Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and other left-wing lawmakers wrote a letter Thursday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch thrashing GOP efforts to block an investigation into ExxonMobil over fraud charges.
Sanders’ letter, which was co-authored by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, suggests that Republican efforts to stymie the investigation “reprises the tobacco lawsuit’s own early history of efforts from Congress to discourage or interfere with that lawsuit in order to protect the tobacco industry.”
Sanders and the others were responding to a letter written by Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, and David Vitter of Louisiana, as well as David Purdue of Georgia slamming what they called witch hunt against Exxon.
They called the investigation against the oil company nothing more than an infringement of Exxon’s First Amendment rights.
“These actions provide disturbing confirmation that government officials at all levels are threatening to wield the sword of law enforcement to silence debate on climate change,” the GOP lawmakers’ letter to Lynch reads.
“As you well know, initiating criminal prosecution for a private entity’s opinions on climate change is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and an abuse of power that rises to the level of prosecutorial misconduct,” the senators added.
Sanders and Warren call the Republican’s free speech argument nonsense.
The First Amendment argument, Warren and Sanders explain, was soundly rejected by the Department of Justice and by the United States D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal back in the 1980s when lobbyists used it to protect the tobacco industry from investigation.
“It has always been and remains good law that fraud is not protected by the First Amendment,” the letter reads. “It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their fraud.”
Sanders and Warren’s letter also accuses Cruz and Lee of being shills for the fossil fuel industry, writing that their letter has all the “same earmarks” of one written and dictated by oil companies like Exxon.
“There has been an outburst of editorial opinion against investigation that has significant earmarks of orchestration: the posts and editorials almost all confuse criminal and civil investigation; they almost all fail even to mention the tobacco lawsuit; they all have only one or two degrees of separation from the fossil fuel industry and its climate denial outlets; and they refuse to acknowledge the settled law that fraud is not protected by the First Amendment,” the Democratic senators’ letter states.
Lynch told a Senate committee in March that the Justice Department had discussed the possibility of investigating global warming skeptics after Democrats floated the idea in 2015.
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