The environmentalist Sierra Club announced today that they would be hiring Al Armendariz as a top official for their Beyond Coal campaign, which aims to get people to stop using the black, lumpy stuff.
If the name rings a slight bell for political junkies, that’s because Armendariz was the star of a recent controversy back at his previous job with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Armendariz was caught on film in 2010 laying out the federal agency’s theory of law enforcement thusly:
He went on to say that the process was to “find people who are not complying with the law and you hit ‘em as hard as you can and you make examples out of them.”
The video was unearthed by staunch EPA critic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., in April. The White House was subsequently forced to distance itself from Armendariz, calling his comments “an inaccurate way to characterize what the EPA does.” Armendariz resigned from the agency on April 30.
Inhofe offered congratulations of a sort to Armendariz: