"In March 2017, a politically connected oil firm called Cimarex Energy Co. was in a hurry to begin fracking on a flat expanse of farmland in the western Oklahoma oil patch.
But the company’s application for a federal drilling permit had been rejected as “incomplete” and “deficient,” records show. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management had flagged both engineering and environmental issues. The company faced a 60-day wait while a revised application was being reviewed.
Cimarex didn’t want to wait. Instead, the company called its lobbyists.
In the days that followed, political appointees at the highest levels of the U.S. Department of the Interior went to extraordinary lengths to fast-track Cimarex’s drilling permit, according to a trove of emails reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting."
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