Interior Department-released calendars of secretary nominee differ from his public descriptions

Although Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a letter to the House Natural Resources Committee in February that he didn't keep calendars and the records of his daily schedule others kept for him were public, the Department recently published to its website hundreds of pages of documents that reveal new details about some meetings that were left off of previous versions of his calendars. The House Natural Resources Committee requested "all calendars and schedules" of Bernhardt's on Feb. 7, after saying the versions posted on the Interior Department's website were missing important details and excluding meeting descriptions or topics for more than 100 hours of "official government time," according to the committee's letter. Bernhardt responded to the committee by stating that he had "no legal obligation to personally maintain a calendar." He said "numerous people" who create calendar entries for him have made those entries public. "To the extent Agency records are created through that process, they are appropriately maintained to fully comply with the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act," he said in the letter. Now, days before his confirmation vote to be the next Interior Secretary, the Interior Department released 439 pages of documents spanning from Sept. 2017 to Nov. 2018 with more information about Bernhardt's daily schedule than previously released by the department. Getting a complete picture of what the former Deputy, now Acting, and, if confirmed, the next Secretary of the Interior Department has been doing since he started in 2017 has been an ongoing battle for outside watchdog groups and Congress...MORE