Like other federal offices, the Department of the Interior gripes about being buried by an avalanche of document requests from Congress. But Interior adds another complaint: It's worried that the records going to Capitol Hill are being used to aid groups suing the department.
Small wonder. After President Clinton designated land in Utah as a national monument two years ago, sparking some interest groups to file a lawsuit, Rep. James V. Hansen, R-Utah, helped subpoena administration documents on the matter.
The litigants "will feel they hit the mother lode with this," The Salt Lake Tribune quoted Hansen as saying. "That's one reason I pushed to make the documents public--to help them."
Or consider what happened last year when the Northwest Mining Association, a group based in Spokane, Wash., sued Interior over a new mining regulation.
After Interior rebuffed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the mining group, citing attorney-client privilege, a House Resources subcommittee chaired by Wyoming Republican Barbara Cubin used its oversight powers to obtain the very same documents the group had wanted.
"This is not about information," a senior Interior official said. "We would give them all the information they wanted. But they wanted the documents to hand to the plaintiff."
GOP committee staffers and industry lawyers deny any hanky-panky. They say that the subpoenaed documents appeared only in the committee's June 5 oversight report, which was issued after the lawsuit had been decided.
"We don't conduct discovery for any private litigant, period," said Duane Gibson, a Resources Committee counsel.
But in a telephone interview, Laura Skaer, executive director of the mining association, said the committee was instrumental in her organization's victory in the lawsuit. Three days later, however, Skaer called back to say her group didn't receive any documents from the committee.
Cubin was involved in another dustup with Interior. Last year, 10 oil and gas associations filed an FOIA request for documents related to an Interior review of businesses that drill on federal land. Interior, which suspected that the associations were gathering ammunition for a lawsuit, told the oil and gas interests they would have to cough up thousands of dollars in retrieval and copying fees.
In March, Cubin told Interior to hand over the documents requested in the initial FOIA. According to Bill Condit, Cubin's subcommittee staff director, the oil and gas interests were "telling us that the department [wasn't] acting on the FOIA request in a timely fashion."
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