Yesterday’s court decision suspending Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s moratorium on deepwater oil exploration has drawn fire because of past and possible current stock holdings by the presiding federal judge, Martin Feldman, in oil services companies. (UPDATE: As it turns out, the judge sold the stocks.) But considering the arguments Salazar submitted to the court, and their apparent contradiction with his earlier public statements, the ruling is not terribly surprising.
On June 10, Salazar had been forced to apologize for falsely implying that experts who peer-reviewed a Safety Report on the Deepwater Horizon rig’s explosion had endorsed his recommendation of a six-month deep-water drilling moratorium. In fact, the experts had never seen the recommendation, which was added after their involvement came to an end.
But the very next day, on June 11th, Salazar cited those experts once again in federal court documents defending the drilling moratorium.
In the June 11 court filing, Salazar’s legal team invoked the “Safety Report,” stating that it had been:
In the same document, Salazar noted that “the Safety Report came up with ten pages of specific recommendations” necessary to ensure safe drilling, again implying that the recommendations had been “prepared with the benefit of consultations with experts…” In the report, even before listing those ten recommendations, Salazar recommended the moratorium as the primary response to the oil spill. Its inclusion next to the expert recommendations provided this maneuver with a patina of scientific credibility.
This was Salazar’s argument to the Court, even though he had already apologized for presenting the Safety Report as though its recommendations had been peer-reviewed by experts. The filing came after the experts’ complaints:
Judge Feldman, in his ruling against Salazar yesterday, noted the contradiction between Salazar’s apology and his court finding:
