News

As the #ExxonKnew campaign continues to unravel (with the latest blow being the Virgin Islands AG office retracting its subpoena), newly released emails confirm that the attorneys general launching climate investigations have been doing everything they can to keep their efforts – and their collaboration with environmental activists – hidden from the public. That includes signing on to a Common Interest Agreement (CIA), which would allow them to keep the emails relating to their investigations under wraps.

The new emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FME Law), confirm that Gregory Schultz of the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office signed on a Common Interest Agreement that was distributed to all the AGs’ offices involved by the New York Attorney General’s office.  Here’s the full exchange of how that went down:

Interestingly, the actual Common Interest Agreement was not disclosed even though it was originally attached to the email above.  As Chris Horner of the Energy & Environment Legal Institute explained in a recent op-ed, the emails obtained from the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office only

“revealed the existence of other ‘responsive’ records not produced. For example, these show Rhode Island’s AG agreed to a second CIA to exempt the AGs’ ongoing campaign from FOIA laws; they withheld it, without admitting they did so, even though it was plainly an attachment to one of the produced emails.”

That’s not all. The Illinois Attorney General actually cited a Common Interest Agreement associated with the Clean Power Plan as the reason it View Full Article