Second Interior Official in Two Weeks Found to Violate Ethics

(Bloomberg) -- A senior Interior Department official violated his ethics pledge by interacting with his former employer as the founder of that company sought the agency’s permission to conduct seismic tests for oil in the Arctic refuge, according to an inspector general report.

The findings, released late Friday, mark the second time in two weeks that a Trump administration appointee at the agency has been rapped for ethics violations. In a May 29 report, the Interior Department’s inspector general said an assistant interior secretary, Doug Domenech, misused his position to help a family member get a job at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Although the new report doesn’t specifically name the official or companies involved, its description of the interactions dovetail with previous reports and a request for the probe lodged last year by the advocacy group Democracy Forward. The group said the report also tracks documents it sent the inspector general as part of its request.

Democracy Forward’s request sought an investigation of the activity of Stephen Wackowski, the department’s senior adviser for Alaskan affairs, who previously monitored polar bear populations for Fairweather Science LLC, an environmental services contractor serving the oil industry.

The agency did not address the identify of the official who was the focus of the report.

A statement from the agency said the report makes clear the senior official in question “acted responsibly and with the highest integrity.” The report documents miscommunications and misunderstandings that illustrate why Interior Secretary David Bernhardt expanded the agency’s ethics office, the agency said in the statement.

In mid-August 2019, Bernhardt consolidated an ethics program in the Interior Department and has hired more ethics officials.

According to the report, the employee violated his federal ethics pledge and a two-year-recusal period by communicating with his previous employer in 2017 and 2018. In one instance, the employee emailed a scientist at the employee’s former company seeking data on endangered species. Later, at another Interior worker’s request, the employee participated in a meeting with the same company scientist.

The interactions came as the Interior Department moved to conduct a streamlined review of proposed seismic testing to hunt for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by SAExploration Holdings Inc., a company whose chief executive officer was also a founder of Fairweather.

The purpose of the ethics pledge is to protect “against even the appearance of privileged access being given to former employees,” the inspector general said. And in these two cases, the employee “violated their ethics pledge.”

According to the inspector general’s report, an Interior ethics attorney said that had they known about the interaction ahead of time, they would have advised against it, and another Interior official could have safely interacted with the company scientist. The employee told investigators he or she believed the interactions were permissible because the goal was sharing scientific data and the conversations didn’t include discussions about permits or other actions the company was seeking from Interior, though no such exemption applied, the inspector general said.

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