This entrance might have given the impression that Zinke was new to politics, that he was arriving in Washington in the only way he knew how. That was not the case. Prior to joining the Trump cabinet, Zinke had served for two years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Montana’s sole delegate in the chamber. Before that, he’d spent four years in the Montana Senate. In 2012, he ran for lieutenant governor. A basic truth of politics held that no one ever ran for lieutenant governor, or lieutenant anything, unless he or she had much higher aspirations in mind. Zinke lost that race, but not the ambition that fueled it.
Zinke was not the front-runner to become interior secretary. The job was supposed to go to Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a U.S. representative from Washington State who was the sole Republican woman in a leadership position in Congress. Hunting enthusiasts were not happy with reports that McMorris Rodgers was about to be given the job, because she favored the sale of federal lands, which could potentially close them off to sportsmen. The hunters had an ally in Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, who was fond of posting on social media photographs of himself with game he’d killed. Junior spoke on the phone and met with Zinke in early December. The two liked each other, and Zinke got the job.
Historically, secretary of the interior was a fraught position, because the department covered so much literal and jurisdictional ground. It included the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but also the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as the Fish and Wildlife Service. Its Office of Insular Affairs administered island territories including Samoa and Guam, while the Bureau of Reclamation was in charge of irrigation policies. Even Interior’s own history cited the nickname that had long hounded this cobbled-together agency: the Department of Everything Else.
Because the department was in control of so many natural resources, its chiefs were frequently susceptible to corruption. The possibilities were near endless. The cabinet chief who presided over Interior’s vast headquarters, which took up an entire block of downtown Washington, administered an astonishing array of wealth that ostensibly belonged to the American public. Energy companies had business before the interior secretary. So did hunters and fishermen, as well as loggers and conservationists, not to mention gaming companies wanting access to Native American territories. There were near-infinite opportunities for corruption. These were opportunities not a few of Zinke’s predecessors happily explored.
The first to seriously experiment with blatant self-enrichment was Columbus Delano, a congressman from Ohio who was picked to lead the Interior Department by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870. Unhappy that the Union Pacific Railroad had difficulty receiving land grants from the federal government, Delano intervened on the railroad’s behalf and pressured Grant to dismiss Amos T. Akerman, the U.S. attorney general, who had opposed Union Pacific. Akerman had been the administration’s most aggressive enforcer of civil rights for African Americans, having successfully secured convictions for six hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan; after he left the Grant administration, efforts to curb the Klan were greatly diminished.
In 1875, it became clear that Delano was issuing surveying contracts in a way that benefited his son, John. Faced with a burgeoning scandal, Grant gave a Trump-like reason for why Delano should be kept on: “If Delano were now to resign, it would be retreating under fire and be accepted as an admission of the charges.” The fire only grew stronger, however, and Delano left that fall.
Richard A. Ballinger became interior secretary in 1909, appointed by William Howard Taft. Presaging Zinke and Pruitt, Ballinger peddled land to coal concerns and hydroelectric companies, reversing protections only recently put in place by Theodore Roosevelt. Confronted by a reporter about what amounted to a giveaway of nearly sixteen thousand acres of pristine land in Montana, Ballinger resorted to the fake news defense: “The dope you put out is all wrong and false.” He resigned in 1911.
It would have been difficult to top Albert B. Fall, one of the chief actors in the Teapot Dome scandal, which marked the most inglorious episode of the generally inglorious presidency of Warren G. Harding. Teapot Dome was a petroleum reserve in Wyoming; the scandal that would bear its name involved Fall, and other administration members, illegally leasing those reserves to oil companies. In 1929, Fall became the first-ever member of a presidential cabinet to also earn the distinction of being a convicted felon, though he had actually resigned the position six years before his corruption case came to trial.
Perhaps the most notorious modern-day interior secretary before Trump came along served in the Reagan administration. Even if conservatives were initially disappointed with Reagan’s cabinet, the right would always have a friend in the Wyoming-born James Gaius Watt. The Washington Post called him “a brisk, self-certain and acerbic westerner who pronounced almost immediately that his task was to ‘undo 50 years of bad government,’” a description that could have just as easily applied to Zinke in 2017.
Democrats despised Watt. “When a new administration comes in, you expect change. But you didn’t expect them to go out and pick the most controversial, bombastic person they could find and put him in,” said longtime Arizona congressman and famed conservationist Morris K. Udall.
Watt described his own views in a way that would not give opponents like Udall much comfort: “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.” He spurned conservation, making lavish giveaways to energy concerns. In 1982, a congressional subcommittee asked him for information on his management of national parks. Watt refused to honor the basic congressional duty of oversight, vowing to “resist committees sending staff to ramble through our files and interrogate and question our staff.”
Watt’s demise came in 1983. That September, he spoke to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a group he had previously worked for. He used the occasion to mock affirmative action. “We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent,” Watt joked. Even in the Reagan years, this caused significant outrage, and Watt was forced to resign, which he did from the California ranch of Thomas Barrack, whose son Thomas Jr. would be a close Trump confidant.
Corruption was not at issue at the time, but Watt later managed some of that, too. After he left the federal government, he became a lobbyist. In that capacity, he was “paid more than $500,000,” court records said, “and was promised additional sums” to pry from Housing and Urban Development administrators “funding and benefits for private landlords and developers.” Asked about that activity in 1989, he lied to a congressional committee. That resulted, six years later, in an indictment on twenty-five counts.
Democrats were not free of ethical failures. Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona governor, was an interior secretary for Bill Clinton, so admired by the president that he was considered for a Supreme Court nomination in both 1993 and 1994. In 1995, three bands of Chippewa peoples from Hudson, Wisconsin, sought to turn a dog-racing track, the St. Croix Meadows, into a casino. The Interior Department rejected the bid, which some charged was done at the behest of a dissenting Chippewa band that gave $230,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The ensuing scandal came to be known as Wampumgate.
One reason that Republican secretaries of the interior were more prone to corruption was that they were ideologically disposed to believe that public lands should be opened to energy companies, that the plight of the desert tortoise was less significant than the business of pumping oil out of the ground. That made them natural kin to corporate interests who held the same conviction.
Cliché has long had Washington exerting a corrupting influence on otherwise honest Americans, but no secret force fields have ever been discovered at work on the banks of the Potomac River. Arrival in Washington could magnify existing flaws, but the city lacked the power to invent new ones. This has always been an inconvenient, uncomfortable truth to admit; far easier to blame Washington itself, as opposed to the politicians who populated it, for every act of corruption and greed that took place within the city’
s confines.
The glorious landscape of Montana was at the center of Zinke’s identity. He was a fifth-generation native of the state, born and raised in Whitefish, near the Canadian border, on the edge of Glacier National Park. Originally from Germany, the Zinkes came to what would later become North Dakota in the 1880s before moving to Montana in the 1930s. Zinke was born in 1961 and lived a “relatively privileged life,” as he put it in his biography, American Commander, thanks to his maternal grandfather’s Chevrolet dealership.
Zinke spent much of his childhood outside, exploring. Then came football. Zinke played strong safety for the Whitefish High School Bulldogs, who won the state title in 1979. Having grown to six foot four in height and 210 pounds in weight, Zinke received a full scholarship to play football at the University of Oregon. (Zinke wrote in American Commander how, some years after his college career was through, he was having a drink in a London military club when he met an Oregon football fan who informed him that, according to the man’s wife, Zinke had “the best ass in the Pac-10.”)
Zinke studied geology at Oregon, “a good fit for someone with a passion for the outdoors.” Although he never pursued a graduate degree in the field, Zinke would routinely refer to himself as a geologist in debates over public lands. This was a misrepresentation of his expertise, but also a clue about how Zinke saw himself, as a rugged renaissance man, a scholar of the western steppe, equally adept with book and gun.
In 1985, Zinke finished college and went through Officer Candidate School. He then made it through the grueling training that allowed him to join the elite Navy SEALs. He would stay a SEAL until 2008.
Being a SEAL defined Zinke the way being a Chicago community organizer defined Obama. “As a former Navy SEAL,” Trump said in nominating Zinke to head the Interior Department, “he has incredible leadership skills and an attitude of doing whatever it takes to win.” But the picture Zinke presented of himself was riddled with falsehoods.
Zinke did perform admirably during deployments in Iraq and the restive republics formerly comprising Yugoslavia. But he also made an error that was highly damaging to his prospects as a career officer, an error that presaged some of the trouble he would bring upon himself at Interior. What happened, in short, was that Zinke used the pretense of SEAL-related business to expense trips back to Montana, where he was renovating a house. The Navy found out and Zinke had to pay back $211. The amount was piddling, but the damage to his military career was immense. Cited for “lapses of judgment” in a 1999 vice admiral’s “fitness report,” Zinke was branded as someone who lacked the character to lead other men into combat.
Zinke did not take the rebuke to heart, and as he turned to politics, he made sure that voters saw no reason to doubt his integrity. What they were to see instead was a warrior-scholar, a patriot who harkened back to an ancient ideal of public service. It was a powerful image, one that would have been even more powerful if it were grounded in truth.
In 2012, Zinke started a political action committee, Special Operations for America, aiming to stop President Obama from winning a second term in office. One of Obama’s achievements had been the successful elimination of Osama bin Laden the year before. Zinke didn’t buy it. Special Operations for America put out a press release that said that “Navy SEALs, special operations personnel and veterans across America have been outraged since Barack Obama conveniently took credit for killing Osama Bin Laden for political gain.”
In the winter of 2014, Zinke announced that he would run for Montana’s at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. This bothered Captain Larry W. Bailey, who once commanded Zinke in the Navy SEALs and was familiar with Zinke’s military career. The letter Bailey wrote that spring, which was circulated privately before seeing publication in the Montana Post and elsewhere, began by calling Zinke a friend. After that, things got less kind. He described Zinke as dishonest and egotistical. “Ryan’s ambitions will not stop here,” Bailey warned of Zinke’s bid for the House. “He has shown by his dissimulation of facts regarding his career that he is willing to do whatever it takes to reach the next level—in his case, the US Senate. I cannot abide that prospect, because THEN he is representing ME and every citizen of this land as a member of one of the world’s most prestigious deliberative bodies.”
The rebuke had no effect on Zinke. On August 21, his campaign sent a fund-raising email. The subject line: “Who killed Osama bin Laden?” The ensuing message crowed about how Zinke “spent 23 years as a Navy SEAL and served as a Team Leader on SEAL Team Six—the team responsible for the mission to get Osama bin Laden.” It was true, SEAL Team Six had done the job. Only, by that time, Zinke was safely back home. He had as much to do with that mission as he did with the invasion of Normandy.
Bailey was right about Zinke’s desire to climb ever higher, wrong about where that climb would take him: not the U.S. Senate, but the cabinet of President Trump.
Zinke’s confirmation hearings to become interior secretary were among the less contentious to take place in that contentious winter of 2017. He admitted that climate change was real—a true feat of courage for a Trump nominee—though he qualified the assertion by suggesting that “it’s not proven science.” He also said he was “absolutely against transfer or sale of public land,” though he was not necessarily against leasing land to energy concerns. This would prove a crucial difference, one that Zinke exploited like a gap in the offensive line.
Leadership would be welcome at Interior, where the transition had not been so much chaotic as nonexistent. There had mostly been “radio silence” from the Trump administration, according to Joel Clement. “Everything was mystery.” There had been rumors that Trump might hand the department over to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, she of “drill, baby, drill,” fame. At least that disaster was avoided. Other disasters loomed.
Clement was the kind of federal employee one rarely read or heard about, because one rarely heard of government workers unless they were caught in an act of fraud or abuse. And so one knew little of who they were, what they did. This made it easier for those who wanted to demonize the federal workforce. A faceless enemy was always easier to attack.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia in 1988, Clement moved to Seattle, where he worked as a canopy biologist, trying to understand the delicate dynamics that made a forest thrive. He later shifted his focus to climate change. Clement joined Interior in 2011 to direct its Office of Policy Analysis. One of his main initiatives was to help Alaska’s indigenous people cope with climate change, the effects of which they were feeling more keenly than the rest of us because they live inside or close to the Arctic Circle.
“We were all waiting with bated breath for this guy,” Clement recalled wistfully. “We had this sort of misconception that Zinke was the individual who testified to the Senate.” That is, a man who truly loved the West and thus understood what was necessary to save it. How wrong any such confidence would prove, and how quickly.
At the very first, little changed. “He didn’t really bring people with him,” Clement remembered, and many members of the beachhead team stayed on. Most influential among these was James E. Cason, who had worked for several previous Republican administrations. In 1989, his nomination to head the U.S. Forest Service was pulled after he was deemed by one Democrat a “James Watt clone.” Under Zinke, Cason would run many of Interior’s day-to-day operations. Another figure who helped shape Interior—and who would, in fact, come to more or less head the entire department—was David L. Bernhardt, a powerful energy and water lobbyist whose many conflicts of interest did not keep him out of the federal government. Those conflicts were so numerous, he had them printed on a card he carried on his person.
Zinke’s retinue did not think to interact with senior career staffers, the ones who knew the work of the department best, neither during the transition nor in the first weeks after Zinke’s imperious arrival on horseback. “They were keeping things pretty close up there on the
secretary’s hallway,” Clement remembered. Morale fell, then fell lower.
Senior career staffers wanted to brief Zinke on their work, but he wasn’t especially interested. “They were huddling” on Interior’s sixth-floor executive offices, “trying to figure out how they were going to kick through the Heritage Foundation’s agenda,” Clement later said. That included making it easier for energy companies to access oil and gas on public lands. Remembering this, Clement chuckled. “There was nothing we were doing that they cared about.”
In late May, Zinke made a raft of hires that would shape the top ranks of Interior for the next two years. Joining Interior that day was Lori Mashburn, an alumna of the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign; before attaining either of those posts, she had worked for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a hectoring far-right group whose warped vision of Christianity advocated for foreign wars and retrograde cultural values but against helping the poor. Timothy G. Williams Jr. had worked for Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ political organization. Scott J. Cameron was an exceptionally well-connected Republican operative who had lobbied for energy companies. Several of the new staffers were also young veterans of the Trump campaign, their hires suggesting that Zinke knew exactly where his horses would get their water.
Just like Pruitt, Zinke saw himself destined for greatness. He commanded that every time he entered Interior’s headquarters in Washington, a special “secretarial flag” be raised above the building, then lowered again when he left. Sally Jewell, who headed the department during the Obama administration, expressed the amused astonishment of many: “I had no idea there was a secretarial flag. And if I had known there was a flag the last thing I would have done was to ever fly it.” The Washington Post report that broke the story of his flag fixation noted that Zinke had commissioned “challenge coins,” commemorative medallions customarily given by members of the military to visiting dignitaries. He also moved to have three sets of doors repaired for the Pruitt-esque sum of $139,000.
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