The Interior Department released documents last night subpoenaed by the House Natural Resources Committee in its probe of a department report on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill that had been doctored to make it appear that scientists supported a deepwater-drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a letter to Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), Interior called the subpoena "unnecessary and precipitous," but it provided 164 pages of correspondence and pledged to provide additional documents on the Deepwater Horizon report later this week.

While Hastings is still reviewing the materials, a committee spokesman called Interior's response "extremely disappointing" given economic duress caused by the administration's drilling ban.

"The department's surreal claim that they don't understand what is being investigated raises questions about whether they're truly interested in living up to the president's pledge of unprecedented transparency, or they're maneuvering to withhold unknown amounts of information from public scrutiny and congressional review," Spencer Pederson said.

The committee has not released the new documents nor has it made available a file Interior provided last October containing 112 documents and 919 pages of emails between Steve Black, counselor to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Neal Kemkar, an agency employee on detail to the Council on Environmental Quality, and the scientists who peer reviewed the Interior safety report.

The dispute suggests that while the moratorium in the Gulf was lifted a year and a half ago, the political battle is far from over.

In his letter to the committee, Christopher Mansour, director of Interior's Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs, said the department has provided nearly 1,000 pages of documents, allowed committee staff to view other materials and has offered to brief the committee on other documents.

"Today we provided a letter to the committee in this same spirit of responsiveness that included additional documents as well as offers of accommodation to meet what continues to be an ever-changing and unsettled set of requests," Interior spokesman Adam Fetcher said. "The letter also expressed our serious and longstanding institutional concerns about the committee's efforts to compromise executive branch deliberations."

The subpoena issued last week asks for all documents created, sent or received by Black, Kemkar, Mary Katherine Ishee, David Hayes and Tom Strickland in the two months following April 26, 2010, involving the "development, editing, review, issuance, response, or reaction to" Interior's 30-day safety report on the Deepwater Horizon spill, which recommended the six-month halt in offshore drilling (Greenwire, April 3).

It also seeks more than a dozen documents that Interior provided to acting Inspector General Mary Kendall but asked to be kept from the public on concerns the predecisional documents could raise confidentiality issues with the executive branch.

The inspector general report in late 2010 concluded that the White House had tampered with language in the report to imply a group of independent scientists supported the proposed drilling ban, though they never endorsed it (Greenwire, Nov. 10, 2010). Interior issued a quick public apology to the scientists, and the report said there was no clear evidence of an intent to mislead the public.

In a February letter to the committee, Interior said that, of the 13 documents, six are copies of the same attachments to the 2010 report for which the agency provided an index last August and three were reviewed by committee staff at the agency.

The agency said it had provided an index of the remaining seven documents but argued they "were not related to the committee's articulated interest concerning how the peer review was described in the executive summary to the ... report."

"Still, the department offered in both its October 13 and 24 letters to accommodate the committee's interest while respecting the executive branch confidentiality interests by meeting with committee staff to provide more information on the nature of these documents," Mansour wrote in a Feb. 2 letter to Hastings. "Although we have received no response, we continue to extend that offer of accommodation to the committee."

A detailed log of letters between Interior and the committee can be found here.

The inspector general report incited a firestorm of criticism from Republican lawmakers who accused the White House of misquoting scientists in order to push an economically destructive and politically motivated halt to deepwater drilling.

Republicans for the past year have tried to obtain underlying documents, drafts and communications that would help identify who at the White House or Interior may have reworked the agency's report but say they have thus far been stonewalled.

Salazar in a conference call with reporters last week said imposing a moratorium on deepwater drilling was "my decision and my decision alone" and was necessary given the crisis the department faced in responding to the BP PLC spill.

"I'm very comfortable that all the right decisions were made," Salazar said.

In addition, he called the committee's investigation a political distraction at a time when Congress should be focusing on legislation that would support the expansion of renewable energy on public lands and the passage of budgets that will support oil and gas production.

"It's that time of season in Washington, D.C., where congressional committees will spend their time going after issues that are of not significant importance," Salazar said, noting that he will do everything he can to cooperate with the investigation. "From my point of view, what the ... Natural Resources Committee is doing is simply distraction in the name of politics."