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In June, Politico reported that Mr. Lesar, the Halliburton chairman, was lending financial backing to a major development in Mr. Zinke’s hometown, Whitefish, that would significantly raise the value of property owned by Mr. Zinke. The development would include a hotel, shops and a brewery, and Mr. Zinke’s wife had pledged in writing to allow the developer to build a parking lot that would help make the project possible. The land for the potential lot is owned by a foundation created by Mr. Zinke.

Because Halliburton is the nation’s largest oil services company, and because Mr. Zinke regulates the oil industry on public land, the deal raised questions as to whether it constituted a conflict of interest. Mr. Zinke’s schedule also showed that he had hosted Mr. Lesar and a developer involved with the hotel-brewery project in his secretarial office in 2017.

In response, three Democrats sent a letter to the Interior Department’s top watchdog, Mary L. Kendall, requesting an investigation into whether Mr. Zinke had used his position as secretary for personal financial gain. In July, Ms. Kendall complied, opening an investigation. In October, her department forwarded at least one inquiry to the Justice Department.

Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for Mr. Zinke, has said that the secretary did nothing wrong and that he resigned from his charitable foundation’s board of directors before the deal was made.

Before Mr. Zinke joined the Trump administration, he often called himself a conservative conservationist. But as secretary, he quickly became one of the chief proponents of Mr. Trump’s energy-first agenda, promoting policies that seek to open the East Coast to offshore drilling, weaken the standards of the Endangered Species Act and shrink two national monuments, constituting the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history.

Last year under Mr. Zinke, the United States offered up 12.8 million acres of federally controlled oil and gas parcels for lease, triple the average offered during President Barack Obama’s second term, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

These policies won Mr. Zinke favor with Mr. Trump, who had made promotion of the fossil fuel industry a key part of his campaign platform, as well as from the oil and gas companies that had increasingly made up Mr. Zinke’s donor base as a Montana politician.

His policies have angered environmentalists, who have filed lawsuits trying to block these plans. Many have argued that Mr. Zinke has turned his back on the nation’s environmental heritage just as dire news about climate change has made land, water and air protection increasingly urgent.