ExxonMobil has demanded that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey provide documents from her office. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
ExxonMobil
Fires Back at Massachusetts AG Maura Healey With Own Suit
05 December 16
When Attorney General Maura Healey and other law enforcement officials announced last spring that they were pursuing fraud investigations against the world’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, former vice president Al Gore called it “the most hopeful step I can remember in a long time” to combat climate change.
“Fossil fuel
companies that deceived investors and consumers about the dangers of climate
change should be, must be, held accountable,” Healey said at the time. “We can all see today the troubling
disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew, and what the
company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public.”
Now those words are
being used against Healey, in a lawsuit filed by ExxonMobil. In a stunning
offense-is-the-best-defense legal strategy, the company is trying to flip a
politically loaded case on its head, saying the Massachusetts Democrat’s
investigation violates their free speech and other constitutional rights, and
that her comments demonstrate she had judged the company guilty before even
conducting an investigation.
In its legal battle
to shut down her investigation, ExxonMobil has demanded that she testify about
her efforts and provide documents from her office — a fight that will play out
this week in Suffolk Superior Court and next week in a Texas courtroom.
“We have no choice
but to defend ourselves against politically motivated investigations that are
biased, in bad faith, and without legal merit,” said Alan T. Jeffers, media
relations manager for Exxon Mobil Corp. “We did not start this, but we will see
it through and will vigorously defend ourselves against false allegations and
mischaracterizations of our climate research and investor communications.”
Healey contends the
corporate response is unprecedented: Not only is the subject of an
investigation refusing to comply, it is demanding an investigation of the
investigating agency.
“They took the tack
of trying to shut down this investigation by suing us,” she said. “And that’s
all this is: a big corporation who doesn’t like that we’re asking questions and
exercising our responsibility and prerogative as the attorney general’s office
to protect investors.”
Healey, a liberal
Democrat who soared to her first election as attorney general in 2014, has
since seized on audacious, high-impact legal battles, going after gunmakers to
try to block “copycat” assault rifles and suing Volkswagen for knowingly
selling diesel cars with emissions problems for years.
After an ugly
presidential election campaign and a rise in complaints about bullying and
discriminatory harassment, she launched a hate-crimes hot line that logged more
than 400 calls in a week. In a fund-raising e-mail last week, Healey pledged to
fight President-elect Donald Trump on any of his “unconstitutional campaign
promises.”
“If he overreaches,
I intend to be there as the People’s Lawyer to stop him — with my voice, with
the law and with you at my side,” Healey wrote in the e-mail from her campaign
committee.
When Healey issued
subpoenas seeking ExxonMobil’s documents on climate change dating to the 1970s,
she was “abusing the power of government to silence a speaker she disfavors,”
lawyers for ExxonMobil wrote in their June lawsuit against her, alleging a
violation of the company’s rights under the First, Fourth and 14th amendments
to the Constitution.
And they criticized
the stories that prompted the investigation: Reports published in 2015 by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times suggested
ExxonMobil had encouraged climate change confusion for years, despite its own
research documenting the risks. Documents showed ExxonMobil had begun making accommodations to its properties, raising the decks of offshore platforms
and protecting pipelines from coastal erosion before launching a campaign to
discredit the likelihood of climate change effects.
Jeffers criticized
“allegations pushed by activists and inaccurate media reports that claim we
reached definitive conclusions about climate change decades before the world’s
experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development.” “This
is simply not credible,” he said.
In March, Healey
joined New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other states’ officials
in announcing they planned to pursue investigations of the oil company with a
creative legal strategy.
They were banding
together to tackle an issue that had proved intractable on the federal level —
in much the same way that states had successfully challenged tobacco companies
— alleging the company had deceived consumers about the life-threatening perils
of its own product.
Fourteen states and
the District of Columbia formed a “Climate Change Coalition Common
Interest Agreement” and agreed to share documents and
information and to keep their deliberations confidential.
Only New York and
Massachusetts have issued subpoenas to date, however.
Despite the sweeping
ambitions expressed in the March news conference with Gore, Healey downplayed
the states’ goals in an interview with the Globe on Friday, suggesting the
attorneys general were merely working to protect consumer interests.
“Anytime we learn
information suggesting or raising questions about whether consumers or
investors were duped, we investigate,” Healey said.
“This is not about
changing climate policy,” Healey added. “The goal of this investigation is to
get to the bottom of what happened, whether or not it’s true that Exxon knew
certain information and made misrepresentations to consumers and investors.
It’s as simple as that.”
The Massachusetts
Republican Party has criticized Healey for pursuing the case and for hiring one
of the most expensive law firms in the Dallas area to represent her office in
the Texas case.
“The attorney
general has spared no expense when it comes to using public money to advance
her political career,” said MassGOP’s chairwoman, Kirsten Hughes.
In resisting the
states’ pressure to produce documents, ExxonMobil turned the tables on the
attorneys general, requesting a treasure trove of documents from them in an
apparent attempt to demonstrate they were coordinating strategy with environmental
activists.
In addition,
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a climate change skeptic who chairs the
House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, accused them of a conspiracy
to quash “legitimate scientific debate about climate change” and issued
subpoenas to Schneiderman, Healey, and environmental groups.
So far, they, too,
have resisted. Massachusetts’ all-Democratic congressional delegation has
countered with a letter to Smith, calling his efforts an abuse of power.
Ironically, this is
happening at a time when there is little lingering debate about the realities
of climate change. Even ExxonMobil acknowledges climate change is real, that it
is caused by increasing carbon emissions, and that it warrants action.
Despite the election
of Trump, who cast doubt on climate change during his campaign, public opinion
seems to be moving, said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, which has received subpoenas from both the House committee and
ExxonMobil.
“I think the tide is
turning on the issue,” said Kimmell, who pointed to a federal court decision last month in Oregon that gave young
people the right to sue the government for failing to protect them from the
future effects of climate change.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment