Source: https://cei.org/AGclimatescheme?utm_source=akdart
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 02:47:23+00:00

Document:
The intent is for those attorneys to advance the donors’ and large environmental advocacy groups’ “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental” policy agenda3 and—according to at least one OAG application—expressly to assist in pursuing the same agenda’s political opponents. In practice, this is a case of law enforcement for hire.
The roadmap for this campaign was laid out by activists and donors in 2012.4 Then in 2016, several state attorneys general (AGs) joined the campaign, which accelerated after that year’s elections. Public record requests looking into how such sensitive offices came to be used this way revealed that, since at least mid-2015, this use of law enforcement underwritten by private donors had secretly involved activist pressure groups, which are working in close coordination with donors and serving as the state AGs’ backroom strategists and partners.
After collapse of an early “informal coalition” of AGs—formed in the spring of 2016 to make desired climate policies become “reality”—in late 2017, another major donor, Bloomberg, announced his plan to use AG offices by privately funding the special AGs program. This expansion extends the model of off-the-books governance detailed by Carol and company from executive offices (such as mayors and governors) to AGs with law enforcement powers.
This approach represents an elaborate, deliberate plan to politicize state law enforcement offices in the service of an ideological, left-wing, climate policy agenda that has been frustrated by the democratic process. Under this scheme and deviating from standard government contracting procedures, private parties with an express policy advocacy agenda can pay to place activist investigators and lawyers in state AG offices to pursue that agenda.
Finally, as if to leave no doubt about the extent of this capture of law enforcement by activist donors, some of those chief law enforcement offices sent attorneys—some at taxpayer expense and others accepting payment of their travel expenses from a green advocacy group—to participate in a briefing on “Potential State Causes of Action against Major Carbon Producers” for prospective funders of the same environmentalist group.
THE MODUS OPERANDI THAT WE have found entails using nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors support elected officials to use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors, with resources that legislatures will not provide and which donors cannot legally provide directly. This model is being employed by activist elected prosecutors as part of this billion dollar-plus annual climate activism industry.
Across various levels of government— including mayors and governors—the bulk of the money apparently goes to pass-through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and off-the-books consultants, report writers, and public relations firms hired through an NGO, which takes a percentage as its fee (up to 24 percent in some cases).5 Another component involves privately hiring and then placing in-house, non-official personnel as advisors when they are actually employed by a donor’s group—again as a cutout.
Extending this scheme to law enforcement seeds sympathetic state AG offices with additional lawyers to pursue“progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions”—in other words, to use their offices to compensate for a political agenda’s failure through the political process.6 Even more troubling, this effort involves investigating opponents, of the climate policy agenda while using law enforcement to intimidate political opponents, seeking to silence the opposition.
The New York AG office’s successful application to the donors’ pass-through for two privately funded attorneys also shows that one objective is to provide personnel to its effort to extract financial settlements from those opponents. Recent practice suggests that the settlements will be distributed in part among political constituencies.
A public relations aide to serve those AGs; emails suggest that this approach also involves providing a media firm based in California to promote the AGs’ efforts.
This model of donors using non-profit groups as pass-throughs to make specific hires and to perform specific jobs, which now extends to the de facto contracting out of law enforcement to private interests, raises concerns beyond mere political opportunism, obvious appearances of impropriety, or even compliant 501(c)3s seemingly renting out their tax-exempt status on behalf of activist donors.7 The use of this approach by AGs carries legal, ethical, and constitutional implications for the integrity of law enforcement and the constitutional policy process. The scheme that gives rise to such concerns is the subject of this paper.
role among AGs in developing the schemes laid out in this paper. In fact, Schneiderman led the precursor “informal coalition”8 of state AGs who presented, along with former Vice President Al Gore, ata March 2016 pressconferencetopublicly launch what proved to be the first attempt at using AG offices to assist the climate litigation industry in going after “Exxon specifically, and the fossil fuel industry generally.”9 That effort also resulted in a subsequently withdrawn subpoena to CEI for 10 years’ worth of records going back 20 years.
Emails obtained in open records litigation show the environmental pressure group Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) admitting, in July 2015, that it was working on OAG investigations of opponents of the climate agenda well before the AGs went public with their efforts in November of that year.
In November 2015, months after this first admission of the collaboration, Schneiderman issued his first subpoena in pursuit of that agenda.
In March 2016, Schneiderman recruited a coalition of 16 Democratic state AGs to investigate opponents of their climate political agenda, under the name “Attorneys General United for Clean Power.”11 The coalition quickly dispersed a few months later when confronted with open records law requests and negative media attention.
Schneiderman arranged for plaintiffs’ lawyer Matt Pawa and the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Peter Frumhoff to brief the AGs and Gore before their AGs United 2016 press conference—where the AGs announced their plans to pursue the investigations sought by UCS, plaintiffs’ lawyers, their partners, and their donors. Both Frumhoff and Pawa were involved early on in the campaign to find “a single sympathetic attorney general” to assist their cause by subpoenaing private parties’ records.
Schneiderman’s office provided UCS an invitation list of OAG contacts to participate in a briefing of outside parties on this collaborative climate litigation strategy, but specifically “Potential State Causes of Action” (discussing investigations and litigation the AGs might bring). The briefing included senior attorneys from AG offices in the Schneiderman-led coalition, UCS, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and their academic and activist partners.
PUBLIC RECORDS CONFIRM THAT state AGs have willingly agreed to—and following very specific instructions have pleaded for—privately funded investigators and attorneys to use AG offices in pursuit of the “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environment” policy agenda.
Frustrated by failure through the democratic process, this campaign now includes the use of law enforcement for political ends. To attain his goals, Bloomberg established the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University (NYU) School of Law, announcing that creation on August 15, 2017.14 The name itself is telling of his intent—to obtain his desired policy effects at the state level, after activists lost certain levers of power at the federal level.
A state attorney general’s office“hires” the NYU Impact Center as its attorney.
NYU also affords the AG ’s office a “pro bono” network of lawyers and a communications staffer who is dedicated to the work that the office agrees to perform.
The contract is for an attorney–client (NYU– OAG) relationship.
NYU and the OAG sign a secondment agreement to place NYU’s attorneys in the OAG to work on specified matters (“progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions”).16 OAG appoints the lawyer as e.g.“Pro bono Deputy Counsel”(see Figure 3).
NYU pays the lawyer; so far those payments range between around $75,000 and $149,483 annually.
The first recruiting letter we have found, dated August 25, 2017, was sent by David Hayes, a former aide in the Clinton and Obama administrations and a green pressure group lawyer who now carries numerous affiliations. Hayes’s emails to the AG offices indicate thatboth he and NYU’s Center are affiliated at some level with the green group Resources for the Future, out of whose Washington, DC, office he indicated he runs this Bloomberg operation.17 However, neither group lists such a relationship on its website (last viewed July 29, 2018).
Hayes sent this pitch, to place privately hired and funded“Pro Bono Special Assistant Attorneys General,”to former campaign managers and other such political aides in politically sympathetic Democratic AG offices.
There are, inarguably, ethical and constitutional issues attendant to this element of that “$1 billion per year on climate work” beyond the obvious appearance of impropriety. The arrangement offers real potential for tainting all related investigations and litigation in the event that those problems become the subject of successful challenge. The workaround of running the funding of this activism through a nonprofit cutout may or may not prove enough to save the work from being thrown out as hopelessly tainted by bias.
The following is an analysis of the scheme and discussion of some of those legal and ethical concerns, with necessary background and citing source documents.
TO BEST UNDERSTAND WHAT COULD lead not only donors and lawyers but also elected AGs to consider engaging in such a scheme, it helps to first recall what the persistent use of state freedom of information laws in 2016–2017 helped expose. Also important is the meeting at which the AGs’ first campaign to assist the climate litigation industry was hatched several years prior.
The activists were fortunate to find not one but several state AGs willing to join the campaign—at least until (apparently unanticipated) scrutiny and negative coverage began, which was prompted by open records requests into just how law enforcement offices came to be used in this way.28 In fact, the coordination exposed between green activists and a network of state AGs—in using the threat of racketeering and other investigations of the climate agenda’s political opponents— became a major topic of news coverage during 2016.
It seems likely that the AGs’ initial foray into the activists’ requested involvement fell apart in some measure because of the (also apparently unexpected) aggressive pushback from one target of an AG subpoena—CEI.
With the benefit of hindsight, the AGs’ scattering under scrutiny and facing challenge is not surprising. Correspondence shows state government officials actively trying to hide their coordination through a purported “Common Interest Agreement” from April 2016. As the name indicates, these instruments are used to protect as privileged the discussions among parties having common interests in a legal proceeding. Those agreements are common—where there is actual or reasonably expected litigation—as is required for the use of said instrument.
In the AGs’ case, there was no relevant extant or reasonably anticipated joint or common legal proceeding. Nor has there been one since. The purpose of their pact, specifically its paragraph 6, requiring consultation among AGs about responding to public record requests, was to shield from public scrutiny the otherwise public record of their efforts to defend President Obama’s global warming policy agenda and their own investigations of political opponents for alleged racketeering or financial fraud deriving from their opposition to the climate policy agenda. After an extended delay brought on by litigation, which was itself forced by stonewalling, courts have held that this arrangement offers the AGs no such shield.32 Numerous other AGs have effectively agreed with this finding, choosing not to fight that battle but instead to realease the correspondence that was purportedly shielded and in many cases withheld by their partners.
Those state-level open records productions, which revealed close orchestration with plaintiffs’ lawyers and environmental activists, proved costly to that coalition and scared off participants while discrediting said investigations. This approach, in turn, likely prompted Schneiderman and company to consider how to pursue such a political coalition while keeping the public records from the public. Critically—and as one email from NYU’s Elizabeth Klein to the Illinois OAG discussed later suggests— Bloomberg’s program aims not only to provide the activist AGs a home to get the band back together, but also to supply another bite at claiming attorney–client and “work product” privileges to shield their work going forward.
The 2016“informal coalition”in practice sought to extract three things from its targets: (a) a vow of silence, (b) a vow not to financially support other opponents of the agenda (like the subpoenaed CEI),33 and (c) a settlement fund in the hundreds of billions of dollars modeled on the tobacco master settlement agreement (MSA).
As in the tobacco MSA, this settlement, in large part, would fund more activist government and would be distributed among political constituencies.34 The same is true of any settlement obtained in the staggered series of lawsuits filed against major energy producers by coastal municipalities such as Marin County, Oakland, and San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2017; New York City in January 2018; inland liberal enclaves such as Boulder, Colorado, in April 2018; and the state of Rhode Island—home of Schneiderman coalition partner Peter Kilmartin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a major proponent of using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against political opponents—in July 2018.
The settlement fund sought by this campaign is enormous. The figure publicly bandied about is $200 billion—perhaps because that was the approximate value of the 1998 tobacco MSA providing the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ and consultants’ settlement template.37 Hydrocarbon energy, however, is a much bigger industry than tobacco.
Q. As director of the Center for Climate Change Communication, what do you do?
A: … As director, I suppose my chief job is raising the money we need to do the research, actually overseeing the research so that it is done of sufficient quality, mentoring my post docs, my students, my faculty, keeping the ship moving forward.
Q. You testified that your earlier job in that position is raising funds?
Q. You said your chief job was the quote. We can go back. Your chief job is raising money to keep it going. Is that still accurate?
A. That is probably a little too glib.... 41.
Srolovic replied: “My ask is if you speak to the reporter, to not confirm that you attended or otherwise discuss the event” (see Figure 4).
At a closed-door meeting held before the March 2016 press conference, Mr. Pawa and Dr. Frumhoff conducted briefings for assembled members of the attorneys general’s offices. Mr. Pawa, whose briefing was on “climate change litigation,” has subsequently admitted to attending the meeting, but only after he and the attorneys general attempted and failed to conceal it.
Possible reasons for keeping both advisors’ role quiet have continued to emerge with more recent record productions.
Strongly negative media attention followed the initial 2016 OAG open record productions that detailed the collaboration between green-group activists, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and AG offices. U.S. Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker, who issued the subpoena against CEI, retreated when CEI filed litigation against him for the move. Amid all of this came seemingly coordinated OAG stonewalling of further requests.
by a court to pay $66,000 in legal fees and court costs over its resulting stonewalling.
Interestingly, given follow-on lawsuits filed by cities and counties, emails suggest the April 2016 “secret meeting” among law enforcement, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and activists also included municipalities.64 Other April 2016 emails show the involvement of Steven Berman, the municipalities’ lawyer in their 2017 climate lawsuits, in the effort to recruit AGs to investigate opponents of the climate agenda.
Thanks to the court-ordered Vermont production in December 2017, we know that the meeting at Harvard also included other parties critical to the success of this briefing on a climate litigation strategy, in which AG offices participated. Although listed nowhere on the agenda, emails state that participants included donors, whose funding makes possible the collaborative, public–private partnership that is the climate litigation industry.
Given further revelations from record productions received in 2018, the claims of phantom privilege suggest apprehension over the prospect of this document’s seeing the light of day. Details were going to emerge; the only real question was when. What to do?
plaintiffs’ attorneys had been introduced to AGs by at least one major donor to make their pitch. Neither hinted that UCS paid AG lawyers’ way. Neither noted that this meeting, for which OAG attorneys flew in to assist with possible AG investigations and lawsuits, was in fact a green- group fundraiser.
The Harvard “secret meeting” agenda and correspondence indicates this session was to strategize about the private litigants’ cases but leaves no doubt that the focus was to discuss how to ensure that AGs would pursue their own investigations and litigation. The panic about releasing this agenda became more understandable after CEI received the production from Oregon State.
These AGs, led by New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts’s Maura Healy had, just weeks before the “secret meeting,” vowed at a press conference to use any means necessary to go after opponents of the political agenda, immediately following a briefing from some of the same presenters, whom the OAGs also asked to deny their role in briefing the AGs and Gore.
CEI has obtained one other relevant document from the office of California’s AG, which instigated its involvement in this campaign during the tenure of Kamala Harris, who is now a U.S. Senator. This three-page “Bios” PDF was circulated among California Department of Justice attorneys on April 27, 2016. It apparently pertains to the Harvard strategy session, but it was not withheld as privileged. The bios are of seven academic and other activist parties listed on the Harvard/ UCS/OAGs agenda. The document is headed at the top of page one: “Technical Advisors and Experts.” It is a “white paper” with no information provided regarding authorship or whom these experts advise.
WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME, WE now see where all of this was headed. As the FOIA litigation ground slowly through the state courts, a new scheme was ultimately arrived upon that gives the troubling appearance of a donor buying a seat at the law enforcement table. This is the Bloomberg “legal fellow” program described earlier and that involves having private activists funding and placing activist lawyers in law enforcement offices to “advance progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal and policy positions.”73 It offered the express inducements of a PR team and “pro bono” legal network as part of a package deal for AGs who will accept one or more privately funded “Special Assistant Attorneys General” to pursue an agreed-upon agenda.
The OAG applies to NYU for a “Special Assistant Attorney General” to be provided to it by NYU’s Center and expressly to perform work that it otherwise would not or could not do in the field of “advancing progressive clean energy, climate change, andenvironmental legal positions” unless the donor provided the resources.
Once approved, the OAG agrees to “hire” NYU, not for payment but for providing office space to the NYU employee.
NYU agrees to pay and hires a lawyer as a “Research Fellow” to act as its employee in the OAG.
NYU seconds the attorney to OAG.
First, our Center will have three full-time attorneys who will be available to provide direct legal assistance to interested AGs….
We look forward to developing a working relationship with your offices and serving as a source of ideas, materials, and contacts on these matters. In that regard, we will maintain a set of on-going relationships with advocates working in the area, and we also are identifying pro bono services that may be available to your offices on individual matters.
Second, our Center will have a full-time communications expert in the clean energy, climate, and environmental field to work with, and help leverage, the communications resources in your offices.
NYU provided state AG offices with a model job description, then worked with the OAGs to tailor it to their individual formats.
Advance clean energy and environmental legal and policy positions.
The latter is, by contract, what the AG’s office will communicate to NYU in regularly scheduled updates, as the OAG’s consideration to the donor for receiving (a) the attorneys, (b) a “pro bono” legal network for issues that particularly interest the Bloomberg operation, (c) in-house NYU legal staff, and (d) a communications aide (“legal and communications resources [through NYU] … as well as through our connections with pro bono counsel and other resources”).
have helped AGs move beyond any discomfort over potential impropriety or simply the terrible optics of signing an agreement to “[c]oordinate with the [NYU/Bloomberg] State Impact Center and interested allies on legal, regulatory, and communications efforts regarding clean energy, climate change, and environmental issues” and “[p]repare periodic reports of activities and progress to the State Impact Center” in return.
AG, the joke goes, stands for Aspiring Governor. For the same reasons, one of the most attractive aspects of this package was likely the communications function.
We noted that one of the State Impact Center’s most important tasks, from our perspective, is to deploy effective communications strategies that will draw attention to key state AGs’ initiatives in the clean energy, climate, and environmental arena.
Like the other inducements, this one raises questions under various state laws: Is this provision of outside consultants on a donor’s tab a gift? Does it violate gift limits? Are the gifts properly reported? Is it an improper benefit? Is this sort of private provision of government services unlawful in that jurisdiction, as it would be at the federal level under the Antideficiency Act—a law enacted to prevent a variety of abuses, including the bestowing of private benefits and avoiding officials incurring obligation to private parties?87 Then there are 14th Amendment and other constitutional and ethical issues are raised and described herein.
The bigger-picture questions remain: Is Michael Bloomberg (a) going to such lengths to avoid directly placing chosen lawyers in AG offices or (b) giving the money to do so directly to the offices, because he is barred from doing so? Or is the effort creating middlemen all merely due to appearances? Is this project an attempt to manufacture a “safe harbor” of attorney–client privilege in coordinating pursuit of political opponents?
And the biggest issue of all is, as Baker Hostetler’s and Cato’s Andrew Grossman suggests, “What you’re talking about is law enforcement for hire.
1. Counsel has agreed to advise OAG on the Subject Matters, including in connection with potential litigation to the Subject Matters to be brought by or involving OAG. Counsel’s engagement is limited to advising the OAG on the Subject Matters only and does not include any commitment or undertaking to appear or represent or to advise the OAG in any proceeding or litigation or to advise the OAG in any other matter, proceeding or litigation.
INTERESTED OFFICES WERE TO follow specific instructions from the NYU Center when applying, including stating what the OAGs would do about the desired areas of investigation and enforcement if a donor were INTERESTED OFFICES WERE TO provide the resources to pursue them.
Priority consideration will be given to state attorneys general who demonstrate a commitment to and an acute need for additional support on clean energy, climate change, and environmental issues of regional or national importance, such as those matters that cross jurisdictional boundaries or raise legal questions or conflicts that have nationwide applicability.
Each application, therefore, affirms that those OAGs are not merely doing what they otherwise would have done but are expressly stating that, but for the inducements, they would not do the particular work. Some were quite explicit.
As the hiring of our initial group of Law Fellows proceeds, we expect to confirm the availability of funding for additional Law Fellows, and [we] may be back in touch with you, in the hope that we might be able to reactivate your application.
progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal and policy positions.
interpreting laws and regulations; (c) providing legal advice; and (d) assisting in preparing legal notices, briefs, comment letters, and other associated litigation and regulatory documents.
energy, climate change, and environmental issues.
Ability to work with partner organizations and to help build coalitions.
The State Impact Center will not have a proprietary interest in the work product generated by the Legal Fellow during the fellowship. The State Impact Center will not be authorized to obtain confidential work product from the Legal Fellow unless the Legal Fellow has obtained prior authorization from the Legal Fellow’s supervisor at the [AG OFFICE].
Activity for the period from the beginning of the Fellowship Period until April 30, 2018, will be provided no later than May 1, 2018.
Activity for the period from May 1, 2018, through July 31, 2018, will be provided no later than August 1, 2018.
Activity for the period from August 1, 2018, through January 31, 2019, will be provided no later than February 1, 2019.
In addition to the formal reporting requirements, the [AG OFFICE] and the Legal Fellow will collaborate with the State Impact Center about clean energy, climate change, and environmental matters in which the Legal Fellow is engaged, including coordination on related public announcements.
THERE SHOULD BE LITTLE ARGUMENT over whether substituting litigation for a failed policy campaign undermines democratic governance and representative government. Similarly, it seems beyond dispute that this is not a proper use of law enforcement. It seems fairly well understood even that government should not be rallying political forces to go after opponents in court. The Washington Post in a 1999 editorial condemned the Clinton administration’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo (now New York Governor) and his effort to use his position to sue gun manufacturers.
By contract, the Bloomberg project at NYU is styled as the AGs’ attorney—paid by the donor, not the client. Some offices viewed by NYU or its benefactors as particularly important in the plan, including New Mexico and New York, were awarded two privately funded SAAGs. The AG offices, by contract, must provide regular updates to the entity paying for the SAAG, their health insurance and other benefits, and supplying the support network. By contract, the AG offices agree to provide office space and to share information with the NYU team. Nonetheless, loyalty is assured, by the same contract, to rest not with NYU but with the AG’s office.
As Andrew Grossman notes, hiring Bloomberg-funded attorneys may run afoul of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, given that the appearance that legal fellows brought on board with an OAG to pursue their private employer’s interests could have a financial interest in pursuing cases.104 The same applies to NYU providing the SAAG, a “pro bono” network of lawyers, and public relations advocacy. NYU surely would see an increase in support if its attorneys placed with AG offices achieved results in advancing “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions.” Similarly, this arrangement to pursue a funder’s policy priorities could create perverse incentives for AGs to investigate or file particular actions against certain industries or parties to keep the funding spigot flowing.
For instance, the New York OAG’s application demonstrated it warranted not one but two Bloomberg-funded lawyers by attaching a “Exhibit A (Select List of Actions”) of matters it was pursuing but for which—in order to continue,alongwithitsothercited“investigations and non-litigation advocacy” activities— “NYOAG has an acute need for environmental litigators.”105 Exhibit A covers 16 of what NYOAG says are 380 active cases handled by its Environmental Protection Bureau, and it prioritizes the sort of cases NYU’s Center cited as intending to support. The pursuit of energy companies for what NYOAG aspires to become actionable climate change offenses, and a litany of“non-litigation advocacy” or OAG Resistance activities against the Trump administration, are particularly telling.
NYOAG has an acute need for additional environmental litigators. First, the initial phase of fighting federal environmental rollbacks necessarily focused on … non- litigation advocacy. Opposing the Scott Pruitt nomination as EPA administrator, advocating the United States to remain in the Paris Climate Accord.
Applications also should identify any state- specific limitations or requirements governing the appointment of an employee paid by an outside funding source, and include a written confirmation that the attorney general has the authority to hire an NYU Fellow as a SAAG (or equivalent title).
Illinois also did not provide CEI that draft or other retainer agreement, but only the secondment agreement (“secondment” is a term used to mean temporary assignment), meaning Illinois’ AG claimed its efforts to arrange for privilege with Bloomberg’s NYU Center were themselves privileged.
the power to hire volunteer assistant attorneys general.” This initiated a theme of NYOAG calling these well- and privately compensated lawyers “volunteers;”121 the questionable nature of such a claim was apparently clear to Oregon’s AG Ellen Rosenblum, who forbade it (see infra). Indeed, the Bloomberg SAAGs most clearly are not volunteers, they are paid $228,322 per year—$78,839 (Matthew Eisenson) and $149,483 (Gavin McCabe).
These are curious assertions. Searching for some claim to permission, the New York OAG invokes a statutory provision, Executive Law Section 62, which on its face is the generic provision all state AGs possess to appoint assistant and deputy AGs, “and fix their compensation,”so long as it remains within what the legislature appropriates for the function.122 Nowhere does this supposed authority to allow donors to underwrite prosecutors on pet issues actually authorize the practice. NY OAG simply equates its authority to“fix” an attorney’s salary, within limits of what the legislature allows him, with the authority to arrange for private parties to pay that salary.
In short, this approach lies entirely outside of what section 62 envisions on its face. There is no doubt that New York’s OAG “fixed” the compensation of its two Bloomberg-funded SAAGs.124 There also is no doubt that the compensation is paid by funds from outside of those appropriated for OAG work. The entire point of the Bloomberg program, of NYOAG’s 13-page application, and of NYU’s requested attestation of OAG authority, was that these special prosecutors are not paid from the amounts authorized or appropriated by the legislature.
If the authority exists in New York to allow privately funded prosecutors, NYOAG has yet to reveal it, and ought to do so now.
Subject: Re: NYU Fellow Appointment Do not use volunteer!
Colleagues, I am pleased to announce that Steve Novick joins Natural Resources Section as a Special Assistant Attorney General, courtesy of New York University. NYU’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center sponsors a two-year fellowship under which it has hired Steve and deputed him to us. Oregon joins New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, and the District of Columbia (so far) as beneficiaries of this fellowship program. The purpose of the fellowship is to provide additional resources to state AGs’s offices in defending and promoting clean energy, climate, and environmental laws and policies.
Please monitor ALL announcements so we can be on same page. Did Steve run this by you, Fred? Are you meeting with Paul this morning? Thx.
Please talk to him about the sensitivities of this appointment and that he must communicate with you and Paul.
No, Steve did not run this by me! Paul, Kristina and I have a call this morning at 10:30.
AS NOTED, CEI AND THIS AUTHOR had previously obtained an email from George Mason University showing UCS’s Peter Frumhoff admitting in July 2015 that the group was already developing the AGs’s pursuit of opponents—months before any subpoena issued.
All of this correspondence seems to provide any supposed “missing link” between the climate industry and the AGs.
ExxonMobil’s right to do business in New York derives from a state-issued certificate of authority. The Attorney General can annul this certificate whenever ExxonMobil exceeds or abuses its authority, when the company fails to serve the “common good” or violates its duty to do no harm.
Forwarding even this jeremiad as somehow informative did not apparently diminish the donor’s standing within the Illinois OAG because emails show AG Madigan spread word of the meeting request among the senior staff ranks, and her scheduler stated that the AG would attempt to do a drop-in on the meeting. Staff members rearranged their schedules to match those of the climate lobbyists. In the end, just two of the four to five prospective presenters (plaintiffs’ lawyer Pawa and the donor Abrams) made it from that side.
AS DESCRIBED ABOVE, A LARGE cache of public records obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with others including those obtained by this author on behalf of organizations over the course of two and a half years, reveals an elaborate and years-long campaign by major left-leaning donors, green advocacy groups, and activist state AGs to politicize law enforcement in the service of the “progressive” environmental policy agenda.
This campaign has evolved from a failed model run by AGs—with the support of, at least, the Union of Concerned Scientists and some faculty allies—to a complex effort entailing privately funded, in-house activist attorneys, known as Special Assistant AGs and paid by private donors, with an apparently much larger network of attorneys and public relations specialists provided to the cause also by donors. By this means, state AGs are using law enforcement offices to advance those donors’ and environmental advocacy groups’ ideologically aligned policy agenda. Those attorneys were recruited, expressly and at least in part, to investigate and prosecute the opponents of those donors’ and green groups’ political agenda to obtain financial settlements.
This is a case of law enforcement for hire. Whether because of the scrutiny of public record requests and because of the legal and ethical implications (including for all investigations or matters tainted by the involvement of a privately funded law enforcement brought in for the purpose), it appears that at least 3 among the 10 previously eager AGs stopped short of bringing on a third-party-funded special assistant AG. This includes even offices, like Illinois’ OAG, that had already formally contracted with the nonprofit to accept the privately funded investigator/prosecutor.
The New York, Maryland, and Oregon AGs have confirmed to us that they have indeed brought on donor-funded prosecutors. Applications to NYU suggest these privately funded law enforcement officers will pursue a finite and readily identifiable set of parties who oppose a certain political agenda. Some have refused to confirm or deny their participation, while others merely seek to obscure it in apparent defiance of transparency statutes.
The extension of this billion-dollar per year climate industry to privately fund AGs to advance an expressly activist agenda and to pursue politically motivated investigations and litigation sets a dangerous precedent. It represents private interests commandeering state police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda. This scheme seeks to hijack the justice system to overturn a political agenda’s rejection through the proper democratic process.
October 3, 2017, email from Dan Carol to aides to Govs. Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, and Jay Inslee; Subject: Draft agenda, presentation, slides, and budget worksheet.
Edouard Morena, “Climate Philanthropy: The Tyranny of the 2 Percent,” Philanthropy News Digest, November 1, 2017, https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/columns/ alliance-pnd/climate-philanthropy-the-tyranny-of-the-2-percent. Marc Gunther, “The Failure of Climate Philanthropy,” NonProfitChronicles.com, March 1, 2018, https://nonprofitchronicles.com/2018/03/01/the-failure-of- climate-philanthropy/. “Climate action has been repeatedly drowned by a devastating surge and flood of money from the fossil fuel industry—nearly $2 billion in lobbying since 2000 alone.” Joe Romm, “Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill U.S. climate action, new study finds,” Center for American Progress, July 19, 2018, https://thinkprogress. org/fossil-fuel-industry-outspends-environment-groups- on-climate-new-study-231325b4a7e6/. Claims that conservative groups spend $1 billion per year on opposition to the climate agenda have improperly attributed all conservative spending as being in opposition to the climate agenda.“Without even addressing the mathematical fact that $900 million is $100 million short of the $1 billion claimed by Goldenberg, Brulle’s paper merely tabulates the total money raised by the 91 conservative think tanks for their total operations regarding all issues they address and does not break down how much of each think tank’s resources are devoted to issues such as economic policy, health care policy, foreign policy, climate policy, etc.” James Taylor, “‘Dark Money’ Funds to Promote Global Warming Alarmism Dwarf Warming‘Denier’ Research,” Forbes.com, January 2, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/ sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/02/dark-money-funds-to-promote-global-warming-alarmism-dwarf-warming-denier- research/#24cf23b6545f.
August 25, 2017, email from NYU’s David Hayes to attorney general (AG) office employees in multiple states; Subject: State Energy & Environmental Impact Center.
“Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control. Summary of the Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies,” Climate Accountability Institute, Union of Concerned Scientists, October 2012, http://www.climateaccountability.org/pdf/Climate%20Accountability%20Rpt%20Oct12.pdf.
To be detailed in a forthcoming report, “Government for Rent.”August 25, 2017, email from David Hayes to state AG offices.
August 25, 2017, email from David Hayes to state AG offices.
March 7, 2016, letter from AGs Schneiderman and William Sorrell (Vermont) to numerous Democrat AGs.
April 15, 2016, email from New York OAG’s John Oleske to staff members from numerous“informal coalition” OAGs; Subject: RE: AG Climate Change Coalition—XOM/Fossil Fuels Working Group.
See the two privilege logs making these claims at https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/ nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=3s1_PLUS_ag7V3BP6D3XR8qklcA== and https://iapps.courts.state. ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=/4gV1PMC_PLUS_ ri7oT5KbMKdnw==.
The coalition included the AGs of California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon,Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands Office of the New York Attorney General, “A. G. Schneiderman, Former Vice President Al Gore, and a Coalition of Attorneys General from across the Country Announce Historic State-Based Effort to Combat Climate Change,” news release, March 29, 2016, https:// ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-former-vice- president-al-gore-and-coalition-attorneys-general-across.
Others included Sharon Eubanks of Bordas & Bordas and Steve Berman of Hagens Berman, neither of whom attended in the end. Abrams also suggested Mark Templeton might attend. Templeton is director of the University of Chicago’s’ Abrams Environmental Law Clinic.
“‘Ending coal power production is the right thing to do,’ Mr. Bloomberg said.” Editorial, “Washington’s ‘Beyond Coal’ Blackout: Michael Bloomberg’s campaign left little spare electric capacity,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/washingtons-beyond-coal- blackout-1428706365.
Juliet Eilperin, “NYU Law Launches New Center to Help State AGs Fight Environmental Rollbacks,” Washington Post, August 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/nyu-law-launches-new-center-to-help-state-ags- fight-environmental-rollbacks/2017/08/16/e4df8494- 82ac-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html?utm_term=.fd5d7fd9a8b8.
The secondment agreement states: “The [AG OFFICE] will provide periodic reports to the State Impact Center regarding the work of the Legal Fellow. These reports will include a narrative summary, subject to confidentiality restrictions, of the work of the legal fellow and the contribution that the legal fellow has made to the clean energy, climate change, and environmental initiatives of the [AG OFFICE]. These reports will be provided pursuant to the following schedule.”“Employee Secondment Agreement between the [AG OFFICE] State Energy & Environment Impact Center at NYU School of Law,” as obtained from New York Office of the Attorney General and from others.
Eilperin, “NYU Law Launches New Center to Help State AGs Fight Environmental Rollbacks,” Washington Post.
Western Wire, “Outsourcing Government: How Deep- Pocketed Philanthropies Are Pushing Climate Policy in State Governments,” Michael Sandoval, March 9, 2017, http:// westernwire.net/outsourcing-government-how-deep- pocketed-philanthropies-are-pushing-climate-policy-in- state-governments/.
David Catanese, “Democrats Seek Blue Wave of Attorneys General,” U.S. News & World Report, July 20, 2018, https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/ articles/2018-07-20/democrats-seek-blue-wave-of- attorneys-general.
See Schneiderman New York Times interview, in which he acknowledges his shift of focus from originally claiming to investigate what ExxonMobil“knew” to investigating what it “predicts.” John Schwartz, “Exxon Mobil Fraud Inquiry Said to Focus More on Future than Past,”New York Times, August 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/08/20/science/exxon-mobil-fraud-inquiry-said- to-focus-more-on-future-than-past.html. Compare that to Justin Gillis and Clifford Krauss, “Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General,” New York Times, November 5, 2015, http:// nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/exxon-mobil-under- investigation-in-new-york-over-climate-statements.html. Those investigations, while ensnaring others such as CEI, are plainly aimed at obtaining a leading players’ agreement toward making it irresistible for settlement down the line with others.
John Schwartz, “Public Campaign against Exxon Has Roots in a 2012 Meeting,” May 23, 2016, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/science/public- campaign-against-exxon-has-roots-in-a-2012-meeting..html?_r=0.
“Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control; Summary of the Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies,” Climate Accountability Institute, Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Greetings all. Our AG has determined that Delaware will not be involved in this worthy effort, and thus will not be signing the common interest agreement,” Delaware Deputy AG Ralph Durstein wrote in a May 9, 2016, email to more than a dozen OAG aides from other states. Subject: Common Interest Agreement. Chris White, “Delaware Dem Is the Latest AG to Pull Out of RICO Case against Exxon,” Daily Caller, September 24, 2016, http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/24/ delaware-dem-is-the-latest-ag-to-pull-out-of-rico-case- against-exxon/. This email, to which the Delaware AG’s office responded, was a notification to all participants in the “informal coalition” led by Schneiderman, pursuant to this purported Common Interest Agreement, about an open records request received by the Vermont OAG. After Delaware begged off, all other participating AGs, with the exception of Massachusetts’s Maura Healey, also quietly ceased active collaboration, including Vermont.
Meeting invitation and agenda, http://eidclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Rockefeller-ExxonKnew- Strategy-Meeting-Memo-Jan-2016.pdf. Amy Harder, “Exxon Fires Back at Climate-Change Probe,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-fires- back-at-climate-change-probe-1460574535.
March 7, 2016, letter from AGs Schneiderman and Sorrell to numerous Democratic state AGs.
Decision, The State’s Motion for Summary Judgment, Superior Court of the State of Vermont, 558-9-16 Wnc, July 27, 2017; J. Teachout, “The Same Court Ordered the Release of Many More Records Purportedly Shielded,” in 349-16-9. Decision, The State’s Motion for Summary Judgment, Superior Court of the State of Vermont, December 6, 2017.
Walter Olson, “Partisan Prosecutions: How State Attorneys General Dove into Politics,” New York Post, March 30, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/03/30/partisan- prosecutions-how-state-attorneys-general-dove-into- politics/. Lachlan Markay, “Leader of Climate RICO Push Foresees Big Checks for Groups Like His,” Washington Free Beacon, May 17, 2016, http://freebeacon.com/issues/ maibach-foresees-big-checks-from-climate-rico/.
“Attorneys General Climate Change Coalition Questionnaire Responses,”, circulated among Vermont AG staff members by the New York AG office on March 25, 2016. Walker wrote that some (unspecified) part of the Hess settlement went to creating an “environmental response trust,” which would convert part of the Hess site “to solar development, we hope.” His office was also “preparing third party subpoenas,” which proved to include the subpoena of CEI for 10 years of records, going back 20 years.
Order transferring action to the S.D.N.Y, Kinkeade, J, N.D. TX, 4:16-CV-469-K, March 29, 2017.
Gabe Friedman, “Could $200 Billion Tobacco-Type Settlement Be Coming over ‘Climate Change?’” Big Law Business, June 14, 2016, https://biglawbusiness.com/ could-200-billion-tobacco-type-settlement-be-coming- over-climate-change/. The tobacco MSA involved a payout by tobacco companies of $206 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement, which seems likely where the targeted figure comes from, as opposed to any rational and calculated basis.
Heather Smith, “How Do You Make Conservatives Care about Climate Change? An Expert Shares Tips,” Grist, October 16, 2015, https://grist.org/climate-energy/how- do-you-make-conservatives-care-about-climate-change-an-expert-shares-tips. See also Lachlan Markay, “Leader of Climate RICO Push Foresees Big Checks for Groups Like His,” Washington Free Beacon, May 17, 2016; see also emails laying out this campaign at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/02/more-rico20- gmu-emails-released/.
Records are available at climatelitigationwatch.org.
Transcript pp. 4–5 at http://climatelitigationwatch.org/ horner-cei-v-gmu-rico-va-foia-maibach-deposition/.
July 31, 2016, email from UCS’s Frumhoff to Maibach, copying UCS’s Nancy Cole and Alden Meyer and their outside PR advisor Aaron Huertas; Subject: FW: Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation of the fossil fuel industry.
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman- former-vice-president-al-gore-and-coalition-attorneys- general-across. See also the transcript at https://www. courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ ExxonDepositions.pdf, Exhibit 5 at App. 64-83. The plan is “to ensure that this most important issue facing all of us, the future of our planet, is addressed by a collective of states working as creatively, collaboratively, and aggressively as possible” (transcript, p. 2), and“we intend to work as aggressively as possible” (p. 18).
J. Teachout, “Decision, Plaintiffs’ Motions for Attorney Fees and Litigation Costs,” Docket Nos. 349-6-16, 558-9-16, 450-8-17. See also Dave Gram, “Judge: Vermont Attorney General Must Pay $66,000 in Legal Fees for Records Denial,” Vermont Digger, July 4, 2018, https://vtdigger.org/2018/07/04/court-says-ag-must-pay-legal-fees-for- records-denial/.
The 96th Judicial Circuit, Judge R. H. Wallace, Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, April 24, 2018, http:// eidclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Tarrant- County-Facts-and-Conclusions.pdf.
April 20, 2016, email from Peter Frumhoff to Phil Mote, Subject: RE: 1 PM EDT/10 AM PDT: Panel Prep: Attributing Impacts to Climate Change and Carbon Producers.
Opinion and Order: ExxonMobil v. Schneiderman et. Al., SDNY Case 1:17-CV-230 (VEC), March 29, 2018, p. 40 (Caproni, J.).
March 28, 2016, email from Scot Kline to various parties in the New York OAG; Subject: Climate Change Conf. Common Interest Agreement.vt.edits.docx.
Confidential Review Draft—March 20, 2016, Potential State Causes of Action Against Major Carbon Producers: Scientific, Legal, and Historical Perspectives. Its purpose was to (a) Create a “space” for a frank exchange of approaches, ideas, strategies, and questions regarding potential state causes of action against major carbon producers and the cultural context in which such cases might be brought; (b) Share legal and scientific information having an important bearing on potential investigations and lawsuits; (c) Surface and consider key concerns, obstacles, or information gaps that may need to be addressed for investigations and lawsuits to proceed; and (d) Establish trusted and productive networks to support ongoing development of these ideas.
April 15, 2016, email from NY OAG’s John Oleske to various OAG coalition attorneys; Subject: AG Climate Change Coalition—XOM/Fossil Fuels Working Group. “All—I overlooked the conflict on 4/25 with the Harvard event — let’s use 4/27 at 3 or 4 pm as the option for that week instead, if need be.”“Shaun: I received your voice message about the conference later this month on climate change. Peter Frumhoff also mentioned it last week. I have been traveling lately. Can you send me the materials on the conference? It also would be helpful to know the list of attendees, including any states. Thanks. Scot Kline.” April 5, 2016, email from VT Deputy AG Scot Kline to Harvard Clinical instructor Shaun Goho, Subject: Voice message.
February 22, 2016, emails from Goho to Connecticut OAG’s Matthew Levine and Illinois OAG’s James Gignac; Subject: Invitation to event at Harvard Law School.
April 7, 2016, email from Goho to bcc: list; Subject: Logistics for April 25 Convening at HLS.
March 17, 2016, email from Shaun Goho to bcc: list; Subject: SAVE THE DATE—HLS/UCS Meeting on April 25, 2016, obtained from Illinois OAG.
See e.g., February 22, 2016, emails from Shaun Goho to Connecticut OAG’s Matthew Levine and Illinois OAG’s James Gignac, Subject: Invitation to event at Harvard Law School.
February 25, 2016, email from Shaun Goho to Roberta James, Maryland Office of Attorney General; Subject: Invitation to event at Harvard Law School.
April 6, 2016, email from Vermont Deputy AG Scot Kline to Harvard Clinical instructor Shaun Goho; Subject: Voice message. Subsequent developments in the climate litigation industry include the addition of municipalities initiating suits against energy companies consistent with the agenda laid out in La Jolla, beginning in summer 2017 with numerous California municipalities and followed later by inland Boulder, Colorado. The lawyer in these early suits was Steven Berman, who, emails show, was in fact involved as early as April 2016.
“Regarding other attendees from California or municipalities there, [it] is my understanding that Massachusetts, at least, [i]ntends to send a consumer protection attorney.” March 18, 2016, email from Shaun Goho to Connecticut OAG’s Matthew Levine; Subject: SAVE THE DATE—HLS/UCS Meeting on April 25, 2016. Emails produced give no indication to which discussion this was responding.
J. Teachout, Decision, The State’s Motion for Summary Judgment, Superior Court of the State of Vermont, 349-16-9 Wnc, December 6, 2017.
“Scientists, Legal Scholars Brief State Prosecutors on Fossil Fuel Companies’ Climate Accountability,” May 11, 2016, https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-frumhoff/scientists-state-prosecutors-fossil-fuel-companies-climate-accountability.
“Environmental Law [and] Policy Clinic Hosts State Discussion of Legal Theories for Climate Change Responsibility,” http://environment.law.harvard.edu/2016/05/environmental-law-policy-clinic-hosts-state-discussion-of- legal-theories-for-climate-change-responsibility/.
April 22, 2016, Philip Mote email to unknown party, Subject: [REDACTED].
March 14, 2016, email from Frumhoff to Mote; Subject: [I]nvitation to Harvard Law School—UCS convening.
April 19, 2016, email from Erin Burrows to unknown list of recipients; Subject: Technical Expert Bios as part of 4/25 materials.
Brief of Amici Curiae, Chamber of Commerce of the United States, Judicial Education Project, and Resolute Forest Products Inc., in Association of American Railroads v. Department of Transportation, et al. Resolute v. USDA, No. 1:14-cv-02103-JEB (D.D.C.).
Michael Bastasch, “‘Law Enforcement for Hire?’ Mike Bloomberg Is Paying for ‘Legal Fellows’ to Help Democratic State Attorneys Resist Trump,” Daily Caller, June 28, 2018,http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/27/bloomberg-legal-fellows-attorneys-general-offices/.
CEI received four “no records” responses to requests for records we proved did exist related to the AGs’ collective pursuit, from Illinois, Iowa, Mississippi, and New Mexico AG offices. Two of these offices then produced records, relating to the NYU venture, after being presented with copies.
Both Hayes and Klein also have @nyu.edu email accounts using their names, as well as accounts using initials and numbers for this correspondence, plus Hayes provides a Gmail account.
January 24, 2018, email from Hayes to Anderson, copying Klein; Subject: Meeting in Richmond. See also January 5, 2018, emails from David Hayes to Virginia’s Donald Anderson (different subjects) and December 6, 2017, email from Hayes to Oregon’s AG Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: Special Assistant Attorney General.
August 25, 2017, email from NYU’s David Hayes to AGO employees in multiple states; Subject: State Energy & Environmental Impact Center.
New York University School of Law, State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, “Director and Staff,” accessed July 26, 2018, www.law.nyu.edu/centers/state-impact/faculty-directors.
November 3, 2017; November 14, 2017; December 11, 2017; December 19, 2017; January12, 2018; and January 23, 2018, emails from NY OAG’s Michael Myers to numerous state OAGs and to Hayes and Klein; Subject: Multistate AG Coordination Call.
As adopted by New Mexico Office of the Attorney General, Job Posting for “Special Assistant Attorney General Full Time/Term,” https://www.nmag.gov/uploads/files/HR/JobPostings/Special%20Assistant%20Attorney%20General_ Full%20Time-Term_Job%20Reference_NYU-FELLOWS.pdf, accessed July 30, 2018.
February 14, 2018, email from David Hayes to two attorneys at the Oregon AG’s office and three NYU colleagues; Subject: Comms follow-up.
Spencer Walrath, “Santa Cruz Joins Controversial Climate Liability Campaign,” Energy in Depth, December 21, 2017, http://eidclimate.org/santa-cruz-joins-controversial-climate-liability-campaign/. http://eidclimate.org/santa-cruz- joins-controversial-climate-liability-campaign/.
Federal Antideficiency Act (ADA), Pub.L. 97–258, 96 Stat. 923, codified at 31 U.S.C. § 1341.
Michael Bastasch, “‘Law Enforcement for Hire?’ Mike Bloomberg Is Paying for ‘Legal Fellows’ to Help Democratic State Attorneys Resist Trump,” Daily Caller, June 27, 2018, http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/27/bloomberg-legal-fellows-attorneys-general-offices/.
“This AGREEMENT (‘Agreement’) is entered into as of January 2018, by and between NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (‘NYU’), a New York not-for-profit education corporation, on behalf of the NYU School of Law’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center (the ‘State Impact Center’) and the Office of the Attorney General for the State of Illinois (‘AGO’).
August 25, 2017, email from David Hayes to OAGs.
October 3, 2017, email from Hayes to Oregon’s Paul Garrahan, Virginia’s Anderson.
See e.g., December 6, 2017, email from Hayes to Oregon AG Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: Special Assistant [Atty.] General.
See e.g., January 5, 2018, email from Hayes to VA OAG’s Anderson; Subject: Meeting in Richmond. Also the January 12, 2018, email from Hayes to PA OAG’s Steven Santarsiero; Subject: Meeting in Philadelphia/Harrisburg.
See e.g., February 14, 2018, email from NYU’s Elizabeth Klein to two OR AGO attorneys and one NYU colleague; Subject: Fellowship program follow-up.
See e.g., October 3, 2017, email from Hayes to Oregon’s Paul Garrahan and the October 13, 2017, Hayes email to Virginia’s Anderson; Subjects: NYU Law Fellow Program.
Outside entities’ clinical operations, typically law schools, place “fellow”-type help in AG offices, but a law school placing clinical students is in the business of educating students. NYU claims an educational mission for its charitable exemption, but is placing experienced, licensed attorneys as prosecutors who are the equivalent of the Attorney General by state statute. NYU’s “State Impact Center” expressly seeks to make (“progressive”) policy impacts at the state level through law enforcement offices. It adopts an avowedly activist and policy-driven agenda. The Center’s public stance is less forthcoming than that and obscures the details confessed in its less-public statements, conveyed in what became public records, “to enable interested state attorneys general to expand their capacity to take on important clean energy, climate, and environmental matters” and to advance the “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environment” agenda as set forth in its more private recruiting materials and contracts. New York University, “NYU Law Launches New Center to Support State Attorneys General in Environmental Litigation,” https://www.nyu.edu/about/news- publications/news/2017/august/nyu-law-launches-new-center-to-support-state-attorneys-general-i.html.
Four state AG offices that applied and were approved for NY-funded prosecutors—Illinois, New Mexico, Virginia, Pennsylvania—have produced “no records” responses when asked specifically for copies of any engagement or assignment letters. We know that Illinois OAG executed the Retainer Agreement and Secondment Agreement.
Editorial, “The HUD Gun Suit,” Washington Post, December 17, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ opinions/1999/12/17/the-hud-gun-suit/48ee0a45-18da-4e8d-9b86-b9512172ae09/?utm_term=.904e2ea81587.
Zoe Carpenter, “The Government May Already Have the Law It Needs to Beat Big Oil,” The Nation, July 15, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-government-may-already-have-the-law-it-needs-to-beat-big-oil/.
Native Vill. of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp., 663 F. Supp. 2d 863, 871–77 (N.D. Cal. 2009), aff’d, 696 F.3d 849 (9th Cir. 2012).
Valerie Richardson, “Democratic AGs, Climate Change Groups Colluded on Prosecuting Dissenters, emails Show,”Washington Times, April 17, 2016, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/17/democratic-ags-climate-change-groups-colluded-on-p/.
103.,“Climate of Unaccountability,” January 11, 2018, Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-of-unaccountability-1515717585.
Office of New York State AG Eric T. Schneiderman, Application to NYU State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, Special Assistant Attorneys General Fellowship Program, September 15, 2017, p. 5. Produced as June 1, 2018, [New York] OAG record production FOIL Request G000103-020718.
Language contained in NYU-provided Secondment Agreement, DRAFT October 18, 2017, as obtained from New York’s OAG and as executed by Illinois OAG on January 16, 2018.
Illinois OAG Employee Secondment Agreement between the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law (executed by IL OAG January 16, 2018, but not yet fulfilled per Illinois OAG as of April 30, 2018).
October 6, 2017, Elizabeth Klein email to IL OAG James Gignac, Matthew Dunn, and Thor Inouye; Subject: NYU Law Fellow Program—Follow-Up.
Language contained in NYU-provided Secondment Agreement, DRAFT 10/18/17 as obtained from New York’s OAG and as executed by Illinois OAG on January 16, 2018.
Offices selected for a Bloomberg SAAG that have slow-walked or outright ignored requests for NYU-related records include California, the District of Columbia, and Massachusetts. Some of these offices are delinquent by months;D.C. has refused to provide anything further than an auto-acknowledgement email despite receiving six separate related requests for records over more than six months.
Virginia Office of the Attorney General NYU Law Fellows Program Application, September 15, 2017, signed by Donald D. Anderson, Senior Assistant Attorney General/Chief.
“Application of the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General for the NYU Fellows/SAAG Program,” p. 4. The OAG also cited to “broad authority” to appoint and set compensation for staff as authorizing private funding of such officers.
New Mexico Office of the Attorney General NYU Law Fellows Program Application, September 15, 2017, signed by Tania Maestas, Deputy Attorney General. The Bloomberg program approved the New Mexico state AG office for not one but two SAAGs. However, that office claims it stopped short and did not follow through. As of August 7, 2018, one job posting for NYU Legal Fellow remained on line as unfilled. https://www.nmag.gov/human-resources.aspx Similarly, the Pennsylvania OAG, which applied by the September 2017 deadline, was approved for a Bloomberg-funded Special Attorney General on December 6, 2017, and it appears to have held a follow-up meeting with NYU in Philadelphia on January 29, 2018. However, at least to date something has prompted them to not follow through.
New York Attorney General Application to NYU State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, p. 5, quoting Executive Law Section 62. NYOAG further continued, “NYOAG has an existing program for volunteer assistant attorneys general that includes several volunteers each year, some of whom receive funding for their work from a third party. There are no state specific limitations governing NYU fellows’ receipt of payment from NYU because …(3) NYOAG will implement internal controls to minimize any conflict that might exist by screening the NYU fellows from participation in or knowledge of any NYOAG matter involving NYU.” Ibid. To explore this interpretation (and application) of the law, on June 13, 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted an open records request seeking the records pertaining to the NYOAG’s other pro bono SAAG appointments, to which it had alluded in making this claim to NYU. It also sought correspondence among Schneiderman or his top two, relevant staffers about these third-party funded SAAGs, a practice which the NYOAG claimed to NYU that it engages in with some regularity. Finally, CEI requested any discussions of the promised “implement[ed] internal controls.” To date, the NYOAG has not responded to any of these requests but says it hopes to by September 28, 2018.
Immediately after declaring these attorneys to be “volunteers,” NYOAG cites to an Advisory Opinion pertaining to (actual, unpaid) volunteers’ legal status as employees, State of New York Commission on Public Integrity Advisory Opinion No. 10-02 (2010). This Opinion notes, in the context of an agency claiming that actual, unpaid volunteers should be permitted to avoid certain ethical restrictions because “it is difficult to hire attorneys during the State’s current fiscal crisis,”“fiscal limitations or individuals’ beneficence cannot be permitted to trump governmental integrity.” Ibid.,p. 5. It also offers the reminder, somewhat unhelpfully for NYOAG’s position, that “It is black-letter law that words and phrases used in a statute are to be given the meaning intended by the Legislature. “It is fundamental that words used should be given the meaning intended by the lawmakers, and words will not be expanded so as to enlarge their meaning to something which the Legislature could easily have expressed but did not” (Citations omitted). Ibid., p. 3.
Then-Judge and future Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Benjamin Cardozo addressed this language in People ex rel. Rand v. Craig (the language NYOAG cited to NYU from present § 62 was at the time contained in Executive Law § 61). In the context of fiscal responsibility he wrote, of relevance, “Emancipation from all restraint should rest upon clear words, and not upon uncertain inferences. ... The AG has no power ... except as he gets it by this section …,” 231 N.Y. 216, 220 (1921)(Cardozo, J.).
New York Consolidated Laws, State Finance Law - STF § 200. Payment of salaries, which reads in pertinent part, “1. The salaries of all officers of the state, and the wages of all employees thereof shall be due from and payable by the state by-weekly [sic], commencing with the fiscal year of the state beginning April first, nineteen hundred fifty-six.” The Advisory Opinion No. 10-02 (2010) that the NYOAG refers to in its NYU application makes clear that even actual, unpaid “volunteers” serving as lawyers are nonetheless “employees” for purposes of applicable laws. Barring some new rationale that NYOAG failed to assert to NYU when claiming authority to enter this arrangement, that claim is unsupported.
“Good News!! The hire slip for Matthew Eisenson been [sic] signed by the Attorney General” [Emphases in original]. January 25, 2018, email from “Legal Recruitment” (Bureau) to ten NYOAG staff; Subject: Approval to Extend Offer - VAAG/NYU Fellow - EPB NYC (Matthew Eisenson). See also, “I’m writing to confirm that we’re clear to make an offer for a fellowship/SAAG position to Matthew Eisenson (JD ’15) at the salary of $75,813 + $3,026 NYC location pay for a total of $78,839. Also to confirm that we’re clear to make an offer for a fellowship/SAAG position to Gavin McCabe (JD 87’) at the salary of $146,457 + $3,026 NYC location pay for a total of $149,483.” January 18, 2018, email from Lem Srolovic to Elizabeth Klein; Subject: NYU Fellow/SAAGS. “During the Fellowship Period, salary and benefits will be provided to the Legal Fellow by the NYU School of Law.” Employee Secondment Agreement between the Attorney General of the State of New York and the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law, p. 2 of 6, signed by David Hayes and Lem Srolovic, Bureau Chief, Environmental Protection Division, December 22, 2017.
June 18, 2018, email from Frederick Boss to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: NYU Fellow Appointment.
“Ok.” June 18, 2018, email from Frederick Boss to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: Re: NYU Fellow Appointment; “Here is the agreement. I cannot find the term volunteer in this draft.” June 21, 2018, email from Frederick Boss to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: Re: NYU Fellow Appointment; “We ran a search and this agreement does not use the term ‘volunteer,’” June 18, 2018, email from Frederick Boss to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: Re: NYU Fellow Appointment.
“Oregon Department of Justice Application for Placement of NYU Law Fellow,” September 15, 2017, signed by Paul Garrahan, Attorney-in-Charge, Natural Resources Section, Oregon Department of Justice.
“Jonathan is potentially still interested in funding additional people directly to work for governors.” August 18, 2017, email from Reed Schuler to CA and WA governor office colleagues; Subject: State capacity / Hewlett.
June 15, 2018, email from Paul Garrahan to Steve Novick; Subject: draft agreement.
JUSTICE-#9011048-v2-NYU_Fellow_Appointment, attachment to June 18, 2018, email from Frederick Boss to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject Re: NYU Fellow Appointment. It is not clear from Oregon OAG’s record productions whether they ultimately required this additional letter supplementing NYU’s standard suite of agreements.
Possibly it was NYU’s persistence to place a prosecutor in the Office that led to this lapse in judgment. On May 11, 2018, OAG’s Paul Garrahan, “attorney-in-charge” of the natural resources division, wrote to the Attorney General, in pertinent part, “I know the Center is still eager for us to hire a fellow—I spoke with Elizabeth Klein two weeks ago in response to her inquiry about where we were in the process.” May 11, 2018, email from Paul Garrahan to Ellen Rosenblum; Subject: AAG position.
A May 2007 Chicago Magazine profile, which is titled “The Wendy City,” opens: “If you don’t know her already, you will soon. Wendy Abrams eco-advocate, political insider, philanthropist.…” Debra Pickett, “The Wendy City,” Chicago Magazine, May 29, 2007, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2007/The-Wendy-City/. Abrams’s bio, featured, for whatever reason, on a United Nations website, states: “Wendy Abrams, an environmental activist, is founder and [p]resident of Cool Globes, a [nonprofit] organization formed to execute the ‘Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet’ exhibit and events in Chicago. She is a member of the National Council of Environmental Defense, the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the National Resources Defense Council C4 Action Fund.” UN Chronicle, “Wendy Abrams,” accessed July 26, 2018, https://unchronicle.un.org/authors/wendy-abrams.
February 26, 2016, email from Eva Station to Khadija Ali, Courtney Levy, and Kirsten Holmes; Subject, RE: Phone call.
Notice also the University of Chicago Law School professor Abrams stated she might also bring in, coincidentally, is the director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic. His background includes a stint administering the BP spill funds. https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/templeton. By chance, the activists’ principal objective here is a tobacco-style settlement fund turning the pariah energy producers into golden geese or rather into virtuous contributors to the public purse and underwriters of preferred political constituency groups (see, e.g., Walter Olson, “Partisan Prosecutions: How State Attorneys General Dove into Politics,” New York Post, March 30, 2017,https://nypost.com/2017/03/30/partisan-prosecutions-how-state-attorneys-general-dove-into-politics/. ).
Berman made a fortune in the tobacco settlement in 1998, as well, and has continued a litigation career apparently designed to obtain large settlements from deep-pocketed industry defendants. (Berman’s firm made claims in one product liability case against drug manufacturers that U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond memorably declared in 2014 gave “new meaning to ‘frivolous.’” Damian Garde, “Meet the lawyer trying to pry drug pricing secrets out of Big Pharma,” Stat, April 20, 2017, https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/20/steve-berman-drug-prices/, citing to http://www. abajournal.com/files/HagensBermanSanction.pdf. Pawa has since joined Berman’s firm.
Alana Goodman, “Memo Shows Secret Coordination Effort against ExxonMobil by Climate Activists, Rockefeller Fund,” Washington Free Beacon, April 14, 2016, https://freebeacon.com/issues/memo-shows-secret-coordination-effort- exxonmobil-climate-activists-rockefeller-fund/.
February 26, 2016, email from Abrams to Khadija Ali; Subject: Background information.
January 13, 2016, email from David Zonana to Sally Magnani, Martin Goyette, Amy J. Winn, Dennis Ragen, and Heather Leslie; Subject: Tomorrow’s Meeting—Part 1 of 2.
April 1, 2016, email from Amy Winn to numerous California OAG recipients; Subject: Matt Pawa Meeting in California—Exxon Climate Change Preliminary Investigation.
April 7, 2016, email from Amy Winn to numerous California OAG recipients; Subject: Notes of Pawa Presentation re Exxon.
April 19, 2016, email from Amy Winn to two California OAG recipients; Subject: Could you [resend] your email identifying the documents fro [sic] PAWA’S presentation?
February 26, 2016, email from Abrams to Khadija Ali, Subject: Background information.
February 26, 2016, email from Khadija Ali to Courtney Levy, Kirsten Holmes; Subject, RE: phone call.
March 15, 2016, email from Khadija Ali to numerous IL OAG colleagues; Subject: Exxon climate change investigation.
Mark N. Templeton bio, University of Chicago Law School, accessed July 26, 2018, https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/templeton.
In 2003, a milestone lawsuit, American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut, was filed in July 2004 and would be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, thereby throwing cold water on the idea of suing businesses under a federal common law claim for climate change damages. AEP v. Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410 (2011).
“UW School of Law to Establish the Kathy and Steve Berman Environmental Law Clinic,” Hagens Berman blog, April 23, 2003, https://www.hbsslaw.com/blog/hagens-berman-blog/steve-w-berman/uw-school-of-law-to-establish-the- kathy-and-steve-berman-environmental-law-clinic. Daniel Jack Chasen, “Legal Eaglets,” SeattleMet, December 28, 2008, https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2008/12/28/0708-legaleaglets.
As a forthcoming paper will detail, Georgetown University Law School is playing an active role serving activist elected office holders, who were recently losing out on a contract bid to manage a climate advocacy campaign as the cutout hiring “staff” and consultants as the back-room manager of a governors’ climate advocacy campaign. UCLA Law School is slow-walking at least three separate requests relating to the AGs’ work, including two by CEI.
Memo available at https://climatelitigationwatch.org/cei-obtains-rfk-pace-univ-memo-seeking-revocation-of- business-license/. See also, Carl Campanille, “RFK Jr. Sent Secret Memo Asking to Ban ExxonMobil,” New York Post, June 17, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/06/17/rfk-jr-sent-secret-memo-asking-to-ban-exxonmobil/.
Robert Kennedy Bio, Pace Elisabeth Haub School of Law, accessed July 26, 2018, https://law.pace.edu/faculty/robert-kennedy.
“Travel assistance would come through UCS; I am copying Nancy Cole, the Campaign Director of their Climate & Energy Program” was stated in the March 28, 2016, email from Shaun Goho to Illinois OAG’s Gignac and Matthew Dunn; Subject: SAVE THE DATE—HLS/UCS Meeting on April 25, 2016. “Hi, Arlene, UCS is able to cover all travel costs including hotel and ground transpo” was in the April 6, 2016, email from Gignac to Arlene Maryanski, copying Dunn; Subject: SAVE THE DATE—HLS/UCS Meeting on April 25, 2016. “All travel costs will be covered by the Union of Concerned Scientists” was in the April 6, 2016, email from Gignac to Arlene Maryanski; Subject: SAVE THE DATE— HLS/UCS Meeting on April 25, 2016.
March 3, 2016, email from Roberta James to colleagues; Subject: Re: Training.
ARMA website, FAQ, accessed July 7, 2018, https://www.arma.org/page/FAQ.
ARMA Metro Maryland website, viewed July 7, 2018, http://www.arma-metromd.org.
June 18, 2018, email from Steven Wolf to “General Counsel,” copying “Executive Staff”; Subject: New NRS SAAG—Steve Novick.

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