Politico Investigation How Zinke lost his way In journeying from Whitefish to Washington, an outsider from Montana failed to follow the political guardrails.

When Ryan Zinke hosted the chairman of the energy giant Halliburton at his Interior Department headquarters in August 2017, the former Navy SEAL was at the pinnacle of a meteoric nine-year rise from retired military commander to rising star of Montana politics to member of the Trump Cabinet.

Unknown to Zinke, he was also setting into motion events that would lead to his crash.


Over dinner, the two men discussed a commercial development project on land abutting a park controlled by a foundation created by Zinke. The project would also include a microbrewery of a type originally proposed by Zinke — part of his longstanding dream of being a business leader in his hometown of Whitefish, a Montana lumber town turned upscale resort. But after POLITICO reported on the dealings between the Interior secretary and the leader of a company he regulates, the Interior inspector general launched an investigation that, in turn, reportedly led to a referral to the Justice Department.

Zinke’s resignation, announced on Saturday, was widely expected, especially after President Donald Trump expressed concern over the Justice Department probe. Zinke, in a Twitter post, declared he was leaving to enable “the President and Interior to focus on accomplishments rather than fictitious allegations.”

But the fall of Zinke over ethics issues — which came in the wake of those of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and HHS Secretary Tom Price — spotlighted the failure of another Trump Cabinet secretary to follow the political guardrails for top Washington officials. Like Pruitt and Price, Zinke was a relatively low-profile politician who lacked any preparation for the close scrutiny he encountered as a senior administration official, leading to more than a dozen investigations of his ethical conduct in 21 months in office.

Ryan Zinke’s simultaneous pursuit of business and politics led to his downfall. Read here.

A POLITICO review of Zinke’s rapid rise from Montana politics to the Cabinet showed that he worked for numerous consulting businesses, firms and foundations — some of which had interests in state government — while serving as state senator, but never had to disclose the identity of his clients under Montana’s largely self-regulating ethics laws. His dealings with the Halliburton chairman had their roots in that period, when he was launching a political career while also aggressively pursuing business opportunities.

Zinke has never publicly expressed any concerns about the appearance of private dealings with the chairman of a company his department oversees. He did not respond to requests for comment to his and his lawyer’s offices.

Those who have followed his career since his retirement from the Navy in 2008 describe a man with unusual self-confidence, enamored of the SEAL ethos of overcoming obstacles to achieve goals. That sometimes required ignoring inconvenient norms or rules, as Zinke himself wrote in his 2016 autobiography, “American Commander.” From his first day as a SEAL, he wrote, “We trained harder, deployed longer and viewed the conventional rules as guidance rather than the law.”

“He was very self-confident,” recalled Dave Wanzenried, a Democratic state senator who sat with Zinke on the finance and transportation committees in the Montana Legislature. “He represented himself as a Navy SEAL — that was part of his schtick. He mentioned it every time he would speak. He was very polite, he wasn’t abrasive, but he made it clear because he was a SEAL and the rest of us weren’t there was a difference.”

After his Navy retirement, he soon won election to the state Senate while racking up a series of jobs and business deals that earned him combined salaries in the six digits in industries ranging from firearms to pipeline technology.

LEFT: A BNSF operated train in Whitefish, Montana on May 1, 2018. RIGHT: Zinke listens to a fellow senator speak on the floor of the Senate Chamber in Helena in 2009. | M. Scott Mahaskey/ POLITICO and Lido Vizzutti/Flathead Beacon

Montana has a part-time Legislature in which members are assumed to have other jobs. The state’s disclosure requirements are relatively lax, allowing members to shield some of the sources of their income behind innocuous-sounding partnerships and foundations. While members are required to reveal conflicts of interest to party leaders, and recuse themselves before voting, the standards are largely self-enforced.

"It’s basically their responsibility if they believe they have a conflict of interest," said Jeff Mangan, commissioner of political practices for the Montana Legislature.

Don Fox, who was acting head of the Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration and general counsel during George W. Bush’s tenure, said Zinke’s ethical lapses as Interior secretary seemed to have their roots in Montana.

“Zinke plays fast and loose when it comes to ethics standards” at the federal level, said Fox. “There is no reason to assume he was any more careful when he was a Montana official.”

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Zinke was a child of the Rocky Mountains.

Recounting his childhood in Whitefish in "American Commander," he cast himself as an enterprising kid who sometimes bent the rules. Zinke recounts how he, as an underage teen, would obtain a case of beer from a local bar by putting it on the tab of his unwitting grandfather, who ran a plumbing and heating shop. Then he’d sell the individual beers to high school kids at a premium price; racing back to the bar, he’d use some of the cash to pay for the case and pocket the profits.

“Provided that the tab was paid, no one was the wiser,” he wrote. “Being the supplier of beer to high school kids had its privileges … I was a ‘made man’ early.”

He excelled in sports and obtained a football scholarship to the University of Oregon. In his book, he claims he chose his major — geology — by “randomly pointing to a major from the academic catalogue.” He played starting center on the Pac-10 team, and proceeded to join the military a few years after graduation.

His 23-year career as a SEAL took him to the upper rungs of the special-operations command, though it was ultimately stalled by indiscretions over billing the military for what ended up being personal travel — what were termed “lapses of judgment” in a 1999 Navy fitness report. His top assignment as a SEAL, he said, was overseeing a joint special-operations command.

Even while he was stationed on the West Coast, he would often return to Whitefish, where his mother left him $76,000 and several properties after her death in 2005, according to county records. Neighbors say they would often run into the affable man they all call Ryan sipping beers at the Bulldog Saloon, Lodge at Whitefish Lake or VFW Hall.

It was little surprise then, that he and Lola, whom he married in 1993, decided to make Whitefish their base of operations after he left the service in 2008. By then, the sleepy small town of his birth had become a popular resort for skiers and golfers, where corporate moguls built mountainside mansions.

While still in California in 2005, the Zinkes had created a business called Continental Divide Inns, which he established to hold real estate, in partnership with a doctor friend who had treated Zinke’s mother for cancer.

Halliburton Chairman, President and CEO David Lesar, third from right, rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on Nov. 18, 2014. Just five months after taking office as Interior secretary, while vowing to expand the amount of public land open for drilling, Zinke discussed private business with Lesar. | Richard Drew/AP Photo

The Zinkes moved to Whitefish three years later, and at the same time he also began discussing with his neighbors the possibility of entering politics.

One of the first steps he took to boost his image around town was obtaining a former gravel pit owned by BNSF Railroad, Montana’s largest railroad, to convert into a public park run by a foundation he created. The park would be BNSF’s — and Zinke's — gift to the Whitefish community, and a tribute to local veterans. To local voters, it served as a reminder of Zinke's own service.

Neighbors recall that Zinke didn’t seem quite sure on his positions on abortion rights or other divisive issues, but made it clear he would try to be true to the spirit of his relatively progressive hometown.

He eventually labeled himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” and reached out to local conservation groups and the Montana Human Rights Network to seek their endorsements.

Steve Thompson, a local climate activist and neighbor of Zinke’s, remembers driving when his cell phone rang with a call from the former SEAL in 2008.

“He had just gotten back into Whitefish,” Thompson said. “He said he just got back into town and was running for state senate and he was a conservationist and wanted votes from Montana conservation voters.

“I told Ryan that I had seen Republicans trying to go green before and then get beat up,” Thompson continued. “He sort of thumped his chest and said ‘I’m a Navy SEAL and I‘m tough and don’t worry about that.’"

Zinke impressed Thompson’s and other traditionally Democrat-backing environmental groups enough to win their endorsements. With their help, he was elected to the Montana State Senate in 2008 as a conservation-minded Republican who would also express moderate views on LGBT issues with a Montana human rights group. Photos from the time show him with a beard, and neighbors recall seeing him behind the wheel of a red Toyota Prius.

Entering the state Senate, Zinke tried to position himself as a citizen legislator, but one of his first moves was casting the deciding committee vote to create a state authority to boost railroad construction, a bill that would benefit BNSF, which was also donating a series of parcels to Zinke's Great Northern Veterans Peace Park Foundation. Despite the appearance of a conflict of interest, there is no evidence that Zinke recused himself or reported the conflict to party leaders.

LEFT: Downtown Whitefish, Montana, on May 1. RIGHT: The Great Northern Veterans Peace Park Foundation — which was created by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and is now run by his wife, Lola — is planning to let developers backed by Halliburton Chairman David Lesar build a parking lot on its land. The Zinkes own nearby properties that would likely rise in value. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO and POLITICO reporting

Meanwhile, he tried to stay true to his positioning as a moderate environmentalist: He opposed a bill that would have gutted Montana environmental regulations. At one point, fellow legislators recall, he also invited military leaders to the Capitol to deliver a presentation on climate change. In 2010, he signed a letter asking President Barack Obama to do more to mitigate climate change.

Around the state capital of Helena, it soon became clear that Zinke had higher ambitions, people who knew him at the time told POLITICO. He used his outgoing personality to get to know most of the state's political leaders, holding court while enjoying a martini the end of the bar at the On Broadway restaurant down the street from the capitol. But while many Republicans were glad to have the charismatic ex-SEAL on their team, he did not handle opposition easily, said Jay Scott, a Montana radio journalist who covered the state capitol during the time.

“For folks he does not agree with, he does not suffer them very well,” Scott recalled. “He wants to get where he is going and generally has a good idea of how to get there, and if people are opposed to him he’s not going back off.”

Republicans in Helena forgave Zinke his votes with Democrats on environmental matters, knowing that Whitefish was a fairly progressive town, said Dave Lewis, a fellow Republican who served in the state Senate with Zinke. But they also knew that his background would help propel him higher in Montana politics.

“Here’s a Montana kid, he grew up here, he served in the military, he played all-state football,” Lewis said in an interview. “He’s got solid gold credentials.”



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Even as he was projecting himself to higher levels of politics, Zinke was aggressively pursuing a raft of business opportunities.

This wasn’t unusual for members of a part-time state Senate that met for 90 days every other year — most, if not all, members had outside jobs, said Eric Austin, a professor of public administrative ethics at Montana State University.

“For someone to have four or five stated sources of income is kind of the outer edge, but I wouldn’t say it was highly unusual,” Austin said. “Folks that are more entrepreneurial — they may serve with nonprofits or boards, those are often not full-time positions. So combining sources of income is not unusual.”

Still, the opaqueness of Zinke’s consulting businesses led some fellow lawmakers in Helena to wonder where all the money was coming from, said Franke Wilmer, a Democrat state representative at the time Zinke was in the Senate and now head of Montana State University’s department of political science. Wilmer said she read contemporaneous local news reports describing Zinke’s various businesses while in Montana.

“It seemed he had a lot of funny consulting contracts ... but who cared, there wasn’t anything we could do about it,” Wilmer said.

By the end of his four-year term as state senator, Zinke was working for numerous private companies and nonprofit foundations and was collecting money for a political action committee that he founded, according to financial disclosure documents. In 2012, Zinke’s last full year as state senator before he joined the U.S. Congress, he was earning nearly $177,000 from five of the companies and foundations. He drew an additional $24,000 from his wife’s family trust.

Ryan Zinke is seen on his property on U.S. Highway 93 in 2012. | Lido Vizzutti/Flathead Beacon

He earned $99,190 from two of his own consulting businesses — Continental Divide and On Point Montana — though the identity of his clients was never disclosed in his ethics forms. Most of the money — $62,590 — came from On Point Montana, which he established with Tom Boyle, a former U.S. Army Special Operations member who had met Zinke while in the service. Boyle did not return messages seeking comment.

The business advertised itself as “matching military, other government agency and other designated organizational requirements with innovative and cost effective industry and business solutions in the State of Montana.”

In addition, he did consulting work for two gun-related firms. Zinke received nearly $17,000 from the Montana-based firearm manufacturer PROOF Research, according to his disclosure forms and a local news report. He also helped establish the Montana Firearm Institute in 2011 to make the state "a smaller version of Silicon Valley" for guns, he told The Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper. The group paid him $6,725 in 2012, the last year of his state Senate career.

While Zinke was collecting salaries from On Point and other entities he formed, he was also running for lieutenant governor on a ticket headed by Neil Livingstone, a conservative television commentator whose views on privacy and national security proved too extreme for some Montana voters.

The 2012 campaign with Livingstone was a failure — the pair would place fifth out of seven in the Republican primaries — but it marked Zinke’s rightward turn to position himself with the ascendant tea party Republicans.

“That wasn’t the person I knew,” said Carol Williams, a Democrat who was state Senate minority leader and worked with Zinke during his time in Helena. “I thought he had done that because it was expedient. For him to be in Montana and go up the ladder, he’d have to be more conservative.”

A few months after the campaign, while finishing his term in the state Senate, Zinke took on a new, lucrative consulting gig for penny-stock company called Save the World Air, which was based in Lola Zinke’s hometown of Santa Barbara, Calif.

Zinke helped introduce STWA executives to representatives of oil and gas companies, including major pipeline developers TransCanada and KinderMorgan. The company boasted of its association with the ex-Navy SEAL and state senator, bringing him on board first as a consultant, then as a member of its board of directors, for which he earned $85,000 in 2013.

STWA was not an orthodox energy company, however. Having changed its original business focus from selling motorcycle parts into Asia to developing technology that would allow oil to move more quickly through pipeline, its business plan left some investment analysts scratching their heads.

LEFT: Neil Livingstone (L) and Ryan Zinke tour the Montana Veterans' Home in Columbia Falls on Dec. 21. RIGHT: The campaign bus of then Montana gubernatorial candidate, Neil Livingstone, and his running mate, Zinke, in Great Falls, Montana, on July 14, 2011. | Justin Franz/Flathead Beacon and Rion Sander/The Great Falls Tribune via AP

“When you look at the way at shareholder letters are written, it’s juvenile,” said Sandy Fielden, an oil-industry analyst for Morningstar Commodities.

During Zinke’s nearly two-year tenure at STWA, the company never made a sale. But its sales pitch, which included saying its technology was proven to work in Department of Energy tests and that major companies were interested, landed it in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Later, after Zinke left STWA upon his election to Congress in 2014, the SEC sent a letter to the company demanding proof for a number of the claims it made in its filings, including when Zinke was director. The company spent a year disputing any wrongdoing, but eventually admitted its technology had never been proven to work at a commercial scale.

Former and current executives at the company, since renamed QS Energy, did not reply to questions.



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While running a statewide campaign for Montana’s sole seat in Congress, Zinke showed the extent of his conversion to conservative politics. On his own Montana radio show, he discussed the conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s birth certificate and whether the president had truly been born in the United States — the issue that vaulted Trump to national political prominence.

Zinke defeated four other Republicans in the primary, and then coasted to victory in a three-way general election with 55 percent of the vote.

Ryan Zinke gets a kiss from his wife, Lola, after receiving word he had won the race for U.S. House on Nov. 4, 2014, in Whitefish, Montana. | Brenda Ahearn/Daily Inter Lake/AP Photo

But even as he began working full-time as a member of the U.S. House, he continued to pursue outside business deals and opportunities.

Back home in Whitefish, he and Lola had spent years trying to build a bed and breakfast they called the Snow Frog Inn and a microbrewery that Ryan named “Double Tap,” a Navy SEAL term for two shots on a target. Neighbors expressed concern about noise and traffic, leading Zinke to temporarily withdraw his proposal for a microbrewery. In 2013, the Whitefish City Council approved the inn. At the same time, it appointed Zinke to a special committee formed to reevaluate zoning rules in the neighborhood, and he pushed for expanded development, even after winning his first federal election.

Less than five months after being sworn into Congress, Zinke took the unusual step of personally appearing before the Whitefish City Council — constituents whose interests he was representing in Washington — to appeal for zoning changes that would benefit his own business.

“In regards to a brewery, I’ve asked for a brewery because that’s what started this whole process,” Zinke told the council in April 2015, endorsing the committee’s recommendations.

Zinke’s efforts to build his business at home coincided with an aggressive push to establish himself as a political fundraiser, a sign of his growing national ambitions.

He had created a super PAC in June 2012 called Special Operations for America. SOFA PAC, as it was known, pledged to use its proceeds for “the election of Mitt Romney and like-minded candidates,” according to press reports of its launch.

Between the summers of 2012 and 2013, SOFA PAC also cut checks marked “consulting” worth $40,000 to Zinke’s Continental Divide firm. More than $200,000 also went to Battleplan Strategies, a consulting firm run by Scott Hommell, a former Marine whom Zinke hired to help with his own campaign and who would eventually become his chief of staff.

From January 2013 to December 2014, SOFA PAC raised $2.9 million from donorsmostly sending in small checks. Zinke stepped down from the super PAC in October 2013, the same month he launched his House campaign. Once Zinke jumped into the race, SOFA made $205,301 in independent expenditures on behalf of his campaign and divided another $311,059 among seven other candidates, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Zinke’s 2014 congressional campaign hired Forthright Strategy, a D.C. firm run by a conservative fundraiser and activist named Kimberly Bellissimo, to help it raise money from small donors. Forthright has been criticized by some fellow Republicans who said it charged more in fees than it transferred to campaign coffers.

With Zinke, Forthright advertised on its website that it transferred more than $500,000 to his campaign — after having raised nearly $2 million. After Zinke won the election, Forthright heralded his success on its website as proof of its fundraising skill.

Zinke, for his part, seemed to employ similar tactics with his own fundraising.

Zinke established a political action committee called SEAL PAC in November 2014, mailing the filing paperwork mere days before he was elected to Congress. In the first two full years of its existence, SEAL would pay half of the $3 million it raised to companies associated with Bellissimo and only $118,000 on actual candidates, according to campaign finance disclosures.

Bellissimo also appears to have introduced Zinke to other fundraising PACs. Both Bellissimo and Zinke attended an event in the Virgin Islands sponsored by the VIGOP, a political action committee whose treasurer is Scott Mackenzie. Mackenzie is a controversial figure in Republican fundraising circles, being listed as treasurer for multiple political fundraising groups that have faced FEC questions into how they raise and spend money.

Zinke would attend similar events in the Virgin Islands while serving a congressman and later as Interior secretary. Last year, after POLITICO reported that he had attended a Virgin Island fundraiser while on official business to the islands during his first month as Interior secretary, the VIGOP stepped in to pay for his expenses for the event.

Bellissimo and Mackenzie’s embrace of Zinke isn’t hard to figure out, said one Republican operative familiar with the VIGOP who requested anonymity to discuss the inner workings of the group.

“These consultants have preyed upon many a first-time candidate, keeping most of the money they raise or spending it on themselves and other closely linked consultants,” said a person involved in Republican fundraising and familiar with VIGOP. “It's just that most of those candidates either don't win or have a short tenure. Zinke is the exception.”

What is the more difficult question is why Zinke has embraced these fundraising groups, said Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, an activist group focused on transparency in campaign finance.

Zinke is pictured on horseback during a visit to Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on May 9, 2017. | U.S. Department of Interior

“Why is the Interior secretary associating with this operation, much less raising money for it?” Fischer said.

Zinke has never publicly addressed the relationship between the fundraising organizations he established and Bellissimo and Mackenzie. Neither Bellissimo nor Mackenzie responded to requests for comment.

Federal investigators cleared Zinke of allegations that he violated rules on campaign activity by government employees. The FEC declined to investigate the fundraiser, saying it was a matter for the Virgin Islands territorial government.



* * *

After Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, as he began casting about for people to assume top positions in his unexpected administration, the president-elect saw a lot that he liked in Ryan Zinke: a military man, a citizen-legislator, a politician known for his informal style and skepticism about Washington bureaucrats.

Trump tapped the second-term congressman to be his Interior secretary, after which Zinke vowed in a statement to uphold “Teddy Roosevelt’s belief that our treasured public lands are ‘for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.’”

But the promotion to the president’s Cabinet exposed Zinke to the much tougher ethical guidelines applied to administration officials, along with the scrutiny that goes along with being the president’s point man on conservation issues. In preparation, he officially stepped down from the leadership of SEAL PAC. He also ceded control of the Veterans Peace Park Foundation — which over the years had collected nearly $130,000 from donors whose names were never revealed — to Lola Zinke.

But he soon came under harsh questioning about just how far he had stepped away from Whitefish.

Just five months after taking office as Interior secretary, while vowing to expand the amount of public land open for drilling, Zinke discussed private business with David Lesar, the chairman of Halliburton. The company is the nation’s largest oil services firm, Halliburton’s drilling equipment was regulated by the Interior Department, and the firm had much to gain from the expansion of drilling on public lands.

Over dinner with the 65-year-old Lesar, Lesar’s son David, and Casey Malmquist, who was assisting the Lesars in developing a swath of property abutting the Veterans Peace Park, Zinke acknowledged discussing the development plan and park, and providing “background” on the neighborhood.

After a meeting at Zinke’s Interior Department office, "we go out to dinner," the secretary later told a Montana radio host. "We talk about the background of the park. What are the neighbors like. What was the vision of the park. Where the boundaries are. Where the water table is, because the water table has changed over time. What the railroad is. So they have the background."

Zinke attends the Congressional Ball in the Grand Foyer of the White House on Dec. 15. | Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

A month later, Lola Zinke filed paperwork with the Whitefish city planner expressing an agreement to allow Lesar’s development to use some of the park’s land for a parking lot.

Plans for the development also included a microbrewery of the type the Zinkes had long sought. The city planner told POLITICO that the developers “certainly implied” that the microbrewery was being set aside for the Zinkes to own and operate.

“Ryan — our development plan and your park project are an absolute grand slam,” Malmquist wrote in one email to Zinke released via the Freedom of Information Act. “I have never been more excited about a development as I am about this one.”

When POLITICO revealed the existence of the development deal in June, the Interior Department inspector general’s office launched a probe.

Zinke tried to downplay the meeting, but the inspector general later referred the matter to the Justice Department for a possible investigation into whether the Zinkes violated federal conflict-of-interest laws.

Soon after, Trump expressed his own concern about Zinke’s ethics, vowing to look closely at the matter. While Interior spokespeople denied that Zinke’s career was in jeopardy, other reports suggested the White House was furious and gave him the choice of quitting by the end of the year or being fired.

On Saturday, Zinke said he would step down.

The outgoing secretary’s friends and political associates were split on whether the couple would return to Whitefish or stay out East. But political watchers who have seen his rise — and knew of his ambitions to enter the Montana governor’s mansion or even the Oval Office — warned against considering this the end of his political career.

“Don’t count him out,” said Dave Lewis, Zinke’s former Montana senate colleague. “He’s not stupid. Unless they have something cold on him doing something incredibly stupid, I think he could still be elected here.”