Chris D’Angelo reports that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has put a hold on the nomination of Daniel Jorjani for solicitor general of the Department of Interior. Wyden is also calling for the Justice Department to add to its ongoing investigation of Jorjani’s ethics whether he perjured himself at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in May. Jorjani is now deputy solicitor general and has been acting solicitor since 2017.
Late last year, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order that put Jorjani in charge of overseeing the agency’s FOIA program. The move stripped transparency authority from the agency’s chief information officer and handed it over to a political appointee who once told colleagues that “at the end of the day, our job is to protect the Secretary” from ethics probes and bad press.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Jorjani in May who was in charge of FOIA requests to the agency. “Is it a career professional or is it a political appointee?” he asked.
“I, myself, don’t review FOIAs or make determinations,” Jorjani said. In a subsequent written response to Wyden, Jorjani said he “typically did not review records prior to their release under the FOIA.”
“No determinations” is not what internal records show. For instance, according to an August 2018 email uncovered by Roll Call and other sources, a political appointee “intervened in a FOIA request during the awareness process, telling FOIA processor Justin Wilkinson ‘please hold up on sending this until we speak.’” That appointee was Jorjani.
Like so many Trump appointees, Jorjani not only apparently has a shaky relationship with truth—he’s also made terrible decisions. At the Western Values Project—a grassroots organization dedicated to amplifying citizens’ voices regarding Western public lands and national parks conservation as counterpoints to the views of industry lobbyists and their many puppets in state legislatures and the federal government—Yetta Stein writes of Jorjani:
While at Interior, the former “key Koch Industries employee” has crafted some of the department’s most controversial legal decisions that have benefited industry and special interests, such as undermining the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Jorjani also worked to reverse a previous departmental ruling that renewed the copper and nickel mining leases for a Chilean mining company, Twin Metals, on the border of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Given how widespread is imitation of their boss’s most salient trait—relentless lying, including under oath—we apparently need a law that allows Senate holds to be placed on Trump nominees retroactively.