From the Daily Caller’s Mike Bastasch:
Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil rights attorney and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts, called investigations of global warming skeptics by state attorneys general “pure harassment.”
“It is outrageous for any law enforcement official to be seeking to win this battle for minds by flexing law enforcement muscle and trying to shut up the other side,” Silverglate told The Boston Herald Thursday.
Silverglate, a veteran civil rights lawyer, was reacting to a subpoena issued Wednesday by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, demanding ExxonMobil turn over 40 years of records, including records regarding prominent conservative think tanks.
Healey claims the investigation is to determine if Exxon misled the public and shareholders about the risks of global warming. Healey is the latest state prosecutor to demand records from groups that disagree with her on global warming. New York AG Eric Schneiderman became the first law enforcer to investigate Exxon in November.
“It’s not the way scientific or factual or even political battles are settled in this country, which last I checked is still a free country,” Silverglate said, who founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
State AGs claim their investigations are based on reporting from liberal news outlets that Exxon tried to cover up the truth about global warming by funding conservative groups skeptical of man-made warming and opposed to anti-fossil fuel policies.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not protect companies from defrauding the American people or improperly disclosing information to their shareholders,” 19 Democratic California lawmakers recently wrote to state AG Kamala Harris, who has her own probe into Exxon.
But as more AGs start to investigate their political opponents, others are propping up to stop what they see as attacks on free speech.
“Exxon is a resident of the state of Texas, and we felt this was an attack on their first amendment rights,” Texas AG Ken Paxton said after he and Alabama AG Luther Strange filed a brief in support of Exxon’s legal battle to defeat a subpoena from U.S. Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker.
“They have every right to have their opinions on climate change. In my opinion you cross the line when you start prosecuting individuals for disagreeing with you,” he said.
Newspapers have also come out against Democratic AGs who are targeting Exxon.
“Climate change campaigners argue the seriousness of the issue means extreme measures are warranted, but the exact opposite is the case,” the Financial Times editorial board wrote in response to the Exxon investigation.
“It is precisely because the stakes are so high that all arguments must be heard. The actions by the attorney-generals can only degrade the quality of that debate,” they wrote.
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It seems to me that these constitution abusers aren’t the least bit democratic. How about:
If I’m feeling real grumpy, I might even go with:
Democratic vs. Democratic
Doh! the link should have been Democrat vs. Democratic
If ACLU is on our side, we are doomed.
This ‘pure harassment’ is starting out just like an Inquisition. A good defense would be to somehow publicly humiliate the Inquisitors to the point they lose all public credibility. I imagine that inquiries into their personal histories would likely reveal facts they would mot enjoy having publicized.
Doesn’t a subpoena need judicial approval and some sort of probable cause?
I am at a loss to see how these AGs can get as far as they have.
Her sole justification is hearsay? I thought they had to have some reasonable belief that a crime had been committed and they had to disclose the crime they think was committed.
Pretty chilling if the courts are going to allow law enforcement to ignore the 4th amendment. We’re going to look at ALL your records to see if you have violated any laws at some time in the past. We don’t know if you have and have no reason to think you have except your neighbor called and said he thinks you may or may not have broken some law, sometime, so we’re going to check.
I Suppose I’ll stop saying ‘last time I checked this is still a free country’ because it isn’t
“Pretty chilling if the courts are going to allow law enforcement to ignore the 4th amendment.”
The Virgin Islands AG withdrew its fishing request, when it was challenged in court.
The demands on Epstein will also be challenged in court.
Don’t count the courts out as being a neutral party in this yet.
AG Healey’s case against Epstein looks particularly weak.
What law says a non-governmental entity has to keep files longer than 7 years ?
i.e. “the ends justify the means”. Where have we heard that one before?
I found this statement ( last 2 paragraphs in the article) very important.
“Climate change campaigners argue the seriousness of the issue means extreme measures are warranted, but the exact opposite is the case,” the Financial Times editorial board wrote in response to the Exxon investigation.
“It is precisely because the stakes are so high that all arguments must be heard. The actions by the attorney-generals can only degrade the quality of that debate,” they wrote.
I hope no one loses sight of that.
Yeah, whatever! Except the stakes they claim are so high are so distorted that they have it backwards. Doing what they want would be the disaster.
People claim the moon landings were faked and we don’t put them in jail. People wear tinfoil hats and we don’t put them in jail. Politicians and pundits argue both sides of issues all day long and one side (or both) must be wrong–and we don’t put them in jail.
The fake claim against Exxon is that there was systemic risk to their shareholders from climate change legislation and/or a potential harm to the public–but as a corporation the law requiring disclosure of regulatory risks is only a few years old, and they complied with this law. If a corp complains too much that they are at risk from regulations, the gov takes revenge on them and their stock tanks. As far as harm to the public, Exxon had no secret knowledge on this topic and actually funded basic research at universities which was published.
The persecution is actually becoming real, but it doesn’t show up in ways that are actionable.
You suddenly find you can’t get fire insurance. It used to be you might find you couldn’t get affordable health insurance but now its something that threatens your mortgage, which is a threat to your home. For one reason or another your building plans were rejected by the local zoning board. It goes on and on.
When the government begins turning on you they’ll use the simplest paths first, the ones they already regulate to the point of total control; insurance.
Clifford Simak wrote a book, it was titled “The Syndic” back in the 1950s. Anyone really interested in the structure of the US political machine should read it. It’s a humorous and condescending view. A more mature treatment of the situation we all face would be John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider”, a book that very accurately describes the society we live in today, and concludes (spoiler alert) that organized crime has taken over our government.
“Climate change campaigners argue the seriousness of the issue means extreme measures are warranted…”
Are we proposing waterboarding with this? What exactly is meant by “extreme measures”?
“Healey claims the investigation is to determine if Exxon misled the public and shareholders about the risks of global warming.”
I am an Exxon shareholder and I was not misled. I have a full understanding of the issues surrounding the use of fossil fuels and the potential impact on global environment.
In my informed and considered opinion, I have no reason to believe the release of carbon dioxide by humans has a deleterious effect on life in any way. I have some reason to believe the release of carbon dioxide benefits life. For that reason alone I support Exxon and I will continue using fossil fuels.
I suppose I missed [an] end italic marker. It there’s anyone (mod. Please? I promise to never bad mouth you again?) out there who might correct that oversight I might promise to never, ever make comments about your mother again?
Missed an. I missed “an” not “and” italic marker.
And why are we still doing this? Write a letter to WordPress? Yank them kicking and screaming into the 21st century? Please? You have a very big and influential blog. Can we get an Edit button? Would that be so hard?
Please delete the comment above after you’ve read it.
Thanks,
Bartleby.
The seriousness of the issue…. the enemy is at the gates, democracy doesn’t work, we need a dictatorship. And as proof look at all the people arguing for the enemy. It’s an emergency, we need extreme measures to silence the opposition. Shadham Hussein was buying nuclear material to build a bomb. Persuing weapons of mass destruction. And if you said that wasn’t true, you were a traitor.
You don’t think there isn’t a price to pay. Lies have a way of destroying people, families and their children. I’m well acquainted with people who twist, distort, and out right lie. Was Iraq worth one American life? And the result went so well too. Instead of a puppet we have ISIS.
I quote: “Sulverglate…. reacting to a subpoena issued Wednesday by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, demanding ExxonMobil turn over 40 years of records, including records regarding prominent conservative think tanks…calls it pure harassment. “…
Clearly, Healy at this point has no data except unverified, undisclosed charges from liberal news outlets or think tanks. In contrast to such undisclosed charges the evidence is strong that climate predictions based on computer models created by climate warming advocates are a complete fabrication designed to make us believe that there is more warming than there actually is. This has huge consequences for global climate policy It demonstrably qualifies as pseudo-science –- using the language of science to promote a non-existent trend.
It all started with James Hansen in 1988 when he presented four computer models of future climate to the Unites States Senate. Three of them were hypotheticals demonstrating how wonderfully lowered carbon dioxide will reduce global warming. The fourth one he called “business as usual.” He calculated it out from 1988 to to 2019. It was an attempt to tell us how bad climate would be if atmospheric carbon dioxide created by humans were allowed to accumulate. From the start, his predicted temperature was always higher than the actually observed temperature was. In some years it was as much as half a degree or higher than observed. Compare this to total warming of only 0.85 degrees for the entire length of the period from 1880 to 2012.
You might think that later introduction of new and better equipment might improve on Hansen’s results but this is not the case. Supercomputers that could handle one million lines of code were supplied to them but there was no noticeable improvement – their predictions were still chronically high. This has been going on for 26 years now. A commercial outfit with an unmitigated failure record would have been shut down long before it even got this far. But global warming management at IPCC is apparently happy. These results are passed on to their political supporters as latest science and are then used it to justify their need for megabucks (or terabucks?) to run their “mitigation” efforts and their international climate funds. This has become a huge profit-making enterprise with a customer base consisting of over 200 nations who were cajoled into signing up for the Paris conference promises.
All I can say about this is that their propaganda machine is a Joseph Goebbels-quality propaganda machine. You may not know this but once he understood that the Third Reich was really kaput he and his wife killed their own young children and then committed suicide. That is history but the computer-predicted climate models are ln front of us now. They need to be shut down urgently to prevent the continuation of the (now) 26 years old global warming model fraud.
I am going to suggest to Maura Healy that she should give up her wild goose chase that these think tank people lured her into and instead concentrate on investigating the management of the global warming models if she wants to be constructive in the global warming area.