Tag Archives: administrative ethics

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.

New Boundary Waters FOIA Complaint Filed Against US Department of Interior

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Yesterday, I submitted my complaint against the United States Department of interior to the US District Court in the District of Columbia, asking the court to compel DOI to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and release documents I’ve requested about the Boundary Waters reversal.

As a pro se litigant, I had to petition the court for leave to use the Electronic Case Filing system, so for now I am in the slow lane, waiting for my paper filing to be assigned a case number. [Update, August 2, 2019: Galdieri v. US Department of the Interior has been assigned Case No: 1:19-cv-02253 and Judge James E. Boasberg has also granted my motion for pro se access to Electronic Case Filing.] In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful to post the complaint online.

There have been a number of reports lately about the efforts to hobble FOIA at the Department of Interior; and just this week, Gail Ennis, the Acting Inspector General at the Department of Interior, announced an investigation of the department’s FOIA Awareness Process.

Ennis is taking this step after several watchdog groups, including American Oversight and the Western Values Project, charged that the awareness review policy at Interior was instituted to protect Trump political appointees from public scrutiny. (EPA instituted a similar policy last month.)

In my complaint, I mention the expansion of that policy in February, 2019, to cover Ryan Zinke and other officials. It seems to have played into Interior’s abrupt cessation of all communications with me, and its apparent decision to withhold responsive documents.

After corresponding with me fairly regularly for almost a year about my FOIA request, providing two document releases, and promising “additional documents” as part of a “rolling response,” Interior went silent on me as soon as I put the documents I obtained online. Since February, when I first published those documents, they have failed to respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting a status update on forthcoming releases. They even failed to respond to several emails asking whether I had, in fact, exhausted all administrative remedies. I guess their silence is the answer to my question.

I suspect I’ve been blacklisted, or, if that’s too strong a word, at least singled out. My argument here is not just post hoc propter hoc. About a month after I first put the Interior documents online, something else happened to deepen my suspicions.

On March 26th, the Solicitor at the Department of the Interior began to follow me on Twitter.

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This account — which was created in February of 2017, never tweeted, and has since been taken down — appears to have belonged to Daniel Jorjani (DJ). In February of 2017, Daniel Jorjani was Principal Deputy Solicitor (PDSOL) at the Department of Interior: DJ, the PD, at SOL. (I have no idea what the 9999 is about.) He’s now Acting Solicitor and — let’s not forget — he also serves as the Department’s Chief FOIA Officer.

Back in March, the DJPDSOL9999 account was following a number of environmental organizations, like EarthJustice, the NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Western Environmental Law, Wilderness Watch, Cultural Survival, and Indian Land Tenure. DJPDSOL9999 was also following Jenny Rowland Shea, who writes about public lands for American Progress, Anna Massoglia, who researches dark money, Aaron Weiss from the Center for Western Priorities, and climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe. The list went on.

At the time he followed me, @DJPDSOL9999 had “liked” only one thing, and that was on March 21st of this year: a retweet with comment by “Matilda Williams” (@katherinewill27) of a tweet by Swing Left of a Washington Post article.

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The article in question is by Julie Ellperin: “Federal Judge Demands Trump Administration Reveal How Its Drilling Plans will Fuel Climate Change.” It’s about a ruling by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras that the Department of Interior “violated federal law by failing to take into account the climate impact of its oil and gas leasing in the West.” Judge Contreras ordered the Bureau of Land Management “to redo its analysis of hundreds of projects in Wyoming.” It was a big loss for BLM. Jeremy Nichols of Wild Earth Guardians is quoted as saying that the ruling “calls into question the legality of the Trump administration’s entire oil and gas program” — which is, of course, Daniel Jorjani’s responsibility.

The lazy false equivalence drawn by Matilda Williams — Obama too! — misses the entire point of Ellperin’s article. “While the Interior Department began to take into account the climate impacts of federal oil, gas and coal leasing toward the end of Obama’s second term, administration officials jettisoned those plans when President Trump took office.” Zinke, Pruitt, and Jorjani himself were enlisted in this fight, and back in March, DJPDSOL9999 apparently felt that they got a bad deal.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with the Chief FOIA Officer at the Department of Interior operating a stealth account on Twitter. If, however, he’s using it to track people who are making public records requests, that is going to raise serious ethics concerns, especially if he is denying or withholding records on the basis of what those people publish.

Perhaps the Inspector General’s report will shed further light on the matter.

Read other posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.