Records Show Trump Interior Secretary Met With Former North Dakota Colleagues

The Interior Department said the meetings, which appear on Doug Burgum's official calendar, were “personal” gatherings “with old friends,” not business.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum pictured at a ribbon-cutting event in May. Credit: Official DOI Photo by Andrew King, Flickr

In January 2025, prior to being sworn in as secretary of the Interior Department, Doug Burgum signed an ethics agreement that restricted him for one year from meeting with North Dakota officials without first obtaining written authorization from agency ethics officials.

That recusal requirement stemmed from Burgum’s eight-year tenure as governor of North Dakota, during which his administration filed numerous lawsuits against the federal agency he now leads.

Official calendars that the Interior Department released last month show Burgum twice met with former North Dakota colleagues within his first year on the job. The calendars briefly disappeared from the Interior Department’s records library then were reposted after Public Domain asked about them.

In July 2025, Burgum met with state attorney general Drew Wrigley, who Burgum appointed to the post back in 2022. In May 2025, he met with Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner. Both meetings were held in Burgum’s office in Washington, DC, according to agency documents.

It is unclear what Burgum discussed with his former colleagues.

In an email to Public Domain, an Interior Department spokesperson said “these were personal meetings, as clearly labeled on the Secretary’s calendar, wherein the Secretary met with old friends from his home state when they were in town.”

“There was no business discussed at these meetings,” the spokesperson wrote.

Present at both meetings was JoDee Hanson, Burgum’s chief of staff. Hanson worked with Burgum for more than two decades in North Dakota, including serving as his chief administrative officer during his tenure as governor. The Interior Department did not respond when asked about the fact that every single entry in Burgum’s official calendar — hundreds of meetings, events and dinners — are labeled “personal.”

In his ethics agreement, Burgum agreed to “receive a written authorization to participate personally and substantially in particular matters involving specific parties in which I know the State of North Dakota is a party or represents a party.”

Records indicate Burgum consulted agency ethics officials prior to dozens of meetings. When he met in March 2025 with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives, for example, ethics officials granted him permission to participate, but flagged his recusal obligations, including those pertaining to North Dakota, and recommended that “he consider including in this meeting appropriate subject matter experts from the DOI, including representatives from the Office of the Solicitor, as determined appropriate” in case off-limit matters came up.

The calendars include no record of ethics officials weighing in prior to Burgum sitting down with his former North Dakota colleagues. The Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether Burgum consulted with ethics staff or why the calendars were temporarily removed from the agency’s website.

Tony Irish, a longtime former Interior Department attorney who now works as a senior counsel at the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, noted that ethics rules require executive branch employees to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. “Certainly in a normal world, the ethics team would have been made aware of this” and had the opportunity to weigh in, he said.

“Ethics is always cognizant of the fact that whatever your intent going into a meeting is, the other party may have a different intent, and is going to inform you of what you need to avoid should it come up,” he said.

In an effort to pinpoint the nature of the North Dakota meetings, Public Domain filed a pair of state records requests to the attorney general’s office and the Department of Agriculture.

The AG’s office provided Public Domain with a screenshot of Wrigley’s calendar showing the meeting with Burgum, with no additional details. When asked directly what the two met to discuss, Suzie Weigel, North Dakota’s Chief Deputy Attorney General, told Public Domain that “a request for information is not a request for records, and a public entity is not required to provide explanations or answers.”

“To the extent that you are requesting a comment, this office declines to comment,” she wrote in an email.

The North Dakota Department of Agriculture separately provided Public Domain with several emails, including one in which an Interior Department official confirmed Goehring’s meeting with Burgum. Agency officials not respond when asked what Burgum and Goehring discussed.

During Burgum’s tenure as governor, North Dakota sued the Interior Department at least five times. Wrigley, the attorney general, also signed onto a friend of the court brief in support of Utah’s effort to wrest control of more than 18 million acres of public land from the federal government.

Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the conservation campaign Save Our Parks, said in an email statement that meetings with North Dakota officials are part of “a pattern of secrecy, backroom deals, and corruption by Doug Burgum and his cronies at the expense of our parks and public lands.”