Earlier this year, two key congressional Democrats reached out to the Interior Department’s inspector general with a provocative allegation: The lawmakers requested an investigation into Karen Budd-Falen, the agency’s third-highest-ranking official, who they said might have played a role in approving a lithium mine after her husband entered into a multimillion-dollar relationship with the mine’s developer.

What’s more, according to the congressional Democrats — Reps. Jared Huffman of California, who is the ranking member on the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the ranking member on the oversight subcommittee — Budd-Falen failed to disclose the key details, not only during her tenure in the first Trump administration but also when she returned to the president’s team last year.

The controversy didn’t generate a ton of headlines at the time, but four months later, the same official is confronting another ethics controversy. The Washington Post reported:

A top Trump appointee at the Interior Department acknowledged that she has been involved in changes to grazing policies that benefit ranching businesses like her family’s, according to a video of her remarks — a claim that some ethics experts say could violate federal law.

Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Falen told a Congressional Western Caucus event in December that grazing policy is part of her job, and “the thing that probably was the closest to my heart was grazing regulations,” according to a video that Senate Western Caucus Chairwoman Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) uploaded to her public YouTube page.

Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of a nonpartisan watchdog group called the Campaign for Accountability, told the Post that her organization had been monitoring Budd-Falen’s activities given her financial holdings and found the YouTube recording of her comments.

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Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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