GAO

Someone’s focus coetus is showing. Right on time with the European Union’s agonizing over how many billions to spend in a “Just Transition Fund” to help balm the self-harm of the job-killing “green deal”, we see U.S. climate activists deploying the same euphemism  for equivalent harms here.

What does “Just Transition” means among friends? “Substantial job losses from the movement towards a cleaner economy”.

h/t Energy Policy Advocates for the records of a “US Climate Alliance” planning session.

Remember this the next time advocates for “substantial job losses”, erm, “movement towards a cleaner economy” denies that.

Have no fears. Money is no object to this crowd, who once warned “before you gasp” about a budget proposal, and that was just for off-books private funding of “climate” staff and consultants for governors (the ask was $50 million for the current period).

BOSTON, MA – Last week,  Timothy Cornell of Cornell Dolan, P.C., filed suit against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey under the Commonwealth’s public records law on behalf of the nonprofit transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA). This suit seeks to compel the AG to reveal details about the use of law enforcement to advance private interests, its own coordination with other outside parties, and an organized effort by certain attorneys general to keep records about all of this from the public.

This is the second time in less than a year that Healey’s Office has forced EPA to file suit to obtain public records relating to its work with the climate industry. In 2019, OAG insisted it couldn’t release its correspondence with a private tort lawyer named Matt Pawa, who pitched AGs to pursue the same energy companies Pawa also was pursuing, “without compromising our investigation or litigation strategies”. The was risible, and after the public interest law firm, Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C, filed suit, OAG turned all of the emails over rather than defend the claims. These emails are directly related to this latest suit.

This new action involves four requests including one that OAG refused even to acknowledge, and another that it charged EPA nearly $1,000 to process, only to cash the check but not produce any records. Both requests relate to OAG’s relationships with outside activist parties, including an academic who wrote her center’s largest private funder from a meeting in Cambridge attended by five attorneys from AG Healey’s Office, explaining that they were gathered to discuss “going after climate denialism [sic]—along with a bunch of state and local prosecutors nationwide”.

EPA also seeks correspondence with an outside activist attorney named Brad Campbell. Emails released in previous litigation with AG Healey’s Office revealed that Campbell worked with tort lawyer Pawa to develop his pitch to AGs to pursue energy companies also being pursed by Pawa. The AGs’ litigation campaign has led to attorney general investigations of private parties, and targeted more than 100 research and advocacy groups, scientists and others.

EPA has learned that AG Healey has entered into contracts relevant to this suit, alternately styled as “confidentiality” and “common interest” agreements, requiring her Office to provide notice to and obtain the consent of outside parties prior to releasing certain public information, thereby contracting away the public’s access to public information as embodied in the open records law.

“The Commonwealth continues to shield its public policy choices behind the Public Records Act’s litigation exemption,” Cornell said after filing the latest lawsuit. “This makes for bad government and worse policy.”

Government Accountability & Oversight is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to transparency in public officials’ dealings on matters of energy, environment and law enforcement

From the Daily Caller:

Read the article here.

Audrey Russo had GAO attorney Chris Horner on her show to discuss developments in the group’s efforts to educate the public on how law enforcement, and other public institutions, are being used to advance an agenda pushed by private interests.

The Washington Times’ story on climate litigation and Michael Bloomberg’s underwriting of state attorney general lawfare closes with a hat tip to GAO’s project, CLW:

Energy Policy Advocates reveals one of AGO’s secrecy pacts attempting to contract away the public’s right to see public records, how institutions being used

Albuquerque, NM, June 15, 2020 – Today, public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO) filed suit against New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), on behalf of the government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA). AG Balderas has refused to release public documents and information, keeping secret his work and even contracts with outside activists, the tort bar and other state AGs to advance private ideological, political and financial agendas.

Records obtained by EPA show the New Mexico AGO is coordinating with other AGs on how best to deny EPA’s requests for public documents and information about their work. AGO ham-fistedly – in some cases cartoonishly – redacts documents, blacking out, e.g., everything other than a claim that a contract is “privileged and confidential”; meanwhile, records obtained by EPA show these are no such thing, but merely deals trying to circumvent open records laws. Demonstrating this, EPA has released one of these sweeping pacts to litigate “climate.”

In New Mexico the AGO is specifically commanded by law to enforce the Inspection of Public Records Act but is now holding itself above the law it is obligated to enforce. In so doing, AGO attempts to avoid New Mexico citizens’ right to the sunlight of public disclosure by entering self-serving agreements to keep the secret operations hidden from disclosure to the public.

EPA has learned that one of these attempted secrecy pacts arranges for state AGOs to serve a supporting role for private tort firms pursuing municipalities in “climate nuisance” litigation. This suggests the prospect that their details have also been shared with the tort bar, and others. Other records obtained by EPA and hidden by AGO reveal a campaign with outside activists to impose the equivalent of the “Green New Deal” on the country but through the courts.

“Most of the public records covered by today’s Inspection of Public Records Act suit were either completely withheld or substantially blacked out. Some of these withholdings are absurd and others EPA has already proved were improper,” said GAO attorney Neal Cornett, who filed the suit with local counsel Pat Rogers of Albuquerque. “AGO is blacking out entire secrecy pacts despite previous judicial findings that an AGs’ pact very similar to those we’ve learned the New Mexico AGO has entered was not a valid common interest agreement and not privileged.

“The public has a right to know how public dollars and the Attorney General’s Office are being used to advance private political agendas, and what contracts it enters in the public’s name,” said Cornett. “New Mexico’s AGO has engaged in unlawful and often clumsy behavior to hide precisely what they are up to, which today’s suit seeks to rectify.”

Government Accountability & Oversight is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to transparency in public officials’ dealings on matters of energy, environment and law enforcement

Full story available here.

GAO Files Suit against Vermont AG to Compel Release of Records Reflecting Work with Third Parties, Including Activists and Activist Attorneys General 

Public records show AGO closely coordinating with other AGs to keep public records from the public, all claiming to have contracted away the public’s open-records rights

MONTPELIER, VT, June 2, 2020 – Today Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO) filed suit over Vermont Attorney General T. J. Donovan’s refusal – in coordination with other state attorneys general (AG) offices – to release correspondence reflecting his office’s work with outside activists, and those same AGs, to advance a shared political agenda. The suit against the Office of the Attorney General (AGO) under Vermont’s Public Records Act, on behalf of the transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA).

The action in the Superior Court for Washington County, the second EPA suit against AGO filed in recent weeks by the public interest law firm, aims to compel AGO to release records which these AGs have coordinated to withhold. AGO has shared most of the public records sought, with others outside of state government. AGO claims it can shield some or even most of these from disclosure because it has entered agreements to not disclose them. As EPA’s complaint notes, there is no Vermont law suggesting that that’s how any of this works.

The complaint notes that “[a]lthough the Public Records Act reflects the legislative intent of making records available to the public on a liberal basis, and Chapter 1, Article 15 of the Vermont Constitution provides that only the legislature has the power to suspend the laws of the State of Vermont, AGO has admitted in various fora, including this Court in a related matter, that it has entered into at least seven purported ‘Common Interest Agreements’ during 2019-2020, which obligate AGO to consult with and obtain consent from other parties about possible release of Vermont records. AGO uses these pacts to shield records from the public eye, while nevertheless sharing such records with actors not employed by the State of Vermont.”

GAO board member and attorney Matthew Hardin filed the suit. Hardin previously won several open records cases fighting “a bogus effort” by AGO to hide records from the public on the same topic as the records it is presently shielding from scrutiny, a matter which also involved a similar secrecy pact among the same parties (the New York courts rightly acknowledged that purported common interest agreement was no such thing, and not privileged, in Competitive Enterprise Institute v. The State of New York. N.Y.App.Div., 161 A.D.3d 1283 (2018), 76 N.Y.S.3d 640). 

About that pact, Vermont’s Deputy AG Scot Kline had written to New York’s AGO expressing concern over adopting “an affirmative obligation to always litigate” record requests looking into their efforts. The actions prompting both recent EPA suits prove that AGO ultimately concluded – even after the New York court’s ruling – that releasing records illuminating its political alliances poses the greater risk than being caught making requesters “always litigate”, after contracting to give other states’ AG offices a veto over the release of Vermont records. 

The Caledonian-Record, in an editorial “AG Smackdown,” captured a key and highly relevant moment from those prior AGO open records cases:

“We get a request from [a group] and so one thing we might consider is where are they — who are these people?” [Chief Assistant Attorney General Bill] Griffin said in a transcript of the hearing. “Where are they going with this? And we Google them and we find, you know, coal or Exxon or whatever — and so we’re thinking this is — we better — we better give this some thought before we — before we share information with this entity.”

“Or it might be a news organization and we think, well, what are they going to do with it?” he continued. “Well, they’re going to publish it to the world. So that would be — I mean, that would be my mental impression and, you know, let’s exercise some caution. Is there some public interest publishing this information at this time? Probably not.”

To Griffin’s first argument, Vermont Judge Mary Miles Teachout asked… “So is that your argument?… That the Attorney General’s Office never has to comply with any public records request because it is the attorney for the state of Vermont?”

To which Griffin replied “We have to determine what’s in the best interest of the state.”

Again, as Judge Teachout ruled in that case, that’s not how this works. Nonetheless, EPA has obtained records confirming the AGOs raised “who is making making [sic] the request” when discussing coordinating their responses to EPA. Other public records obtained by EPA leave no room for doubt whether these pacts are being used to hide records and show that, far from claiming privileges only where necessary, AGOs are laboring to construct such claims.

AGO not only maintains that these purported contracts entered into on behalf of the state shield certain public records from disclosure, but are themselves beyond public scrutiny. This refusal is particularly remarkable in that the agreements have all been shared with other states; EPA has learned that some are with private parties. That was the subject of EPA’s suit filed in late April.

Public records obtained by EPA show that the pacts involve assisting the “climate nuisance” tort bar and have recently been invoked to hide coordination with former senior Obama Environmental Protection Agency appointees and career employees turned activists. All of these efforts seek to use the courts to revive and impose a shared, failed policy agenda.

“The public has a right to know how its institutions are being used, and what contracts it enters into in the public’s name,” said Hardin, who is also Energy Policy Advocates’ counsel in public records suits in Washington State, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

Government Accountability & Oversight is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to transparency in public officials’ dealings on matters of energy, environment and law enforcement

Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead writes, about former Vice President Joe Biden’s vow, if elected, to re-impose the Paris climate treaty on the United States, that Paris was “envisioned as the first step in a globally coordinated campaign to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.” Finally, a first step!

Or rather, Here we go again.

A quick if very abbreviated reminder:

The United Nations writes of itself, “In 1992, its ‘Earth Summit’ produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a first step in addressing the climate change problem.” 

Of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol amending that agreement, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres said “The Kyoto Protocol was the first critical step – today we must take further and more far reaching action towards a truly sustainable future for seven billion, rising to over nine billion, people.”

Of the 2009 amendment to UNFCCC agreed in Denmark, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, “Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order, nothing more but also nothing less”.

There were more such initial forays but, anyway, now Paris represents that first step mankind could, at long last, take.

Evocative of Mr. Biden’s pronouncement that it’s time those high-earners who pay the overwhelming share of individual income taxes finally “put some skin in the game”, his party’s leading voices insist that decades of international climate agreements and costly domestic policies constitute “climate inaction”. Rather than years more of make-believe, let’s recognize what the taxpayer has spent on this agenda, and assess what we have received for the “investment.