Tag Archives: Antofagasta

Documents Delayed and Permits Accelerated: A Critical Minerals Play?

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Is the Trump administration preparing to invoke emergency powers in order to accelerate permitting for Antofagasta’s sulfide mining project near the Boundary Waters? Listen to what Pete Stauber and Mike Pence were saying in Hibbing the other day.

It has been over two months — 78 days, in fact — since the Department of Interior has released any documents in response to my FOIA lawsuit, despite a February 7, 2020 court order requiring regular monthly releases of 750 pages. While I consider options to get the process back on track, I am also trying to figure out what the delay might mean.

An October 6, 2020 Joint Status Report set out some reasons for the delay.

It’s hard to know what to make of these representations. Let’s start with the September releases, since the reviews mentioned in the connection with the October releases sound a little more standard (and are for that reason even more opaque).

In a letter dated October 31, 2019, I was told by Department of Interior Counsel that all requests for agency records related to Secretary Zinke “must” go through the Secretary’s office, so the Secretary’s records were not, and would not ever be, included in searches the Office of the Solicitor. How, then, does the Office of the Secretary claim “equities” in documents from the Office of the Solicitor? It looks as if the firewall they tried to erect between the two offices didn’t hold up or was nothing more than a temporary blind. The back and forth we had over Tax Analysts v. Department of Justice, a landmark case regarding “custody” and “control” of responsive records, probably needs revisiting.

That leaves the six pages being sent to the White House for “consultation.” What’s in those six pages, and who is undertaking the review? One guess is that they concern communications between Daniel Jorjani and Michael Catanzaro, who until April 2018 was Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Energy and Environmental Policy. Catanzaro met regularly with then-Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, and he appears to have acted as a sort of White House liaison on the Twin Metals matter.

A front page story in the June 26, 2019 New York Times has Catanzaro meeting with Antofagasta executives as early as May of 2017, and the timeline shows him meeting with Daniel Jorjani about the “Minnesota project” in August of that same year. Stephen Vaden, a political appointee at USDA, also attended that meeting and Vaden appears to have stayed in the Minnesota loop to keep Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue apprised of legal developments. (For the next year or so, Perdue would bide his time, lie and equivocate, before abruptly canceling a planned two-year scientific study to determine whether federal lands bordering the Boundary Waters should be withdrawn from mineral development.)

Catanzaro has returned to lobbying for oil, gas, and mining clients, and it seems a little far-fetched to think the hold up might be due to White House sensitivities around Vaden, whose nomination to the United States Court of International Trade is now awaiting a vote in the Senate. Why, then, the consultation at the White House?

Consider that this delay might not less about protecting persons, or political appointees, and more about protecting a position that the White House, the Solicitor’s Office, the Secretary of the Interior, USDA and Antofagasta Plc have jointly developed — seemingly in tandem with their efforts to renew Antofagasta’s leases in northern Minnesota. The position is simply that Twin Metals will be a source of critical minerals.

Only two days after Daniel Jorjani met with Catanzaro and Vaden in August of 2017, the Department of Interior hosted the CEO Critical Minerals Roundtable; and though Antofagasta was not among the mining companies represented on that occasion, the company changed the description of its Twin Metals project to include cobalt — on the list of “critical minerals” — for its 2017 Annual Report. (The 2015 and 2016 Annual Reports make no mention of cobalt.) Immediately after Interior published its list of critical minerals, Gary Lawkowski, who is now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management and was then Daniel Jorjani’s Deputy, recommended a public relations strategy that positioned Twin Metals as a critical minerals play. “One thing you all may want to note — the Forest Service has indicated that they believe there are potentially cobalt and platinum deposits underneath Superior National Forest.” And, as I mentioned in the FOIA webinar I gave in July, Interior has now started to redact Lawkowski’s use of the phrase “critical minerals” in Twin Metals document releases, which indicates some new sensitivity on the point.

This might help explain the legal reviews holding up the October production as well. But the real issue here doesn’t have to do with the documents I’m expecting. It has to do with how the White House, the Department of Interior, and other agencies are developing the critical minerals position on Twin Metals. We can get a sense of where things seem to be heading from the speech Representative Pete Stauber gave to warm up the rally crowd in Hibbing, Minnesota for Vice President Mike Pence just the other day:

Plaid jacket jingoism. But note especially the way Stauber deliberately conflates “copper-nickel mining” with “strategic metals mining,” and organizes the Twin Metals project under emergency powers the president arrogated to himself in the September 30 Executive Order on critical minerals. Pence softened things a bit when he elaborated on the theme, but he told the crowd that the Executive Order “cuts burdensome regulation and eliminates permitting delays.”

The argument Stauber and Pence were starting to make in Hibbing appears to be that the White House can invoke emergency powers in order to accelerate or even sidestep environmental review on behalf of Antofagasta, because Twin Metals is a source of critical minerals and therefore covered by Executive Order.

The Order asks the Secretary of Energy to identify “all such regulations that may warrant revision or reconsideration in order to expand and protect the domestic supply chain for minerals” and to propose changes within 90 days. That puts us at the end of December, and, if current polls hold, right near the end of Trump’s presidency. In the meantime, the order also authorizes the Secretary of the Interior and other agency heads to “use all available authorities to accelerate the issuance of permits and the completion of projects in connection with expanding and protecting the domestic supply chain for minerals.” If Trump loses Tuesday’s election, they’ll have just a couple of months to get this done.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

New Citigroup CEO Has Strong Ties to Chile’s Luksic Group

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Goodbye to all that? With Andronico Luksic Craig looking on, Jane Fraser makes her exit from the May 2019 press event marking the repayment of the Banco de Chile’s subordinated debt.

Jane Fraser, who was named last week to succeed Michael Corbat as CEO of Citigroup, has longstanding business ties to one of Chile’s most powerful business conglomerates, the Luksic Group.

Antofagasta Plc, the company with plans to mine copper and nickel on the edge of the Boundary Waters, is among the conglomerate’s principal holdings — which is why I thought it would be instructive to start looking at the Fraser-Luksic connection as Citigroup prepares for its leadership transition.

It’s unclear just how much exposure Fraser has had to the mining side of the sprawling Luksic business empire. Citibank’s dealings with the Luksic Group over the years appear to be primarily through Quiñenco SA, the financial holding company through which the group controls its investments. It is clear, however, that Fraser enjoys a fairly close business relationship with Andronico Luksic Craig.

Fraser’s relationship with Andronico Luksic Craig and the Luksic Group developed as she came up through Citigroup’s Latin American leadership ranks. After a four-year stint from 2009-2013 as CEO of Citi Private Bank, which serves the bank’s wealthiest customers, the Luksic family possibly among them, Fraser was CEO of Citigroup Latin America from 2015-2018. During that period, she also served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Banco de Chile, co-chair with Andronico Luksic Craig.

The role came with the job. In 2007, Citigroup and Luksic-controlled Quiñenco SA established a partnership that gave Citi a 32.9 percent stake in LQ Inversiones Financieras, the Quiñenco subsidiary that has held a controlling stake in Banco de Chile since 2002. (This was, not coincidentally, the year Andronico Luksic Abaroa handed the reins to his sons Andronico and Guillermo.) The Luksic Group grew rapidly after its move into banking, growing in value from $1.9 billion to $15.6 billion over a ten year period, according to a 2017 London Mining Network report, and “profits were increasingly linked to financial capital and speculation.” Citi took part in that spectacular growth, and in 2010 increased its stake in LQIF to 50 percent.

The partnership with Citigroup also helped the bank through the final stages of its recovery from the financial crises of 1982-3, culminating in the repayment of the bank’s subordinated debt in May of 2019. A “dark chapter” of the Pinochet period had come to a close, thirty years after Pinochet fell from power. The event must have had special significance for Luksic, whose family had decamped to London after the 1973 military coup and only returned to Chilean investment circles with the onset of the financial crisis and recession of the 1980s. Settling the debt of the Banco de Chile must have felt like an act of historical redemption.

In the press conference organized for the occasion, Fraser appeared in the Paseo Ahumada side by side with Luksic and Mario Marcel, the president of Chile’s central bank.

Fraser is now set to become one of Wall Street’s most powerful bankers. Asked to comment on her promotion, Luksic was effusive in his praise, calling Fraser a “pioneering woman” and a “tremendous leader” who will make “an enormous contribution not only to Citigroup, but to the entire financial industry.”

It is still too early to say what, if anything, her move north might mean for Luksic’s business fortunes or the Chilean mining company’s North American ambitions.

Selective Evidence and the Office of the Solicitor

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As attorneys at the US Department of Interior drafted a Solicitors’ opinion from a memo written by a mining company lobbyist, they sought historical evidence to support the lobbyist’s claims. Since issuing the opinion in December of 2017, they have kept the evidence they found from being fully disclosed; and they have also failed to account for historical evidence that runs against the finding the mining company wanted.

During last month’s webinar, I mentioned that attorneys at the Department of the Interior and lobbyists for Chilean mining giant Antofagasta often seem to be singing from the same song sheet. By way of example, I pointed to the fact that both the mining company and the government started talking about Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project as a source of “critical minerals,” and in particular cobalt, at the same time. To illustrate, I included a document in the webinar slides where Interior’s Gary Lawkowski proposed using critical minerals as the cornerstone of the public relations strategy around the Boundary Waters reversal. That’s a topic I hope to have more to say about in the future, especially if I succeed in getting those talking points Lawkowski drafted released in unredacted form.

In a comment posted to the Zoom chat during the webinar, Steve Timmer suggested an even better example: the very legal opinion that allowed Interior to renew Antofagasta’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters — a document known as an M-Opinion — was derived almost entirely from a 2016 letter to then-Solicitor Hilary Tompkins written by WilmerHale’s Seth P. Waxman on behalf of his client, Antofagasta.

I’ve written about Waxman as the architect of the Boundary Waters reversal before, but it’s still disconcerting to think that attorneys at the Department of Interior were taking their cues from a mining company lobbyist and faithfully following his line of argument. The lobbyist, after all, is hired to advance the financial interests of the mining company, not to act in the public interest — which is what government officials, public servants, are supposed to do.

A November 7, 2017 email shows attorneys at Interior pursuing Waxman’s argument that a mineral lease form issued in 2004 is “ambiguous.” The email is reproduced several times in one set of Boundary Waters documents I obtained through FOIA, but it appears unredacted only once. (Now that I’ve been able to read it, I’ll add it to the Twin Metals Timeline.) It’s an email from Jack Haugrud to Briana Collier, asking for “more evidence” that will help them grapple with a key ambiguity Waxman identified.

It’s unclear why the Solicitor’s office would want to redact both the content of Haugrud’s email and the subject of the email (“Twin-More Evidence”), especially considering the ambiguity Haugrud identifies would turn out to be central to the argument of the December 2017 M-Opinion. “Twin Metals is entitled to a third renewal,” according to the Jorjani opinion. Why? For the same reason Waxman identified: “the renewal terms of the 2004 lease form do not govern. The form is ambiguous, and the intent of the parties to keep operative the terms of the 1966 leases becomes clear once the BLM’s decision files are examined.”

So Haugrud writes to Collier looking for “anything from 1999-2004” that would clear up this ambiguity, and “more conclusively show that BLM intended to incorporate the 1966 lease terms into the 2004 leases.” The goal here was clearly not to air all the historical evidence, but to show that the 1966 leases “govern.” This is an exercise in foregone conclusions — Waxman’s conclusions.

In reply, Collier attaches a set of documents she’s gotten from colleagues in the Milwaukee office of USDA. The first paragraphs of a number of these documents have also been redacted, but it’s pretty clear the redacted paragraphs set out terms of renewal, including stipulations. I posted a couple of these documents on Twitter the other day.

 

For what it’s worth, I’m going to appeal these exemptions, since the agency decisions they report are final, and can’t reasonably be construed as deliberative or privileged. Why were these paragraphs blacked out in the first place? Why redact correspondence between Interior and mineral lease holders from 1987, 1999, or 2003? I could hazard a guess, but that won’t really change the fact that the stipulations and conditions they set out are, for now, hidden from the public. As a result, it’s hard to have confidence in the M-Opinion’s summary:

In sum, we have found no documents or other evidence that indicate in any way that the 2004 renewals were to be on altered terms or conditions from the 1989 leases. Because the 1989 leases renewed the leases under the same terms and conditions as the original 1966 leases, those terms remain operative in the 2004 renewal and, as discussed below, entitle Twin Metals to a third renewal.

In the end, as I’ve noted before, Daniel Jorjani and his team of attorneys simply took Waxman’s cues. So the best way to deal with the ambiguity of the 2004 forms, Jorjani writes, is to consider “extrinsic evidence beyond the ‘four corners’ of the document…to ascertain the intent of the contracting parties.” Here, too, Jorjani will follow Waxman in seizing on the decision files of the Bureau of Land Management to show “that the BLM renewed the leases in 1989 under the same terms as the 1966 leases and did so again in 2004.”

And what were those terms? If you adhere to Waxman and Jorjani’s reading of the evidence, the terms are clear: the mining company, the holder of the leases, is entitled to a “non-discretionary” right to renewal:. “because of recognized operational problems in the area, producing minerals in the short term would have been impossible. The leases thus would serve no rational purpose absent a non-discretionary right to renew; no company would undertake the necessary investment for exploration and development knowing that it could be unilaterally deprived of any ability to recoup that investment.” In other words, northern Minnesota is a tough place to operate, so there was never any requirement to bring the leases into production. Solicitor Tompkins was wrong to say there was.

There are a couple of problems with this line of argument. The first has to do with the recourse to extrinsic evidence. Once you go beyond the four corners of the document, where do you stop? Why are BLM decision files from the 1980s the only extrinsic, or historical evidence to consider? To my mind, there are at least three other kinds of extrinsic evidence that need to be taken into account: the redacted paragraphs in the BLM correspondence noticed here; the provisions of the 1978 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act; and the good faith representations made by the Department of Interior when the agency first issued the 1966 leases.

That last item brings me to the second problem with this Waxman-Jorjani line of argument. As Representative Alan Lowenthal has repeatedly pointed out, there is clear historical evidence that the original 1966 leases did not confer a non-discretionary right to renew. There were conditions and stipulations. One was a production requirement. That is, the 1966 leases would not be renewed if the company failed to bring them into production — to start mining — by the end of the primary term of the leases: 1986. The Bureau of Land Management said so in the press release it issued at the time, and in an earlier post I produced several Minnesota newspaper accounts reporting on the production requirement. Here is another that I found just this morning, an article that ran in the New York Times on June 15, 1966.

It seems likely the Times and other newspapers explicitly mention this detail not just because it was included in the BLM press release, but mainly because it was a critical piece of information for investors. Purchasers of International Nickel Company stock at the time would have wanted to know what plans there were to develop the newly-acquired Minnesota leases and what commitment the company had to make a going venture of them. Fifty-four years later, the American public deserves the same consideration.

Update August 28, 2020: An Amended Complaint filed in Wilderness Society et al. v. Bernhardt et al. might help explain why the first paragraphs of those Milwaukee documents were redacted before being released.

The complaint quotes an email from a legislative assistant for Congressman Pete Stauber to a Forest Service Congressional liaison: “I just wanted to touch base on the Twin Metals situation. The company is getting increasingly concerned about the stipulations put forward by the Forest Service on the up or down vote they require for mineral lease renewals every ten years. Both Reps. [Tom] Emmer and Stauber are increasingly concerned that these stipulations could deter Twin Metals from making further investment in the area and slow down economic development in turn.”

Under pressure from Stauber and Emmer, we learn, the Forest Service waived its statutory right to consent to all future lease renewals. This was a departure — an arbitrary and unlawful one, according to the complaint — from the terms of the 1966 and 2004 leases. The Forest Service established new stipulations, including “(1) a right to perpetual renewal of the Leases if Twin Metals complies with the Leases’ terms and stipulations; and (2) a stipulation that if Twin Metals fails to meet certain milestones for developing and constructing a mine during the 10-year renewal period, the Leases will terminate, but with provisions that can toll the Leases’ term.”

It seems the redacted portions of the Milwaukee documents might have set out stipulations that were not to the mining company’s liking. Further discussion here.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

 

 

 

 

More Evidence Foreign Mining Company’s Interests Were Top Priority at Trump’s Interior

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This month’s release of Boundary Waters documents in response to my FOIA lawsuit may only number 19 pages, but it helps highlight an important point, one I have repeatedly made when writing and speaking about this issue: reviving Antofagasta’s expired mineral leases in Superior National Forest was a top priority for the incoming administration.

We don’t know why.

The July release shows officials at BLM revisiting the proposed mineral withdrawal in Superior National Forest much earlier than previously known. On January 25, 2017, Richard Cardinale and other Interior staff meet to discuss a correction to the Federal Register. The original notice of the proposed two-year mineral withdrawal incorrectly stated January 21, 2017 as the end date (which would amount to a two-day, not a two-year segregation period). This seems like straightforward, conscientious work.

Two days later, on January 27, 2017, just one week after the inauguration, political appointee Daniel Jorjani seizes on this briefing and forwards it — at 4:48AM — to Katharine MacGregor and Kathleen Benedetto.

It’s clear that the trio has been discussing Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project in northern Minnesota. Why the routine publication of an errata notice in the Federal Register should have excited them, or how it might have served their ends, remains unclear.

But this Jorjani email appears to have gotten the ball rolling. MacGregor requests a list of all public land withdrawals and segregations made in the last year of Obama’s presidency, which Michael Nedd dutifully prepares and delivers on Monday, January 30.

We know from the timeline that by Thursday of that same week, February 2, Kristin Bail is putting together a briefing for MacGregor on Antofagasta’s leases near the Boundary Waters. I am unable to say whether other segregations and withdrawals on Nedd’s list were dealt with so zealously.

It seems safe to say that the business interests of a Chilean conglomerate took precedence over a whole lot of other matters at the Department of the Interior in the first weeks of the Trump administration.

The new documents are here.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

A Small Set of Jorjani Boundary Waters Documents

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A new set of documents released yesterday in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit offers a little more insight into the role high-level political appointees at the Department of Interior played in the Boundary Waters reversal.

This latest release is the smallest I’ve received to date: 197 pages, whittled down by reviewers from 1,000 potentially responsive pages. As always, the documents are pretty thoroughly redacted, with most of the redactions made under Exemption 5, which covers attorney-client, attorney-work product, and deliberative process privilege.

Most of the documents appear to be email correspondence to and from Daniel Jorjani, who was then Principal Deputy Solicitor at the Department of Interior. I’ve written about Jorjani before (see, e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4). Some of these documents have already been made public. But even these duplicates can be revealing. For example, an exchange between Daniel Jorjani and David Bernhardt mocking Governor Dayton includes the Principal Deputy Solicitor’s approving reply (“perfect”) to Bernhardt’s sneer, which I had not seen before:

perfectSalazar

Or consider this example, which I posted on Twitter yesterday:

Lawkowski thought it might be a good idea, for public relations purposes, to make it seem that Chilean mining giant Antofagasta’s copper and nickel mining operation in Minnesota would deliver critical minerals: “the Forest Service has indicated that they believe there are potentially cobalt and platinum deposits underneath Superior National Forest,” he writes on December 20th, 2017, noting that cobalt and platinum were included on the new list of “critical minerals” published by the US Geological Survey earlier that same week.

He may have shared the same line of thinking with Downey Magallanes, another political appointee, at around the same time. “Are you working on twin metals [sic],” she writes, asking if Lawkowksi can “do a blurb for the weekly report much like you did for MBTA [the MIgratory Bird Treaty Act, subject of another controversial December 2017 Solicitor’s opinion]?”  Lawkowski is ready to help, and runs his (here, wholly redacted) effort by Haugrud and Jorjani:

lawkowskimagallanes

At the time, Magallanes was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the Department of the Interior. (She now works in Government Affairs at BP.) As the timeline indicates, she had been in the Twin Metals loop since at least April of 2017. In December, as Deputy Solicitor Jorjani prepared to release a new legal opinion that would clear the way for the reinstatement and renewal of Antofagasta’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters,  it would have been Downey’s job to integrate the legal opinion into a broader policy framework. Invoking the new list of critical minerals would have helped her do that.  Platinum and cobalt deposits in the Duluth Complex would provide a policy rationale — or at least a convenient pretext — for allowing Antofagasta to mine copper and nickel on the edge of the Boundary Waters. 

You can explore the new set of documents here, and all the Boundary Waters records I have received to date here. 

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

A Debate Over Environmental Review? New Boundary Waters Documents

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“Again pinging BLM”: in 2017, the US Forest Service appears to have been concerned over what standards of environmental review applied to the proposed mineral withdrawal in Superior National Forest.

A new set Boundary Waters documents arrived yesterday. This is the latest monthly installment in a “supplemental production” of responsive records the Department of Interior agreed to make after I sued for failure to comply with FOIA. This batch includes 378 pages, pretty thoroughly redacted. I’ve put them online (1,2, 3, along with the rest of the Boundary Waters documents I’ve obtained) and started to go through them.

Their arrival might be timely. Some of the records show officials at the Department of Interior trying to decide on appropriate standards of environmental review as they work on renewing Chilean mining giant Antofagasta’s mineral leases in Superior National Forest. That is a question at the heart of a new lawsuit filed at the start of this month in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Wilderness Society et al. v. David Bernhardt et al. says the Bureau of Land Management failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in renewing Antofagasta’s mineral leases. It also charges that the US Forest Service acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner (in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act) when it reversed course and promoted mine development, despite having previously found that allowing sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters would pose unacceptable risks.

Hopefully this case is going to shed light on the question why Interior rushed to renew Antofagasta’s mineral leases, and at whose direction, and why Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue abruptly cancelled the scientific study of sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters.

While the new documents don’t answer those questions directly, they conform to the pattern we’ve seen in previous document releases. They paint a picture of nearly complete regulatory capture, with Interior officials meeting and working closely with executives from Antofagasta and their Twin Metals Minnesota subsidiary as well as lobbyists from WilmerHale.

There are, for example, records here of a March 6, 2018 meeting and another on March 22nd. Daniel Altikes (the Antofagasta executive I discussed in a previous post) flies up “from Chile” for that one:

The documents also show Antofagasta/Twin Metals weighing in on what standards of environmental review should apply to the renewal of their mineral leases as well as their preference right lease applications (or PRLAs). According to the meeting summary prepared by Ryan Sklar of the Office of the Solicitor, the mining company recognizes “that there is debate about the type and scope of review that is necessary/appropriate.” Not surprisingly, they would prefer a Categorical Exclusion (CX: meaning the renewal would essentially be exempt from environmental review!), but they will settle for a “limited EA” (which is essentially what they got).

The meeting with Altikes and the lobbyists from WilmerHale on Thursday, March 22nd appears to be the follow up Sklar mentions here. It’s unclear from the documents I have whether there was much debate on that occasion or any dissent in the room at all.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here. 

An April Set of Boundary Waters Documents, or, Mr. Altikes Comes to Washington

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Back on February 7th, in a Joint Status Report filed with the US District Court of the District of Columbia, the Department of Interior agreed to conduct additional searches in response to my Freedom of Information Act request regarding the renewal of mineral leases near the Boundary Waters held by Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta, Plc. This was a tacit admission that the initial searches the Office of the Solicitor conducted (and which produced about 6,000 pages of records) were inadequate, as I complained to the court. Specifically, those first records searches appear to have deliberately excluded any search terms having to do with the Chilean side of this story. Now a new release of documents — just over 1,000 pages, and the first in what is supposed to be a series of monthly releases — helps us fill in the Chilean picture just a little more and add more detail to the timeline.

These documents (in five parts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) are now posted on documentcloud.org along with the other Boundary Waters documents I’ve obtained through FOIA.

The new records are mostly emails, all very thoroughly redacted, from the files of Karen Hawbecker, Acting Deputy Solicitor, Energy and Mineral Resources. They include some documents that came along as attachments — briefings, drafts of letters, and so on. As the timeline shows, Hawbecker was in the Twin Metals loop as early as February 7, 2017, just a little over two weeks after the inauguration, and, as these new records remind us, she stayed in the loop.

In fact, one of the more striking records included in this new release takes us well beyond the 2017 decision timeline I’ve been tracing (and beyond the scope of my initial records request). It’s a Building Admittance Request form dated May 8, 2018, that shows Hawbecker meeting with Daniel Altikes, Vice President of Antofagasta, Plc. Along with him is Kevin Baker, Vice President of Legal Affairs, Twin Metals Minnesota, and two lobbyists from WilmerHale.


This meeting comes less than a week after Mitchell Leverette of the Department of Interior notified Kevin Baker that he was reinstating the leases near the Boundary Waters, on May 2, 2018.

Up until now, we knew that Antofagasta had a couple of meetings with high level officials at the Department of Interior about their mineral leases in Minnesota. Now it appears that Altikes and the Chilean company had much easier and more frequent access to Trump administration officials than I ever realized. So, for example, we find Altikes on the calendar of then-Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management Joseph Balash, meeting with Interior officials on October 3, 2018 along with Twin Metals CEO Kelly Osborne.

Altikes3Oct2018

This was just about a month after Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that USDA had cancelled a two-year scientific review of a proposed mineral withdrawal for the Rainy River Watershed, removing “a major obstacle to mineral leasing in Minnesota.” The topic of this October 2018 meeting with Altikes and Osborne was: “to share our hopeful schedule/milestones for the next 24 months.” Interior and Antofagasta are now working in synch.

A profile of Altikes in Vanguard magazine gives him all the credit:

…it was the challenge posed by American regulatory regimes that proved the most daunting. Five years after laying the legal groundwork for a massive mining venture, the project — totaling hundreds of millions of dollars of investment — got challenged by U.S. regulators.
For foreign-born lawyers like Altikes, such circumstances — navigating one of the world’s most confounding and complex regulatory structures — would’ve been reason enough to quit and cut the losses.
Owing to his extensive experience working with American firms, Altikes knew that his only recourse was to immerse himself in the head-spinning legal waters of Washington, D.C.
In time, he started interfacing directly with governmental representatives….

Another, earlier example also leads us to Sonny Perdue’s decision to cancel the two-year scientific study. On September 28, 2017, Altikes met with Vincent DeVito, who was then Counselor to the Secretary for Energy Policy. The April documents suggest how this meeting may have come about.

On June 15, 2017, Karen Hawbecker drafted a letter to Ian Duckworth, Chief Operating Officer of Twin Metals Minnesota, and circulated the draft internally for comment. It is a reply to a letter Duckworth sent on May 26, 2017, the contents of which we can infer from Hawbecker’s reply.* Duckworth had complained about the proposed mineral withdrawal of Superior National Forest and asked, or demanded, that the US Forest Service cancel its application for withdrawal, or that the Bureau of Land Management deny the Forest Service’s application. In her response, Hawbecker also acknowledges Duckworth’s request for a meeting with then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and directs Duckworth to contact the administrative assistant for Vincent DeVito and schedule a meeting with him.

DeVito’s 2017 public calendars are not searchable, so they have to be scanned one day at a time. I have not yet come across a meeting with Duckworth on them, but the September 28 meeting with Altikes — the top lawyer for Duckworth’s Chilean boss — obviously followed from Duckworth’s complaint. (As if to prepare for the meeting with Altikes, DeVito also met with Twin Metals lobbyists from WilmerHale three days earlier, on September 25.)

What prompted Duckworth to complain about the proposed mineral withdrawal on May 26 is also clear and worth pointing out: the testimony of Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, just one day earlier, at a hearing on the US Forest Service Budget held by the House Committee on Appropriations.

At that hearing, Representative Betty McCollum asked Perdue along with US Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell whether the Forest Service would let the two-year federal scientific study of sulfide mining in Superior National Forest go forward. Secretary Perdue reassured Representative McCollum that he and Secretary Zinke had “already met about this” and he would “absolutely” allow the scientific study to proceed.

He did not, of course, and the Forest Service still refuses to release the findings of the incomplete study. They’ve issued a wholly redacted copy, and now they claim the study includes only “deliberative pre-decision materials” that are not suitable for public release and would only create confusion if they were released.

It remains unclear why Perdue went back on his word and abruptly cancelled the US Forest Service study in September of 2018. We can see that Hawbecker cc’d USDA on her June 2017 reply to Duckworth. Just months later, an executive from Antofagasta would have the high-level meeting Duckworth sought the day after the Secretary of Agriculture said he would listen to the scientists.

*CORRECTION 26 April 2020. In my latest review of the documents produced so far, I found a copy of the Duckworth letter, written the day after Sonny Perdue testified that he would allow the scientific study to go forward. The letter is addressed to both Ryan Zinke and Sonny Perdue. (Hawbecker’s reply mentions only Zinke. We don’t know if USDA replied, or if Hawbecker’s was the only reply.)

The letter accompanied a four-page Twin Metals legal memorandum.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here.

On the Boundary Waters, Top Interior Department Lawyer Gets the Historical Record Wrong

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Newspaper accounts and congressional testimony from 1966 suggest that Solicitor of the Interior Daniel Jorjani overlooked — or deliberately suppressed — critical evidence when he ruled, in 2017, that Antofagasta Plc had a right to renew its mineral leases near the Boundary Waters.

About a month ago, and just two days after his Senate confirmation as Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, Daniel Jorjani appeared before the House Natural Resources Committee to testify about his agency’s failure to cooperate with congressional oversight requests.  A highlight of that hearing came when Representative Alan Lowenthal pressed Jorjani about the renewal of mining leases near the Boundary Waters.  Jorjani was politically motivated, Lowenthal contended, and acted without regard for “history, law, and common sense.”

To help drive home the point, Lowenthal produced a 1966 Department of the Interior press release that directly contradicts one of the key legal arguments Jorjani made: that the terms of the original 1966 International Nickel Company leases “govern” the two leases currently held by Antofagasta, Plc, and — this is critical to his argument — that renewal of the leases was not conditioned on bringing the mine into production: “the historical record of the 1966 lease implementations,” Jorjani wrote, “show that production was not made a condition of renewal.”

In making this argument, which involves a tortured reading of renewal terms in Section 5 of the 1966 leases, Jorjani followed the lead of Antofagasta’s own legal counsel, Seth Waxman. Here, Waxman appears to have led Solicitor Jorjani astray. As Lowenthal points out, Jorjani is unable to account for the Department of the Interior’s own press release, issued the very day the leases were signed in 1966, which states unambiguously that the leases will be renewed “if the property is brought into production within the initial 20 year term.” What are we to make of this discrepancy? This is a question Lowenthal has been asking for two-and-a-half years.

In the exchange that follows, Jorjani says legal opinions about contracts are “not driven by press releases” and offers some evasive, time-wasting thank yous for the question, but he fails to put the matter to rest. Here’s video cued to the start of Lowenthal’s time.

News reports about the lease signing only serve to strengthen Lowenthal’s point. A June 15, 1966 Associated Press story by George Moses reproduces the language of the Department of the Interior press release. Here, for example, is a detail from the story as it ran in the Fergus Falls, MN Daily Journal:

The twenty year condition appears to have been an uncontroversial part of the agreement, unlike royalty rates, which took until November of 1966 to approve. On November 14, 1966, the Star Tribune could still say “the situation in regard to copper and nickel taxation is cloudy,” and an article in the Star Tribune on December 22, 1966 makes it clear the subject is still being debated into the winter; but there is no indication of controversy over the lease renewal terms.

In the June 15th Associated Press story, Henry Wingate, Chairman of International Nickel Company, “said he expects the property to be producing within a few years.” He and others at International Nickel were confident — too confident, as it turns out. In a July 13, 1966 story in the Minneapolis Star, published just about a month after the lease signing, Wingate’s second in command, John Page, predicted they’d be in production “in three years, if everything goes right.”

Wingate and other executives at International Nickel were confident they could bring the Minnesota leases into production within the space of a few years because they had successfully brought a much larger mining operation into production in just four and a half years. In that case, they also had to build a town to house 4,000 workers and their families. (That is how the boomtown of Thompson, in Manitoba, Canada, came to be built.) Twenty years would have seemed like a cakewalk. Others felt assured. When John G. Harlan Jr. of the General Services Administration testified before the Senate in 1967, his understanding was that International Nickel “plan to get into the production” in Minnesota by the early 70s.

Wingate, Page, and Harlan were about to be disappointed and see their confidence deflated. Right around the time International Nickel signed its Minnesota leases, the company’s fortunes took an unexpected turn. Competition stiffened, as other producers began bringing less expensive nickel oxides and ferroalloys into production. Nickel miners struck at International Nickel’s Sudbury mine. In 1966, the strikes were violent; in 1969, they were disruptive. The early 1970s brought recession. International Nickel’s stock tumbled, and Wingate’s successor,  L. Edward Grubb, made it his policy to curtail new development. Wingate would die in 1977 without seeing the Minnesota leases he’d signed a decade earlier come into production.

For Jorjani’s reading of the 1966 leases to prevail, we have to ignore all this history — the issuing of the press release and contemporary news reports, the company’s false projections of confidence, the bottom-line effects of work stoppages and labor strife, the economic stagnation of the early 1970s, and the decision at International Nickel to cut back on new development. Surely this is all part of the rich historical record, and even this cursory review shows exactly the opposite of what Solicitor Jorjani claims.

Postscript, November 22, 2019. Nicholas Lemann devotes a few paragraphs to International Nickel’s 1974 acquisition of Electric Storage Battery (ESB) in Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream. It was the first “hostile” takeover (F.J. Port, ESB’s president, called it a “hostile tender offer made by a foreign company for all of ESB’s shares”).

The deal set a precedent, and helped set the pattern for a broader economic transition from industrial to financial capitalism. It also helps illustrate how far International Nickel had traveled in the short space of the eight years since it had acquired its Minnesota mineral leases in 1966.

By 1974, International Nickel Company was looking for steady and reliable sources of revenue to offset cyclical downturns in nickel, and ESB’s battery business seemed to offer that. After a hard fought battle, International Nickel won a Pyrrhic victory, purchasing ESB at an inflated price. The battery maker was losing money by 1981. Inco eventually broke it up and sold its parts.

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here. 

 

Interior Still Hiding the Role of Political Appointees — Update on the Boundary Waters FOIA Case

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Interior’s latest responses to my FOIA complaint show that the Office of the Solicitor continues to protect political appointees from public scrutiny. 

Back in July, I filed a complaint against the U.S. Department of the Interior in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, saying Interior had violated the Freedom of Information Act and was wrongfully withholding responsive documents. After providing me with about 5,000 pages of documents in response to a FOIA request I’d made on January 19th, 2018, and promising a “rolling release” of more documents, Interior abruptly cut me off, failing to answer numerous emails and phone calls, and leaving me with no recourse but to ask the court to compel them to comply with the law.

After asking for an extension, which I granted, lawyers for Interior filed an answer to my complaint on Wednesday, October 15th. The following day, Judge Boasberg issued a minute order asking the parties to confer and submit a joint proposed briefing schedule by the end of this month. It seems the case is now ready to go forward, with Interior maintaining that my complaint is groundless.

In a bid to settle the whole matter once and for all, just a few days earlier, on October 10th, Interior released a new set of responsive documents. The decision letter that accompanied this release copies the DOJ attorney for the defendants and characterizes this as the “third and final” decision for this particular FOIA request.

So, the position of the Department of the Interior appears to be: we have given you everything you are going to get, and you should stop complaining. The main trouble I have with this position is that they haven’t even begun to give me the very documents I ask for in my FOIA request: namely, and this is the very first item in the request, “any communication sent and received by the Office of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, including but not limited to any emails or letters sent and received directly by the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke or on behalf of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, regarding the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Antofagasta Plc, Twin Metals Minnesota,” and so on.  I’ve gotten nothing — zero, zip — to or from Ryan Zinke. Are we to believe that the Secretary of the Interior never communicated about a major reversal by his department of the previous administration? Nor have I gotten anything to or from Deputy Solicitor Daniel Jorjani, who signed the reversal, and whose communications I also asked for.

It’s pretty clear that Interior is protecting political appointees like Zinke and Jorjani from having to show their work — which is exactly what Jorjani has been trying to accomplish with his expansion of the FOIA awareness review policy at Interior. That is the thrust of reporting (like this and this) by Jake Holzman at Roll Call, and the reason why organizations like American Oversight, Earthjustice, and the Western Values Project have asked Interior’s Inspector General to launch an investigation of the awareness review process. It’s also an issue on which Jorjani may have misled the Senate during his confirmation hearing, prompting Senator Ron Wyden to ask that Jorjani’s confirmation be held up until it could be established whether he had perjured himself. (Despite Wyden’s effort, Jorjani was confirmed as Solicitor on September 24, 2019.)

What I’ve gotten, instead, is the work product of civil servants, career attorneys, not political appointees. Even that material has been revealing. With the documents provided so far, I’ve managed to put together a timeline of the work done at interior to reverse the Obama administration. The documents allow us to reconstruct an intensive lobbying effort led by WilmerHale that included visits by executives from Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals to the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, the Department of the Interior, and the White House. It appears Antofagasta’s attorneys at WilmerHale even provided the blueprint for the M-Opinion, the reversal, that Daniel Jorjani eventually signed. Since I first put them online, these documents have also made their way into Congressional hearings and on to the front page of the New York Times.

The latest release of responsive records is yet another partial disclosure that keeps the work of political appointees out of view. The records come from Division of Mineral Resources attorney Brianna Collier. It’s the second batch of documents from Collier, and though they give us a little more detail into the reversal process, they are a dodge. I’ve added them to the online collection of Boundary Waters FOIA documents here.

All of the work product is heavily redacted, most of it totally redacted. Collier’s emails are more lightly redacted, and they show her at work on the draft of the Boundary Waters reversal as early as May of 2017, when she first prepares an outline of the new M-Opinion. She starts writing a draft in earnest after a meeting between Interior officials and Twin Metals executives on October 12th, 2017. She’s tasked with getting the thing done in the space of about a month, but others, like Jack Haugrud, appear to be calling the shots (as Collier makes clear on November 17th, when she writes to tell Haugrud she is “working away on editing the Twin Metals opinion according to your directions”).

Something notable happens that very evening, the new correspondence reveals. Haugrud becomes aware that Gary Lawkowski — a political appointee who at that time is serving as Counsel to Daniel Jorjani, and who worked with Jorjani at the Koch-affiliated Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce — has been working on his own draft:

So it appears that there were, at one point, two drafts of the M-Opinion in circulation, one that Collier had been working on since first making an outline in May, and then another by political appointee Gary Lawkowski. Haugrud saw it as his job to reconcile them before forwarding the opinion to Daniel Jorjani for review. It’s not clear Lawkowski’s “ideas” made it into the final draft of the M-Opinion, or what those ideas were. When we next come across Lawkowski in the records we have so far, it’s December, and he’s circulating talking points about the reversal that put the focus on strategic and critical minerals. Does that tell us something about his ideas one month previous? If so, those political arguments never made it into the final M-Opinion.

Until we see more documents, and learn more about why this matter was a priority for the Trump administration, it will also remain unclear what role political appointees like Lawkowski, Jorjani, and Zinke played in the Boundary Waters reversal. This appears to be something they are trying to keep from the public. Why?

Read more about the Boundary Waters reversal here. 

A Motion in D.D.C. and Some Updates to the Twin Metals Timeline

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A March 1, 2019 motion filed in Voyageur Outward Bound School et al. v. United States et al draws on the collection of documents I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Interior. The motion asks Judge McFadden of the US District Court for the District of Columbia to compel the completion of the administrative record. This is from the declaration filed together with the motion to compel:

During the week of February 11, 2019, Plaintiffs learned of a set of 4,490 pages of documents that Louis Galdieri had obtained from the Department of the Interior in response to a January 2018 FOIA request and had published online earlier that week (Galdieri FOIA Production). Mr. Galdieri is unaffiliated with Plaintiffs. After reviewing those thousands of pages of documents, Plaintiffs identified the documents attached hereto as Exhibits A–J as particularly relevant to the issues in this case.

As it now stands, the record before the court paints an incomplete picture. The Exhibits filed together with the motion include key documents from the FOIA production that now appear in the Twin Metals timeline. These documents show Interior officials working closely with lobbyists from WilmerHale, giving short shrift to environmental advocates and setting scientific findings aside, and meeting multiple times with executives from Antofagasta, Plc and Twin Metals Minnesota.

The FOIA production also offers evidence of coordination with the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, where the CEO of Antofagasta met with the ambassador in late April of 2017, and with the Trump White House, where the Antofagasta CEO and his entourage may have had meetings as early as May of 2017.

Overall, the documents demonstrate clearly that the review of the Twin Metals matter undertaken at the Department of Interior was an exercise in a foregone conclusion. The goal from the outset was to reverse the Obama administration and deliver for the mining company.

The attorneys for the plaintiffs called out a some documents that had escaped my noticed. These now appear on the timeline. One document was not there because I could not figure out where it should fall in the chronology: it is dated  “April XX” of 2017. It is a copy of a Memorandum for the Secretary — namely, Ryan Zinke — from the Office of the Solicitor, heavily redacted on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.

The eight page memorandum is pretty clearly the same memo, or a draft of the same memo that Kathleen Benedetto forwarded to Zinke on April 25, 2017. That memorandum was developed from a Briefing Paper that had been in the works at Interior as early as February of 2017. The memo provides Zinke with “a set of options for reversing” BLM’s decision on Twin Metals before he meets with Representatives Tom Emmer and Rick Nolan the next day . Even though the XX in the date is not a Roman numeral but a placeholder, I’ve dated it April 20th, just to assign it a place in the timeline.

AprilXXSol

That redacted document helps bring Zinke into the picture. I’ve also added an October 12th, 2017 meeting between the Office of the Solicitor meets and Twin Metals Minnesota. We know about this meeting from an October 27, 2017 email sent by Briana Collier to Karen Hawbecker and Richard McNeer of the Office of the Solicitor. She reminds them that Jack Haugrud expects the Solicitor’s office to produce “Twin Metals M-Opinion Reversal Draft” in “4-6 weeks from when we met with Twin Metals on October 12th.”

This document might help clear up some confusion I had about how many times the Solicitor’s office met with Antofagasta executives. I had counted only the May 2nd and July 25th meeting with Antofagasta CEO Ivan Arriagada, but a March 1, 2019 letter from three House leaders — Alan Lowenthal, Raul Grijalva and Betty McCollum — to Secretaries Perdue and Bernhardt pointed to a third meeting: “Antofagasta met with Jorjani three times in the months leading up to the issuance of his Solicitor opinion in December 2017,” the letter reads. Maybe this October 12th meeting counts as the third meeting. I’ve written to McCollum’s office for clarification, but have not received a reply.

Even with all the redactions, gaps in the record, and unanswered questions, it seems pretty clear that in the Twin Metals matter the Department of the Interior was serving private interests, and not the public interest. At whose direction we still do not know; nor do we know why the matter appears to have been a priority for the new administration.

Interior has not yet provided me with all the documents I requested back in January of 2018. Maybe some fresh answers will come with the release of additional documents.

Update, 22 March 2019. One day after I posted this, on March 15th, 2019, attorneys for the defense filed a brief in opposition to the plaintiff’s March 1 motion.

Writing for the DOJ, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jean E. Williams maintains that documents obtained through FOIA are not necessarily part of the administrative record. These are merely “internal transmittal emails, deliberative documents, and privileged attorney work product” that the plaintiffs “offer…exclusively in an improper attempt to prove the subjective motivation or mental processes of the decisionmaker.” The federal government cites plenty of case law to support this point.

Further,

this Court should deny Plaintiffs’ belated motion because Plaintiffs have not met the heavy burden of overcoming the presumption of administrative regularity that attaches to an agency’s designation of the administrative record and because the this  [sic] Court’s review of any reviewable, final agency action challenged by the Complaints should be limited to consideration of whether the agencies’ stated reasons are arbitrary and capricious.

To the layperson, it would seem that the arbitrary and capricious nature of those “stated reasons” is exactly what the FOIA production suggests. The Jorjani memo appears to have been an exercise in a foregone conclusion, written from a blueprint set out in 2016 by Seth Waxman, the mining company’s attorney. There are those meetings with the CEO of Antofagasta Plc at the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile, at the Department of Interior, and at the White House. There is abundant evidence that Interior worked hand in hand with mining company representatives to reach its conclusions.

None of that should enter into determining whether the FOIA production is part of the administrative record, the federal government argues. The court should look at the emails arranging these meetings, and determine only whether they are rightly considered part of the administrative record. The emails were not themselves “considered in reaching the decisions to reinstate the leases,” they assert. Or, as they put it at the end of their brief, the emails were not “actually before the decisionmaker.”

Finally, Plaintiffs’ motion should be denied because Plaintiffs offer these documents for an impermissible purpose. Plaintiffs admit that they intend to use the documents to attempt to show Federal Defendants’ subjective intent in reaching the challenged decisions. But the law of this Circuit is clear that APA review is limited to an agency’s stated justifications, not the mental processes or subjective motivations that may underlie a decision. For this reason, this Court should deny Plaintiffs’ motion because the proposed supplement is irrelevant to the questions before the Court.

The Court is not going to guess at mental processes or motivations, but can it really come to a decision about the arbitrary and capricious nature of the Jorjani opinion without considering what the plaintiffs call “the why and the how” of the Jorjani opinion? Or without taking into account the fact that the CEO of Antofagasta himself was “actually before the decisionmaker,” several times? That is what these documents show.

Update, 23 March 2019. Yesterday, as I was writing the previous update, the Plaintiffs filed a reply to the DOJ brief.

In this latest filing, the attorneys for Voyageur et al. argue that the documents produced by Interior in response to my FOIA request cannot be dismissed on the grounds that they are just “deliberative” or covered by attorney-client privilege. The agency has already redacted these documents to protect deliberative process and preserve attorney-client privilege, and “plaintiffs only seek to include the documents as redacted.”

They also make clear that their real complaint has to do with the Department of Interior claiming that they were merely correcting an error in the M-Opinion issued by Solicitor Tompkins. “Under the banner of error correction,” Jorjani smuggled in a new policy. “The documents…are relevant to establishing whether the stated rationale was pretextual,” in which case, they would be relevant to the plaintiffs’ claim that the agency did not have the proper authority to issue the new opinion.

Finally, they take up the DOJ’s argument that the documents in question were not “before the decisionmakers.” As I mentioned yesterday, this argument essentially amounts to saying that the decisionmakers did not have the emails themselves before them as they worked. Here, the plaintiffs cite case law to the effect that “a document need not literally pass before the eyes of the final agency decision maker to be considered part of the administrative record,” as a 1996 case, Miami Nation of Indians v. Babbitt, reads. But that is not even the major flaw in DOJ’s argument, they say. 

The documents were “to and from” the decisionmakers themselves, “generated by, and circulated between” them; and “agency decisionmakers considered them directly or indirectly” in reaching their decisions. Some of the documents show decisionmakers running their work by the White House and other policymakers. Looking at the Twin Metals timeline, it is hard to deny that “influential officials responsible for domestic and international policy concerns discussed Twin Metals with the agency decisionmakers in the lead-up to the challenged decisions,” as the Plaintiffs assert here.

Still others show requests coming directly from Antofagasta Plc, and internal discussions at Interior about the meeting between CEO Arriagada and high-level officials. The DOJ has already introduced into the administrative record the April 17, 2017 letter from Ivan Arriagada to Ryan Zinke (which I discuss here). So they admit that’s relevant and part of the record. Why admit that and exclude other correspondence that shows the extent of Antofagasta’s influence over the Office of the Solicitor, its meetings with the State Department, or the Trump White House?

If I may venture a summary: this appears to be a case of high-level public officials blatantly serving the private interests of a foreign mining conglomerate, and pretending all the while to be scrupulous about the law.

Update, 8 April 2019. Today, Judge McFadden issued an order denying the Plaintiffs’ motion to admit documents produced through my January 2018 FOIA request. The court relied for its decision on the “strong presumption” that an agency has properly compiled the administrative record. So “the Court finds that the Federal Defendants have compiled the administrative record here in good faith.” This is a setback for the plaintiffs, and, for what it’s worth, a good occasion for me to think about the record I am producing here.

Read other posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.