Newly Obtained Email Shows NAAG Role in Activist Recruitment for #ExxonKnew Investigations
NAAG served as conduit for plaintiffs bar to select “sympathetic AGs”
CLW admits it has not before seen the below document. An informal survey of parties who presumably would have seen it — had it been sent to all “Energy and Environment Bureau Chiefs and designated representatives” — yielded no recognition.
Numerous aspects of this record are remarkable, both on its face and given other information CLW has obtained, more on which later.
Notably:
- This document was first produced in response to an open records request to an OAG for documents containing “Pawa” and/or “Oreskes”
- Other OAGs receiving the same records request did not produce this document
- Other OAGs also did not produce it when specifically asked for it
- To date, only “progressive” OAGs have produced copies of this NAAG email to “Energy and Environment Bureau Chiefs and designated representatives”
- This suggests that, to NAAG, “Energy and Environment Bureau Chiefs and designated representatives” meant some of them — the word “sympathetic” comes to mind
- Among those OAGs actually solicited by NAAG on behalf of “an advocacy group…requesting that the attorneys general investigate Exxon for alleged violations related to fighting and/or addressing the climate crisis”, least one circulated a series of lengthy memos within minutes of receiving this recruiting notice (not the documents themselves)
- Those memos — all redacted in their substantive entirety — also were produced in response to an open records request seeking documents containing “Pawa” and/or “Oreskes”
- AGs did follow through to obtaine the activists’/trial bar’s documents, 7 PDFs totaling hundreds of pages
- NAAG provided the documents via an on-line portal (when an OAG had technical difficulties, NAAG offered to mail a thumb drive or disc)