GAO

Curious Chronology re DoI Official’s Ethics Claims

, 0

“1001” Reasons Congress Needs More Information

A timeline of events surrounding Elizabeth Klein’s appointment as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Interior sheds some light on the Department’s ethical lapses and raises even more questions.

January 21, 2021  Elizabeth Klein, recent-former Deputy Director of the Michael Bloomberg group created to plant activist attorneys in state AG offices to, among a very few other things, file suit against federal agencies including the Department of the Interior, joins the Department of the Interior, per Klein’s LinkedIn page.

April 24, 2021  WaPo reports that bipartisan Senate opposition has scuttled Klein’s expected appointment to be Deputy Secretary of the Interior.

May 25, 2021  House Natural Resources Subcommittee holds a hearing at which Klein testified and during which the following exchange occurred:

Representative Boebert: Ms. Klein, the White House pulled your potential nomination to be the Deputy Secretary because your conflicts of interest were so severe that you faced bipartisan opposition. Has the ethics office at the Department provided you with a recusal list? Yes or no.

Ms. Klein: Thank you for that question. Yes, I have been consulting on an ongoing basis with our ethics officials and am taking my responsibilities and ethics requirements seriously and I have an ethics agreement that I operate under.

Representative Boebert: So, you have been provided with a recusal list. Who and what matters are you currently recused from and would you provide the Committee with that full list?

Ms. Klein: I am happy to provide the list.

(emphasis added)

June 3, 20201 Reps. Westerman, Gosar and Boebert send letter to Klein/DoI reminding them of this exchange and the promise to produce, noting there has been no production, and requesting records by COB June 10, 2021. These include:

  1. A copy of Ms. Klein’s signed ethics pledge.
  2. A copy of the information Ms. Klein provided to DOI’s Ethics Office describing her work at SEEIC.
  3. A document describing the role and responsibilities of the Deputy Director of SEEIC during Ms. Klein’s tenure in the position.
  4. A document listing the regulatory challenges supported or advocated by SEEIC or its legal fellows.
  5. A document listing the matters and actions on which Ms. Klein advised or supported through her work at SEEIC.
  6. A document listing the decisions, deliberations, and actions that include Ms. Klein’s participation as a DOI employee from January 20, 2021 to June 2, 2021.

June 4, 2021 DoI provides Klein with “Ethics Guidance on Recusal Obligations”, “supplement[ing] and replac[ing] the interim ethics guidance on recusal obligations provided to you in earlier draft memoranda”.

June 5, 2021 (Saturday)  Klein provides a signed and dated (that day) “Ethics Recusals & Screening Arrangement” stating, inter alia, “this memorandum fulfills the requirement established in Section 4(a)(iii) of Executive Order 13989 entitled, “Executive Order on Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel” (Jan. 20, 2021) (Ethics Pledge).”

June 10, 2021  DoI writes to the Committee to provide these documents, seemingly affirming in its cover note that Ms. Klein had no ethics agreement in place at the time she testified that she was operating under an ethics agreement. This raises concerns, particularly given 18 USC §1001 (which sets forth criminal penalties for providing false information to the U.S. Government).

May 28, 2021   Days after Ms. Klein’s appearance, United States District Court for DC Judge James Boasberg schedules a hearing for June 4, 2021 on Energy Policy Advocates’ (EPA) motion for a preliminary injunction to compel DoI to release Klein’s ethics recusals letter and related documents, under a federal FOIA request and lawsuit filed by EPA.

At the hearing Judge Boasberg orders the case to proceed under an expedited briefing schedule, moving it forward on the calendar by many months.

This makes Ms. Klein’s ethics records, including any pledge in effect on May 25, 2021, and all back-and-forth in preparing any ethics and recusal agreement and other related documents, subject to a federal court’s order for expedited consideration.

As such, regardless of any follow-up legislative oversight, further records informing a conclusion about this testimony should become available in coming weeks.

EPA Heavily Redacts Official’s Recusal Information

, 0

The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has released selected, often heavily redacted records pertaining to the conflicts and recusals for Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator, and Acting Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation (i.e., “climate”), Joe Goffman.

The recusal statement is notable for what it does and does not include. As for the redactions, they appear to be heavy-handed given past EPA practice. The refusal in full to release draft recusals appears to be an improper withholding of the “back-and-forth” known to be subject to release.

Readers may recall Energy Policy Advocate’s amicus brief in State of New York et al., v EPA, which revealed Goffman’s role consulting for progressive attorneys general on particular regulatory matters presently before USEPA, and under Goffman’s present remit. For example, the scheme to use the “NAAQS” regime to sneak in what the Wall Street Journal called “Biden’s ‘Back Door’ Climate Plan”.

There is no mention of any such work or recusal in what USEPA did release…including the recusal statement (it seems that learning what the drafts contain will require litigation). As such, these records sharpen the question — increasingly appropriate for Biden’s climate “all-star” team — of what Goffman disclosed about his prior work to his ethics officer(s) and when he he disclosed it.

The release is timely, incomplete though it may be. Appointees can remain in an “Acting” capacity for a limited number of days. There is scuttlebutt that the Biden White House intends to game the law and calendar to keep Goffman in place as “Acting” AA for as long as possible to put off or even avoid subjecting him to the scrutiny/accountability of the confirmation process.

The “Back Door Climate Plan” and the past consulting with AGs adverse to USEPA in litigation on matters in Goffman’s portfolio may well be two reasons for that.

In an interview last week with Politico — he is getting around these days (and ducking the same question, as well as at least one question about the NAAQS scheme) — Goffman dodged a question whether he expects a change in his status as only one of two confirmable USEPA appointees about whom the White has yet to produce paperwork.

Do you want to be nominated to be the assistant administrator for air and radiation?

I haven’t thought about that in quite a while. I’m extremely content with what I’m doing now on a day-to-day basis.

The recusal letter and what it contains — as well as what it does not — seems likely to be an issue in the event the Biden Administration seeks to formalize Mr. Goffman’s role and subject him to the required accountability. Given the increasingly obvious reluctance to facilitate congressional oversight and exploration of these activities, presumably the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee plans to schedule a hearing on its own.

CLIMATE LITIGATION BOMBSHELL: New Paper Exposes AG “Climate” Suit as Illicit Product of Private Lobbying, Misrepresentation, Paid ‘Cutouts’

, 0

Today the public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C., published a paper on behalf of its client the government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates, titled “Private Funders, Public Institutions: ‘Climate’ Litigation and a Crisis of Integrity”.

Minnesota’s “climate” lawsuit and its replica filed the next day in Washington, D.C., like all of these suits, represent transparent attempts to manufacture state jurisdiction for a litigation campaign that, its proponents previously admitted, is national, belongs in federal courts, and seeks to substitute verdicts for Congress’s refusal to adopt their desired policy agenda.

The paper reveals, for the first time, damning details confirming who is actually conducting this purportedly governmental litigation campaign and how they are doing it, as described in the parties’ own hand.

This paper, and yesterday’s Supreme Court opinion in BP p.l.c. et al. v Mayor & City Council of Baltimore, serve as bookend reminders of the importance of this jurisdictional issue in the wave of “climate” litigation washing over state courthouses around the country, and the impropriety of their proceeding in local courts.

Read the paper here.

Banking Committee Rs to Biden: Cool it on Fossil Fuel Finance Freeze-Out

, 0

Another fed gov’t campaign to strangle legal businesses’ access to capital

From the Senate Banking Committee Republicans, a letter to the Biden White House’s climate-treaty czar John Kerry and the administration criticizing efforts to coerce banks into de-platforming fossil energy companies, and taking aim at a new global warming disclosure mandate on publicly traded companies.

Toomey, GOP Banking Members Demand Kerry, Biden Administration Stop Trying to De-Bank Energy Companies

Also Push Back on New Global Warming Disclosure Mandates for SEC-regulated Companies

Washington, D.C. – Ahead of President Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate, U.S. Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and all Republican members of the committee sent a letter calling on Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry to stop pressuring banks to make energy-related lending commitments.

In the letter, the members argue that abusing government power to influence bank lending and investment practices will distort capital allocation, raise energy costs for consumers, and slow economic growth. The members also reminded Mr. Kerry that one of the main drivers of America’s economic success has been that our government is based on the rule of law—not coercion.

“Beyond the poor track record associated with central economic planning, this apparent attempt to prevent energy companies from obtaining capital disturbingly resembles the Obama administration’s notorious ‘Operation Choke Point’ scandal, in which financial regulators attempted to coerce banks into denying services to legal yet politically-disfavored businesses.”

The letter also expresses concern that President Biden will soon sign an Executive Order setting in a motion a new mandate forcing publicly-traded companies to disclose non-material information on global warming. The members wrote:

“The apparent objective of this effort is not to protect investors, but to punish lawful energy companies by deterring lending to, and investment in, such firms.”

Read the full letter here.

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, We Think

, 0

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s Office led the development of what the Wall Street Journal editorial board called “Biden’s ‘BackDoor’ Climate Plan,” a clever if likely unlawful way to sneak in the Green New Deal under the auspices of controlling ozone — ditching failed climate messaging on “Polar ice caps and the polar bears [which] have become the climate change ‘mascots,'” because, “Unfortunately, climate change in the abstract is an increasingly – and consistently – unpersuasive argument to make.”

 

The plan is laid out in months of emails between James’s Office and other OAGs with former EPA career attorneys and officials, and even the current Biden EPA climate chief. It is what a James-led lawsuit filed by those same AGs the day before the inauguration set in motion, as detailed in an amicus brief here.

It’s what they are doing. Understandably, AG James doesn’t like having that pointed out, according to her letter to the WSJ editors that ran last Friday.

Regardless, the albatross of climate doomsaying and Green New Deal moon battery has yielded, for practical purposes, to a new narrative “about our neighbor with respiratory illness,” a rhetorical sleight of hand “highlighting the children’s health dimension to all of our major initiatives,” to capture those “many Americans who otherwise would oppose many of our regulatory actions.”

This is the plan, as laid out on The Most Cynical EPA Memo, Evah™, re-released by GAO on the document’s anniversary last month. EPA and its allies are doing what they said for years, among themselves, they needed to do. And which a paper trail shows that James’s Office prepared for months to do. Exposure of which has only prompted AG James to insist that you shouldn’t believe your lying eyes but instead, remember your neighbor with respiratory illness. Which, the paper trail shows, is not what this clever move is about.

AG James’s LTE simply protests — and proves — too much.

More Minnesota Madness: Keeping Records From the Public, and “Red Area” Courts From Scrutinizing OAG

, 0

Claiming Inconvenience, Minnesota AG Ellison Seeks to Keep Court in “Rocks and Cows” Country Away from Scrutiny of Bloomberg-funded Attorney Deal

AG Office Claims “No Connection” Between Home County of Employer OAG Targeted and Records About OAG Coordination with Outside Groups to Target the Employer

Move comes as OAG refuses to release signed Confidentiality Statement that activists on a Zoom call, posted on YouTube, suggested was violated

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has been sued for yet again ignoring a Minnesota Government Data Practices Act request by the government-transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA). In response, Ellison’s Office has insisted that any confidentiality agreement that a Michael Bloomberg-financed “Special Assistant Attorney General” named Leigh Currie signed in order to be placed in Ellison’s Office remain secret, and that only Minnesota courts located in St. Paul should have any role in scrutinizing the arrangement.

This document became of increased public interest and legal importance when an environmental activist — one who has maintained a continuing relationship with Ms. Currie through an activist-group board — boasted both that he brought Ellison’s June 2020 “climate” lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and Flint Hills Resources to Ellison, and that he has personal knowledge of Ms. Currie’s work on that suit.

After seeing those remarkable claims by the pressure group Fresh Energy’s chief Michael Noble, and having learned of Ms. Currie’s relationship – apparently continuing even after being placed in Ellison’s Office — with Noble on the advisory board of another activist group called Climate Generation, EPA submitted a Minnesota Government Data Practices Act request to OAG on September 4, 2020 for the “SAAGs’” ‘on-boarding’ documents.

This was one of several moves by EPA to learn what information AG Ellison did, or did not, require of the two “Special Assistant Attorney Generals” – Ms. Currie and another, Peter Surdo,  hired and placed by a Bloomberg group to file Ellison’s climate crusading litigation. EPA had previously learned that OAG had not obtained the Bloomberg group’s engagement letters with its privately hired attorneys placed in OAG asserting the parties’ relationship, SAAGs’ tasks and compensation. This is increasingly of public interest in the state.

After OAG ignored the request, EPA filed suit in Lyon County, home to Flint Hills Resources, targeted by Ellison. Lyon County also, however, is in “Greater Minnesota,” or what Gov. Tim Walz notoriously described as “red areas” home to “mostly rocks and cows” and, apparently, somewhere the AG does not feel his Office’s operations should face scrutiny.

In response, OAG released a heavily redacted version of Currie’s resume — redacted to hide her reported outside activities, which are at least in some pertinent part already publicly boasted of, and is of course precisely where we would see if she disclosed her ongoing service on the board of Climate Generation with, e.g., Noble. OAG also refused to release a signed copy of the Confidentiality Agreement Ms. Currie would certainly have signed were she an actual employee of the Office, as opposed to being an employee of Bloomberg’s group.

Regarding Noble’s boast and what his claims suggest, the Confidentiality Agreement is clear:

No employee shall disclose to an unauthorized person any information obtained during employment with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office (“Office”) which in any way relates to the representation by the Office of the public, the State, a State agency, the Attorney General, or any other client of the Office, or is otherwise confidential or non-public under applicable law.

Staff attorneys shall abide by the Rules of Professional Conduct and applicable law in maintaining the confidentiality and non-public status of all such information. Other employees shall regard as confidential and non-public all information received, and shall not disclose or disseminate any information except with the consent or at the direction of his or her manager or deputy. This obligation of confidentiality applies not only while an employee is on staff but also after the employee leaves the employment of the Office. If an employee has any questions regarding this obligation of confidentiality, the employee should consult with his or her manager or deputy.

CONFIDENTIALITY STATEMENT

I, ____________________________________, do hereby acknowledge that I have been

Print Name

advised of my strict obligation of confidentiality regarding information obtained during my employment with the Attorney General’s Office as reflected in the attached OBLIGATION OF CONFIDENTIALITY OF EMPLOYEES OF THE MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE. I hereby agree to abide by and comply with this obligation of confidentiality.

________________________________________________

Signature

______________________________

Date

In order to avoid having to release any such signed agreement, and an unredacted resume showing if Ms. Currie in fact disclosed to OAG her ongoing relationship with the boastful environmentalist with whom Currie still serves on an activist group’s board, OAG vowed to try and escape the clutches of the Lyon County courts, informing GAO of its intention to file a motion seeking to move a lawsuit away from Lyon County, to the Ramsey County District Court in St. Paul,apparently taking the position it can’t get a fair trial outside the state capital.

Minnesota’s Government Data Practices Act (MGDPA) allows for actions against the state to be filed in “any county” (Minn. Code 13.08(3), Civil Remedies). Ellison’s Office instead cites the state’s general venue provision, which MGDPA’s own venue provision supplants, to move the case out of Lyon County and into St. Paul.

Although Ellison’s Office has had no problem finding or appearing in Lyon County courts previously, the AG now claims that filing pleadings electronically is too inconvenient from St. Paul, that hearings likely to be held electronically overly burden the Office and, most shockingly, that there is no connection between the records at issue and Lyon County.

Flint Hills has a facility in Marshall, which is also home to the Lyon County courthouse.

GAO’s Chris Horner notes, “Lyon County residents are suitable as targets of an activist litigation campaign joined by Minnesota’s Attorney General with outside help and apparently coordination but, it seems, not to have a role in examining the propriety of this campaign. Ellison’s position embodies what the Center for the American Experiment called the War on Greater Minnesota well before Gov. Tim Walz’s admitted his view that ‘mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area’.”

The provision of the Minnesota Code under which Ellison anticipates filing the motion allow a change of venue when the parties agree, or if a defendant has been added to prevent a change of venue, neither of which apply. Venue changes are also permissible if it is inconvenient for witnesses to travel to a trial, which a judicial system that quickly adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic with Zoom and WebEx hearings has proved is no longer a consideration.

Implicit in the AG’s effort, therefore, is a belief that the fourth factor permitting a change of venue applies here: Venue may also be changed “when an impartial trial cannot be had in the county wherein the action is pending.” It stands to reason, therefore, that Ellison apparently believes the judicial system of Lyon County cannot be trusted to give him a fair and impartial trial.

GAO’s Matt Hardin, who filed EPA’s records suit, says that “The Attorney General’s claims that the records at issue have no tie to Lyon County, and that it is terribly inconvenient and antithetical to justice to have this heard in Lyon County, are plainly not supported by the facts.”

Ellison’s Office also raises further questions about its arguments by claiming, in its required discussions with GAO prior to filing a motion, that this action should be heard in St. Paul because EPA’s “related cases” under MGDPA are being tried there. This is remarkable.

It was just late September when Ellison’s Office refused to answer even one interrogatory about the very same information, attesting that it was all “irrelevant to the matters at issue in this suit.” Now, however, the AG asserts that the information is so overwhelmingly related to those St. Paul suits as to exclude any Minnesota courts but those located in St. Paul from participating in efforts to examine the machinations of Ellison’s Office.

Hardin added, “The transparency laws are there to protect the rights of all Minnesotans, not just those who live in St. Paul. All Minnesotans deserve a say in how Mr. Ellison is running his office, especially when he uses out-of-state resources to target local employers, and employees.”

Biden Cabinet Nominee Open to New Taxes to Pay for “Climate Agenda” — as Gov., Sued Energy Cos. to Obtain “Sustainable Funding Stream” Because Legislature Refused

, 0

GAO and ClimateLitigationWatch readers are familiar with the effort by the State of Rhode Island to sue energy companies in state court for causing climate change, hoping to cash in after the administration concluded that the State’s “Assembly [had] very conservative leadership — don’t care about env’t”, leaving the Governor “looking for sustainable funding stream”.

So it should be no surprise that at her confirmation hearing to serve as Pres. Biden’s Secretary of Commerce Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo continued the line that the “climate” agenda spending ambitions cost a lot of money, “We need funds”, and someone’s just going to have to suck it up and hand over their money to pay for them.

“We need funds”. — Commerce Sec. Nominee Gina Raimondo

According to two contemporaneous sets of notes from a meeting at (natch) the Rockefeller mansion — one set handwritten by a Rocky Mountain Institute aide, another by a rep from Tom Steyer’s energy Foundation — Raimondo’s own Cabinet aide, Department of Environmental Management chief Janet Coit, laid out that that meant suing “in state court” for “priority — sustainable funding stream”.

So dig deep, they’ve got a spending agenda. And you’re just the folks to pay for it.

Voila! Minnesota AG Contract With Climate Nuisance Tort Firm Appears

, 0

Within hours of Energy Policy Advocates filing suit against the Minnesota Office of Attorney General this morning (noted by GAO at 10:40, here), in part over a missing contract hiring an outside law firm to sue energy companies for climate change, the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget provided the group with the contract in response to an outstanding records request.

To no one’s surprise, lawyers stand to make a fortune off of what the Attorney General claims are the taxpayers’ damages.

What is particularly strange is this following attestation by AG Ellison, given that Michael Bloomberg’s group provided him with not one but two privately hired attorneys to prepare and file this suit on which they’ve been working full-time, according to a remarkable and troubling boast of inside knowledge by one activist close to “Special Assistant AG” Leigh Currie.

One would think that, with the taxpayers financing a top-10 sized law firm in the state and at least one major political donor providing more, let’s say, targeted resources to pursue ideological priorities, that might be enough. Now, what else is going on to bankroll these suits?

Read the entire document here.

Load More