"House Republicans slash conservation protections for beloved wilderness while targeting green groups for investigation."
"As federal agents last month gunned down American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis, President Trump’s GOP operatives and allies were waging another sort of war on Minnesota — a ferocious legal and legislative attack on the North Star State’s most important wildlands and the environmental advocates fighting to protect them. A central player in this ongoing effort is Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), with help from political figures tied to Trump’s Interior Department.
Late last month, just days before masked federal agents shot ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the back, the House of Representatives, at Stauber’s urging, voted to roll back a ban on mining in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. The 20-year “mineral withdrawal,” first implemented during the Obama years, had been reestablished by the Biden administration to protect the crown jewel of Midwestern federal lands — the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The GOP vote to rescind the ban relied on an arcane legal maneuver and was a handout to one primary beneficiary — the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta Plc and its subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota, which are seeking to build a copper-nickel mine on national forest land just outside the borders of the Boundary Waters. Conservationists see the mine as a major pollution risk that could contaminate the region’s interconnected waterways, including the lakes and rivers within the wilderness area itself.
The Boundary Waters wilderness is a pristine landscape of glacial lakes and hardwood forests along the Canadian border of northern Minnesota. At more than a million acres, it is one of the nation’s largest and most popular federal wilderness areas, a refuge for wolves, bears, loons, eagles and more. The wilderness area sits in a region which contains a major complex of copper, nickel and other platinum-group minerals. As AI data centers, electric vehicles and the like drive up copper prices, Twin Metals Minnesota wants those riches, and has worked the levers of power in Washington D.C. for more than a decade to get its way.
At a cost of $260,000, Twin Metals recently retained the services of The Bernhardt Group, a lobbying shop founded last year by former Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and staffed with former government officials. Bernhardt’s firm has been pushing the foreign mining company’s priorities in both houses of Congress, at the Justice Department, the Interior Department, USDA and at the Executive Office of the President, according to lobbying disclosures."
