A pact among Democratic state attorneys general investigating Exxon Mobil’s climate change strategy may have been crumbling from its start, the free-market group Energy & Environment Legal Institute said Friday, disclosing new emails showing evidence that the coalition is weakening.
The E&E Legal Institute said it obtained new emails that show the pact led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had been unraveling for months.
The conservative group, which has been waging a campaign to expose Schneiderman, said the emails “offer further insight into the collapsed support” for the New York attorney general’s “ever-shifting #ExxonKnew investigation.”
The New York attorney general started an investigation with 18 other state attorneys general earlier in the year based on news reports that the oil company covered up studies by its own scientists detailing the harm climate change would cause its business.
The attorneys general subpoenaed the company and several conservative think tanks asking for years of documents and communication records on the issue of climate change.
E&E Legal has been releasing documents and emails it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests for several weeks to expose the political nature of Schneiderman’s investigation and its unraveling after Exxon and the think tanks began pushing back in the courts.
The records suggest that the coalition lost members “to fear of scrutiny” from the media and the public, E&E Legal said. “They also show AG offices seemingly getting back at each other over self-serving, improperly selective releases.”
The emails show Delaware’s attorney general seeking to disassociate from Schneiderman soon after being asked to join the coalition by signing a common interest agreement. In a May email, the Delaware attorney general declined to join the effort by saying he would not sign the agreement. The group said Delaware declined to join the effort after Schneiderman’s office had included the state as part of the initial bloc of AGs involved in the climate investigation.
“Our AG has determined that Delaware will not be involved in this worthy effort, and thus will not be signing the common interest agreement,” Delaware Deputy Attorney General Ralph Durstein III wrote in a May 9 email to the offices involved.
“What had changed in those few short weeks?” E&E Legal asked. The group said Durstein was writing specifically in response to new notices of Freedom of Information requests coming to the attorneys general from media and others, asking for documents related to the Schneiderman-inspired investigations.
Soon after, U.S. Virgin Islands’ Attorney General Claude Walker began curtailing his probe, which had gone after the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute by issuing it a subpoena for years of documents and emails related to climate change.
The emails show Schneiderman organized the effort “really to provide the appearance of broader support for his own individual overreach,” said Chris Horner, senior legal fellow for E&E Legal.
The emails provide further evidence that Schneiderman’s “supposed coalition” was “doomed from the start,” Horner said.
