All in the Family: The Foreign Mine, the Former Interior Secretary, and the Congressman Who Delivered

A Chilean company wanted twenty years of Boundary Waters protection erased. Rep. Pete Stauber (MN-R) got it done, starting with the witness he called a "neutral geologist."

The Politics Chicks, Christy Branham, and belvederestp

Jun 05, 2026

Pete Stauber delivered the Boundary Waters to a foreign mining giant — and the tell wasn't the campaign checks. It was the "neutral" geologist he put on the stand, who'd helped run the company that stood to profit.

When Rep. Pete Stauber (MN-R) moved to reopen 225,504 acres near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters to copper-nickel mining, clearing the path for Twin Metals, the mine owned by the Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta he didn’t start with a vote.

He started with a witness.

At a 2023 field hearing convened to build the record for his Boundary Waters mining bill, H.J. Res. 140, Stauber introduced a “neutral” chief geologist who had, in fact, helped run Twin Metals’ corporate predecessor and never disclosed it.

That single omission is the key to how a foreign mining company’s wish list became federal law, one perfectly legal, perfectly timed campaign check at a time.

It’s worth slowing down on that hearing, because everything else grows out of it.

On May 2, 2023, Stauber gaveled the field hearing to order in a school auditorium in Mountain Iron, Minnesota, and called his first witness.

“Dr. Dean Peterson,” he said “the chief geologist for Big Rock Exploration.”

Clean. Neutral. A scientist, there to tell Congress what was in the ground.

What Stauber didn’t add is in Peterson’s own written testimony, still posted on the House Natural Resources Committee’s website:

Dr. Peterson is the former Senior Vice President of Exploration at Duluth Metals:

The company Antofagasta bought in 2015 to create Twin Metals Minnesota, the very firm holding the leases his week-old resolution was written to revive.

The “neutral geologist” had helped run the company that stood to win.

Stauber never mentioned it. Not in the introduction. Not once in the hearing.

And Peterson wasn’t the only friendly face. Stauber chose all three witnesses himself.

A second, Jessica Johnson, was presented as a local voice; she was the government-relations manager for Talon Metals, another mining company with its own Minnesota nickel project. The third was a resort owner who told the panel the region was sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in copper and nickel.

The Star Tribune’s headline for the day put it plainly:

“A field day for powerful mining interests.”

“Great to see you all again here today,” Stauber told them.

Again.

That word is the tell.

The hearing wasn’t convened to weigh whether copper mining beside the most-visited wilderness in America was a good idea. It was staged to enter a verdict into the permanent record — for a bill Stauber had already filed, one week earlier. Peterson even brought a prop:

A resource map made by his own firm, titled to spotlight Stauber’s own 8th Congressional District, carrying a valuation a colleague on the dais nudged toward “over $1 trillion.” Peterson agreed.

The trillion-dollar number that traveled out of that room was a congressman’s suggestion and a witness’s yes — not a finding.

None of that is interpretation.

It’s the transcript, the witnesses’ own biographies, and a corporate-ownership record anyone can pull. Hold onto it.

Because everything that follows is documented the same way.

What Was Actually on the Table

The land sits on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

In January 2023, the Interior Department issued Public Land Order 7917 and withdrew roughly 225,504 acres of the Rainy River watershed from federal mineral leasing for twenty years. That order did one concrete thing:

It blocked Twin Metals — the wholly owned subsidiary of the Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta plc — from mining there.

Stauber set out to erase it.

After a conventional resolution stalled, he reintroduced the measure as H.J. Res. 140 under the Congressional Review Act:

The one vehicle that cannot be filibustered and needs only a simple majority in the Senate.

The House passed it on January 21, 2026. The Senate passed it 50–49 on April 16. President Trump signed it on April 27.

Strip away the procedure and here is the shape of it:

A foreign-owned company wanted two decades of protection erased from American public land, and the congressman whose district touches that land built the record, chose the witnesses, and picked the one path a minority couldn’t stop.

He delivered.

*From Protection to Repeal — the two-year arc from withdrawal to signing.*

The Lobbyist Who Used to Run Interior

While Stauber moved the bill, Twin Metals was buying help in Washington.

For years its lead shop was Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the firm David Bernhardt joined after running the Interior Department in Trump’s first term. The same department, in case it needs saying, with direct authority over these leases. Senate lobbying disclosures, as reported by the Star Tribune, show Twin Metals paid Brownstein Hyatt about $730,000 in 2022 alone.

In mid-2025, Bernhardt left and opened his own firm. Three of the lobbyists who had worked the Twin Metals account followed the contract over.

Disclosures and public reporting put the company’s payments to the new shop at roughly $380,000 from its founding through the first quarter of 2026 — the exact window H.J. Res. 140 was moving — and show it lobbying the House, the Senate, the White House, Interior, and the Justice Department.

A former Interior Secretary, paid to work his old agency for a foreign mining company, while the local congressman drove the bill that clears its path.

Read that again.

Now, About the Money

Here I have to be straight with you, because the people defending this won’t be.

Every contribution I’m about to show you is legal.
Capped at $5,000. Filed. Disclosed.

A subcommittee chairman taking checks from the industries he oversees is the most ordinary thing in Washington, and by itself it is not a scandal. I am not going to tell you the money bought the vote. It didn’t have to.

Stauber chairs the subcommittee. He wrote the bill, staged the hearing, and chose the one legislative vehicle a minority couldn’t stop.

What the money documents is not a motive. It is a schedule.

*The Money Kept Time — contributions clustered to the bill’s milestones.*

Twenty-one days after he introduced the bill, two National Mining Association PACs — MinePAC and CoalPAC — each cut him a check on the same day.

Twenty-eight days after the House passed it, they did it again on the same day, joined by a partner from Bernhardt’s firm.

To be fair about this, MinePAC and CoalPAC are both the National Mining Association. One organization writing two checks, not three strangers coordinating in a back room. And the honest version is still damning enough.

An industry timed its lawful generosity to a bill’s heartbeat, and the heartbeat was set by the man it was paying.

Step back and the category fills in:

Roughly $96,000 in career contributions from mining, fossil-fuel, and mineral-industry PACs.

OpenSecrets ranks Stauber the third-highest recipient from the mining industry in all of Congress. He chairs the House subcommittee with jurisdiction over federal mineral policy.

*~$96,000 in mining and fossil-fuel PAC money over his career.*

None of it is a crime. All of it is the texture of how a thing like this gets done — and the texture is the point.

*Legislation In, Donations Out — every milestone on the bill, and the checks that followed.*

The Machinery Underneath

Stauber’s campaign account is only the top layer.

Beneath it sits a web of joint fundraising committees and leadership PACs, several sharing one treasurer and one post-office box in Hudson, Wisconsin. Two of them sit squarely inside the bill’s window.

The Greater Minnesota Victory Fund reimbursed a Stauber chief of staff about $7,088 for two Ritz-Carlton fundraisers while H.J. Res. 140 was pending in the Senate. And Friends of Surface Transportation, a road-construction committee, registered on February 16, 2026 — the same day Stauber added it to his own paperwork — raised $80,000, and wired about $31,851 to his campaign on March 31, sixteen days before the Senate vote.

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Two Notices the FEC Has Open

As of this writing, the Federal Election Commission has two enforcement notices open against committees in Stauber’s network at the same time.

The first went to his campaign three days before the Senate vote, flagging contributions that appeared to exceed federal limits, and to be precise:

The donors flagged there are a Teamsters PAC and a rail-union PAC, not the mining money.

The second went to Friends of Surface Transportation a month after the bill was signed, over two contributions that never appeared on its reports.

An FEC notice is a request to explain, not a finding of guilt; committees clear them all the time with an amended filing.

I am not calling them proof of anything. But two open at once, bracketing the vote and the signature, are a fair measure of how much money was moving, and how fast.

*What the FEC Is Asking About — two notices, open at once.*

The Sum of It

Strip it to the studs, and keep only what a document will back:

A congressman called a witness a neutral geologist when the man had helped run the company that would profit and never said so.
He filled the rest of the panel with a mining-company employee and a booster, then called it a hearing.
A foreign mining company hired the former Interior Secretary to lobby his old department.
The industries that stood to gain timed their lawful checks to the bill’s milestones—and twenty years of protection on the edge of the Boundary Waters are now gone, signed into law.

No single check is too big. No disclosure is missing. No law is broken.

That isn’t the defense it sounds like. It is the design.

The limits keep the numbers boring. The disclosures get filed. The lobbying gets registered. The witness turns in his bio. Every move happens in the daylight.

Which is exactly why almost nobody bothers to line them up.

That is the cleanest money in Washington. And clean is precisely how they need it to look.

One more thing worth watching:

The filings covering contributions after April 27 go public in mid-July. If the metronome is still keeping time, it will show.

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