In the wake of the news that ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson has been nominated by the present-elect to serve as Secretary of State, the AGs and activists pushing the #ExxonKnew campaign are only further solidifying the fact that their crusade against the company is driven by politics.

As case in point, immediately after the Tillerson news broke, Attorney General Maura Healey ran to the Boston Globe to suggest that the Exxon CEO should “come clean” and “absolutely answer the questions that we’ve been asking for months now.” Of course, Healey is referring the subpoena that she issued to the company as part in the #ExxonKnew crusade.

This move comes not long after a federal judge issued a discovery order against Healey, and later to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, to determine if they had a political motivation for their probes of Exxon – specifically if “bias or prejudgment” influenced their decision to initiate what could be a “bad faith” investigation.  Let’s just say her latest statements don’t help her case!

Healey wasn’t the only one out there trying to capitalize on politics for #ExxonKnew. NPR also published an interview yesterday with Susanne Rust of the Rockefeller-funded Columbia School of Journalism, which produced the original climate hit pieces on Exxon, to discuss Tillerson’s nomination.

To her credit – and in a departure from her other #ExxonKnew friends – Rust did note that Tillerson “is not a climate change denier,” and went on to admit that under Tillerson’s watch, ExxonMobil “accepted that climate change was real, called it something that was concerning and risky not just to the planet, but to the company.” Of course she still claimed he would be bad for the climate because is “still in the business of supporting the oil and gas business around the world.”

While Healey and her #ExxonKnew friends may not want to admit it, given the pending discovery order, one former AG recently acknowledged that the entire affair is “politically motivated.”  As Douglas Gansler, former Attorney General of Maryland, View Full Article