[link removed]
How one Trump Interior nominee fast-tracked a ‘deficient’ drilling plan

In March 2017, a politically connected oil firm called Cimarex Energy Co. was in a hurry to begin fracking on a flat expanse of farmland in the western Oklahoma oil patch.

But the company’s application for a federal drilling permit had been rejected as “incomplete” and “deficient,” records show. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management had flagged both engineering and environmental issues.

The company faced a 60-day wait while a revised application was being reviewed. Cimarex didn’t want to wait. Instead, the company called its lobbyists.

In the days that followed, political appointees at the highest levels of the U.S. Department of the Interior went to extraordinary lengths ([link removed]) to fast-track Cimarex’s drilling permit, according to a trove of emails reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Among the officials moving to expedite the permit: Katharine MacGregor, who was recently nominated by President Donald Trump to the powerful No. 2 post at the Interior Department, an agency that supervises hundreds of millions of acres of national parks and public lands, including their use for energy production. Her confirmation hearing is set for tomorrow.

From her years as a Republican staffer to the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, MacGregor already was well known as a friend of the energy industry: In recorded remarks at a June 2017 meeting, the Independent Petroleum Association of America’s political director quipped ([link removed]) that once MacGregor joined the Department of the Interior, “We’ll call Kate” became the association’s default solution to regulatory roadblocks.

New from Reveal Local Labs

Silicon Valley is home to a few of the largest, most powerful tech companies in the world. It also ranks among America’s most expensive housing markets.

These two facts are hardly news to nearby residents or to anyone who follows the tech industry closely. What is surprising, however, is the amount of property these companies own directly – and the monetary value attached to it.

In our latest Local Labs collaboration with KQED, The Mercury News, NBC Bay Area, Renaissance Journalism and Telemundo 48 Área de la Bahía, we spent nearly a year analyzing half a million property records to determine who, exactly, owns Silicon Valley.

The short answer? A small collection of tech companies, along with Stanford University, control billions in property south of San Francisco. We investigate how this power is changing the communities that surround them – and what, if anything, they owe to the people who become casualties of their success.

Read more:

Google v. Apple: While one takes on the housing crisis, the other stands back ([link removed])
Who owns Silicon Valley? ([link removed])
Meet Silicon Valley’s top property owners ([link removed])

P.S.: Our Reveal Local Labs initiative ([link removed]) supports lasting investigative reporting collaborations in communities across the United States.

The mission is to build partnerships across platforms and local institutions – including newspapers, radio, television and ethnic media, as well as key community-based institutions that can deepen the reach and impact of deeply reported investigative projects. Learn more here.

Pardon me

President Donald Trump has brought presidential pardons into the news by granting clemency to several controversial people, including Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona who targeted immigrants at traffic stops, and a serviceman who killed a suspected terrorist in the Iraqi desert. In this episode, we go beyond the headlines and tell the story of a pardons system gone awry.

We meet Charles “Duke” Tanner, a former boxer who is serving 30 years in federal prison after being convicted of drug trafficking. He was among tens of thousands of black men arrested during the war on drugs who have been in prison for decades. Tanner has applied for clemency twice, but his application is languishing among 13,000 others at the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney.

Why has the mechanism for granting pardons broken down? To find out, we talk with a pardons advocate and a former staff member of the pardon attorney’s office and learn that the system stalled after then-President Barack Obama attempted to reduce mass incarcerations from the war on drugs. The pardon attorney’s office has been without leadership for more than two years, and the White House is ignoring its recommendations.

We end by going back in history and finding parallels between Trump and former President Richard Nixon. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election documents instances in which pardons were offered to members of Trump’s administration to keep them from cooperating with investigators. And Trump has said he can pardon himself. Similar scenarios came into play during the Watergate scandal, and in an interview first broadcast on our show, we hear President Gerald Ford explain his decision to pardon his predecessor.

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