Citadel Ruins, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah.
Credit: BLM

Archeologists helped draft the law that presidents use to protect areas like the Grand Canyon, but today’s Republicans want to muzzle archeologists and others to keep them from weighing in on a lawsuit over Trump’s yanking protections from Utah sites that date back to the end of the last Ice Age.

Our nation’s Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to protect ancient American Indian sites, but Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jean Williams asked a federal judge not to accept legal documents from archaeologists objecting to Trump’s largely dismantling two national monuments in Utah. She said the blitz of documents was “inherently prejudicial” to Trump and the other defendants.

“Federal defendants do not have adequate time or space to address every formulation of the arguments,” Williams wrote.

Williams works in the environmental division, led by Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who represented BP in lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation’s largest oil spill.

The Hopi Tribe, other American Indian tribes […]