of favoritism continued to dog Ballinger as Secretary of the Interior. The most serious charges involved coal development in the Chugach National Forest by a Seattle developer and Ballinger crony, Clarence Cunningham, and financed by a corporation associated with J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheim family of New York City. The group had staked 33 claims, although Alaska land laws were designed to foster small farmers and prevent monopoly and thus required each claimant to prove that he or she was acting on his or her own behalf, as well as limited each claimant to 160 acres. While land commissioner, Ballinger granted the developer special access to government files. During the several month gap in 1908 between his employment as land commissioner and interior secretary, Ballinger acted as an agent for the Cunningham/Morgan/Guggenheim development group with the federal government, lobbying then Interior Secretary Jim Garfield. Upon becoming Interior Secretary, Ballinger reassigned General Land Office investigator Louis R. Glavis, and ultimately fired him after he complained to Gifford Pinchot (head of the Forestry Bureau and thus responsible for the Chugach, although also subordinate to the Interior Secretary), President Taft and cooperated with the press. A series of muckraking articles, including Glavis's in the November issue of Collier's Weekly roused the conservationists. An article in Hampton's even accused President Taft of being part of a conspiracy hatched at the 1908 Republican Convention. Ballinger again dismissed the controversy and President Taft appeared to want the ordeal to end, maintaining that both Ballinger and Pinchot remained committed to Roosevelt's conservation policies. Ballinger, however, threatened to resign unless Taft consented to a congressional investigation to exonerate him, and in December sent a letter to Washington state's Republican senator Wesley Jones demanding a complete investigation. Although even Charles Taft advised the President to ask for Ballinger's resignation, Taft stood by his appointee, and attorney general George Wickersham even backdated to September 11, 1909 a report concerning Glavis' firing. After a Washington insider warned Collier that Ballinger planned to sue his magazine after the planned "whitewash", it hired Louis D. Brandeis as its counsel. Pinchot went public with his differences with Ballinger's approach and his office delivered another report to the Senator Dolliver, Republican chair of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. This prompted Taft to fire Pinchot as well, while Roosevelt was in Africa. During the special committee's hearings, both Glavis and Pinchot testified, and testimony