The Trump Department of Justice is defending in court a Biden-era EPA veto that blocks one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits on the planet, a 220,000-acre swath of Alaska that court papers say contains an estimated 80 billion pounds of the metal. The decision puts the administration at odds with its own declared national emergency on critical minerals, and the CEO of the company behind the project says the contradiction hands Beijing exactly the leverage President Trump has vowed to break.
Pebble Limited Partnership and the state of Alaska have sued to overturn the January 2023 veto. Briefing in the case is set to wrap up by mid-April, after which the court could rule or schedule oral arguments. Yet rather than reversing course, Trump's DOJ stepped in to defend the same regulatory action the Biden EPA imposed.
The White House, the EPA, and the DOJ all declined or failed to respond to multiple requests for comment from Fox News Digital, which first reported the story. The DOJ deferred to the EPA. The EPA said nothing.
That silence speaks volumes, because the facts on the ground tell a story of competing priorities inside the administration, with a familiar family name hovering over the dispute.
Donald Trump Jr. publicly opposed the Pebble Mine in August 2020, posting on X that he agreed "100%" with GOP operative Nick Ayers, who had urged President Trump to direct the EPA to block the project. Trump Jr. wrote:
"The headwaters of Bristol Bay and the surrounding fishery are too unique and fragile to take any chances with. #PebbleMine."
Ayers, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, had framed the mine as a threat from a Canadian company. Northern Dynasty Minerals, the Canadian parent of Pebble Limited Partnership, became an easy target for conservation-minded opponents on both sides of the aisle.
A source close to Trump Jr. told Fox News Digital that the president's son has not spoken to his father or anyone in the administration during this term about Pebble Mine. But the source acknowledged he did weigh in with the president during the first term. During that term, Pebble's permit request was rejected, though the company later won a reversal through an internal appeals process. While that process was still playing out, the Biden administration issued its veto.
The Trump family has not been shy about wielding legal and political influence when they believe the stakes warrant it. Whether Don Jr.'s earlier stance still carries weight inside the West Wing is an open question, one the White House has chosen not to answer.
Since taking office, President Trump has moved aggressively to dismantle the environmental policies of his predecessors and shore up America's mineral supply chain. He signed executive orders declaring a national emergency on critical minerals, directed federal agencies to fast-track permitting, and expanded the government's list of critical minerals by adding copper and nine others.
Copper. The very metal sitting beneath the Alaskan tundra in quantities that Pebble says could supply about 15% of U.S. demand.
The United States currently imports roughly 45% of its copper. China dominates more than half of global copper refining. Beijing is also the world's leading import source for more than two dozen critical minerals, controls roughly 70% of rare earth mining, and commands nearly 90% of rare earth refining. Those numbers define the strategic landscape the president's own executive orders describe as an emergency.
Pebble CEO John Shively told Fox News Digital the administration's courtroom posture directly undercuts that agenda:
"It sort of conflicts a little bit with what President Trump is doing."
Shively credited the president for identifying the problem. But he did not hide his frustration at the follow-through.
"I'll give him credit. One of the things I like to say in life is, 'If you don't recognize a problem, you're never going to solve it.' Well, they have recognized we're in serious trouble in getting minerals in this country and metals, and so it's a little surprising they continued the EPA lawsuit."
The veto itself relies on a rarely used mechanism under the Clean Water Act. Normally, a company seeking to mine applies for a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But the EPA can step in and block that permit, effectively killing a project regardless of what the Corps decides.
Pebble's lawyers have argued in court papers that the company "spent decades and a billion dollars planning the safest and least impactful mine possible." The current veto targets an expansive 220,000-acre area in Alaska's Bristol Bay headwaters, near Lake Iliamna, a body of water covering about 1,000 square miles at the base of the Alaskan Peninsula. The proposed mine site sits less than 20 miles from the Newhalen River area near the village of Iliamna.
The Obama EPA first flagged the region in 2014, concluding that mining in Bristol Bay's headwaters could damage the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery. That finding laid the groundwork for the Biden-era veto nearly a decade later.
Shively's sharpest argument may not be about Pebble at all. It is about what the veto precedent means for every other energy and mineral project the Trump administration wants to green-light. As Shively put it:
"If they can use this tool against us, they can use it anywhere in the country. And when you get rabid environmentalists in government, they tend to use these kinds of tools."
He urged the administration to stop looking backward and start thinking about the weapon it is leaving loaded for the next president.
"Instead of focusing on comments from the past, we hope the administration is worried about the next president using this EPA veto to shut down signature Trump energy and critical mineral projects."
That warning deserves serious attention. If a future Democratic administration can invoke the same Clean Water Act veto to block a copper mine Trump himself added to the critical minerals list, what stops it from doing the same to a lithium project in Nevada, a rare earth mine in Wyoming, or an offshore drilling permit anywhere on the continental shelf? The precedent is the point.
Nick Ayers did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. But his 2020 post remains on the record. Ayers wrote that "a Canadian company will unnecessarily mine the USA's greatest fishery at a severe cost. This should be stopped." The framing, a foreign company threatening an American natural treasure, resonated with sportsmen and conservation voters who typically lean Republican.
Bristol Bay's salmon fishery is genuinely world-class. Nobody disputes that. The question is whether the EPA's blunt veto power is the right tool to protect it, or whether a properly conditioned permit, the kind Pebble says it spent a billion dollars designing, could have threaded the needle. The Biden EPA chose the nuclear option. The Trump DOJ, for reasons it will not explain publicly, chose to defend it.
Internal tensions within the Trump orbit are nothing new. Reports of White House friction have surfaced on other fronts, and the Pebble Mine dispute adds another layer. The administration's public posture on minerals and its courtroom posture on Pebble point in opposite directions, and no one in an official capacity will say why.
Pebble and Alaska are asking the court to scrap the veto and allow the company to continue with the permitting process. With briefing wrapping up by mid-April, a decision could come at any time, or the court could call for oral arguments, pushing the timeline further out.
Shively framed the stakes in national defense terms. The company has "already committed to building a lot more defense capacity," he said. Copper is essential to advanced weapons systems, electrical infrastructure, and the kind of industrial base the president says America must rebuild. Eighty billion pounds of it sits under Alaska, blocked by a Biden-era regulation that the Trump DOJ has chosen to uphold.
China, meanwhile, keeps refining. Keeps mining. Keeps tightening its grip on the minerals the modern economy runs on. Every month the Pebble veto stands, Beijing's leverage grows, not because China did anything new, but because Washington chose not to act.
The administration declared a national emergency on critical minerals. It added copper to the critical list. It ordered agencies to fast-track permits. And then it walked into court to defend the single most consequential regulatory barrier to the largest known copper deposit in North America.
If that is not a contradiction, the word has no meaning.
Conservatives have long warned that unchecked EPA authority poses a threat to domestic energy production and resource development. The Clean Water Act veto mechanism is a case study. It allows a single agency to override the permitting process, bypass the Corps of Engineers, and kill a project after a company has invested years and billions in compliance. The tool exists whether a Republican or a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.
By defending the Pebble veto, the Trump DOJ is not merely preserving one Biden-era decision. It is ratifying the legal theory that the EPA can unilaterally shut down mining across hundreds of thousands of acres, even when the targeted minerals appear on the president's own critical list. Future administrations will cite this case. Environmental groups will cite this case. And the next time a president tries to fast-track a mineral project, the opposition will point to Pebble and say: your own DOJ agreed with us.
Shively sees the trap clearly. Whether the administration does remains an open question.
You cannot declare a national emergency on critical minerals and then defend the regulation that locks them in the ground. Sooner or later, one of those positions has to give, and right now, China is betting it won't.
