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Trump Administration Must Open Keystone Documents or Say Why Not

Trump Administration Must Open Keystone Documents or Say Why Not

(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration must either release documents related to its approval of TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline or justify to a court why it won’t.

Environmental groups have argued that the government withheld information in a case challenging the federal cross-border permit granted in March for the $8 billion conduit. On Wednesday, defendants including the U.S. Department of State were ordered by a Montana federal court judge to either supplement the record with the documents by March 21, or say why they must be withheld.

The dispute stems from a legal challenge filed in Montana by environmental groups last year. The Wednesday ruling comes after opponents asked the court to force the government to lift "the confidentiality designation for certain files." The U.S. Department of Justice rejected the premise of their request.

"There is simply no merit to Plaintiffs’ arguments that, without internal drafts and predecisional, deliberative communications, the tens of thousands of pages of the existing administrative records are insufficient to permit judicial review," the agency, one of the defendants, said in a filing last month.

Excluding documents doesn’t mean records were "cherry-picked," the department said.

Foes of the project have said the government relied on "an arbitrary, stale and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago."

For its part, TransCanada has said the project has sufficient shipper support, though the Calgary-based company hasn’t formally decided to build the line. TransCanada didn’t immediately respond to comment. Vincent Campos, a spokesman for the State Department, declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.

--With assistance from Andrew Harris

To contact the reporter on this story: Meenal Vamburkar in New York at mvamburkar@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net, Christine Buurma

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