The stink of Trump-era corruption still lingers
The Trump administration may be gone from Washington, but the acrid stench of corruption lives on.
Case in point: An allegation that former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt pressured agency personnel to approve a controversial Arizona housing development in return for political donations to then-President Trump by the builder and his associates.
The allegation came in a request issued Wednesday by House Democrats for a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the approval by the Interior Department and the contributions to Trump represent “a potentially criminal quid pro quo.”
The referral letter was signed by Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine), chair of its oversight and investigations subcommittee.
In an email, Bernhardt called the letter “a pathetic attempt ... to fabricate news.”
The committee request involved intricate maneuverings over environmental approval for the Villages at Vigneto, a planned community of 28,000 housing units, plus a golf course, resort and commercial development, proposed for a 12,300-acre tract outside Tucson.
The project has been consistently opposed by environmental groups and questioned by the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which has long held that it requires detailed biological analysis by the Army Corps of Engineers to determine its impact on endangered species.
The agency maintained that position until late 2017, when it suddenly reversed itself. (Its reversal has since been countermanded by the Biden administration.)
Around the time of the original reversal, the project’s developer, Michael Ingram, and several of his business associates made what the committee labeled unusual donations totaling $241,600 to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee — most of them on the same day: Oct. 6, 2017.
Lanny J. Davis, a spokesman for Ingram, calls the referral from Grijalva and Porter “false, misleading, unfair, and strikes me as reminiscent of McCarthyism’s use of innuendo as a surrogate for fact.”
Among the political donors named by Grijalva and Porter are Arte Moreno, owner of the Angels Major League Baseball team, and his wife, Carole. The committee says Arte Moreno, like most of the other donors named, has a “relationship” with Ingram — in his case, through their common membership on the board of the TGen Foundation, which raises money for biotech research in Arizona.
The committee letter doesn’t specifically accuse the Morenos or the other donors of wrongdoing.
The committee did, however, ask the Department of Justice “to investigate and consider whether criminal charges should be brought against any party” for violating federal anti-bribery law.
According to Open Secrets, a database of campaign contribution records, Arte and Carole Moreno each donated $5,400 to the Trump campaign on Oct. 6. These are the only donations to Trump by the Morenos on record, though they’ve expressed support for Trump in the past.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Marie Garvey, a spokeswoman for Moreno, told me. Referring to the Vigneto project, she said, “Mr. Moreno has nothing to do with this development. He is a longtime Republican supporter and donor.”
Before delving deeper into the Vigneto machinations, a few words about Bernhardt and his role at Interior. Trump appointed Bernhardt as deputy secretary of the Interior — the No. 2 post within an agency dealing with clients in the water and energy industries that had paid millions in lobbying and legal fees to his law firm.
Bernhardt pledged to recuse himself from matters related to his former clients for one year. Almost immediately after the year expired, he surfaced attacking the federal Endangered Species Act — a statute over which he had sued Interior on behalf of the giant Westlands Water District in California.
The application of the Endangered Species Act to future water projects was of profound interest to Westlands, not to mention other industries Bernhardt represented as a private attorney.
After Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned under an ethics cloud in 2019, Trump nominated Bernhardt as Zinke’s successor. Critics saw the appointment as a mockery of good government principles. The liberal Center for American Progress labeled Bernhardt “Trump’s most conflicted Cabinet nominee.”
That brings us back to the Vigneto case. The development had been the focus of long-term conflicts between the Army Corps, which was inclined to wave the project through, and Fish and Wildlife, which thought its potential impacts were serious enough to warrant high-level consultation between the two agencies as required by law.
The field supervisor for Fish and Wildlife overseeing the project, Steve Spangle, was consistently backed by his colleagues there and by superiors at Interior.
That changed after Trump took office. First, the Army Corps signaled its intention to approve the project without Interior’s agreement. Then, a flurry of meetings and calls involving Bernhardt, Ingram and others occurred, some of which did not appear in Bernhardt’s official schedule.
On Aug. 31, 2017, Spangle said, he got a call from Interior lawyer Peg Romanik in which he says he was instructed to change his position on Vigneto at the request of a “high-level politico.” Romanik and Bernhardt had met that morning, though the topic of the meeting was not disclosed. Spangle said he worked under pressure to issue a changed opinion on Vigneto in a way that would not make the political influence obvious.
The Army Corps gave the project its green light in October 2018 but suspended its approval the following February after environmental groups filed a lawsuit challenging its action.
Spangle retired from Interior in March 2018 and began to tell his story publicly. “I got rolled,” he told his local newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, and later repeated to CNN. He said he was told by Romanik “that a high-level politico in the Department of Interior” had instructed her to call him to rescind his position.
For nearly 20 years, the Interior Department held firm that a major real estate development on ecologically fragile land required careful scientific study.
After the arrival of the business-friendly Trump administration, the agency staged an about-face for a well-connected Republican businessman.
That happened while Interior was being led by a team that saw its purpose as promoting development, downplaying scientific judgments and running roughshod over environmental regulations of long standing. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign coffers were fattened up.
Let’s see the DOJ take these allegations seriously and launch an investigation.