Last week CLW revealed the details behind Washington Times story that broke the news of a new army of activist-group attorneys in DA offices, uncovered in records obtained by the transparency group Energy Policy Advocates (EPA). These records reveal an escalation of AGs/donor involvement with state attorneys general.
CLW noted, “The privately funded network of attorneys pushing political agendas through law enforcement offices is a sprawling one”. Indeed, there is evidence of seemingly related efforts to elect not only “sympathetic” AGs but district attorneys (as ‘telegraphed’ in 2012), added to the longer running campaign to reduce the public’s influence on judicial selections.
The picture that emerges is one of an organized effort to occupy our judicial process, at all levels, for the purpose of using law enforcement to attain political ends.
The same picture reveals both a very small world and an increasingly big network using privately funded attorneys to aid elected officials’ activist use of the courts.
For example, again thanks to EPA, we can add the “climate nuisance” plaintiff the City of Baltimore, which refuses to release records which it describes as “the correspondence between Robert B. McKinstry Jr and the City’s attorneys”, and the agreement between the Law Department and outside counsel”.
https://climatelitigationwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Baltimore-McKinstry-denial-rotated.pdf
Baltimore thereby seemingly acknowledges that it, too, has a relationship with the attorney EPA found working in or with the attorneys general of DC, and Maryland. Baltimore is not, to CLW’s knowledge, involved in the activists’ “emoluments” litigation campaign. It is, however, not just home to the Maryland Attorney General, but a leading “climate nuisance” plaintiff for the tort bar.
Mr. McKinstry claimed to the Times that his talents are being donated to these leading players in climate activist Michael Bloomberg’s climate/AG scheme to pursue emoluments clause investigations and litigation. This seemed odd, given his career apparently dedicated to environmentalist issues and, lately, more specifically the climate industry.
Regardless of further details to come, this Baltimore revelation now connects the Bloomberg AGs and climate-nuisance tort plaintiffs.