Following up on this post, yesterday the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee held a hearing into the Biden-Harris Department of Energy politicizing U.S. energy security and national security by “pausing” permitting for certain new exports of liquified natural gas. The subcommittee pressed for answers to the questions raised by GAO’s work and specifically referred on multiple occasions to DoE’s stonewalling in the release of documents both to GAO and to the subcommittee itself.
A video of the hearing is here.
DoE’s representative Brad Crabtree avoided providing any answers to the crucial questions regarding how the “pause” came about, and the invited White House aide, John Podesta, was not there at all. Notably, Crabtree couched his denial of the existence of a buried LNG export study— proof of which GAO has uncovered—by slipping in the weasel word “final” and claiming that studies DoE buried were mere drafts. The Biden-Harris DoE thus claims that no “final” 2023 report was ever produced. Which in DoE’s self-serving interpretation could, most likely does, mean no 2023 report was “produced,” and the report was instead buried. So, it was never final.
One other interesting thing he did say was that the Department has been producing the records sought in FOIA litigation by GAO and then again in a followup request parrying DoE’s disingenuous thrusts…to the Committee. But not yet to GAO. Despite GAO’s latest request specifically for the documents Crabtree referred to expressly invoking FOIA’s provision for expedited treatment.
DoE denied expedited processing, but apparently will process these records anyway seeing as how it a) knows Congress seems to want the docs and b) is producing them.
Another 2,000 pages of records are to be released, Crabtree says, this Friday. To the subcommittee. But not the requester.
What is more remarkable about this is that DoE has spent lots of taxpayer dollars insisting it simply cannot produce records at that rate.