Activists released more than 7,500 emails Wednesday that they say showed the fossil fuel industry’s influence over new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The emails were released by the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office Tuesday night in compliance with an emergency court order issued Thursday. Pruitt was the state’s attorney general until Friday, when he was sworn in as the nation’s 14th EPA administrator.
The bulk of the emails was sent to the Center for Media and Democracy, which petitioned the court after waiting two years for the emails to be released by Pruitt’s former office under normal public release channels.
“The newly released emails reveal a close and friendly relationship between Scott Pruitt’s office and the fossil fuel industry, with frequent meetings, calls, dinners and other events,” said Nick Surgey, the research director for the group, vowing to continue to press Pruitt’s office to release all communications between the new EPA chief and the energy industry.
The 7,564 emails that were released are only a small portion of what the group had requested over the last two years.
“We will keep fighting until all of the public records involving Pruitt’s dealings with energy corporations are released — both those for which his office is now asserting some sort of privilege against public disclosure and the documents relevant to our eight other Open Records Act requests,” Surgey said.
Democratic senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee had petitioned the court in Oklahoma to order the records released in the run-up to Pruitt’s confirmation vote last week. The Democrats attempted to use the court order to delay the vote until after they had time to sort through the emails.
But the Republican leadership ignored the requests, saying Pruitt had answered hundreds of questions and complied with the Senate confirmation process.
The top Democrat on the environment committee, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said he was disappointed that the leadership did not wait for the emails to be released before holding the vote confirming Pruitt.
The group released the emails on Wednesday, one day after Pruitt served his first day as administrator of the EPA.
It is not clear how the Democrats will use the emails now that Pruitt is serving as administrator. They had argued that it was necessary to have the emails for senators to have all the facts on the former Oklahoma attorney general’s dealings with the industry.
The Center for Media and Democracy’s general counsel, Arn Pearson, said there was no excuse for the emails not being released before the Senate vote. Doing so would have given lawmakers a chance “to assess Pruitt’s ties to the fossil fuel industry,” Pearson said.
The group pointed out a few emails that it said showed how fossil fuel trade groups successfully influenced the former attorney generals positions on several issues, including opposition to the Renewable Fuel Standard, the EPA’s program that requires ethanol and other biofuels to be added to diesel and gasoline.
The group said the emails showed that the oil and gas lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers “coordinated opposition in 2013 to both the Renewable Fuel Standard Program and ozone limits with Pruitt’s office.”
Although the refinery group “was making its own case against the RFS with the American Petroleum Institute, it provided Pruitt with a template language for an Oklahoma petition, noting ‘this argument is more credible coming from a state,'” the group said. “Later that year, Pruitt did file opposition to both the RFS and ozone limits.”
The group also underscored an email from fracking giant Devon Energy, which showed the company helped Pruitt “draft language that was later sent by Pruitt to the EPA about the limiting of methane from oil and gas fracking.”
“In 2013, Devon Energy organized a meeting between Scott Pruitt, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and coal industry lawyer Paul Seby to plan the creation of a ‘clearinghouse’ that would ‘assist [attorneys general] in addressing federalism issues,'” the group said of the emails it received. “Melissa Houston, then Pruitt’s chief of staff, emailed Devon Energy saying ‘this will be an amazing resource for the AGs and for industry.'”
The emails do not purport to show anything illegal on the part of Pruitt and his office over the meetings and discussions included in the emails. The group does say that last week’s court decision shows that the attorney general office’s withholding of the records was in “violation of the state’s Open Records Act for improperly withholding responsive public records and ordered his office to release thousands of emails in a matter of days.”
Carper underscored that point in a statement before the Senate voted on Pruitt’s nomination, saying the judge scolded Pruitt’s office for its “abject failure” in abiding by the state’s public records law.
