House Republicans Subpoena Interior Secretary

DENVER — A House committee issued a subpoena Wednesday ordering Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to produce a critical peer review and other documents related to the Environmental Protection Agency’s spill at the Gold King Mine.

The House Natural Resources Committee subpoena calls for Ms. Jewell to produce by Feb. 26 a peer review conducted last year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) on the Interior Department’s technical evaluation of the accident.

A Feb. 11 report on the spill conducted by the committee’s majority staff refers to the peer review, which was mentioned in the Interior Department’s technical review but never released.

“It is important to note that although the USACE peer reviewer agreed that the report properly describes the technical causes of the failure, he had serious reservations with the chronology of events internal to EPA from the day of the telephone call to [Bureau of Reclamation] and up to the day of the mine failure,” says the Interior Department review released Oct. 22.

The committee staff report concludes that “an understanding of the Technical Evaluation’s errors and misleading nature reveals the gravity of the peer reviewer’s comments.”

More here