House Oversight Committee Presses DoE on LNG “Scandal-pause” Exposed by GAO

The Washington Free Beacon reports on a letter submitted by the House Committee on Oversight & Accountability seeking answers to questions raised by GAO’s Freedom of Information Act litigation most recently noted here.

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Excerpting the story:

In court filings cited by the Oversight Committee leaders and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the Department of Energy acknowledged in September that it completed the information request, which yielded 97 responsive documents totaling 4,354 pages.

The Department of Energy, though, never shared those documents. On Friday, it sent its final response to the request to Government Accountability and Oversight, saying it understood the group’s request to be seeking only any “final” natural gas export study and that it did not find a “final” study in its search. The group’s information request never specified that it only sought “final” studies rather than potential draft studies.

“The clear implication is that one or more draft studies do exist, and DOE is attempting to cover that up,” Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.), Oversight energy subcommittee chairman Pat Fallon (R., Texas), and Rep. Clay Higgins (R., La.) wrote to Granholm on Wednesday.

“The Committee demands that DOE finally provide complete and accurate information related to the Committee’s investigation and all relevant studies or drafts thereof that may have been conducted or prepared prior to DOE’s January 26, 2024, imposition of the Biden-Harris LNG export ban,” the lawmakers added in the letter, which was first obtained by the Free Beacon.

The Free Beacon quoted GAO attorney Chris Horner who “characterized the Department of Energy’s actions as a ‘full-blown scandal.’ ‘The Energy Department says, on second thought, it has no records at all,’ said Horner. ‘How did so many potentially responsive records vanish overnight? What happened was the Department of Energy effectively rewrote our request to engineer this reversal and a seemingly less-damning ‘no records’ response.’

‘This confirms our information that the purported rationale for this reckless January 2024 ‘pause’ on further natural gas exports was a fabrication: the study was already performed in 2023 and was spiked,’ he added. ‘This administration did not spike the study because it supported their desired strangulation of fossil energy. The information that led us to this inquiry was, in fact, that the study was spiked because it surprised the administration by once again touting the benefits of natural gas exports.'”

The piece continued:

In other words, according to Horner, the Department of Energy possessed a nonpartisan study showing the environmental, economic, and national security benefits of continued natural gas exports when it chose to block those same projects earlier this year. Horner said the agency ignored its own internal information to appease left-wing climate activists.

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