Posted on 12/08/2014 12:24:23 PM PST by Citizen Zed
The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state.
But Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon’s chief of lobbying.
“Outstanding!” William F. Whitsitt, who at the time directed government relations at the company, said in a note to Pruitt’s office. The attorney general’s staff had taken Devon’s draft, copied it onto state government stationery with only a few word changes, and sent it to Washington with the attorney general’s signature. “The timing of the letter is great, given our meeting this Friday with both EPA and the White House.”
Whitsitt then added, “Please pass along Devon’s thanks to Attorney General Pruitt.”
The email exchange from October 2011, obtained through an open-records request, offers a hint of the unprecedented, secretive alliance that Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general have formed with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against President Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
“When you use a public office, pretty shamelessly, to vouch for a private party with substantial financial interest without the disclosure of the true authorship, that is a dangerous practice,” said David B. Frohnmayer, a Republican who served a decade as attorney general in Oregon. “The puppeteer behind the stage is pulling strings, and you can’t see. I don’t like that. And when it is exposed, it makes you feel used.”
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
If it matched Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s sentiments, opinions and advice on the issue, I’ve got no problem with “who” wrote it. You think Obama writes all his stuff? You think Boehner/McConnell/Reid/Pelosi?etc writes all their stuff?
I honestly could not care less unless they had to overcome Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s objections to the letter by paying him off. That would be a problem. But if Pruitt is in agreement? No problem.
Isn’t the proper plural of Attorney general “Attorneys General”?
These guys should have sent their emails through the IRS router.
If it is the truth who cares who wrote it. When is Congress going to read all the crap they sign?
The carbon impact of Keystone 1 has been tripled:
(1) Implied carbon content as it crosses the US border;
(2) Inherent carbon release for the volume in the pipeline;
(3) Actual carbon content release at the refinery.
This is the tri-fold accounting done by the EPA to attain the ^wildly excessive^ amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
You need an apostrophe, dude.
Yes - and no apostrophe for plural; that would be for possessive. The editor who wrote this headline is in error.
No, I do not. It is a plural, not a possessive.
Attorneys General was the accepted plural until pretty recently, when the folks in charge of such things said “OK, I give up...call ‘em attorney generals if you must”.
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