{"id":96692,"date":"2018-12-15T18:24:29","date_gmt":"2018-12-16T01:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/interior-secretary-zinke-resigns-amid-investigations\/"},"modified":"2018-12-15T18:24:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-16T01:24:29","slug":"interior-secretary-zinke-resigns-amid-investigations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/interior-secretary-zinke-resigns-amid-investigations\/","title":{"rendered":"Interior Secretary Zinke resigns amid investigations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Interior
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, second from right, is joined by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, right, during a press conference May 8, 2017, at the Butler Wash trailhead within Bears Ears National Monument near Blanding, Utah. Zinke submitted his resignation Saturday amid intense pressure from the White House.<\/span>Michelle Price\/Associated Press file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

President Donald Trump announced Zinke\u2019s exit via twitter Saturday morning, and offered praise for the embattled Interior chief.<\/p>\n

\u201cSecretary of the Interior @RyanZinke will be leaving the Administration at the end of the year after having served for a period of almost two years,\u201d the president tweeted, trailing off in a second sentence. \u201cRyan has accomplished much during his tenure and I want to thank him for his service to our Nation\u2026\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the former Navy SEAL and Montana congressman worked aggressively to promote Trump\u2019s agenda of expanding domestic energy production, administration officials concluded weeks ago that he ranked as the Cabinet member most vulnerable to congressional investigations once Democrats took control of Congress in January.<\/p>\n

During his nearly two years in office, Zinke came under at least 15 investigations, including inquiries into his connection to a real estate deal involving a company that Interior regulates; whether he bent government rules to allow his wife to ride in government vehicles; and allowing a security detail to travel with him on a vacation to Turkey at considerable cost.<\/p>\n

Zinke was cleared in several of those investigations, and chose to attack his critics rather adopt a more chastened tone. Late last month, he accused Rep. Ra\u00fal M. Grijalva, D-Ariz. \u2013 who had called on Zinke to step down and is poised to take over the committee that oversees Interior in January \u2013 a drunk.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard for him to think straight from the bottom of the bottle,\u201d Zinke wrote from his official Twitter account on Nov. 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, second from right, is joined by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, right, during a press conference May 8, 2017, at the Butler Wash trailhead within Bears Ears National Monument near Blanding, Utah. Zinke submitted his resignation Saturday amid intense pressure from the White House.Michelle Price\/Associated Press file President Donald Trump announced Zinke\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":96693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[782],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-96692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-governmental-entities"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96692"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=96692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}