A heap of emails, text messages and calendar entries obtained by environmentalists offers new details about the behind-the-scenes operations of the Trump Interior Department.
The thousands of pages of records reveal concerns about funding freezes, details about industry meetings with top officials and the early influence of the “Department of Government Efficiency” inside the Interior Department.
Those documents, released Friday by the Sierra Club, come after the green group filed a lawsuit accusing the agency of failing to respond to public records requests.
In one exchange, a first-term Trump Interior official raised concerns with a department aide about funding that had been paused to a project in Montana. Heather Swift, who worked for then-Secretary Ryan Zinke at Interior, is now chief of staff in Zinke’s Montana congressional office.
