Developer's lawyer wants hearing to rebut charges about Benson project

A congressional committee that wants a criminal probe of the Trump administration’s handling of a proposed Benson development ignored or glossed over key events as part of “an attempt to select facts to fit a predisposed narrative,” an attorney for the project’s developer told reporters this week.

Longtime D.C. attorney Lanny Davis is seeking a public hearing to rebut allegations of potentially criminal behavior made by a House committee chaired by Tucson Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva.

“I ask Rep. Grijalva, Rep. Porter, to give me a chance to respond to what in my opinion are false and misleading allegations,” Davis said at a a press conference Thursday.

Grijalva chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, while Rep. Katie Porter, a California Democrat, chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

On May 11, the full committee sent Attorney General Merrick Garland a 37-page letter citing what it calls strong evidence of an illegal “quid pro quo” between senior Trump administration officials and Michael Ingram, chairman of the Phoenix-based company seeking to develop the 28,000-home Villages at Vigneto.

The committee wrote Garland that it has documented private meetings and personal communications in 2017 over the fate of that project between Ingram and top administration officials, including Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and their staff members.

The committee alleged these meetings and communications directly led to political pressure being applied by Interior higher-ups on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official Steve Spangle to reverse his long-held stance that the project needs a full-scale review of its potential to dry up the nearby San Pedro River.

Eighteen months later, Spangle told the Arizona Daily Star and then, other media, that he was “rolled” into changing his stance on the project by pressure from “a high-level politico” to back off on the case.

The committee also documented that Ingram and several other Arizona residents linked to him made what the criminal referral letter describes as “highly unusual out-of-cycle donations” totaling $241,600 to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee in October 2017. That was the same month Spangle reversed himself on the need for a Vigneto analysis.

Spangle’s reversal cleared the way for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reissue a federal Clean Water Act permit for the project that it had previously suspended.

Obama administration support cited

At his press conference, Davis accused the committee of failing to pay adequate notice to several important events that he said showed Spangle’s reversal wasn’t the result of top-down political pressure, as the biologist alleged to the Star in April 2019, after he retired from the wildlife service.

First, Davis said, the Obama administration’s Army Corps of Engineers had issued a Clean Water Act permit for the project back in 2006 and stood behind it during the rest of Obama’s tenure, through January 2017.

“Is there anyone who believes the Obama administration was influenced by Republican donations?” Davis said.

Second, in June 2019, the wildlife service’s Jeff Humphrey wrote a letter saying that after a review of the case done with no supervision by the service’s regional or Washington, D.C. offices, the agency saw no reason to change its 2017 decision not to require the detailed analysis of Vigneto, Davis noted. Humphrey had replaced Spangle as field supervisor of the agency’s Arizona Ecological Services office.

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“Why wasn’t that quote included in the letter? Is that getting in the way of the narrative?” asked Davis, referring to the Natural Resources Committee letter to Garland.

Third, Davis said the House committee confused correlation with causation in linking Interior’s change of position on Vigneto to big campaign donations to the Trump administration.

“The rooster crows and the sun rises. That doesn’t mean just because one happened after the other that the rooster caused the sun to rise. Donations and political meetings occur all the time,” Davis said.

Davis repeatedly made the point that he, like Grijalva and Porter, is a “progressive Democrat,” one who represented President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s when Clinton was under a federal investigation for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.

“Of all things a progressive Democrat doesn’t do, one is to ignore the presumption of innocence,” Davis said. “What harm is there? If the committee chair or staff disagrees with me, fine. Let’s have it out in public. Let’s prove we can agree to disagree civilly.”

“Smelled bad then ... and now”

In a statement, Grijalva didn’t respond directly to Davis’ request for a hearing. But he said, “The question before the committee was whether sufficient evidence exists of potentially criminal behavior that further investigation by the Justice Department is warranted. The committee determined that it did. It is my hope Mr. Ingram will cooperate fully with DOJ” (the Department of Justice).

“Mr. Ingram’s attorney wants to talk about everything except the main issue: a quarter of a million dollars in donations was given at the same time the permit was opened for re-evaluation. The other details he has referenced are fully addressed in the 37-page referral. We encourage DOJ to investigate the primary question at hand,” Grijalva added.

For his part, Spangle told the Star he hadn’t expected anything like the House committee’s letter seeking a criminal investigation of the Vigneto case.

“I had one goal in mind, to let American people know there were people in the administration neglecting their trust responsibility,” Spangle said Thursday in a telephone interview, explaining his decision to go public on the case. “That’s all I had in mind. I never thought it would go anywhere like where it would go.

“Professional investigators like yourselves and the committee dug a lot deeper than I had intended to do,” Spangle told the Star. “I just wanted the public to know that decisions were made that were politically driven, that smelled bad then and smelled bad now.”

“I will be happy if justice is done. If it’s appropriate it should be done. If not it shouldn’t be done,” Spangle said of the committee’s request for a criminal probe of this case.

“I’m not versed in the law. I don’t know who said what to whom, but it’s pretty evident that the Natural Resources Committee did a through look at it,” he said.

When a reporter at Davis’ press conference also said he thought this case didn’t smell good, Davis replied, “The Constitution doesn’t allow a criminal referral based on smell.”