Al Armendariz, the Environmental Protection Agency official who resigned after video showed him saying regulators should “crucify” oil and gas companies, refused to testify at today’s House hearing.
Armendariz informed the House Energy and Power Subcommittee through his attorney yesterday afternoon that he would not testify at the hearing on his comments, despite previously agreeing to do so.
Recommended Stories
“Why, several weeks after he had agreed to testify, did he retain counsel and withdraw?” House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in his prepared remarks at the hearing today. “The EPA did not make a witness available to appear alongside Dr. Armendariz today. Did the Obama administration urge him not to appear?”
Today’s hearing was prompted by video of Armendariz explaining his enforcement of oil and gas industry regulations. “It’s kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them and then, you know, that town was really easy to manage over the next few years,” he said in 2010.
In March, another EPA official told a Yale University assembly that his agency’s chief, Lisa Jackson, had adopted an emissions standard that will effectively require coal towns to “just go away.”
