Last week was a revealing one for the Department of Interior. According to a few different FOIA requests that finally went public, a Heartland-affiliated staffer and Trump appointee attempted to interfere with climate science at the agency and circulated climate denial blogs and reports, a top aide to Zinke met dozens of times with mining companies then made decisions that benefited them, and another political appointee potentially violated ethics rules by attending events at her former employer, the Heritage foundation.
The first story, which appeared in the Washington Post on Wednesday, was based on emails FOIA’d by Joel Clement, the career Interior staffer who resigned in protest last July after being moved from working on climate change to an accounting position where he cashed checks from fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
Forcing Clement to switch careers now seems to have been an incredible mistake. Clement apparently knew exactly what to FOIA to show WaPo how an assistant secretary to Zinke, Doug Domenech, and DOI staffer and Heartland regular Indur Goklany attempted to edit press materials for a climate study.
Then last Thursday, HuffPo’s Chris D’Angelo reported that according to a FOIA’d schedule, White House liaison to DOI Lori Mashburn might have violated ethics rules by attending Heritage Foundation events. Because Mashburn previously worked at Heritage (one of at least 27 Trump appointees from the Koch-funded organization) such participation runs afoul of rules that require a year long “cooling-off” period for appointees and their former employers. This participation also seems to contradict the ethics pledge the Trump administration introduced (which was weaker than a similar Obama pledge.)
Also on Thursday, the AP broke news that the DOI spent $139,000 for a door for Zinke’s office. This isn’t quite as bad as opening the door to denial, but still the sort of thing that would rank as a major scandal if it happened in the Obama administration.
The hits kept coming last week: on Friday, the Guardian and Pacific Standard published a story based on the schedule of Kathleen Benedetto, a political appointee who oversees the Bureau of Land Management. Turns out this former geologist and mining advisory has an exceptionally cozy relationship with mining companies and lobbyists, meeting with them dozens of times in 2017. Unsurprisingly, Benedetto then made decisions favorable to their interests.
But that wasn’t the end of DOI’s rough week. Later on Friday, Clement’s FOIA’d emails made a second appearance, with HuffPo’s Alex Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo finding Goklany referring fellow DOI employees to denier sources as rebuttals to real climate science. The emails show Goklany sent something from Mercer-funded CO2Science, a post from WUWT, and two reports he’s written for GWPF and Cato. Robert Brulle, Drexel University professor who studies climate denial networks, lamented to HuffPo that with Goklany and Domenech, DOI is “in the bubble of the climate misinformation world and ignoring their own scientists” like the experts at USGS and in the Forest Service. As we’ve mentioned a time or two before, ignoring science for denial is a great way to get a policy struck down in court, making this revelation a potentially critical legal liability.
We’ll have to see how many more FOIAs come out, but at this rate Zinke and his appointees must be starting to lament reassigning Clement. Before long they’ll be begging for Clementcy.
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