The rendezvous between the Facebook CEO and US Geological Survey (USGS) scientist Dan Fagre—a research ecologist who studies glacier melt—was supposed to happen at Glacier National Park on June 15, 2017. A week before the event, Fagre was abruptly uninvited from the tour.

New internal emails from the Interior Department (DOI) reveal more details about Mark Zuckerberg's mysteriously cancelled meeting with a federal climate scientist.

Motherboard reported last month that DOI officials, some appointed under the Trump administration, had long disapproved of the meeting, and attempted to "manage the talking point" of Fagre's participation. The more than 300 hundred pages of USGS and National Park Service (NPS) documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showed staff trying to explain why Zuckerberg was not allowed to speak with Fagre. Many had no idea why he had been removed.

Today, Motherboard received additional USGS records pertaining to the incident. A significant portion of these documents contain emails already included in the other two dispatches.

However, new emails explicitly state that USGS was not responsible for pulling Fagre from the tour, confirming reports that it was not accountable.

"Yikes! This is bad press. Do you think it was our communications folks or NPS's that would not let this guy talk," wrote Eugene Schweig, a USGS geologist, to USGS public affairs specialist Heidi Koontz in July.