Report: The Climate Industry Is Using Philanthropic Donations to Weaponize State Prosecutors Against Climate Skeptics

August 31, 2018 in News by RBN Staff

 

Source: Need To Know | Daily Caller

Chris Horner, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Paris

 

Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow, Chris Horner, presented a study that exposes an elaborate campaign by the billion-dollar-per-year climate industry that weaponizes state prosecutors by arranging private parties to fund and direct them, led by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Horner reported that the scheme “uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors.” -GEG
  • A new report digs deeper into the ties between Democratic state attorneys general and environmental activists.
  • The report is based on two-and-a-half years of government documents gathered by Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Chris Horner.
  • Horner exposes a “law enforcement for hire” scheme between Bloomberg Philanthropies and state attorneys general.

A new report based on documents collected over two-and-a-half years through open records requests outlines an “elaborate campaign” by the “billion-dollar per year climate industry” to weaponize state attorneys general (AGs) in service of the global warming agenda.

That campaign culminated in what the report labels “law enforcement for hire” because it allows political donors to pay for state prosecutors “in the service of an ideological, left-wing, climate policy agenda.”

“It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda,” Competitive Enterprise senior fellow Chris Horner wrote in his report, a copy of which was given to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Horner builds on initial reporting by TheDCNF about Bloomberg Philanthropies’ funding of legal fellows to advance “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions” at AG offices.

Horner’s report goes more in-depth, drawing on more than two years of government records requests, many of which he had to sue unwilling AGs offices for. Horner wrote that states “routinely force litigation before releasing the relevant public records.”

Horner’s report details the actions of a group of AGs and activists, led by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, that eventually led to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg paying for “legal fellows” to work in state law enforcement.

Schneiderman led some states to investigate oil giant ExxonMobil for allegedly misleading investors and the public about the severity of man-made global warming. His broader coalition, called AGs United For Clean Power, promised to work together to advance a climate agenda, but that coalition seems to have fallen apart since its inception in 2016.

At least six state AG offices had taken on Bloomberg-funded legal fellows, Horner reported, including Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia.

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