Wampum

Maybe if some of the big box blogs read us little guys, they'd have a clue as to why Arizona Congressman Renzi has been indicted.

From Wampum, April 25th, 2007:

The facts surrounding the Renzi situation are somewhat complicated, but here's the gist: Renzi's former business partner owned 400+ acres of land along the environmentally-endangered San Pedro River which Renzi suggested be part of a federal-private land swap, a swap which would allow relatively unrestricted private industry copper mining by Resolution Copper Co., a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, in the Apache Leap area of Arizona. Once Renzi made the suggestion, his partner was able to sell the land at a premium, to investors, which included former DoI secretary Bruce Babbitt, interested in its use in a different land swap.

Still following all this? A more in-depth discussion from last year can be found here.

Renzi was the original sponsor of the legislation on the Resolution Copper land swap, but by mid-2006, he'd developed a case of cold-feet, as the San Carlos Apache Tribe expressed concerns that the transfer of the federal land into private hands would curtail their access to ancestral sacred sites and acorn gathering areas. While industry and most state and local politicians urged the tribe to accept the purported concessions by Resolution, tribal leaders refused to move on the subject until after tribal elections in November...

Just to make the case more intriguing, as I mentioned in the above post, it might be tied to the firing of USA Paul Charlton.