The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources has launched an investigation into three environmental groups and is seeking evidence of “collusion” between the groups and the Biden administration to reintroduce a ban on mining within the same watershed as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

On Monday, the committee sent letters to the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice and the Wilderness Society requesting documents and communications between the groups and Biden’s U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior.

The letters were signed by Reps. Pete Stauber, R-Minnesota, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources; Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, the chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources; and Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

“The Committee is keen to discover the details of (the groups’) backroom roles in the cancellation of the Twin Metals leases and the Superior Withdrawal, particularly given tax-exempt environmental groups’ continued pressure to oppose mining in northern Minnesota and otherwise negatively influence America’s natural resource and energy priorities,” the letters said.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, responded in a letter Thursday, which he shared with the Duluth News Tribune.

“Your ‘investigation’ is in actuality an abuse of power, inappropriately weaponizing government powers against law-abiding American citizens in a clumsy attempt to intimidate them,” Suckling wrote. “The center is not and cannot be intimidated.”

A spokesperson for Stauber did not respond to the News Tribune’s request for comment.

Earthjustice declined to comment for this story, and the Wilderness Society did not respond to the New Tribune’s request for comment.

The Republican congressmen said “at least one of” the groups held “off-the-book meetings” with Biden administration officials at the Interior Department ahead of its decisions to cancel two federal mineral leases for Twin Metals and ban mining for 20 years on 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest within the Rainy River Watershed, which is shared with the BWCAW, over concerns mining would pollute the wilderness area.

Earthjustice then represented groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Wilderness Society, intervening in a lawsuit to support the Biden administration’s actions, the congressmen wrote.

“At the very least, these meetings created a serious appearance of impropriety; more likely, these meetings violated ethical standards and evidence potentially improper relationships between (the Center for Biological Diversity) — and other similarly radical groups — and the Biden administration,” the letter to the Center said.

The Biden administration’s moves effectively killed Twin Metals’ plans to build an underground copper-nickel mine, processing plant and dry-stacked tailings storage facility on the edge of Birch Lake and upstream of the BWCAW.

But the Trump administration has said it will reverse the Biden administration’s actions to limit mining in the Superior National Forest and return Twin Metals leases.

Suckling wrote that the Center for Biological Diversity “had no meetings with any federal officials about the proposed Twin Metals mine while our lawsuits about the matter were active.

“I’m sure you know this already since your letter tellingly doesn’t refer to the existence of any such meeting,” Suckling wrote. “Nor, quite curiously, does it describe any specific center action as potentially violating any specific law or regulations.”

In an email to the News Tribune, Suckling said Twin Metals met with the officials “at least 18 times during its suit” and pointed to other connections, including high lobbying expenses by Twin Metals and the fact that during the first Trump administration, President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, rented a Washington home owned by Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic, whose family controls Antofagasta, the Chilean global mining giant that owns a 100% interest in the Twin Metals project.

“So if the House wants to investigate actual suspicious influence, it should focus on Twin Metals,” Suckling said.

Twin Metals declined to comment.

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