Exxon Mobil attorneys pushed back hard against Democratic New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in court, accusing him of manufacturing an email scandal involving Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to gain publicity for his failing climate change investigation, according to court documents filed in New York.
“To date, Exxon Mobil has produced more than 2.4 million pages of documents in connection with the [New York attorney general’s] climate-change investigation and has worked diligently to respond to [Schneiderman’s] extraordinarily broad and, in our view, often unreasonable and improper, investigative demands,” the lawyers said in a letter to the Supreme Court of New York Thursday night. “So far the NYAG has found no evidence of the far-flung campaign to mislead the public [on climate change] that he routinely claims has been going on for decades.”
Schneiderman made headlines this week when he filed a letter with the state court, making the argument that Tillerson used an email alias, “Wayne Tracker,” to disguise conversations about climate change when he was CEO of the company. He explained that gaining access to those emails is necessary to the attorney general’s investigation.
Schneiderman “now suggests that a single email account might house the evidence that his 18-month investigation has yet to uncover,” Exxon attorneys told the court Thursday. “The suggestion is preposterous. If the Wayne Tracker account was used to communicate with other Exxon Mobil executives about climate change, those emails would reside in the accounts of the other executives. But the NYAG nowhere claims that the emails he has seen involving the Wayne Tracker account are of any significance whatsoever.”
The attorney general has been subpoenaing the oil giant for documents related to climate change for more than a year based on news reports that the company had covered up its own internal findings that showed global warming, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, posed a significant risk to its business. The company adamantly denies the allegations.
“The fact that Mr. Tillerson used two email accounts was readily apparent from documents produced in this matter over the past year,” the company told the court Thursday. “While there is nothing improper about using more than one account to organize and prioritize emails, it is entirely improper for the attorney general to raise this issue for the first time in a letter filed publicly with the court.
“Not only did that letter violate this court’s requirement that parties attempt to resolve disputes before bringing them to the court, it has unfairly prejudiced Exxon Mobil in the eyes of the public based on sensational coverage in the press. A simple question about subpoena compliance should not have been handled this way.”
Schneiderman is trying to prove that the company, by not disclosing its own internal findings on climate change, defrauded its shareholders and the public. The letter that he sent to the court on March 13, disclosing Tillerson’s email alias, was covered by most news networks and gained widespread coverage. Exxon said Schneideman’s claims that the email was used to hide conversations was completely untrue. The email address was used to traffic priority conversations and message to him while he was CEO. Tillerson’s middle name is Wayne.
“Obtaining publicity, not information, appears to have been the real goal of the NYAG’s March 13 letter,” Exxon attorneys told the court. “Such an approach does not serve the productive resolution of discovery disputes, but it does serve the NYAG’s well-established preference to litigate his case in the press rather than court. That objective also explains the NYAG’s decision to portray an innocuous business practice unfairly and inaccurately as a sinister effort to withhold information.”
Exxon pointed out that emails from the Wayne Tracker account began being sent to Schneiderman more than a year, and to insinuate anything different goes against legal procedure.
Industry officials said the point of the letter is to demonstrate that the company is complying with Schneiderman’s subpoena requests and that the attorney general’s actions come from a place of “political grandstanding.” They hope the court will see it their way.
But Schneiderman’s office has trouble with what Exxon is stating in the letter. His office pointed out in an email that the March 13 letter to the court was meant to underscore where the company was lacking in its response to the subpoena.
His office pointed out to the Washington Examiner that out of the hundreds of thousands of documents Exxon has produced, only 160 are emails from management.
“More than 16 months after receiving our subpoena, Exxon is just now admitting it may not have preserved or produced the emails of its former CEO, who used an alias email account,” said Amy Spitalnick, the AG’s press secretary. “We look forward to addressing these, and the other issues our letter raised, in court.”
The Exxon attorneys appeared to brush off any such explanation of Schneiderman’s intent in their letter to the court. They suggest there is ample evidence that it was an orchestrated attempt at publicity.
“Predictably, Exxon Mobil received press inquiries within minutes of receiving the NYAG’s letter, and advocacy groups allied with [Schneiderman] in his campaign against the company quickly issued press releases denouncing Exxon Mobil’s purported misdeeds, going so far as to suggest that the Wayne Tracker account was used to conceal information about climate change,” the attorneys said.
“The facts, as known to the NYAG, come nowhere near supporting such allegations,” the lawyers said. “And ultimately, no amount of distortion and dissembling can distract from the NYAG’s failure to develop any evidence supporting the allegations he has been pressing for the last year and a half.”
