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On the heels of last week’s federal court order subjecting Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and parties involved in the #ExxonKnew campaign to judicial scrutiny, yesterday ExxonMobil asked a federal court to join the Green 20 ringleader – New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman – as a defendant in the case and invalidate the subpoena he issued in 2015.

Explaining the basis for the discovery order, Bloomberg reported today that “The timing of Exxon’s filing [against Schneiderman] wasn’t happenstance.  Last week, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in Fort Worth said in writing that he was concerned that Healey may have engaged in a ‘bad faith’ pursuit” of the company given her biased and prejudicial public rhetoric on the matter.  As a result, Schneiderman, Healey, and other participants in the #ExxonKnew cabal will be compelled to produce internal emails and other documents and, potentially, sit for depositions.

In other words, the tables have turned, and the “investigators” themselves will now be investigated about what they knew, said and did in the run-up to launching their campaign.

Much like the successful filing against Healey, ExxonMobil’s motion to join Schneiderman in the case lays out compelling evidence that the New York AG was also acting (leading the coalition) in “bad faith,” and that he and Healey“joined together with each other as well as others known and unknown to conduct improper and politically motivated investigations of ExxonMobil in a coordinated effort to silence and intimidate one side of the public policy debate on how to address climate change.”

While recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have provided quite of bit of insight into the genesis and execution of the #ExxonKnew campaign, formal discovery processes are certain to expose a whole lot more.  We know, for example, that activists like the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Peter Frumhoff were View Full Article