Zinke used Thanksgiving to sneak a Koch adviser and party loyalist into key public information role

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Zinke used Thanksgiving to sneak a Koch adviser and party loyalist into key public information role

The person in charge of FOIA requests to the Interior Department is, uh, unlikely to view them favorably.
https://thinkprogress.org/zinke-interior-koch-public-information-22c3baada9d6/



Alan Pyke
Dec 10, 2018, 7:37 pm




After attracting more scandals in 18 months than his four predecessors managed in 16 years, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke quietly shut the door to further public scrutiny of his office over the Thanksgiving break.

The secretary gave control of incoming Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to former Koch Industries adviser and longtime Zinke consigliere Dan Jorjani in an order dated November 20 but first uncovered Monday afternoon by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Zinke’s move on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving is best understood as a reshuffling of his resources, from attack to defense. Jorjani has worked for the agency since at least May 2017, serving as the chief lawyer putting Zinke and Trump’s agenda into black-letter policy action. He worked with energy industry interests to pen the rollbacks of Obama-era regulatory decisions protecting migratory birds and rejecting a mining proposal at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, according to reporting by Pacific Standard’s Jimmy Tobias.

As Zinke’s management of the department drew scandalous scrutiny — like so many other Trump cabinet secretaries, Zinke appears to play fast and loose with ethics rules governing travel costs — Jorjani wrote to a colleague that Interior staffers’ primary responsibility is to protect Zinke from negative press. He will now be the central gatekeeper of the agency’s documents when journalists, watchdogs, and other citizens seek insight into the conduct of their government.


The appointment follows Zinke’s much-criticized attempt to replace the department’s Inspector General with the same Trump administration employee who previously helped Secretary Ben Carson spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on new decor for his Housing and Urban Development office. Zinke appears to have taken just one lesson from that experience: When replacing professional oversight and transparency officials with political allies, it’s better to do it over a holiday week.


Though courts often frown on bad-faith invocations of executive privilege and other exceptions to the FOIA law from government officials, an initial rejection from a FOIA officer typically buys many months of delay even if a judge later orders public servants to hand over documents. The potential for such abuse of FOIA decision-making authority by political hands is part of the reason the work is typically done by career civil servants. Zinke’s sly Thanksgiving maneuver boots a career Interior employee out of the FOIA driver’s seat, replaced by a person whose stated loyalty is to Zinke first and the department’s mandates on behalf of the public second. Some environmental groups worry that the public interest might not even be second on Jorjani’s mental list, given his years of legal service to the arch-conservative Koch brothers.


Jorjani is likely to be busy. As of late August, there were 15 separate active investigations into Zinke’s conduct atop the agency in his first 541 days in office, according to Bloomberg’s tally of Trump administration scandals and potential scandals. The same tracker records 11 official investigations of the past four heads of Interior combined, over roughly 16 years of service.

Zinke has wielded the agency as a weapon on behalf of pollution-heavy industries, despite his carefully curated public image as an outdoorsman who cherishes wilderness spaces. .........................







Out west, MAGA means steamrolling local perspective in favor of oil driller greed
Lost in Trump’s attacks on specific communities, a battle over the idea of community itself.

https://thinkprogress.org/out-west-maga-means-steamrolling-local-perspective-in-favor-of-oil-driller-greed-4366e190536d/




In the northwestern corner of New Mexico, inside a makeshift cave deep within a winding canyon, there is a spiral carved into the sandstone.

The giant slabs of rock that create the cave were set by human hands nearly a thousand years ago. Positioned to let a small dagger of sunlight through, they are one of the oldest man-made timepieces on the continent.

The Pueblo people who built the “Sun Dagger” to gauge solstices and other astral events also hewed a massive trading empire out of the harsh landscape that is now the American southwest. Nearby Pueblo Bonito was the largest building in North America until the late 1800s.

Today, a national park protects Chaco Canyon from the predatory fingers of mining companies and oil drillers. But beyond the park boundary, precious lands stuffed with Chacoan ruins and still home to Navajo families have been leased out to mining and drilling companies for decades. The heavy roadways constructed to connect these leasing parcels have criss-crossed the hundreds of square miles of archaeological evidence of Chacoan culture that still remain after a millennium.


All but 9 percent of publicly-owned land in this corner of New Mexico has been leased out for industrial profit. In late January, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sold another four drilling leases at auction, despite prolonged protest from native people who still live there, conservationists who fear the permanent destruction of something precious, and local businesses that make their money from interacting with this landscape rather than ripping it apart.

The parcels leased in January are 20-odd miles from the edge of the park and do not threaten Chaco Canyon itself. But the process by which these taxpayer-owned patches of land were auctioned off is worrying for the outdoor outfitters and hunting guides whose financial interests are in tension with a drilling company’s needs. And for the few pockets of Navajo who still make their homes in the area, the ongoing sale of industrial leases threatens to destroy their way of life in a more fundamental way.


“They should be making those decisions in a way that doesn’t pick winners and losers.”

“Folks who live out there have such a great level of concern about more and more development,” local archaeologist Paul Reed said, “because they’re not getting the opportunity to say, ‘This area that doesn’t look like anything to you is in fact very important to us and we’d like you not to build anything there.’”..........................




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A visitor approaching some of the many ruins that dot Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area. CREDIT: Flickr/donzermeno
Out west, MAGA means steamrolling local perspective in favor of oil driller greed