Recall that Democratic Party State Attorneys General and the Virgin Islands territorial Attorney General have subpoenaed private enterprises for all correspondence related to objections to political agendas touting climate warming and the need to redistribute wealth to “green” energy crony companies. These subpoenas are intended to gain access to correspondence with anyone at all, and the companies have been threatened by these AGs with RICO proceedings if the victim target companies don’t comply.
In response to that, several of those target companies have countersued, demanding the AGs’ documents related to the AG cases, among other things under FOIA. The AGs have refused to supply the requested documents, citing…secrecy.
Democratic attorneys general led by New York’s Eric Schneiderman are seeking to block efforts to obtain documents about their efforts by invoking an overbroad claim to secrecy in ongoing legal proceedings, according to the Energy and Environment (E&E) Legal Institute.
According to Chris Horner of E&E,
These activist AGs are trying to write themselves out from freedom of information laws their legislatures have written them into. …they are hiding behavior that seems to be precisely the sort of abuse lawmakers sought to expose to sunlight when deciding to cover their States’ chief law enforcement officers under FOIA laws….
In fact, these AGs appear to have preemptively colluded in their secrecy. The AGs involved
circulated a common interest agreement in March that detailed their cooperation in the Exxon matter. It explicitly prohibited signatories from sharing information about the legal campaign.
The agreement stipulated that if any relevant information “is demanded under a public records law, the party receiving the request shall … refuse to disclose any shared information unless otherwise required by law.”
Oddly, that agreement was discovered in the course of a prior E&E FOIA request; hence the apparent effort to ignore current FOIAs.
Because facts upset their predetermined narrative and undermine their political standing.