Move Reverses Trump Effort to Allow Chilean Mogul’s Mining Operations Near Wilderness
The Biden administration canceled two leases tied to the billionaire former landlord of Trump adult children and ex-White House employees for mining that could have spoiled a Minnesota wilderness for centuries.
Biden’s Interior Department found significant legal problems with how the leases were renewed in 2019 under Team Trump.
“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. “We must be consistent in how we apply lease terms to ensure that no lessee receives special treatment.”
Former President Jimmy Carter signed a law more than four decades ago to prohibit mining in the Boundary Waters. The pristine wilderness stretches almost 200 miles along the U.S.-Canada border in Minnesota and has more than 1,200 miles of canoe routes and more than 1,000 lakes.
Twin Metals leased land near Ely, Minn., just three miles away from the Boundary Waters, and wanted to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and precious metals. Under former President Barack Obama, the Forest Service said a copper-nickel sulfide mine carried an “unacceptable” risk that the mine might “cause serious and irreparable harm” to the Boundary Waters.
Under Donald Trump, attorney Daniel Jorjani, who previously worked for the Koch-funded Freedom Partners, claimed that the Obama administration had misinterpreted the leases and that the Bureau of Land Management didn’t have the discretion to deny the lease renewal application by Twin Metals.
Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushnerl, highly placed Trump administration officials, leased a six-bedroom home owned by a company controlled by Andrónico Luksic, the Chilean mogul behind Twin Metals, while Trump was president. The $5.5 million home is in the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where billionaire Jeff Bezos and Obama bought homes. A spokesman for Luksic has said the Kushners’ choice of the property was coincidental.
Ann Marie Bledsoe Downes, an attorney who reviewed the leases for Biden’s Interior Department, also found that Joseph Balash, Trump’s assistant secretary for land and mineral management, disregarded the authority of the Forest Service to block land from being leased for mining.
Twin Metals called the leasehold cancellations “a political action intended to stop the Twin Metals project without conducting the environmental review prescribed in law.”
