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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday defended his decision to scrap much of the Bush administration's final oil-lease sale in Utah even though his inspector general found nothing improper about the auction.
Salazar spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told The Associated Press that Salazar acknowledges the investigation found no evidence of pressure on federal employees to speed up a sale of drilling parcels near Utah's national parks.
She said, however, that the report had no bearing on Salazar's decision to scrap 77 of the leases two months after taking office.
The 10-page report submitted by John Dupuy, the assistant inspector general for investigations, was dated Dec. 28, 2009, but wasn't released until late Monday. A copy was first sought under an open-records request by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who examined a draft in April.
Those parcels were already being held up by a federal lawsuit and Salazar wanted to take a "fresh look" at the parcels before deciding whether to release them, she said.
Barkoff said Salazar wasn't available for comment Tuesday.
The lawsuit that blocked the release of the 77 leases has yet to be resolved. Environmental groups who filed suit contend the Bush administration skirted environmental laws by making them available for sale.
Salazar has criticized the auction as a rush job that threatened Utah's most magnificent landscapes, including land near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.
Investigators found no evidence in interviews of key BLM officials in Utah and Washington, D.C., or a review of e-mail correspondence that Bush administration appointees pressured employees to rush the sale, the report said.
The report, however, faulted BLM for contributing to a perception that the sale was rushed in the month before President Barack Obama took office. It cited, among other issues, the failure to provide advance notice to the National Park Service and the agency's subsequent refusal to take parcels close to Utah's redrock parks off the list when the park service objected.
The auction on Dec. 19, 2008, was troubled from the start, when a Utah college student grabbed a bidder's paddle to run up prices and take parcels between Arches and Canyonlands national parks for safekeeping.
Tim DeChristopher, who acknowledged he didn't have $1.7 million to pay for his leases, has pleaded not guilty to felony counts of interfering with and making false representations at a government auction. He has said that he disrupted the auction as an act of civil disobedience to focus attention on climate change.
The half-year delay in the investigators' report was an oversight, said Kris Kolesnik, the associate inspector general for external affairs at the Interior Department.
"Not all OIG reports get posted to our website but this one should have been when it was released pursuant to a FOI request," Kolesnik said Tuesday. "We are correcting this internal oversight by posting the report on our website."
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
