From: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
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It was in the final week of the Obama administration that the Interior Department’s then-solicitor general, Hilary C. Tompkins, announced that a 1936 action by Congress to extend a provision of the Indian Reorganization Act to Alaska “provides specific authority for the secretary (of Interior) to take Alaska lands into trust.” Ms. Tompkins also determined that the authority was not limited by a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the subject and that neither the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 nor the Federal Land Policy and Management Act “expressly or impliedly repeal that authority.”
Now, however, President Donald Trump’s principal deputy solicitor general in the department, Daniel H. Jorjani, has withdrawn that opinion, stating he was doing so as part of the administration’s wider regulatory review process. But Mr. Jorjani also wrote in his June 29 opinion that the previous administration’s position “omits discussion of important statutory developments, resulting in an incomplete analysis of the secretary’s authority to acquire land in trust in Alaska.”