A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming one of the attorneys general targeting Exxon Mobil is hiding information connecting the investigation to environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer.
The Free Market Environment Law Clinic (FME) filed a lawsuit against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office for allegedly withholding Freedom of Information Law requests. The group alleges the New York Democrat denied them public records relating to Steyer’s possible involvement in the probes.
“We believe that the citizenry has a right to know whether political activist billionaires like Tom Steyer are setting the agenda of the New York Attorney General’s Office,” David Schnare, E&E Legal’s general counsel, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a press statement.
He added: “The public also has a right to know if indeed political donors arranged for AGs to work with activists they support to promote their agenda.”
Schneiderman kick-started his campaign against Exxon in November, “demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents” from the oil producer dating all the way back to the 1970s. Several other attorneys general, including fellow Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, have leaped on board the inquisition since that time.
FME Law and several other groups asked Schneiderman’s office for records reflecting meetings it had last fall with the former billionaire Democratic donor and his lawyer Ted White.
The New York attorney general’s office withheld almost all of the responsive records, divulging 23 pages of press clippings, according to a press statement announcing the lawsuit. The Democrat’s office withheld all relevant correspondence as “privileged.”
The investigations are based on reports by liberal-leaning media outlets InsideClimate News and Columbia University – the reports claim Exxon has known the risks of global warming for decades but kept such knowledge under raps.
The media have applauded InsideClimate News in the past despite the fact that the outlet’s chief benefactor, the billionaire Rockefeller Family Fund, colluded with several environmentalist groups to take the oil company.
Steyer, for his own part, has waged his own crusade against Exxon, directing his political action committee NextGen Climate Action to hold a rally in April to push New Hampshire’s Attorney General Joseph Foster to take up the anti-Exxon message.
NextGen is also calling on the attorney general “to find the truth about whether Exxon Mobil intentionally misled the public about the risk climate change and fossil fuels pose to our communities,” according to a press release.
Schneiderman managed to rake in $264,000 in campaign donations from well-heeled people with ties to lawyers and environmentalists backing the Democratic prosecutor’s global warming investigation.
Democratic moneyman George Soros and his family, for instance, have shoveled $251,000 into Schneiderman’s political war chest since 2006. Soros himself has given the New York attorney general $64,500, while his sons and daughter-in-law donated the rest.
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