Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal Review section featured a long profile reaffirming the obsessive campaign by late-generation Rockefeller family members against ExxonMobil, the company that not only cruelly subjected them and their predecessor generations of Rockefellers to a lifestyle bubble-wrapped in inherited wealth but also led the way in imposing the horrors of affordable automobility and safety from the elements on billions more. As the otherwise supportive piece suggests, the guilt often triggered by such unearned wealth can provide the sort of drive that helps give lives meaning.
The item gently outs, then moves on from, a truth which seems likely to feature prominently if and when any of these Rockefeller-fueled matters go to trial:
However, one euphemism stood out.
‘Privately’? Might there be more accurate and informative descriptors for a campaign by these wealthy and well-connected individuals to secretively—and with the aid of a political party and media platforms they underwrite—urge public officials to commit ‘their’ office to the Rockefellers’ service in going after the object of the Rockefellers’ obsession?
Records obtained by Government Accountability & Oversight (and Francis Menton) leave neither room for doubt nor reason to elide that the Rockefeller Family Fund lobbied, and employed political operatives and dumpster diving smear merchants, to convince law enforcement to assist its family’s personal ideological crusade?
By some odd stroke of fortune we may never fully understand, the paper trail of this ostensibly ‘private’ behavior—of leveraging public resources and public offices, including ‘what you should do with Martin Act subpoena authority and how you should do it’ memos—has been revealed by documents pried out using public records laws.