#cronyism — Public Fediverse posts

A FOIA Update, Of Sorts

Last week, a Government Information Specialist at the State Department emailed to ask if I would still be interested in records I requested in 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act. “The Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of its backlog of FOIA requests,” she wrote, and if (after failing to respond to my request for five years) she did not hear from me within thirty days, “the Department will conclude you are no longer interested in pursuing this request, and your request will be administratively closed.”

The request itself concerned the Kalorama mansion purchased by Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic Craig right after the 2016 election, where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump lived during Trump’s first term. (I’ve written several posts about the situation over the years. This one is a pretty good primer.) When Jared and Ivanka decamped to Florida in 2021, the Kuwaiti foreign mission leased Luksic’s Washington, DC property; federal law required State Department approval. So I asked to see the Kuwaiti foreign mission’s written request and the State Department’s Notice of Approval.

I was casting a wide net in order to learn what I could about Luksic, his influence operations, and his international network of business relationships, which now extends to the very edge of the Boundary Waters, where Luksic-controlled Antofagasta plc plans to build the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine.

It was a longshot request to begin with. Is there anything to learn from these Foreign Mission Office records, five years later? Not likely, but who knows? So I replied that I am still interested. I feel obliged to see the thing through, or to see that the Department of State meets its obligation to the public. 

While I had the attention, or at least the email address, of someone involved in the comprehensive review, I thought I should ask about two other requests I’d filed with the Department of State back in October of 2018, and which I’ve been trying to chase down ever since. These requests concern the use of the US embassy in Santiago, Chile as a business backchannel for Antofagasta: one asks for records of a 2017 meeting between Antofagasta CEO Ivan Arriagada and Carol Perez, then US ambassador to Chile; the other asks for embassy communications regarding Trump’s nomination of Andrew Gellert to replace Perez. Over the years, the Department has set and missed several estimated dates of completion for these requests. I detailed some of the back and forth in a 2023 post. Since then, or at least for the past couple of years, the FOIA Office has failed to respond to my requests for more information about the status of these requests.

On Monday, this reply came:

These requests remain in process and has [sic] a new estimated date of completion (EDC) of January 31, 2028.  EDCs are estimates and subject to change. You will be notified of the results of the Department’s search and review efforts in response to these requests as soon as that information becomes available.

This is just boilerplate, of course; the subject-verb disagreement in the first sentence looks like a copy-paste accident. Still, a few observations. 

The requests are said to be “in process,” but in eight years no “search and review efforts” have been undertaken. The new estimated date of completion falls in the last year of Trump’s second term – a year and a half from now – and the FOIA office is not even committing to a response when the 2018 request hits the ten-year mark. I am sufficiently annoyed by this delay that I have to wonder aloud (but without evidence) if there is some directive at State to push FOIA matters, or certain FOIA matters, to the end of this administration. 

The FOIA office blames a backlog of requests, and that backlog is real. “The State Department’s FOIA backlog spiked by 6,000 cases to a total of 27,619” this fiscal year, reports Justin Doubleday. Back in June, Minho Kim did some great data analysis for the New York Times showing that federal agencies “accumulated the highest-ever backlog of cases in fiscal year 2025, raising questions about compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.” Not surprisingly, “the problem appears to have worsened under President Trump.” And the backlog problem has been compounded by cuts to FOIA staff, leaving “several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant” at State. One administration official quoted by the Times says the Trump administration chose to “hire ICE officers instead of FOIA processors.” That snide remark alone speaks volumes about this administration’s misplaced priorities, its refusal of all accountability, and its contemptuous disregard for the public interest. 

To put it another way: the FOIA backlog is itself a symptom of bad government and corruption, a condition that is only exacerbated by the Trumpist dismantling and hijacking of public institutions and federal agencies.

In 2019, William J. Burns warned against Trump’s “diplomacy of narcissism, bent on advancing private interests at the expense of our national interests.” The events that prompted my FOIA requests in 2018 – the meeting of an Antofagasta executive with Ambassador Perez and the nomination of Gellert, a Kushner friend – fit the pattern. The cronyism and self-dealing of the first term have gotten much worse and much more blatant this go-round. Charles Kushner is ambassador to France! Jared and Steve Witkoff are the faces of US diplomacy. The ambassador to Chile is Brandon Judd, a longtime Trump campaign stalwart and former head of the Border Patrol union. Judd’s main qualification seems to be that he spent some time in Chile in the 1990s, proselytizing for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. José Miguel Insulza put it bluntly: “de diplomacia no sabe nada.”

AmbassadorJudd has not exactly covered himself in glory. He caused an uproar just a couple of weeks ago when he criticized Chilean cabinet ministers for expressing serious and legitimate concerns about the new 12.5 percent tariffs on Chilean exports, petulantly adding that there would be no agreement if they continued their criticisms. Judd went on to suggest that Chile’s business leaders should “complain to your authorities to prevent them from making declarations about the relationship with the United States.”

“The ambassador,” said Juan Gabriel Valdés, “does not seem to understand that he is not part of the Chilean political system…. he does not have a role to play in internal Chilean political debate.” And this was not an isolated incident, Valdés noted. It was “the third or fourth time” that Judd had acted more like a colonial viceroy than a diplomat.

For the moment, at least, Chile’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Pérez Mackenna and his team are handling Judd. Pérez Mackenna is a seasoned negotiator. Before joining the right-wing Kast government this past spring, he spent nearly three decades as CEO of Quiñenco, managing the global operations of the Luksic business empire. Make of that what you will.

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A Reminder that Antofagasta’s Copper and Nickel Mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters is a Coordinated Political Project

In my most recent post about the Senate vote to overturn the Rainy River Watershed Mineral Withdrawal, I made the simple point (for what seems the umpteenth time, forgive me) that this latest bid to hand over the Boundary Waters to a foreign mining company is part of a coordinated political project, one that stretches back to Trump’s first term and with connections to Project 2025.

The coordinating is being done behind closed doors, much of it by Antofagasta’s lobbyists, and nowadays that means The Bernhardt Group, the lobbying firm that Trump’s former Secretary of Interior, David Bernhardt, set up last year. The Group has edged out all other firms and now exclusively runs the Antofagasta lobbying game in DC.

Now we have The Bernhardt Group’s lobbying disclosures for the first quarter of 2026. The form shows a slight increase in revenue — from $110,000 in the final quarters of 2025 to $120,000 this quarter. Three Bernhardt lobbyists worked every room necessary: the House, the Senate, Interior, Executive Office of the President, and USDA.

It’s notable that the Group did not lobby DOJ this quarter, as they did in 2025. As I remarked last week, passing HJR 140 likely rendered moot the case before the DC District Court of Appeals. A favorable judgment in that case seemed highly unlikely.

Having worked with the federal government to put that case on hold, the Bernhardt Group could focus instead on the political front. The House and Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140 to overturn the mineral withdrawal. The Executive Office of the President could be involved in all sorts of ways, and it’s worth remembering that one of the most powerful figures in that Office these days is Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025; the agencies (Interior and USDA) had to be captured and controlled — easy enough with people like Doug Burgum and Brooke Rollins in charge.

Under their direction, the agencies will now start taking steps to approve Antofagasta’s lease applications (the stated object on these federal disclosures) and move the Twin Metals project toward the permitting phase.

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The Boundary Waters Litigation is on Hold, Again.

I’ve been traveling for the past week or so, and haven’t had a chance until this morning to publish these latest filings in Twin Metals v. US. (For background, see this, this, this, and this, among many other posts.)

As those who have been following the case are aware, in March of 2025, just a month after he was sworn in, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum did an about-face and joined the plaintiffs (a foreign mining company with plans to mine nickel and copper on the edge of the Boundary Waters). At the time, the parties requested that this case be put on hold, or held in abeyance. A group of small businesses and non-profits involved in the case as Defendant-Intervenors that I have been calling the Civil Society group did not join the government in that request.

The motion for abeyance granted (back in July), Burgum and the mining company’s lawyers and lobbyists then had 90 days to find a way around the provisions and protections put in place by the Biden administration. Those 90 days have nearly come and gone. So on October 1 they requested and on October 7 the court granted another 180 days.

Antofagasta and its lawyers appear to have realized a while ago that they are unlikely to prevail in a court of law, so the company has been seeking delays at the DC Circuit while looking for political answers to its problems. This is a theme I’ve been trying to stress in my posts on this subject (e.g., this one, from 2023).

90 days was not nearly enough time to do all they had to do. Consider just a couple of highlights (or lowlights) from this past summer. Pete Stauber failed to smuggle a Boundary Waters blowout sale into the budget bill, but Interior managed to revoke the legal opinion that recognized the federal government’s authority to say “no” to the mining company. (That legal work had mostly already been done by solicitor Daniel Jorjani in the first year of the first Trump administration.)

Now Doug Burgum and the mining company lawyers and lobbyists need to find a way to revive the Chilean conglomerate’s cancelled leases and do something about the preference right lease applications that the previous administration denied. That will ultimately require doing something about the 20-year Rainy River watershed mineral withdrawal, which Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claims a “review” determined to be unnecessary.

The federal government is currently shut down and the case in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is now on hold until April, 2026. For the sake of good housekeeping, here are the court documents.

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#corruption #cronyCapitalism #cronyism #kleptocracy #oligarchy #pollution #resourceHoarding #Water

@ThermiteBeGiants @GarethDennis

A very illuminating article. Thank you Gareth for going public and exposing the rot at the top of Network Rail. My son is a senior railway engineer and I see similarities between you both. We have seen the terrible effects of reputational protection over health and safety in the Post Office and the Blood Scandal. Henry should be sacked in disgrace.
#ukrailway #cronyism

@DaveyDelimbo
Sadly, these terrible collapses like the #MiamiTower are just a tip of the iceberg.

We wrote something recently on another device and will get it out in the days ahead.

In #Australia we've been struggling with our own #propertyDeveloper and #privateEquity craze since #Sydney2000, and yes, a lot of dodgy #construction.

The #realEstate and #propertyCouncil have been aggressively #lobbying #selfRegulation for as long as we can remember too.

#rentseeking #cronyism #assetInflation