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GAO Files Suit against Minnesota AG Ellison Over Refusal to Release Records

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EMBARGOED For Release Until
August 14, 2019 10 AM CDT		Contact: info “at” govoversight.org

GAO Files Suit against Minnesota AG Ellison Over Refusal to Release Records re Bloomberg-Funded “Special Assistant AG”, Tort Bar Recruiting of AGs

Group Reveals Ellison as newest AG to take Bloomberg-funded prosecutor

Today the public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO) filed suit against Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison under that state’s public records law. This suit, on behalf of the nonprofit group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA), seeks to compel the AG to release documents shedding light on the use of law enforcement to advance private interests.

At issue are AG Ellison’s correspondence with activists, donors and plaintiffs’ lawyers. Public records reveal a campaign to use Attorneys General offices to advance those parties’ financial and ideological pursuits. EPA requested OAG provide copies of certain emails of Deputy Attorney General Karen Olson with or relating to outside parties including the lead plaintiffs’ law firm recruiting litigants to sue energy companies in the name of “climate change”.

In recent years the tort bar has recruited state and local governments as plaintiffs. As their litigation faltered, some plaintiffs’ lawyers sought “a single sympathetic attorney general” to subpoena private records and provide a much needed boost to their stalled efforts. After that, billionaire activist and major Democratic Party donor Michael Bloomberg created a group to recruit and privately staff AGs to support his “climate” activism. One of those AGs is Ellison.

Ellison recently brought in a privately hired attorney through Blomberg’s group revealingly called the “State Impact Center”. That group hires then places lawyers in AG offices to advance a donor’s policy concerns as “Special Assistant Attorneys General” (SAAGs), and provides other private resources and attorneys for friendly offices pursuing matters of concern to the donor.

OAG never announced – and apparently never authorized Bloomberg’s group to announce – this partnership. However, an attorney who signed yesterday’s litigation filed by OAG in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals — a Bloomberg priority — boasted on his LinkedIn profile to being “embedded with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office as an Environmental Litigator and Special Assistant Attorney General”. Like the rest of this new breed of activist, he is in fact employed “as a Fellow with the NYU School of Law’s State Impact Center”.

Revelation of Ellison’s “SAAG” marks the first new addition to Bloomberg’s corps of AGs since December 2017, after something of an Omertà set in following unwanted scrutiny of the arrangements. This newfound shyness notwithstanding, private money continued flowing to underwrite more such placements. EPA’s requests also covered OAG correspondence with an employee of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office who, public records show, is coordinating recruitment of attorneys general offices for Bloomberg’s group.

Records arranging these relationships can be revealing — already Virginia’s legislature has acted to ban its AG, Mark Herring, from following through on his written promise to use his office “to advance the agenda represented by” Bloomberg’s group. GAO is in court seeking to obtain records pertaining to that breathtaking confession. Oregon’s legislative counsel has declared that the scheme violates that state’s laws. Maryland’s AG plainly violated state law in appointing its Bloomberg “SAAG” – calling him “pro bono” after setting the attorney’s (privately paid) salary at $125,000 plus benefits. GAO is also in court seeking Maryland’s unredacted “Application”.

GAO’s Chris Horner, who detailed the evidence about both the plaintiffs’ and Bloomberg’s climate schemes in his August 2018 paper “Law Enforcement for Rent”, and a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, says that

“The public deserves to see any discussions between AG Ellison’s Office and a major party-donor’s group, particularly one soliciting AGs to bring on privately funded prosecutors to advance that donor’s agenda.”

Horner adds, “Across the country, we have found attorneys general offices deeply concerned about the public learning more about the influence of plaintiffs’ lawyers and activists in using those law enforcement offices to advance a political or financial agenda. Far too often these activist AGs make the public sue to obtain public records. Add Minnesota’s AG to that list.”

EPA also requested emails reflecting the use of online storage sites such as Dropbox to conduct official business. This growing practice of public officials using off-site, private web storage raises serious concerns about compliance with public records retention requirements.

MN OAG insists that any records responsive to these requests are exempt under “a number of legal privileges, including the attorney work product, the attorney-client, and the deliberative process privileges”.

“EPA has done great work bringing transparency to Attorneys General Offices across the nation,” said Matthew Hardin, Energy Policy Advocates’ Executive Director. “Now that we’ve unfortunately been stonewalled in Minnesota, we can add one more AG’s office to the list of those who require the public to bring suit to shine the disinfectant of sunlight on these matters.”

GAO filed suit with local counsel Douglas Seaton of the Upper Midwest Law Center and James Dickey of Hellmuth & Johnson, PLLC.

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

PDF of this press release: GAO-8.14.19-MN-OAG-suit-releaseDownload

PDF of the legal complaint:

MGDPA-ellison-ComplaintDownload
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New Mexico Attorney General Forced To Respond To Criticism Over Use Of Bloomberg-Funded Attorneys

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From Western Wire

Pressure is building on New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas over his office’s use of attorneys that are paid for by a group created with financial backing of New York City Mayor and climate activist Michael Bloomberg.

Balderas is one of 11 state attorneys general known to the public who has brought on such private attorneys funded by Bloomberg’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law. These attorneys are hired and have their salaries and benefits fully paid for by the Center, then are placed in state attorneys general offices specially to work on climate and environmental matters, including assisting with litigation against fossil fuel companies.

Western Wire first reported on the arrangement in Balderas’ office in September 2017.

Now Balderas is receiving criticism from Power the Future, an energy advocacy group, and the American Tort Reform Association, according the Albuquerque Journal. These criticisms have prompted a harsh rebuke from the newspaper’s editorial board.

They have accused Balderas of avoiding transparency by giving power to privately-employed attorneys to shape policy in New Mexico even though they’re funded by climate activists in New York. They contend these attorneys have no accountability to New Mexico taxpayers.

This growing public pressure has forced Balderas’ office to respond. His spokesman told the Albuquerque Journal that the attorney general has routinely hired attorneys funded by outside sources, although he cited legal settlements from anti-money laundering and mortgage cases and grants from the federal government, not private sources like Bloomberg’s group.

Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) is a public interest law firm that litigates against AG offices to obtain records such as those relating to the Bloomberg program. GAO’s Chris Horner dismissed Balderas’ insistence that this is a common activity as “comparing apples to stethoscopes,” noting, “The group’s name affirms its objective is to obtain state-level policy changes, though it seeks to do so via law enforcement, not the policymaking process.”

Full story here

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Uh oh, Green Activists With Ties to China Advised Obama State Department

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By Kevin Mooney

The Natural Resources Defense Council held close ties to the Obama administration, providing advice on joining the Paris Agreement while simultaneously maintaining ties to China, according to attorneys and policy analysts who have reviewed email records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

While many of the emails are heavily redacted, they provide insight into how the NRDC, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, and its close associates in Beijing, sought to maneuver the United States into an international climate change accord that has all the “hallmarks of a treaty” without the “advice and consent” of the Senate, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, explained in an interview.

The United Nations’ Paris Agreement, which took shape in December 2015, figures prominently in emails between Jake Schmidt, the NRDC’s director of international programs, and several State Department officials including Todd Stern, who was a special envoy for climate change at the time of his correspondence with Schmidt in 2014 and 2015.

Cohen calls the agreement “an instrument to redistribute wealth, through higher energy prices, from middle- and lower-income people to well-heeled renewable-energy providers and investors in developed countries, while spreading some largesse to elites in poorer countries via the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.”

President Obama took executive action to have the United States become part of the international agreement in September 2016, which requires participating countries to establish their own “nationally determined contributions” toward what the U.N. describes as a “global response to the threat of climate change.” The nationally determined contributions (NDCs) detail how much each country plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In June 2017, President Trump announced during a White House ceremony that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The president said the treaty was unfair to American workers and taxpayers.

Chris Horner, an attorney with Government Accountability and Oversight, a nonprofit, public interest law firm, said he would still like to see the White House submit the agreement to the Senate as a treaty in need of ratification.

“Paris is a treaty according to all historic and common-sense considerations,” Horner said in an email to the Free Beacon. “The ‘legal form’ stunt pretending otherwise that the Obama administration pulled satisfied a publicly stated priority of the French hosts of the Paris talks, of the Obama White House and State Department, and of NRDC which, emails suggest, was the State Department’s adviser on that issue.”

“Behind that move lies a ‘Circular 175 memo,’ which is required prior to the U.S. entering any agreement and which must address that very question of ‘legal form,'” Horner explained. “Whatever that memo said, it reflected NRDC’s role and input and served as the justification for the Obama claim that an obvious treaty—adopted by all of our supposed models under their procedures for treaties, as opposed to ‘agreements’—was actually not a treaty for U.S. purposes.”

Full story here

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Green Banks and Climate Alarm: One More Reason for a “Red Team” Review

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Renewable Energy Agency Props Up Alarmist Panel Supporting Demands for Renewable Energy Agencies…

President Eisenhower presciently warned of a “scientific-technological elite” as a threat alongside the “military-industrial complex”: “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” In practice, government funding has underwritten something of a war on intellectual curiosity, if that curiosity threatens that federal funding.

This brings us to the vast and largely taxpayer-funded Climate Industrial Complex. That blob recently lashed out at the prospect of a “red team” review of climate projections, independent of federal government outfits. Those outfits both ritually prophesy, and existentially depend upon public acceptance of, looming catastrophic man-made global warming 

Now we know that the proposed review, in the form of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, is on hold at least until after the 2020 elections.

This is disappointing given the myriad reasons to demand such a review — beginning with each and every Obama regulatory overreach that depends on the regulatory Leviathan’s self-serving doomsday reports, and every Climate Kidz lawsuit seeking to disband with our separation of powers once and for all. 

Now we learn of another reason, found in of all places the growing fad of “Green Banks”. These are not much more than slush funds to politically allocate billions of dollars propping up ‘investors’, who in turn are propping up the climate industry and its calls for more — you guessed it — Green Banks.

Green Banks happen to be the subject of ongoing investigative research project of Government Accountability & Oversight. GAO has studied public filings, emails and other public records to examine the leading “Green Bank”, one that public records also show is the model for a group of off-books staff being provided to activist governors by ‘progressive’ foundations with the goal of affording each willing governor his own Obama-style “green jobs” fund to distribute.

GAO plans to publish the first chapter in this story soon. Some background first. 

Independent review of these climate proclamations was so terrifying because it would finally offer the long-eschewed adversarial process, involving actual subject matter experts not dependent on climate alarm for their prosperity or prestige. It would confront whether the federal climate blob is being straight with the public. That is, whether these outfits are, as they seem, merely enabling the climate industry of which they are part, with “official reports” declaring calamity unless we adopt a political agenda.

Consider the Fourth National Climate Assessment released in November 2018. This ritual shriek of terror was co-authored by government researchers, whose programs stay funded by grace of climate alarmism, and activists such as Union of Concerned Scientists’ Brenda Ekwurzel.

Yes, that UCS, which, public records reveal  happens to be the driving force behind state attorneys general investigations of parties who have stood in the way of the “climate” agenda.

In other words, these “official reports” represent precisely what the term “industry science” connotes, with the industry being the climate industry, which we know is at minimum “over $1 a billion a year” industry. Meanwhile, politicians aspire to each having their own $1 billion “Green Bank.” Green Banks depend upon alarmist prognostication.

And now one of these Green Banks has taken a stake in producing more doomsday reports, by financing a panel that President Trump disbanded. 

The Washington Examiner reported in an April item, “Born-again climate commission disbanded by Trump calls for new agency”. The article noted (emphases added):

A federal climate change advisory commission that President Trump disbanded early in his tenure has reconstituted itself to call Thursday for the creation of a climate agency outside of Washington to help states make scientifically-based decisions about global warming….

The advisory committee, comprising dozens of scientists, had reconvened with the help of the New York state government’s renewable energy agency — called the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Columbia University, and professional scientific organizations.

The report released Thursday is meant to provide the scientific foundation for states’ efforts in dealing with “the new normal” — which includes the effects of climate change on daily life, Richard Moss, the advisory committee’s team leader…

Translated, Trump axed an activist federal panel that had for years produced grist for the climate industry to push policies and litigation, but also supporting politicians distributing bags of money in a way reminiscent of President Obama’s “Green Jobs” schemes propping up renewables companies. “New York state government’s renewable energy agency” — NYSERDA, which depends upon climate alarm to skim hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and ratepayers to be directed to political uses — reconstituted the panel, as the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment. 

Indeed, all of the parties reconvening this process have a stake in ensuring further alarm: Columbia University has numerous schools and dedicated centers feeding at the climate industry trough, from the home of climate activists led for years by James “Coal Cars = Auschwitz Cars” Hansen — to, naturally, its law school; the science professions have grown fat and increasingly dependent upon federal funding (there is a reason the American Association for the Advancement of Science chose Washington, DC for its headquarters).

As you might expect, GAO has found that NYSERDA is rife with apparent conflicts of interest. Add to those glaring conflicts its financing of an “independent” committee to advocate for more of what NYSERDA does. Which is funnel tax- and rate-payer dollars into green boondoggle after green boondoggle.

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Behind the curtain: How Bloomberg Pays to Prosecute the Trump EPA

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By Chris Horner and Victoria Toensing, writing in the Wall Street Journal

The State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, a group created by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2017, is hiring and placing lawyers in the offices of state attorneys general. The mission of the group, which is led by a former Interior Department official and housed at New York University’s law school, is to provide “direct legal assistance to interested attorneys general on specific administrative, judicial or legislative matters involving clean energy, climate change and environmental interests of regional and national significance.” At least one of the two Bloomberg “special assistant attorneys general” placed in the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James is involved with the prosecution of Exxon Mobil for its supposed offense of “climate denial.”

Emails obtained under a public-records law show that the center submits detailed biweekly reports to Bloomberg Philanthropies. State legal officers taking money from private funders to pursue policy outcomes desired by those funders is inherently suspect. It also raises questions about the laws governing gifts, campaign contributions and bribes. To the extent these Bloomberg-funded lawyers are involved in prosecutions, it raises serious due-process concerns as well.

The NYU law center’s principal focuses are thwarting Trump administration policies and advancing a green agenda. “The gist is that Bloomberg is funding through NYU some fellowship positions for midcareer environmental litigators to be farmed out to State Attorneys General to join the fight against Trump’s rollback of our environmental protection laws and regulations,” wrote Maryland’s Deputy Attorney General Carolyn Quattrocki in a November 2017 email to colleagues. Bloomberg-funded lawyers are currently assisting in dozens of lawsuits against both the Trump administration’s regulatory reforms and private entities involved in any business contrary to the green agenda.

The office of New York’s then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman asked the NYU center to send two Bloomberg-funded lawyers in 2017 because it was understaffed and wanted to “expand” litigation against the Trump administration and private parties. Without a privately underwritten special assistant attorney general, Mr. Schneiderman’s office claimed, it would have trouble “opposing the Scott Pruitt nomination as EPA administrator, advocating for the United States to remain in the Paris Climate Accord,” and pursuing other green political goals, such as “building models for two different types of common law cases to seek compensation and other relief for harm caused by fossil-fuel emissions.”

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring’s application got straight to the point. His office would use Bloomberg resources “to advance the agenda represented by” the donor. Only the intervention of the state Legislature stopped him from doing so.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, whom Bloomberg supported in a 2013 primary race and who served as the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s lead recruiter, heavily redacted his office’s request for Bloomberg resources, forcing the public-interest law firm Government Accountability and Oversight to file suit to obtain the full application. The suit revealed that Mr. Frosh requested a $125,000 salary plus benefits for his Bloomberg-funded special assistant. Mr. Frosh appointed the lawyer under his “pro bono special counsel” authority. The term “pro bono” is generally understood to mean that the client doesn’t pay the lawyer. But under Maryland law, as affirmed in the 2015 case State v. Westray, it also means “the attorney represents the client without compensation.” Mr. Frosh had no legal authority to enter this arrangement.

The scheme is more troubling the closer one looks. Mr. Bloomberg is a major donor to Democratic politicians and causes. He has made electing progressive attorneys general his priority. Two Bloomberg-funded groups, Independence USA PAC and Everytown USA for Gun Safety, put more than $2 million into electing and re-electing Mr. Herring.

The State Energy and Environmental Impact Center has placed at least 11 special assistants in eight attorney-general offices. There could be more, but the center has stopped announcing new placements, possibly as a result of scrutiny from groups like ours. If no other state joins Virginia in standing up to Mr. Bloomberg’s scheme, there is no limiting principle on partisan appropriation of public legal offices other than that the donor and the cause be acceptable in certain polite circles. These agreements to serve a donor-driven agenda threaten the legitimacy and important work of attorneys general offices. This apparent trade in buying and selling official functions demands a full public airing and unbiased reckoning.

Originally published in the Wall Street Journal here

Mr. Horner is an attorney and member of the board of directors of Government Accountability and Oversight PC. Ms. Toensing is a partner in the law firm diGenova & Toensing, which represents GAO in its lawsuit against the Maryland Attorney General.

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@UCSUSA “Union of Concerned Scientists” seem more concerned with funding frivolous lawsuits

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Excerpts:

Advocacy Group Pays Conference Fees for Mayor to Promote Energy Lawsuits

Santa Cruz mayor will tout lawsuit against Exxon to other mayors

An environmental advocacy group is paying the registration fees for Santa Cruz mayor Martine Watkins (D.) to attend the United States Conference of Mayors Summit in Hawaii later this month, where Watkins will speak in favor of governments suing large energy producers over climate change.

Santa Cruz is one of many California municipal governments that have filed nuisance complaints against companies such as Exxon, BP, and Chevron asking courts to order the creation of “abatement funds” to pay for past and future damages resulting from climate change.

Watkins told the Washington Free Beacon by email last week that the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) “has offered to cover the conference registration cost on my behalf.  I’m using personal funds to cover the remainder of costs.”

UCS later confirmed the transaction was already completed.

…

“I’ve been invited to participate in the Climate Mayors Summit on June 26 in Honolulu as a member of a roundtable exchange, to share information about our climate action work,” Watkins wrote in the local paper Santa Cruz Sentinel.

“Although I’ll be attending as the Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, I will not be using any city funds, resources, or taxpayer dollars. I am personally committed to using this national platform to advocate on behalf of our city, and ultimately, the sustainability of our planet for future generations.”

“I will specifically speak to our lawsuit against the largest fossil fuel corporations seeking to hold them accountable for their reprehensible contributions to climate change.”

The UCS has agitated for exactly these kinds of legal actions.

Documents previously published by Chris Horner of conservative watchdog group Government Accountability and Oversight showed that in 2016, UCS was co-host for a “safe space” meeting at Harvard University including activists, government officials, and lawyers to discuss possible legal actions by governments against energy producers.

Another email, also obtained by Horner, showed that in 2015 UCS was already strategizing along these lines, writing that “we think there’ll likely be a strong basis for encouraging state (e.g. [attorney general]) action forward and, in that context, opportunities for climate scientists to weigh in.”

UCS’s underwriting of program fees for Watkins could possibly violate California ethics laws.

Full story here

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More shenanigans with State AG’s paying Enviro-lawyers off the books

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Embedded AG fellows raise concerns

Bloomberg nonprofit pays salaries of lawyers working for Dem AGs

Coverage from CommonWealth Magazine by Sarah Betancourt – excerpts:

A NONPROFIT BACKED with money from Michael Bloomberg is paying the salaries of 14 lawyers who are working on environmental and climate change issues for Democratic attorneys general around the country, including Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law, created in 2017 with $6 million in funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, has raised concerns in a handful of states about a private organization funding the pay of employees at a public law enforcement agency.

‘“It looked inappropriate to me, that someone could go to the AG and say, ‘Hey I want to fund two positions to bring lawsuits in an area I’m interested in,”’ said Cameron Macdonald, executive director of the Government Justice Center in New York, a conservative taxpayer watchdog group.

Macdonald filed a complaint with the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, an oversight and compliance agency in New York, but heard nothing back. “This is like a workaround, allowing for AGs offices to bypass their legislatures to get funding for pet projects,” he said.

…

In Massachusetts, Healey’s office is being sued by the nonprofit Energy Policy Advocates in Suffolk Superior Court over unreleased documents pertaining to the fellowships. The group is claiming the state’s public records law covers documents exchanged between Healey’s office and the State Impact Center. The group appears to be seeking the documents in connection with its interest in lawsuits involving Healey and ExxonMobil over climate change.Meet the Author

Healey’s office says the fellows who work in her office are paid $72,450 and $94,500 by the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. (They don’t show up on state payroll records.)

Full story here

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Judge Says NY AG May Have to Turn Over Reports About Privately-Funded Lawyers

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Excerpts From InsideSources by Jessica R. Towhey

A New York state Supreme Court judge ruled Wednesday that ExxonMobil may access quarterly reports on a special program in the New York Attorney General’s office funded by a private, outside interest that officials have fought to keep secret.

ExxonMobil is seeking the documents as part of its defense against a years’ long investigation and legal wranglings on the part of New York Attorney General Letitia James that alleges the company misled investors about how climate change regulations could impact its business.

Under state Supreme Court Judge Barry R. Ostrager’s ruling, the Attorney General’s office will turn over the reports to him, and he may decide to provide them to ExxonMobil after review. The reports presumably will show what Special Assistant Attorneys General Matthew Eisenson and Gavin McCabe, who are funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies through the NYU Law School’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, have been working on since joining the office in 2017.

…

The Bloomberg-funded program places lawyers with five to 10 years of experience practicing environmental law into Attorneys’ General offices to “advance progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions,” according to an email obtained by a former fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who has been pursuing information on the program. There are at least seven states, including New York, that participate in the program. The Wall Street Journal called the program “ethically dubious” in a recent editorialand noted that documents being sought by legal observers and ExxonMobil “may reveal a trail of influence peddling.”

…

“Over the years, significant evidence has been disclosed in the public record showing that the New York Attorney General’s investigation of ExxonMobil–and now this lawsuit–were done in close coordination with outside groups that are financially and politically motivated,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel for Manufacturers’ Accountability Project. “The goal of these private groups is to weaken the energy manufacturing industry, rather than seeking justice. Today’s hearing helped further expose this unfortunate reality to the public, and we continue to urge the Attorney General to adhere to basic principles of transparency that should be required of every public official.”

Full story here

Worcester Telegram covers GAO lawsuit against @MassAGO office

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Excerpts:

Massachusetts AG and Supervisor of Public Records are targets of records lawsuit

By James F. Russell, Correspondent

Posted Jun 12, 2019 at 2:49 PM Updated Jun 12, 2019 at 4:30 PM

BOSTON – A multimillion-dollar fund established by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat with a net worth Forbes.com estimates at $56 billion, is at the center of a lawsuit filed against two Massachusetts Democrats who hold statewide offices.

Approximately $6 million was gifted from a foundation established by Mr. Bloomberg to the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, based at New York University School of Law, The The Washington Post reported in August 2017.

A principal aim of the lawsuit is to shine light on whether Attorney General Maura Healey’s office has accessed private attorneys who would be paid from that fund – instead of the state picking up the tab – regarding environment enforcement actions – and whether such an arrangement is proper. The plaintiff in the case says the complaint was filed to try to force the attorney general to release records about possible arrangements between her office and the Impact Center.

The Impact Center’s website says they “support state attorneys general in defending and promoting clean energy, climate and environmental laws and policies. The non-partisan State Impact Center provides assistance to attorneys general in a number of ways.”

That includes: “Working with interested attorneys general to identify and hire NYU Law Fellows who serve as special assistant attorneys general in state attorney general offices, focusing on clean energy, climate and environmental matters.”

During a March 5 press conference organized by the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, Ms. Healey said, “We are proud to work with the Center. … Our work is about combating climate change. … In the face of efforts to take us backwards, to ruin the health and well-being of the planet, we will continue to see this administration in court,” a reference to the myriad lawsuits she is involved with targeting President Donald Trump’s administration.

Ms. Healey and Secretary of State William F. Galvin are being sued for allegedly failing to uphold the state public records law – Ms. Healey for allegedly not providing public documents, and Mr. Galvin for allegedly not compelling her to do so.

The complaint also alleges their offices worked in tandem to withhold information – what the lawsuit claims were “ex parte” communications.

Citing the active litigation, the Secretary of State’s office declined to comment.

…

It sought, “all opinions. … concluding that a Special Assistant Attorney General, or anything else provided by NYU, does or does not constitute an impermissible gift,” and “all correspondences sent to, from” Ms. Healey’s chief of staff, involving New York University.

Assistant Attorney General Lorraine Tarrow denied the request, stating on Feb. 22 in a letter that the information is “not subject to disclosure. … as they are records specifically exempted … by statute … as they are personnel files … some of these records are privileged attorney-client communications that are likewise protected.”

Mr. Hardin appealed the Tarrow denial to Supervisor of Public Records Rebecca Murray.

In her six-page determination issued on March 15, Ms. Murray wrote: “To deny access. … a records access officer must identify the record, categories of the records, or portions of the record it intends to withhold … Therefore, the AGO (attorney general’s office) must provide additional information regarding the nature of the responsive records.”

…

Suffolk Superior Court ordered the DAs to provide the records, back in November, but the three refused, and appealed the decision.

The case is expected to go before the state Supreme Judicial Court later this year.

Full story HERE

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GAO Files Suit Against Department of Interior

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FOIA suit seeks records concerning leaks, coordination of staff with outside parties, possible improper removal of records

For immediate release.

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C. (GAO), filed suit against the Department of the Interior on behalf of the public policy transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA). This federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit seeks records relating to the tenure of a senior Interior official who recently departed to work for the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations, a body which has ramped up investigations of its new hire’s former employer and colleagues. 

EPA believes the information it seeks may be related to high-profile leaks out of Interior, and to certain aspects of and demands by those subsequent congressional investigations. There has been widespread media and public interest in those matters. 

Chris Horner, who filed suit for GAO, noted that

“Today’s suit comes amid information, already in the public domain, suggesting a larger, coordinated effort under way to prompt investigations into individuals in numerous agencies including Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.” Horner continued, “That campaign regularly alleges coordination by public officials with outside interests, seemingly to delegitimize all policy actions with which the particular officials are associated. Similarly, the records EPA seeks in this suit are of great public interest.”

That campaign also is occurring amid revelations of activist donors placing their own employees in law enforcement officesat the state level to pursue the donors’ agenda, attorneys general instigating investigations at the urging of plaintiffs’ lawyers, issues which GAO is at the forefront of exposing. Further, activists are ‘doxxing’ and otherwise harassing public employees who dare pursue policy reforms, reflecting a disturbing trend, discouraging qualified citizens with useful experience from entering public service. This proxy war also blocks reforms, with serious policy and legal implications. 

Interior owed EPA responses to these requests in May, after having also afforded itself extensions of time. It has failed to provide any substantive response, prompting today’s suit.


Government Accountability & Oversight is a 501(c)3 non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to transparency in government on matters of energy, environment and law enforcement.

The lawsuit filed today is here:

US-dept-of-interior-lawsuitDownload

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