When Tom Collier thinks about his ongoing battle with the EPA, he recalls Rita Lavelle. Ms. Lavelle was an assistant administrator there in the early 1980s when she was accused of improperly coordinating with businesses her agency regulated. More than 20 officials ultimately resigned, and Ms. Lavelle went to prison for perjury.

The EPA is now repeating history, this time in aid of the greens—and leaving far more evidence than was ever marshaled back then. Mr. Collier runs the Pebble Partnership, which wants to develop a jobs-rich mine in southwest Alaska. For more than a year, he’s waged a hardball fight to uncover why the EPA blocked his proposal before he could even file a permit. He’s now obtained documents that explain it. The agency acted for ideological reasons, and in coordination with green activists.

In February 2014 the EPA took the unprecedented step of issuing a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine, flouting long-standing law that gives the Army Corps of Engineers first authority over such projects. The EPA claimed it got involved in “response to petitions” in 2010 from Native American tribes. And it claimed it issued a veto because its internal watershed assessment proved the mine would do environmental harm.

The veto hit weeks after Mr. Collier took over Pebble, turning the former Clinton administration official and lawyer into a full-time EPA battler. He’s filed a lawsuit questioning the EPA’s veto authority; another demanding hidden EPA documents; and yet another claiming the EPA flagrantly violated a federal law requiring officials to work with outside players in a public and structured way—not in secret. He’s sending info to the EPA’s inspector general, who is now investigating.

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