How Donors & Media Allies Engineer Attorney General Investigations - Climate Litigation Watch

How Donors & Media Allies Engineer Attorney General Investigations

Tomato-Tomahto, Persecute-Prosecute

CLW readers are familiar with the role played by Rockefeller organizations, and the media outlets they underwrite, in expanding the climate litigation industry. Otherwise known in some quarters as “going after climate denialism–along with a bunch of state and local prosecutors nationwide.” 

This role has been ably chronicled in numerous items posted at Energy in Depth.

Records obtained from the Washington State legislature lay out the anatomy of one result the advocates sought to instigate.

With the occasional, amusing Freudian slip.

As CLW readers also know, GAO represents Energy Policy Advocates in litigation against the Washington State Attorney General’s Office to obtain records pertaining to its dabbling in the arena around the same time that the legislator issued his LA Times-prompted call.

Numerous documents that that Office is withholding or heavily redacting have already been released by other offices — including one acknowledging the “attribution” problem, explaining why they didn’t follow Eric Schneiderman down this path, which the tort bar then arranged to declare no longer a problem.

Those releases by other offices also show that WA AGO’s penchant for secrecy amounts to improperly hiding important public information — about how it uses its authorities, and under what influences — from the public. Which is a problem hardly limited to the Washington State AGO.

One thing is clear, and made clearer in recent AG actions in open records litigation about which CLW will write soon: a group of climate-activist offices have committed, indeed contracted, to make sure that anything further that comes out about their collaboration on climate litigation, be it with the tort bar or former EPA officials, only comes out by order of a court.