Fakegate: Open Letter to Directors of the Pacific Institute
FEBRUARY 29, 2012 – Today, The Heartland Institute sent the letter below to the following members of the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute:
Peter Boyer, Trustee, The Ayrshire Foundation
Gigi Coe, Trust for Conservative Innovation
Joan Diamond, Chairperson, The Nautilus Institute
Anne Ehrlich, Senior Research Associate, Stanford University
Eric Gimon, Department of Physics, University of California – Berkeley
Corey Goodman, Managing Director, venBio LLC
Margaret Gordon, Second Vice-President, Port of Oakland
Malo Andre Hutson, Affiliated Faculty, University of California
Olivier Marie, Business Strategist, Haas School of Business
Richard Morrison, California Advisory Board, The Trust for Public Land
Robert Stephens, President, MSWG, Inc.
Michael Watts, Geography Department, University of California, Berkeley
We will post at www.fakegate.org any replies we receive. Previous press releases from The Heartland Institute plus links to dozens of news reports and commentary on Gleick’s transgressions can be reviewed at Fakegate.org. The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
February 29, 2012
Dear _________:
On February 27, the Pacific Institute made the following announcement:
The Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute is deeply concerned regarding recent events involving its president, Dr. Peter Gleick, and has hired an independent firm to review the allegations. The Board has agreed to Dr. Gleick’s request for a temporary leave of absence …
The Heartland Institute’s staff, directors, donors, and other victims of Mr. Gleick’s crime look forward to reviewing the outcome of your investigation. Please confirm that you intend to make public the results of your investigation.
I hope that you and the firm you have hired will pay special attention to the documents I have enclosed:
- The emails Gleick exchanged with Heartland prior to committing his crime, in which he was respectfully invited to debate Heartland Senior Fellow James M. Taylor on the issue of climate change at Heartland’s anniversary benefit event in August. In these emails, Gleick is informed of Heartland’s policies regarding the confidentiality of its donors and why we adopted that policy. Gleick declined the invitation to debate.
- The emails Gleick used to steal documents intended to be read only by members of Heartland’s board of directors. Gleick falsely assumed the identity of a member of Heartland’s board on the same day (January 27) that he declined the invitation to debate climate change with Taylor.
- The forged memo Gleick included with the stolen documents and falsely represented, in his message accompanying the documents to 15 allies and journalists, to have come from The Heartland Institute. I have highlighted the forger’s own words, as opposed to text that was copied and pasted from the stolen documents, and included my own analysis of this fraudulent document.
- Gleick’s partial confession, in which he admits to having stolen the documents but claims that the memo, which he previously said came from The Heartland Institute, came “in the mail” from an anonymous source. He claims he stole documents because “a rational public debate is desperately needed,” a debate he had just declined to participate in. He offers his “personal apologies to all those affected,” presumably including people he knew his actions had put in harm’s way. He does not say or offer to do anything that would limit or undo the harm he caused.
I hope you will tell me, as you review these documents, if you recognize the author of the highlighted text of the forged memo, and if you believe Gleick received it from an anonymous source, and if you believe Gleick has shown any personal remorse for what he has done.
Finally, please pass along the following questions to the “independent” firm you hired to investigate Gleick:
- Did Gleick use Pacific Institute computers to establish the Gmail email account under the name of a Heartland board member?
- Did Gleick use Pacific Institute computers to establish the Gmail email account under the name of “heartlandinsider@gmail.com,” which he used to send the fake memo and the stolen documents to 15 media outlets?
- Does the investigative firm intend to examine whether Gleick is the author of the fake memo?
- Does the outside firm have access to all of the personal computers Gleick may have used to write and send the emails or to write the forged memo?
- Is the fake memo or any trace of it on Gleick’s personal computer(s)?
- Is the fake memo or any trace of it on the Pacific Institute’s computer system?
- Is there evidence (as a blogger says) that the fake memo was scanned into a PDF document on a scanner at the Pacific Institute?
- Does the Pacific Institute have possession of the hard copy of the fake memo or the envelope in which it was supposedly sent?
- What steps does the Pacific Institute plan to take to preserve these and other documents relevant to the investigation?
Sincerely,
Joseph L. Bast
President
The Heartland Institute
=============================================================
NOTE: Michael Watts, Geography Department, University of California, Berkeley is no relation to Anthony Watts, proprietor of this blog – Anthony
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- Heartland’s Invitation to Gleick – Details (climateaudit.org)
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Personally, I think letters like this have ever so much more impact coming not from anyone on Heartland’s board of directors, but from an attorney, formally warning them to preserve the evidence even as it invites response.
Email from an individual can often be ignored. Email from an attorney — especially if accompanied by a court “discovery” order — cannot. Who cares, after all, about their independent investigative firm? The only firm that matters is the legal firm representing the Heartland institute, which is surely not fool enough to try to do this on their own without counsel.
rgb
BOOM! Ahhh, love to be a fly on the wall in the lawyer’s office when the consequences of THAT letter are considered in full…
I see another greenwash coming. Those who review themselves always find themselves exemplary.
Anne Ehrlich is on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute? How deliciously appropriate. She and her husband Paul are among the least successful of the failed serial doomcasters that include Holdren, Hansen, and Stephen Schneider. No wonder they’re teamed up with a loser like Gleick.
w.
That letter would have force only if it were written under legal letterhead, and accompanied by a demand letter for the preservation of evidence. Otherwise, sending it seems like naive posturing to me. The Pacific Institute board can ignore that letter with complete impunity.
Mr. Bast neglected to include posthumous board member Stephen Schneider (in memoriam) among the recipients, by the way. That was an opportunity lost.
REPLY: This letter is for public consumption, the letters going out from the legal team are not. – Anthony
“What steps does the Pacific Institute plan to take to preserve these and other documents relevant to the investigation?”
Good luck with that one…
Possibly the most important question there, which in my experience dealing with large companies and organizations, will be answered with a PR response, if at all.
Definitely worth putting some pressure on, however – destruction of evidence raises presumption of guilt, not to mention an Obstruction of Justice charge.
It would be more forceful from a lawyer at a prominent law firm. IMO, it still signals that HI are willing to play hardball on this if PI and Gleick do not come clean on the source of the fake strategy document.
Still unsure about pronunciation. Is it Gleick as in weak / leak, or is it Gleick as in fake / rake, or yet Gleick as in thick / dick ?
If we’d needed evidence HI doesn’t have money to pay for attorneys or PR professionals, we’ve got it now.
Ditto comment No. 1 from Robert Brown. I earn most of my living testifying and consultig as an expert witness in court cases. Not only does a message carry more weight coming from an attorney, Heartland would be well advised to stop making public comments, clam up and allow an outside counsel handle all communication. I don’t think there is anything to hide, but I know the workings of loose words in legal procedings.
Robert Brown,
Isn’t the FBI already on this case (so reported here on WUWT)? It would be hard to fathom that the FBI are not already crawling around P.I. unless they are not fully “on board” that this is a serious issue. Also, we don’t know (and probably will not know) what communication H.I.’s legal team might have had with P.I. This “open letter” from H.I. is more for P.R. value and to put P.I. on the spot in public than anything else.
Willis, I was struck by Anne Ehrlich’s name too. Googling for her took me soon enough to the Wikipedia page for her husband. It was fun in its way to read the following about the famous interaction with Julian Simon:
A fringe character who also happened to be right. The last sentence put the radio silence that’s been imposed on characters like Steve McIntyre into a fresh light.
I doubt Steve would sign up for everything Simon taught. But that’s not the point. If you prove these guys are wrong you’re “fringe” and they refuse to meet you. If you agree with them and thus become wrong with them, as Gleick obviously did, they’ll shower you with kudos, MacArthur Genius and all.
Good letter, Mr Bast.
Or Gleick as in hike/pike?
A Muir Russel type investigation? Just gobsmacking. That may have worked with the Brits to some degree, I seriously doubt it will work with us Yanks.
Is a copy of the full letter sent by HI to the Pacific Institute available ? Lots of times a letter such as this includes a “cc” listing the name of a law firm. That will often serve as a rather pointed wake-up call that all of these communications are being reviewed by competent legal counsel.
Unless the “(as a blogger says)” post has changed, it doesn’t allude to the “fake memo was scanned into a PDF document on a scanner at the Pacific Institute“.
“• Is there evidence (as a blogger says) that the fake memo was scanned into a PDF document on a scanner at the Pacific Institute?”
This is turning into the classic of all whodunits. This could become a case study for all first year IT students. I love it.
Freedom 55 comes to Pacific Institute.
Frank I hope to XXXXX that they have ior are using legal council and that they are not posting the legal letters, because they have been told not to and this is just “sample” of the legal letters that have beeen sent. Otherwise the whole thing is a joke.
Anne Ehrlich!
Alllllllrighty then. That certainly explains things.
But I thought we were all supposed to be dead by now?
Gleik. It’s pronounce similar to “Wile E” as in Coyote.
OPEN CAUTION TO THE PACIFIC INSTITUTE
Dear PI,
I suggest that you and your independent investigators resist the temptation to use the failed Phil Jones defense in your strategies.
Let me paraphrase and reword slightly the infamous Phil Jones defense for you {italized words and the strike through are mine-JW}
“[ . . . ] Why should I make the
dataevidence examined by PI’s independent investigator and the results of the independent investigation available to HI, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”PI board of directors, your independent investigation’s credibility hopefully will not be impeached due to interference by you or by interested third parties who can have conflicts of interest with your independent investigators.
John
Robert Brown says:
February 29, 2012 at 10:23 am
Personally, I think letters like this have ever so much more impact coming not from anyone on Heartland’s board of directors
This is a polite letter pointing out some facts that one may not wish to ignore before signing off on the ‘internal whitewash’ investigation that many organizations engage in. I.E. Hire a ‘blind man’ to investigate…then hold up the report from the ‘blind man’ that authoritatively states that he ‘didn’t see anything’. The backsides of the Board is ‘duly’ covered. They had an investigation…no wrongdoing was found…back to business as usual.
Heartland has now publicly provided to each of the board members documents that would appear in an ‘actual’ investigation and the questions the ‘internal investigator’ should be answering.
From commenter oMan at CA, and my reply:
Posted Feb 29, 2012 at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Reply
It will be interesting to learn who paid for the equipment used by Gleick, and any expenses he incurred, in preying on Heartland. He seems to be the recipient of public funds in various roles. Suppose his computer and email account were funded by a US government grant. That might establish a possible link between a felony and assets purchased with taxpayer money, or a diversion of those assets to purposes outside the scope of the grant, or false claims against the government for payment in respect of activities outside the scope.
This kind of thing is very well-developed law in the field of medical claims and, I think, increasingly in cases of misdirected public funding of scientific work. Even poor accounting and proper segegation of assets can be problematic.
It is also an area where private relator actions can be brought if the government does not act.
The closer you look, the worse it gets.
neill
Posted Feb 29, 2012 at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Reply
This would seem the strongest motivator to get the Feds moving into this. Even if the current DOJ leadership is averse taking action against a CAGW leader, the criminal misuse of taxpayer dollars may not leave them a choice in the matter.
Boudumoon says:
February 29, 2012 at 10:40 am
“Still unsure about pronunciation. Is it Gleick as in weak / leak, or is it Gleick as in fake / rake, or yet Gleick as in thick / dick ?”
Wikipedia says:
“Peter H. Gleick (glick[1]; born 1956) is an American scientist working on issues related to the environment,”