely regarding ongoing litigation, were not included in this release because they will “require consultation” with DOJ, according to the letter accompanying these records. A December 5 note about comments received on the draft from the Environmental and Natural Resources Division and a query from an ENRD attorney asking when the new M-Opinion will be issued are among the traces of those communications.

These documents also heighten the impression that there might have been some tension between political appointees and career attorneys at DOI in that first year of the Trump administration. Duplicates of some previously released emails show Gary Lawkowski, the political appointee who was then serving as Counselor to fellow Koch alumnus Daniel Jorjani, running some kind of independent operation within DOI. Lawkowski asks to see the mineral leases in November. He then drafted, or announced that he was drafting, his own version of the M-Opinion, which appears to have created confusion. As we know, he also floated the idea that the new M-Opinion should be positioned as a critical minerals play. While Lawkowski is pushing that industry-friendly line, Richard McNeer, who has been with the Solicitor’s Office since 1998, suggests including some talking points about how the public can make its views known to the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.

Overall, then, this latest release contributes to the impression that the Boundary Waters reversal was a political project from the get-go. We still don’t know enough about the forces behind that project or about the ways it connected with other schemes run behind the facade of government during the last administration. I remain convinced there is a larger, untold story here, but I am less confident than I was a few months ago that the current administration is going to pull back the curtain or investigate how this all went down.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here. 

*Update, 23 June 2021: It turns out we know exactly how this email read before it was redacted this time around.

And among the documents I’ve obtained is a fully redacted copy of the scenarios paper. It’s entitled “Twin Metals Potential Scenarios for Lease Renewal.” The title almost suggests that Twin Metals (or, more likely, Antofagasta’s WilmerHale lobbyists) provided the scenarios or developed them with Karen Hawbecker.

Perhaps the “comments” included were Hawbecker’s comments on scenarios created by lobbyists or with them? It’s worth noting that these scenarios emerge in the workflow at the Solicitor’s office just a couple of weeks after a July 25, 2017 meeting with Antofagasta, as the timeline shows. Did Antofagasta executives and their lobbyists arrive with these scenarios in hand? Were the scenarios the subject of the meeting?

In any case, Karen Hawbecker worked on the scenarios and forwarded them as separate documents, as scenarios 1, 2A, 2B, and 3, on August 6 and 7 2017 to Jack Haugrud, correspondence shows. The scenarios were then combined into the scenarios paper. Haugrud offers his opinion (“Karen, I”) in some back and forth with Hawbecker on August 7, 2017 that is also redacted.

So the latest redaction only served to direct my attention to these documents and raise the question why there should be sensitivity around them now. It would be troubling if attorneys at Interior were now trying to cover their tracks after following Antofagasta’s lead during the Trump era.

A BLM Map of Critical Minerals Near the Boundary Waters

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The latest release of Boundary Waters documents arrived today, a 14th supplemental production in response to my FOIA lawsuit v. the Department of the Interior. I’ve put them online here.

Two things caught my attention right away: first, an inventory of documents the Solicitor’s office at the Department of the Interior put together, apparently in connection with the Voyageur litigation. A short Twitter thread calls out some items of interest.

Also among the records I received today: a Bureau of Land Management map showing prospecting permits and preference rights leases in Superior National Forest.

There are already a significant number of active leases and many more in the application stage that could eventually come online.

The purple plume of inferred and hypothetical reserves of critical minerals is especially noteworthy here.

We know from other documents I obtained that political appointees in the Solicitor’s office intended to position Antofagasta’s mine as a source of critical minerals; and after the Trump administration published a new list of critical minerals in 2017, Antofagasta itself even flirted briefly (in its 2017 Annual Report) with the notion that Twin Metals had significant cobalt reserves.

The Biden administration is currently reviewing the actions the Trump administration took on Twin Metals and — maybe just as importantly — they are undertaking a review of the critical and strategic minerals supply chain. If it were to be fully developed, that purple plume of hypotheticals and inferences could become a real-world industrial corridor.

Update, 12 May 2021: According to a May 10 Settlement Agreement in Center for Biological Diversity et al. v. Mitchell Leverette et al. (a case in the US District Court of the District of Columbia), the Bureau of Land Management will review its May 1, 2020 decision authorizing the extension of 13 of the prospecting permits indicated on this map. The renewals were made without an Environmental Assessment under NEPA or an effects determination under the Endangered Species Act. These thirteen prospecting permits are for all intents and purposes suspended until BLM completes its review; Antofagasta agrees not to engage in any ground disturbing activities. Antofagasta’s two mineral leases are also under review at Interior and USDA, and we can expect some news on that front in the June 22 filing in Wilderness Society v. Bernhardt.

A Return to Science and a Push for Responsible Mining — Whatever That Means

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New Boundary Waters documents arrived yesterday. I posted a short thread on Twitter as I reviewed them.

These records traverse familiar ground. Most date from January, 2018, when attorneys at Interior were preparing letters notifying the Forest Service and Twin Metals that the Solicitor’s Office had reversed the Obama administration.

For Twin Metals, this would mean that the Department of Interior had rescinded its rejection of their application for lease renewal. Not a green light — that would come more than a year later, in 2019 — but an encouraging sign of new and friendly disposition. For the Forest Service, the reversal would send an early signal that the two-year mineral withdrawal study would either have to favor renewal of Antofagasta’s leases (unlikely), or it would have to be cancelled if it were going to stand in the way of renewal. The issue raised questions about compliance with NEPA, as one heavily redacted exchange suggests:

It would be helpful to know more about how these attorneys saw the problem with NEPA at this time, especially when evaluating the action then-USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue in September of that same year, when under political pressure he abruptly cancelled the planned study.

The document trail invariably takes us back to that critical decision. It deserves careful and comprehensive review. There was some movement in this direction yesterday, when Senator Tina Smith wrote to Perdue’s successor at USDA, Tom Vilsack, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to ask that the BLM and Forest Service to start a new mineral withdrawal and segregation process and resume the study Sonny Perdue interrupted.

Smith’s letter calls for a return to science but recommends a more limited review than the situation warrants. She wants the agencies to determine whether copper and nickel can be “safely” mined in this area, and she also wants to present herself as a champion of Minnesota mining. It’s a move she seems to have learned from Amy Klobuchar.

Be that as it may, Smith offers Vilsack and Haaland one way forward over the next few months, during the court-ordered 90-day stay in Wilderness Society v. Bernhardt.

We must protect our precious wilderness. At the same time, we must pursue opportunities for both recycling and responsible mining of important mineral resources in the United States. If you believe—as I do— that the United States should lead the way in creating a clean energy future, then we must support public policy which allows for responsibly mining the minerals that this future requires. It is irresponsible and unethical to outsource exploitive [sic] labor practices and environmental degradation to other places while we reap the benefits. However, copper-nickel mining is not right for all places. There are some places too sensitive to mine. This is why we the [sic] mineral segregation and withdrawal study is so essential.

The letter simultaneously recommends precautions for the Rainy River Watershed and “responsible mining” to build “a clean energy future.” Those two things aren’t necessarily incompatible, but it’s unclear how this statement translates to coherent rule-or decision-making. It’s also the same line on mining that Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has taken in recent public statements. How will the new administration determine what responsible mining for the clean energy future looks like? That is going to take some difficult conversations, but it’s not an issue Granholm, Vilsack, and Haaland can or should put off for very long.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack Should Promptly Review the Trump Administration’s Decisions around Mining in Superior National Forest

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The 12th supplemental production of Boundary Waters documents in response to my FOIA lawsuit is now up on documentcloud. This Twitter thread calls out some highlights:

What’s most remarkable is just how consistent this release is with previous releases. The story remains the same: the Trump administration’s decisions around mining in Superior National Forest, on the edge of the Boundary Waters, were heavily influenced by a lobbying blitz, interference with regulatory review, and a coordinated, high-pressure campaign to cancel a planned scientific study.

This latest release offers some new details and color around the decision to reinstate Antofagasta’s mineral leases, as attorneys at Interior work on the official reinstatement letter and the news release that will become part of the public record. Most of the editorial decisions they take are heavily redacted; but the decision to opt for an “if-asked” statement over an official press release is exactly the strategy taken with the initial reversal or M-Opinion in December of 2017. Under the subject heading “Twin Metals Acquired vs. Public Domain Lands,” there is more discussion about the map drawn by mining engineer Timothy Howell, and how to reconcile its boundaries with Antofagasta’s Preference Right Lease Applications. And those PRLAs are also the subject of yet another meeting at Interior in March of 2018 with a gang of attorneys from WilmerHale and Twin Metals. Their objective is to press Interior on Antofagasta’s Preference Right Lease Applications and fix the scope and schedule for environmental review, prescribing the “regulatory scheme” officials at Interior should follow. As I noted in my Twitter thread, Chris Knopf and I called out a strikingly similar effort in regard to these PRLAs at another March 2018 meeting.

The story these records (and all the records I’ve received) tell inevitably arrives at then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue’s decision to cancel the mineral withdrawal study in Superior National Forest. I’ve written about this critical decision before (here, here, and most recently, here). It was the product of a coordinated pressure campaign by WilmerHale lobbyists, top executives at Antofagasta, the White House, Republican legislators, and the Congressional Western Caucus.

From this release, we learn a little more about that decision.  In the Spring of 2018, for example, attorneys at Interior still assumed that Perdue would allow the mineral withdrawal study to proceed. In fact, in April of 2018, Secretary Ryan Zinke was prepared to reassure Representative Betty McCollum that the scientific study would help satisfy NEPA and protect Minnesota taxpayers from environmental and economic disaster. Perdue’s decision would break that promise in order to satisfy President Trump.

So these records from the Department of Interior appear to shed light on corruption at the USDA. It’s clear that newly confirmed USDA Secretary Vilsack should promptly review Perdue’s decision, publish an unredacted version of scientific findings to date, and open an ethics investigation into cancellation of the proposed mineral withdrawal. It’s time to repair the damage Perdue did, return the agency to science, and restore the integrity of USDA.