New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other state AGs are probing ExxonMobil — but maybe they’re the ones who should be investigated.
E-mails obtained by a free-market think tank (the Energy & Environment Legal Institute) show Schneiderman & Co. colluded with two activists last month just before the AGs rolled out their anti-Exxon campaign.
A top Schneiderman aide even tried to keep the press in the dark about the role of one activist, Matt Pawa.
Pawa was also in the loop for a January meeting by various groups — Greenpeace, the Working Families Party, the Rockefeller Family Fund — to plan how to “delegitimize [Exxon] as a political actor,” smear it publicly as “corrupt” and steer away investors.
The meeting’s agenda? How legal action — including by state AGs — and other tactics could do the job: “Which of these has the best prospects for successful action? . . . For creating scandal?”
Schneiderman and his AG camorra now seem to be executing that plan. One line of attack: Try to prove Exxon misled the public decades ago about research on the dangers of climate change. Preposterous: That science is still far from settled. And Exxon now supports action on climate change.
But attacking it is a win-win for lefty, enviro-pandering pols, like Schneidy: He wins points for targeting a Big Oil icon, and might score a big payday from some legal action.
Trouble is, the anti-Exxon campaign is starting to look like a conspiracy in its own right — pursuing a purely political vendetta in a blatant abuse of office.