Chris White | Energy Reporter
A Virginia-based law firm sued Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Monday for using attorneys financed by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to engage in a climate crusade against Exxon Mobil.
Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) filed the lawsuit against Healey for using two privately funded attorneys to focus on prosecuting oil and gas companies. The attorneys are paid through a $6 million grant from Bloomberg and have ties to the anti-Exxon campaign.
GAO, which is filing on behalf of Energy Policy Advocates (EPA), is seeking correspondence and documentation of the hiring and work of these attorneys. Healey, a Democrat, is a critic of President Donald Trump and has promised her constituents that she will work to prevent the president from opening up coasts for oil and gas drilling.
Bloomberg, a prominent Democratic donor, launched the Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2017 with a $6 million campaign to embed attorneys in AG offices to push back against Trump’s efforts to roll back environmental regulations.
Various AGs are reportedly using them to engage in climate lawsuits against Exxon. For instance, Gavin McCabe, a lawyer connected to Bloomberg Philanthropies, signed an amicus brief in June 2018 supporting New York City’s yearlong climate lawsuit against Exxon and Chevron. (RELATED: Bloomberg’s Climate Crusading Apparently Isn’t Enough For Some Enviros)
Critics believe Bloomberg uses his group as a type of pass-through entity through which donors can support elected officials with resources that legislatures will not provide and which donors cannot legally provide directly. Much of his money targeting oil companies goes through Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Timothy Cornell, an attorney representing EPA, said agreements between private parties and the attorney general should be made public. “I’m not anticipating anything specific in these agreements. All I know is that the public should know what’s in them,” Cornell said to the Boston Herald. “The public should know what’s going on with their government.”
Healey’s office has not responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Mikey Bloomberg has an obsessive compulsive disorder with respect to climate. Unfortunately, he also has a near-bottomless checkbook and what is essentially a private broadcast platform that he uses to promote his opinion. He is the very definition of a limousine liberal.
He is pretty much against everything including the U.S. Constitution. Life Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness are his enemies.
Except for HIS Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Four weeks ago he was laying into Trump for the high oil price.
Today he is laying into Trump for the low oil price.
His sense of logic rivals that of OAC.
Bloomberg is probably smarting from losses trying to manipulate oil prices through his financial entities. Major banks and investment houses are pulling away from crude speculation as they find it is too volatile and market forces much bigger than they are impact the price of crude making it hard to control and milk for profits. What a shame for them. Thus Bloomberg bitches when prices rise or fall outside of his control and he doesn’t make the massive profits he wants for himself.
Nice theyve been sued and outed though;-) alittle sunshine on the undead might work wonders;-)
The suit asks the court to force the release of public records. link It doesn’t seek monetary damages except costs.
IMHO, it’s a bit sleazy that people give their organizations acronyms like EPA and GAO. It makes it seem like the government is doing something which is, in fact, being done by private parties.
Given the Democrat/Republican split on support for CAGW, it would be nice if a court would acknowledge that the issue is more about politics than about science.
“Gutfeld on Elizabeth Warren’s apocalyptic climate change rhetoric”
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6045022837001/#sp=show-clips
Over the years, legislating the allowance of the U.S. government to use propaganda has been expanded from countering foreign propaganda to active use on citizens for the purpose of promoting agendas.
“Public service” announcements from the National Ad Council are in many cases beneficial. However, it is particularly insidious that news organizations are told what to report and they are paid for doing so for what amounts to be brain washing.
“Public service” announcements from the National Ad Council are in many cases
beneficialsimplistic and insult the intelligence of most normal people.FIFY.
If I were too stupid not to know you shouldn’t text and drive in the first place, why would a stupid radio ad telling me not to text and drive all of a sudden get my attention?
OH MY, I never thought it was dangerous to text and drive, but that ad I just heard on the radio sure set me straight! I’ll never text and drive again! But I can’t wait to get home so I can play indoor baseball with avocados. 🙂
It is very interesting how in the USA the government is literally at the beck and call of the people. Revealing contracts between private persons or organisations and the government is unusual in many countries.
A government “of the people” is very different from a government of one party in which the government and its ruling party treat the people as an enemy to be fooled and manipulated.
To the extent the employees of government are accountable to the people as a whole, the people can demand action and correct a busy and misuse.
The law suit in this case is the public protecting their interests against the possible manipulation of the government system by an individual – something to be abhorred.
This case we need to watch as well.
I keep hoping that Mikey’s ego will get so big, he’ll blow up like a blimp; and the last anyone will see of him will be when he’s carried aloft over the Atlantic.
Then he could join the other great Bloviator Al the Goracle
It sounds like a criminal conspiracy to me.
Socialist billionaires should not be able to buy their own personal prosecuting attorney in the State Attorney General’s Office to do their bidding.
State Attorneys General should not be engaging in partisan political prosecutions paid for by socialist billionaires.
Where’s the DOJ and the FBI in all this?
Agreed, Tom. The imposition of large private money by-passes the legislative control of the purse. It also serves biased policing, and seems a very dangerous trend.
RICO??
Excerpted from above article:
Call it what it is, ………. a bribe, …….. not a grant, ……. and prosecute both Bloomberg and Healey.
If someone gives something directly to a public official, that’s bribery. I think where I live it’s illegal for any public official to take a gift worth more than ten bucks. That’s not what happened here though. The AG wasn’t personally enriched.
In some jurisdictions, it is legal for private parties to assist the public prosecutor. example In such cases, there is no upper limit on the amount of money that the AG’s department can accept. So, whether or not something illegal happened depends entirely on the state laws involved.
The lawsuit isn’t alleging that there was any illegal activity, it just asks for proper disclosure of what was going on.
A bit off topic – I was heartened to hear the following from President Trump:
commieBob, your example doesn’t analogize private funding of public Attorneys General to pursue biased prosecutions.
commieBob – June 6, 2019 at 6:13 am
cBob, this was excerpted from your cited “example”, to wit:
commieBob, that is all well and good in the case of “crime victims”, …….. but there is really no way in hell that you or anyone else can claim that Blumberg and/or his Philanthropies are “crime victims” of any global warming crime(s) that involved the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere by oil and gas companies, …… namely Exon/Mobile, ……. SIMPLY BECAUSE, …… there is/was no such crime that has been previously determined by politicians or Officers of the Court, …….. but on the contrary, ……the literal fact is, the $6 million “bribe” money given by Michael Bloomberg to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey was specifically meant for the AG to persuade a Jury that a “crime” had been committed based solely on, per se, paid “expert opinions” and nothing else. No facts, no evidence, no proofs, ……. just hearsay claims of associations, correlations, insinuations, etc.
commieBob, as far as I’m concerned, Bloomberg was bribing the NY AG, ……. but was just legally donating to the non-profit Sierra Club, to wit:
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/06/05/trump-unmoved-by-prince-charless-appeal-on-climate-change/23742485/
Trump unmoved by Prince Charles’s appeal on climate change
Yahoo News
Dylan Stableford
Jun 5th 2019 2:09PM
During his three-day state visit to the United Kingdom, President Trump had scheduled a 15-minute meeting about climate change with Prince Charles, a noted environmentalist.
The meeting went on for 90 minutes. And Trump, a noted climate change skeptic who once called global warming a “Chinese hoax,” was apparently unmoved.
“I believe there is a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways,” Trump told Piers Morgan in an interview that aired on “Good Morning Britain” Wednesday. “Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming; that wasn’t working, then it’s called climate change, and now it’s called extreme weather.”
Trump cited the recent spate of deadly tornadoes in the United States. The president argued that the country has seen extreme weather before.
“Forty years ago, we had the worst tornado binge we’ve ever had,” Trump said. “In the 1890s, we had our worst hurricanes.”
end except
It sounds to me like Trump is up on all the nuances of the CAGW hoax. He must read WUWT. 🙂
When Trump says the weather changes “both ways” what he means is the weather gets cold for a while and then the weather gets warm for a while. “Up and down” is another way he has described it. No Hockey Sticks for Trump!
Government for hire is back. It’s the new gangs of NY.
Nanny Mayor anti-Big Gulp is also funding multiple US Senate races for Democrats.
In Arizona, he’s putting money behind former-astronaut Mark Kelly’s bid to defeat Senator McSally via PACs that will attack her as Trump supporter.
Most of what is motivating him is his anti-2nd Amendment fervor. Of course the Billionaire travels with armed security wherever he goes in public. Bloomberg is the typical rich elitist who loves to tell others how he wants them to live. And I suppose doesn’t like having to sharing fossil fuel he needs for his private jets with us plebes.
When he was mayor of a US city, NYC, he fought against the 2nd Amendment. He even, as a mayor, sent “agents” to a gun show in another state in an effort to shift the blame for NYC”s high murder rates from NYC’s useless and ineffective gun control laws to … anywhere else but them.
Now he’s focused on the Green Gangrene agenda.
Hmmm …. I wonder if there’s a common goal?
It isn’t that NYC/NYS gun laws are ineffective per se, it’s that the DA’s office won’t prosecute offenders who use guns in the commission of a crime for the gun offense, which is usually charged separately.
Impeachment now!
A criminal probe is in order.
Even rich people can be complete morons .
These climate charlatans need to explain how a trace gas represented a fraction of 1% can be manipulated
to control the earth temperature within 1 degree .
You would think it would be impossible to pull a con-job this big off but one look
at today’s media explains a lot .
The climate bed wetter climate industry gets away with it because the media and scientists are bought but they are losing as the predictions of doom enter the nut stage .