Senior BLM official violated ethics rules on investment, IG says
- September 24, 2024
Scott Streater, E&E News
The Interior Department’s inspector general concluded that the Bureau of Land Management’s second-in-command violated ethics rules in failing to disclose a financial investment in Berkshire Hathaway for about a month in 2021.
Nada Wolff Culver, BLM’s principal deputy director, sold stock in the company that year, after notifying the Interior Department ethics’ office about the holdings.
Investigators found Culver did not violate criminal conflict of interests laws with her husband’s financial investment in ConocoPhillips, according to the inspector general’s report issued Tuesday that documents its more than yearlong inquiry prompted last year by an outside watchdog group. BLM last year approved ConocoPhillips’ controversial Willow oil project in Alaska.
The inspector general’s office reported that Culver “initially failed to identify her holdings of Berkshire Hathaway stock” after the agency’s ethic’s department emailed her a “List of Prohibited Investments” for senior Interior officials, and asked her to identify whether she had any financial ties to any of the companies.
Berkshire Hathaway is on the list of prohibited stock ownership updated every year by the ethics department because they own or have financial interests in companies that are, or have proposed, energy projects on federal lands. Among the companies Berkshire Hathaway has majority ownership in is NV Energy, the Nevada-based utility that is building the Greenlink West and Greenlink North transmission line projects that are projected to cross hundreds of miles of federal lands in the Silver State.
But Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, which filed the ethics complaint with the inspector general in January 2023 requesting the investigation, claimed victory.
“Culver’s multiple failures to timely report her prohibited financial holdings is representative of the haphazard manner in which ethics obligations have been (de)prioritized” by the agency and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Chamberlain said in an emailed statement.
“This most recent IG investigation of one of Sec. Haaland’s top lieutenants simultaneously finds fault with her actions and wipes the slate clean for any consequences,” he added. “It also erodes further any false narrative that a Biden-Harris administration has somehow avoided ethics controversies or misconduct after claiming to be the most ethical administration in history.”