In a quest to shrink national monuments, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public lands boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released last week and retracted a day later. The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated as national monuments. Comments the department's Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show that they sought to keep some of the references out of public view because they were "revealing [the] strategy" behind the review. | 
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