Thread by @weareoversight

In an unusually political and unprofessional Twitter exchange, an Interior Department spokesperson stated that the agency had hired new ethics staff as part of an apparent commitment to ethical conduct.

We’ve been investigating ethics issues at DOI.

When he took office, Secretary Bernhardt — who had recently been a fossil fuel industry lobbyist — reportedly carried a notecard to keep track of his potential conflicts of interests.
washingtonpost.com/national/healt…

And just 4 days after his 2019 confirmation, DOI's IG opened a probe looking at 7 separate complaints, including ethics violations, pertaining to Bernhardt.

Here are some of the previously-unreported areas of concern we’ve uncovered regarding Bernhardt & potential ethics issues:

Bernhardt appears to have traveled to a conference involving former clients against the advice of DOI’s Ethics Dept.—and then his staff appears to have reported to Ethics that he canceled the trip.
americanoversight.org/document/doi-t…

americanoversight.org/document/doi-e…

We received travel vouchers & receipts showing Bernhardt traveled to CA for the Assoc. of California Waters conference in 2018. But in correspondence between Bernhardt’s staff & ethics officials later that year, his office claimed he cancelled the May trip due to ethics’ input.

In other words, Bernhardt’s staff reported he received ethics input not to attend the conference, receipts show Bernhardt attended the conference, and then his staff told ethics he did not go to the conference.

We obtained Aug. '18 emails btwn Bernhardt’s schedulers & Fieldwood Energy, which was acquiring a former client of Bernhardt’s. The scheduler noted the “slight hold up” was due to this conflict, as the ethics staff specifically did not approve the discussion of the acquisition.

However, given that the meeting request explicitly included topics of “Fieldwood’s recent restructuring and acquisition of Noble Energy’s deepwater assets…”, we have questions about whether DOI was ultimately able to maintain this supposed firewall.

Finally, Bernhardt has come under fire for taking actions in his first year as secretary that benefited Westlands Water District, a former client.
nytimes.com/2019/02/12/cli…

Records we obtained show that on August 16, 2018, Bernhardt received ethics approval to attend a meeting with California’s Governor and several water districts; Westlands Water District planned to attend the meeting.

At this time, ethics officials noted that his 1-year recusal had passed and now Bernhardt was subject only to Trump’s ethics pledge, which ethics argued did not include “Westlands, since Westlands is a state entity and therefore not considered a former client under the pledge.”

Although technically approved conduct, the decision to quickly engage Westland because it was designated a “state entity” raises questions about where else Bernhardt’s DOI may have interpreted ethics rules to benefit Bernhardt and his former clients.

In our litigation to obtain records related to Bernhardt’s ethical conflicts, DOI has produced thousands of pages. It’s a testament to the complexity of Bernhardt’s ethics situation that we’ve received this volume of communications.
americanoversight.org/document/compl…