Porter, Katie Rep 96%

SEE CRYPTO war chest eg sherrod brown 40m$ KATIE p 91% WIN RATE

hjr 54

THUS TARGET

SEE ELIZ WARREN

https://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/katie-porter

2021 100 96% life

:{---

SEE CRYPTO war chest eg sherrod brown 40m$ KATIE p 91% WIN RATE

GGL 12 25

AI Overview

Coinbase CEO

Brian Armstrong is a significant political donor, particularly to pro-crypto causes and candidates, including substantial support for Donald Trump's political efforts, with Coinbase contributing to a PAC that supported Trump and Armstrong meeting with him after the 2024 election; he aligns with pro-crypto, free-market ideals, supports regulatory clarity, and embraces libertarian-leaning concepts like "economic freedom" and "Network State" philosophy, advocating for less government intervention in crypto, which contrasts with stricter regulation under previous administrations.

Donations & Political Involvement

Pro-Trump/Crypto PACs: Armstrong and Coinbase donated heavily to super PACs like Fairshake, which supported pro-crypto candidates, including Trump.
Meetings with Trump: Armstrong met with Donald Trump post-election in 2024 to discuss potential personnel appointments for a new administration.
Hiring: Coinbase hired Chris LaCivita, Trump's former campaign manager, to its Global Advisory Council.

Political Stance & Ideology

Libertarian/Pro-Crypto: Armstrong champions economic freedom and has spoken positively about Trump's push for regulatory clarity, viewing it as crucial for the crypto industry's growth.
"Network State": He supports the concept of the Network State, a political movement advocating for decentralized, technology-driven governance.
Advocacy: Armstrong actively lobbies for clear crypto legislation, aiming to move the industry from being "at the little-kids' table" in DC to having real political power.

Relationship with Trump

Shift from Skepticism: Trump, once a Bitcoin skeptic, became a proponent of digital assets, a shift welcomed by Armstrong and the crypto industry, leading to a strong working relationship.
Regulatory Goals: Armstrong sees the Trump administration as key to establishing clearer rules, contrasting with perceived "weaponization" of unclear rules by the Biden administration.

---

GGL 12 25

AI Overview

Coinbase CEO

Brian Armstrong was a major figure in the crypto industry's political spending during the 2024 U.S. elections, which included significant financial involvement in races involving Senators Sherrod Brown and Representative Katie Porter.

Brian Armstrong's Role and Donations

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, was a prominent donor to pro-crypto political action committees (PACs), most notably Fairshake.

Individual Donations: Armstrong personally donated $1 million to the Fairshake PAC network and more than $100,000 to individual lawmakers.

Corporate Contributions: Under Armstrong's leadership, Coinbase was the leading corporate contributor to Fairshake, providing approximately $66 million to support industry-friendly candidates and oppose crypto-skeptics.
:
Advocacy: Armstrong actively advocated for the crypto industry's political influence, stating, "Money moves the needle... For better or worse, that's how our system works". He also encouraged a "pro-crypto Congress" and actively sought to unseat anti-crypto politicians.

Involvement in the Sherrod Brown Race

The crypto industry targeted Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who was the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee and a noted crypto skeptic.

Opposition Spending: Fairshake and affiliated PACs spent an estimated $40 million to oppose Brown's reelection and support his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, who was a longtime crypto advocate.

Outcome: The massive spending contributed to a tight race, which Moreno ultimately won in the November 2024 election. The ads run against Brown did not mention crypto and instead focused on other political topics.

Involvement in the Katie Porter Race

Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) was running in the California Democratic Senate primary and was also a target of the crypto industry's political spending.

Opposition Spending: Fairshake spent over $10 million in an effort to derail Porter's campaign, reportedly due to her association with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her general skepticism towards the industry's energy usage.

Outcome: Porter was a primary target of the PAC network and ultimately did not advance past the primary, losing to Adam Schiff, who was seen as more favorable to the industry.

The industry's spending campaign was largely successful in influencing key races, with 91% of the candidates the industry backed with significant funds winning their elections in 2024.

How tech bros bought 'America's most pro-crypto Congress ever'}:

Nov 23, 2024 — Armstrong, Coinbase's CEO, gave more than $1.3 million to a mix of PACs including Fairshake and JD Vance for Senate In...

CNBC·MacKenzie Sigalos

7:49

Crypto Super PACs Amass Over $100 Million for 2024 Elections

May 6, 2024 — Top Crypto Spenders. Coinbase. Coinbase is a leading cryptocurrency exchange offering users a platform for buying and s...

Public Citizen

Big Crypto, Big Spending: Crypto Corporations Spend an ...

Aug 21, 2024 — The primary beneficiary of the corporate crypto cash is Fairshake PAC, a super PAC that has raised $202.9 million. Mor...

Public Citizen

---

WFB 12 25

2025 Man of the Year: Katie Porter’s Ex-Husband

Washington Free Beacon Staff

December 31, 2025

Behind every man there’s a great woman. Or so the saying goes. But if you ask Matthew Hoffman, that woman might be standing behind you with a molten pot of potatoes, and the only thing great about her is the size of her temper. And, well, her size. Hoffman claims that in 2006 his then-wife yelled at him, "Can’t you read the fucking directions?" before dumping the steaming spuds on his head, burning his scalp. Hoffman says he suffered a litany of abuse for years, both physical and verbal in nature, before she divorced him in 2013. This woman became a Democratic member of Congress from California, ran a failed Senate campaign, and is now looking to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.). Fat chance: The woman is Katie Porter.

By now you may be familiar with Ms. Porter’s school of manners: In an October interview with CBS News, a reporter lobbed a softball question at her, asking how she planned on winning over Trump voters, who comprise 40 percent of the state’s electorate. "How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?" Porter scoffed. Following a back-and-forth with CBS, Porter called the interview "unnecessarily argumentative" and threatened to walk out.

Or perhaps you recall the interview Porter did with then-energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, in which the congresswoman chews out one of her staffers for appearing in the background. "Get out of my fucking shot," she says, in a video obtained by Politico.

None of this comes as a surprise to Hoffman, who recently told the New York Post that his ex is a "master manipulator" and "it’s about time" the rest of us caught on. The tales of Hoffman include Porter smashing a coffee pot because the house was supposedly not clean and refusing to allow him to have a cell phone because "you’re too fucking dumb to operate it."

Perhaps if Hoffman had his own political aspirations, he would stand by his woman and trade the Porter name for a state cabinet position. Instead, he's blazing his own trail.

For being ahead of the curve, for warning Californians before it’s too late, and for being Tina to Katie’s Ike Turner, Matthew Hoffman, you are a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.

Published under: California , Gavin Newsom , Jennifer Granholm , Katie Porter

---

pharma you lie 521 an

---

https://www.alternet.org/dianne-feinstein-2659095354/

run for senate

---

https://www.alternet.org/watch-katie-porter-debunks-lauren-boebert-s-on-federal-workers-at-house-hearing-2659570269

---

https://legiscan.com/US/bill/HJR48/2021

ann says katie porter hjr 48 11/21

---

no lnx vid

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/16/viral-spread-lies-katie-porter-shows-twitters-power-amplify-disinformation/

intercept 12 22

LIES ABOUT REP. KATIE PORTER reached millions of Twitter users this week, as the California Democrat’s remarks about how the platform has been used to falsely label LGBTQ+ people as pedophiles were misleadingly edited and captioned in tweets by influential right-wing activists.

The deceptive clips of Porter’s remarks, accompanied by false claims that she had condoned pedophilia, were viewed more than 2.2 million times on Twitter after being shared by right-wing activist accounts, including Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and Jaimee Michell’s Gays Against Groomers.

Those video clips were created by Porter’s political enemies, who made it seem as if Porter, at a Congressional oversight hearing on Wednesday, had argued that pedophilia was not a crime but an identity.

Transcripts and video of Porter’s complete remarks make it clear that she was saying something entirely different — namely, that right-wing activists have inspired hatred of LGBTQ+ Americans in tweets falsely accusing them of being pedophiles, or so-called groomers.

[vid]

a spokesperson for Porter also told the fact-checking service VERIFY, which works with local news stations in 29 states, that the representative “did not say that pedophilia is not a crime.”

In an irony that perfectly encapsulates the impossibility of reasoned discourse with far-right activists willing to lie, the video used to smear Porter was taken from her discussion of a report documenting how activist accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers use Twitter to falsely accuse LGBTQ+ liberals of pedophilia. The report was produced by the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign.

At the hearing, Porter prefaced a question for Kelley Robinson, the HRC president, by saying: “Your organization recently released a report analyzing the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ+ people as so-called groomers. The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids. And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”

Porter then asked Robinson if Twitter’s hateful conduct policy allows users to call LGBTQ+ people “groomers” on the platform.

After Robinson explained that those slurs are used in violation of Twitter’s poorly enforced community guidelines, she added that when people baselessly use words like “groomers” and “pedophiles” to describe LGBTQ+ people, “it is dangerous, and it’s got one purpose: It is to dehumanize us, and make us feel like we are not a part of this American society, and it has real-life consequences.”

Porter responded by saying that she agreed with Robinson that the use of such terms to smear members of LGBTQ+ communities whose politics differ from the far-right activists was intended to marginalize them.

“I think you’re absolutely right,” Porter said. “And it’s not, you know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and of ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow, and engaged in criminal acts, merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity. So this is clearly prohibited, under Twitter’s content, yet you found hundreds of these posts on the platform.”

in addition to Raichik and Michell, whose anti-LGBTQ+ activism has previously been amplified by America’s most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson, misleading clips of Porter were also shared by Greg Price, a former Republican operative and Daily Caller social media editor; Sebastian Gorka, who was fired by the Trump White House; and Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right Malaysian blogger Elon Musk frequently replies to and agrees with on Twitter.

While the tweets from Cheong and Raichik — who falsely asserted that “Rep Katie Porter (D) says pedophilia isn’t a crime- it’s an identity” — were eventually flagged as misleading by Twitter users, the 1.5 million people who follow Michell, Price, or Gorka encountered no such warning.

Although he did not share the video, Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, also lied about what Porter said on Twitter. “Katie Porter just said that pedophilia isn’t a crime, she said it’s an ‘identity,'” Jackson claimed, falsely. “The sad thing is that this woman isn’t the only VILE person pushing for pedophilia normalization. This is what progressives believe!”

While the HRC report Porter highlighted showed that right-wing activists had violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy repeatedly before Musk bought the platform, the previous ownership team did make some attempt to rein in Raichik, who was temporarily suspended several times.

Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk

Since Musk took control, however, “retweets of right-wing figures’ tweets that included the anti-LGBTQ ‘groomer’ slur increased substantially, as did mentions of right-wing figures in tweets containing the slur,” according to new data from LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD and Media Matters, a watchdog group that monitors right-wing misinformation.

Michell’s Gays AgainstGroomers account, the study found, “saw an increase of nearly 300% for retweets of tweets with the slur,” comparing the two months before and after Musk took control of the platform. Raichik’s Libs of TikTok “saw more than a 600% increase in its mentions,” over the same period for tweets using “groomer” slurs.

---

U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva and committee member Rep. Katie Porter are investigating an alleged bribery scheme in which they believe a real estate developer donated to a super PAC aligned in support of former President Donald Trump in exchange for pardons for two other men.

The two Democrats wroteto Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Friday, calling on her department to release all documents related to the pardons of Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been convicted in 2012 of setting fires on public lands they had leased after illegally killing deer on the land.The two men were sentenced to five years in prison with time served in 2015, sparking right-wing protests including a 40-day armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Grijalva (Ariz.) and Porter (Calif.) believe real estate developer Mike Ingram—who was the subject of the Natural Resources Committee's first-ever criminal referral regarding another potential bribery case involving a clean water permit for one of his developments—secured the Hammonds' pardons in 2018 with a $10,000 donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.

According to the letter, Ingram's assistant emailed a Trump Interior Department official on May 25, 2018, attaching two articles arguing for the Hammonds to be pardoned. On July 1, a Republican lawmaker who supported the Hammonds tweeted that Trump was "seriously considering" pardoning them.

One day later, Ingram made his donation, and just over a week after that Trump announced he was pardoning the Hammonds.

"Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017-2018 nonpresidential election cycle," wrote Grijalva and Porter. "That donation was the subject of the committee's criminal referral regarding the Villages at Vigneto development [in Arizona]. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committeeon the same day or within just a few days that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram's favor."

"The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds' pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation," they added.

On social media, Porter noted that she and Grijalva uncovered the evidence of Ingram's alleged bribe "while investigating a possible $240,000 quid pro quo scheme between the Trump administration and a developer."

"We're requesting documents to help us get to the bottom of [the Ingram case]," Porter said. "I have zero tolerance for corruption."

---

The 45th district was created as a result of the redistricting cycle after the 1980 Census.

The district is based in Orange County and includes all of Irvine, Tustin, North Tustin, Villa Park, Laguna Hills, Lake Forest, and Rancho Santa Margarita, as well as parts of Anaheim, Orange, Laguna Woods, Mission Viejo, and Trabuco Canyon.

10 22

Katherine Moore Porter^[3] (born January 3, 1974) is an American politician, law professor, and lawyer who is the U.S. representative from California's 45th congressional district since 2019. She is the first Democrat to be elected to represent the district, covering much of south-central Orange County, including Irvine, Tustin, and Lake Forest along with large portions of Anaheim and Laguna Niguel.

Porter graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School and has taught law at several universities, including the University of California, Irvine, William S. Boyd School of Law, and University of Iowa. She is deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and has received media attention for her questioning during congressional hearings.

Early life and education

Porter was born on January 3, 1974, and grew up in the small farming community of Fort Dodge, Iowa.^[4][5] Her father was a farmer-turned-banker.^[2] Her mother, Liz, was a founder of Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting.

After graduating from Phillips Academy,^[3][6] Porter attended Yale University, where she majored in American studies, graduating in 1996.^[7] Her undergraduate thesis was titled The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community.^[8] She was a member of Grace Hopper College (then called Calhoun College) at Yale.^[9] Porter also interned for Chuck Grassley during this time.^[10]

Porter later attended Harvard Law School, where she was the notes editor for the Harvard Women's Law Journal and a member of the Board of Student Advisers.^[11][12] She studied under bankruptcy law professor and future U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and graduated magna cum laude with her Juris Doctor in 2001.^[2]

Career

Porter was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas.^[11] She practiced with the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon,^[11] and was the project director for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges' Business Bankruptcy Project.^[13][14][15]

Porter was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law.^[11] In 2005, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor,^[11] becoming a full professor there in 2011.^[16] Also in 2011, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.^[7][17] Porter's textbook Modern Consumer Law addresses consumer laws in light of Dodd–Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.^[18]

In March 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be the state's independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement.^[19] As monitor, she oversaw the banks' implementation of $9.5 billion in settlement reforms for Californians.^[20]

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

H.R.4663 — 116th Congress (2019–2020) Freedom from Price Gouging Act, sponsored by Porter

2018

In the 2018 elections, Porter ran for the United States House of Representatives against two-term incumbent Republican Mimi Walters in California's 45th congressional district.^[21][22][23] She defeated Walters^[24] to become the first Democrat to represent the 45th district or its predecessors since it was created in 1953.^[25][26] The district was the 28th from 1953 to 1963, the 35th from 1963 to 1973, the 39th from 1973 to 1975, the 40th from 1975 to 1993, the 47th from 1993 to 2003, the 48th from 2003 to 2013, and has been the 45th since 2013.

Porter and Harley Rouda, also elected in 2018, were the first non-Hispanic Democrats to represent Orange County-based districts since Jerry M. Patterson left office in 1985. Her win was part of a historic night for Democrats that saw them take every seat in the historically Republican county, including all four centered in the county.

Porter did not accept corporate PAC money in her bid for Congress.^[27] She was endorsed by End Citizens United, a political action committee seeking to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.^[28] Porter has cited an overhaul of campaign finance laws and protection of voting rights as legislative priorities.^[27]

2020

Porter ran for reelection to a second term. She advanced from the top-two primary in first place and faced off against the second-place finisher, Republican Mission Viejo Mayor Greg Raths, in the general election. Porter won with 53.5% of the vote to Raths's 46.5%.^[29][30] She became the first non-Hispanic Democrat in 38 years to win a second term in an Orange County-based district. Despite the 45th's recent trend toward the Democrats, in much of the district she is the only elected Democrat above the municipal level.

2022

Porter is running for reelection, this time in California's 47th congressional district.^[31]

Tenure

As of June 2022, Porter had voted in line with Joe Biden's stated position 98.2% of the time.^[32]

Help America Run Act

In March 2019, Porter introduced the "Help America Run Act" (H.R.1623), a bill that would allow people running for the House or Senate to use campaign contributions to pay for healthcare premiums, elder care, child care and dependent care. The bill passed the House in October 2019 and moved on to the Senate for a final vote.^[33]

Congressional questioning

Porter has gained notice for her pointed questioning of officials during congressional hearings, often using visual aids such as whiteboards.^[34][35]

She attracted attention for her questioning on the House Financial Services Committee. In March 2019, her questioning caught Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan contradicting what his corporate lawyers were arguing in court, in that statements he had previously made pledging transparency were "corporate puffery", according to documents lawyers submitted.^[36][34] In April 2019, Porter drew attention for her questioning of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimonabout how a Chase bank teller should make up a $567 shortfall between her monthly budget and her paycheck.^[37]

In May 2019, she asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson about "REOs", real estate owned properties, which he confused with Oreo cookies.^[38] She asked Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Kathy Kraninger to solve basic math problems about annual percentage rates on payday loans, which Kraninger declined to do.^[37]

In March 2020, Porter used five minutes of questioning to get the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert R. Redfield, to agree to use its legal authority to make testing for the COVID-19 virus free for all Americans.^[35]

At an August 24, 2020, Congressional hearing, Porter questioned Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He admitted to her that he did not know the cost of mailing a postcard or a smaller greeting card, the starting rate for U.S. Priority Mail, or how many Americans voted by mail in the 2016 elections. Before his appointment by the Trump administration, DeJoy had no previous experience working at the agency.^[39]

In a December 2020 House hearing, Porter sparred with United States Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin over COVID-19 relief funding.^[40][41]

In January 2021, after Porter's removal from the Financial Services Committee,^[42] the House Democratic caucus came under criticism from Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen for denying Porter a waiver that would have allowed her to serve there and on the Natural Resources and Oversight committees.^[43]

Impeachment of Donald Trump

Porter received recognition for being one of the first Democrats in a swing district to support an impeachment inquiry based on the findings of Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation.^[44][45] She voted for both the first and second impeachments of Donald Trump.^[46][47]

Infrastructure bill

Porter voted for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on November 5, 2021.^[48] The act funds electric vehicles, helps airports reduce emissions, and funds roads and bridges.^[49]

Committee assignments

Caucus memberships

Other political roles

Porter served as one of three co-chairs of Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign.^[52]

Political positions

Abortion

Porter has a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America and an F rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America for her abortion-related voting history.^[53][54] She opposed the overturning of *Roe v. Wade*, calling it "terrible...not just for women, but for all Americans."^[55]

Electoral history

... 2018

ggl

Rep. Katie Porter Introduces Bill to Crack Down on Big ...

https://porter.house.gov › news › documentsingle

Sep 7, 2022 — The Competitive Prices Act closes loopholes that price-gouging corporations exploit to escape accountability in antitrust cases. “Big ...

Fighting Corruption | U.S. Representative Katie Porter

https://porter.house.gov › news › documentsingle

Mar 8, 2021 — Dear friend, Real people, not special interest donors, should decide our elections. Since the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United ...

Newsletters

Fighting Corruption

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print this Page Share by Email

Washington, March 8, 2021

Tags: Government Accountability

Dear friend,

Real people, not special interest donors, should decide our elections. Since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision in 2010, corporations and special interest groups have spent billions of dollars to influence our elections and corrupt our democracy. I’m fighting to restore power to the people.

Throughout my time in Congress, I’ve made it a priority to increase transparency in our government and get special interest money out of our politics. That’s why I proudly voted for H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a sweeping democracy reform and anti-corruption bill that passed the House on Wednesday. This legislation will expand and protect the right to vote, reduce the role of special interest money in our elections, and rein in the influence of super PACs to restore faith and integrity to our democracy. I’m also proud that the For the People Act included my amendment to ban foreign money from state and local ballot initiatives.

I took this selfie with Rep. John Sarbanes (MD-03), the author of the For The People Act, after we finished voting on the bill's passage.

The final version of this landmark bill also included a proposal I introduced last Congress to make it easier for working parents to run for office. The provision I led allows candidates to use campaign funds to pay for child care, elder care, or dependent care. Running for public office should be open to all Americans and not a luxury only the wealthy can afford.

I was proud to be elected to Congress in 2018 with a historically diverse group of new Representatives. Most of us were not in politics or elected office before we got to Congress; we were nurses, non-profit leaders, public school teachers, and consumer advocates. Our government works best when it reflects the diversity of America, and that means we must strive to make it possible for people from all backgrounds to run for office.

To keep Congress focused on democracy reform, during my first term, I founded End Corruption, which I currently co-chair with Rep. Jason Crow. Since its founding last year, End Corruption has hosted important conversations to build public awareness about the need for major democracy and anti-corruption reform. We’ve supported legislation such as H.R. 1 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in each branch of government.

I hosted an Instagram Live with my End Corruption co-chair, Rep. Jason Crow (CO-06), to explain why H.R. 1 is so critical to our democracy.

As your representative, I will continue to do everything in my power to get our government to work for families first. As a leader in anti-corruption efforts in Congress and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, I will always work to strengthen our democracy and fight for Orange County families. To stay up to date on how I’m representing you and California’s 45th District, please follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @RepKatiePorter.

Very truly yours,

New Rep. Katie Porter Bill Holds Government Accountable for ...

https://porter.house.gov › news › document single

2 days ago — WASHINGTON—Congresswoman Katie Porter (D-CA), Vice Chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations, today introduced ...

U.S. Representative Katie Porter

https://porter.house.gov

Rep. Porter Introduces Legislation to Eliminate Foreign ...

https://porter.house.gov › news › documentsingle

Jul 29, 2021 — The Foreign Political Influence Elimination Act of 2021 would close loopholes that enable foreign governments and corporations to make campaign ...

Rep. Porter Introduces Bill to Raise Fees on Polluters ...

https://porter.house.gov › news › documentsingle

Mar 2, 2021 — The Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, co-led by full Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (AZ-3) and Congressman Alan Lowenthal ...

US Representative Katherine Porter | BillTrack50

https://www.billtrack50.com › legislatordetail

Bill	Bill Name	Progress
HR5	Equality Act	Crossed Over
HR7	Paycheck Fairness Act	Crossed Over
HR8	Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021	Crossed Over

View 633 more rows

Katie Porter | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

https://www.congress.gov › member › katie-porter

Results 1 - 100 of 125 — Sponsored legislation by Katie Porter, the Representative from California - in Congress from 2021 through Present.

duck 10 22

:{Home | Katie Porter for Congress:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Katie Porter is serving her second term in Congress fighting for Orange County families. She is running for reelection in California's 47th Congressional District which includes Irvine, Costa Mesa, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach. Endorsements X Join our movement

:{https://en.wikipedia.org:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › wiki › Katie_Porter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Katie Porter - Wikipedia:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Katie Porter Katherine Moore Porter [3] (born January 3, 1974) is an American politician, law professor, and lawyer who is the U.S. representative from California's 45th congressional district since 2019.

:{https://porter.house.gov:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{U.S. Representative Katie Porter:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

U.S. Representative Katie Porter Stay Up To Date Sign up to receive updates on my work on behalf of Orange County families. $15,141,054.46 Returned to OC residents in federal benefits 311,461 Responses to emails, letters, and calls from residents of the 45th District 4,167 Cases closed helping OC families with federal agencies Quick Links

https://www.desmog.com/2022/10/07/slapp-lawsuits-exxon-chemrisk-dapl-climate-change-raskin/

Emily Sanders

In 2018, Krystal Two Bulls received notice that she was being sued for criminal conspiracy.

Two Bulls, who is Oglala Lakota and North Cheyenne, has been organizing for environmental justice for much of her life. She was raised on the North Cheyenne Indian Reservation of Lame Deer, Montana, part of a community that had resisted coal developments for nearly 40 years. In 2016, she helped defeat Arch Coal’s plans to build a massive strip mining operation on the reservation’s border. The project would’ve been one of the largest coal mines in the United States.

Later that same year, Two Bulls received an urgent call for assistance from land and water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, who were working to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, which transports crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

When Two Bulls arrived, the conflict between protestors and local police was escalating. Her auntie, Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, had recently been arrested after standing in the path of a bulldozer set to dig up human remains at an ancestral burial site. Two Bulls spent three-and-a-half months supporting and sustaining the camp — handling basic logistics like providing protestors with food, warm clothing, and other necessities — all in the face of violence by state police. She then helped to launch the No DAPL Solidarity Campaign, a global movement to back the Indigenous opposition to the pipeline.

It wasn’t until a year after camp was shut down that Two Bulls, who came to North Dakota on her own dime and left in debt, found out she was being sued for millions of dollars by the pipeline developer, Energy Transfer Partners. The charges were brought under the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Practices (RICO) Act,a law originally designed to prosecute the mafia. The company claimed that through her “calls to action,” including a statement on Greenpeace’s website asking “all people from around the world to take action” and “come stand with us” against the Dakota Access pipeline, Two Bulls and others had conspired to interfere with Energy Transfer’s business operations and engaged in organized crime. The individuals and groups’ opposition, the company claimed, was defamatory and cost key investments in its pipeline.

In 2017, The Intercept reported on documents leaked from former personnel at an international security firm, TigerSwan, revealing that Energy Transfer had paid the firm to use military-style surveillance and infiltration tactics to gather information that could be deployed in a RICO lawsuit against the anti-pipeline activists.

Two Bulls is just one of many victims of the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs— strategic lawsuits against public participation — to silence and intimidate its critics. A report released last month by legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International identified 152 instances of legal and judicial harassment by fossil fuel corporations to suppress dissent in the United States over the past 10 years, including 93 SLAPP lawsuits.

Just this week, a California oil industry trade association paid nearly $650,000 in fees to the city of Los Angeles and several environmental advocacy groups the company had targeted in court for years following the city’s implementation of new environmental safety requirements for drilling applicants. After declaring bankruptcy, the California Independent Petroleum Association was allowed to pay only a fraction of a judgment initially awarded to the city and groups by a trial court that ruled the lawsuit was a SLAPP.

“With the strengthening of our movements, the revelation of how long the fossil fuel industry has been aware of how their practices impact and contribute to climate change, and the rise of legal cases against oil and gas corporations, these companies are becoming more desperate to silence the voices of their critics,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel at Greenpeace USA.

A wide range of concerned groups, from community organizers to members of Congress, are taking up the fight against SLAPPs. Last month, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing to expose the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs and its backing of bills to criminalize protest. The committee’s witnesses, including Padmanabha and others, explained that corporations were using these tactics to suppress activists’ ability to freely voice dissent.

The day after the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the subcommittee chairman, introduced the SLAPP Protection Act of 2022 — the first federal legislation that would “establish a procedure to dismiss, punish, and deter strategic lawsuits against public participation.” Advocates say the bill could create a sorely needed protection for individuals and community groups who speak out against fossil fuel infrastructure, and an important safeguard for free speech at large.

According to EarthRights International, the proposed legislation would provide a federal mechanism for SLAPP suits to be quickly identified and dismissed while balancing the rights of plaintiffs and defendants. The bill would also force those bringing SLAPP suits to pay their opponents’ legal fees if the lawsuit is proven to have abusive intent.

Advocacy organizations are also tackling the issue. EarthRights is a member of the Protect the Protest coalition, an initiative created in response to the rise of SLAPP suits. “If a corporation can sue a nonprofit organization out of business for criticizing its activities, then that’s extremely dangerous,” Kirk Herbertson, senior policy advisor at EarthRights International, said.

About a year after Energy Transfer filed its lawsuit against Two Bulls and others, a district court judge in North Dakota dismissed the case, denying the RICO claims with prejudice — meaning the company could not refile those claims.

RICO claims, which can triple the amount of damages sought in a SLAPP suit, can be financially devastating — even for a larger, well-resourced organization like Greenpeace USA,which was named in the original suit. While Energy Transfer’s RICO claims against the organization have been dismissed, the pipeline company filed a second lawsuit in North Dakota state court, which is scheduled for trial in June 2023. In its current case, which also names Two Bulls as a defendant, Energy Transfer argues that Greenpeace USA conspired with others to defame, trespass, and interfere with business relationships, among many other charges.

Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.

“Companies are becoming more desperate to silence the voices of their critics”– Deepa Padmanabha

Fighting these lawsuits not only takes vast amounts of money, but also time and energy. Padmanabha said that since mid-2016, her career has been almost entirely dedicated to advocating against corporate lawfare — corporations’ use of the legal system to attack opponents — preventing her from engaging more in the dire work needed to prevent climate catastrophe.

“The next decade is so critical in our fight against climate change. And if we didn’t have to deal with these lawsuits, we would really be putting every penny and every minute we have into fighting the existential threat of climate change,” Padmanabha said, adding that they are also intended to intimidate and deter individuals and lesser-resourced, smaller groups from speaking out.

Karen Savage was working in Massachusetts as a middle-school math teacher when she got hit with a SLAPP suit. In 2013, she and another environmental activist, Cherri Foytlin, wrote an unpaid article for the Huffington Post about a so-called independent study fromscientific consulting firm ChemRisk. The study had claimed that there was no connection between chemicals released during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the serious health problems reported by cleanup workers and coastal residents in its aftermath.

As their reporting revealed, ChemRisk — a company with a long history of working with polluters, including defendant PG&E in the infamous Erin Brockovich case — produced “science” on behalf of BP that the oil major could use to defend itself from liability in court.

After the article was published, the Huffington Post received an immediate request from the company to retract it, which they forwarded on to Cherri Foytlin. (In a note on her Facebook page, Foytlin told ChemRisk to “kiss my derriere.”)

Foytlin’s Facebook post, along with many other social media posts from the two writers, appeared in a defamation suit filed against them by ChemRisk in New York state. The company claimed their article contained falsehoods — though, according to Savage, ChemRisk couldn’t explain what those falsehoods were — and that as long as it was kept online, the article would “continue to do substantial harm to ChemRisk’s reputation.”

“Basically what they wanted to do was shut us up,” Savage told me. “It was an intimidation tactic.”

With pro-bono representation, Savage and Foytlin were able to get the suit dismissed in New York. Within two weeks, the company refiled in Massachusetts, where Savage lived. At one point, she said, the company’s lawyers even attempted to serve her in her classroom while she was teaching.

Cardno ChemRisk, the parent company of ChemRisk, did not respond to a request for comment.

The case was eventually dismissed under the state’s anti-SLAPP laws, and ChemRisk was forced to pay Savage and Foytlin’s attorney’s fees. Savage said she believes that ChemRisk never sued them in Louisiana, where Foytlin lived, because of the three states, Louisiana’s anti-SLAPP laws were the strongest, and the suit would’ve been dismissed faster and with greater consequences for the company.

That tactic of searching for the most favorable court, called forum shopping, is something Raskin’s anti-SLAPP statute would address by creating a standard applicable across the United States. At present, 32 states and the District of Columbia have anti-SLAPP laws, yet they have varying degrees of efficacy. And while the fate of a federal bill could depend on the outcome of midterm elections, most state anti-SLAPP laws have passed with bipartisan support.

Savage — who has since become a journalist and haswritten for DeSmog about being arrested by pipeline security while reporting — said she hopes Raskin’s bill would help put an end to this tactic. “If you know the truth, and you’ve got factual backup, and someone comes at you, you can’t back down on that,” Savage said. “The whole reason they’re coming at you is because they also know that you have the truth.”

While the fossil fuel industry works to stamp out the speech of environmental advocates on the one hand, it is now arguing that its climate denial is protected speech on the other. At the same time that Raskin held his hearing into the fossil fuel industry’s assault on the First Amendment, the House Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee held a separate hearing to examine how public relations firms market climate disinformation and delay action on behalf of Big Oil. In that hearing, chaired by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), Republicans and their witness argued that the committee was attacking the corporations’ right to free speech.

“Taken together, the two [hearings] are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens,” Amy Westervelt recently wrote in The Intercept. The fossil fuel industry, she explained, has been developing the argument that its public statements on climate policy are protected speech since the late 1960s, all while working to expand the right of corporations to buy influence over politics behind the scenes.

In a paradoxical twist, fossil fuel companies are even attempting to wield existing anti-SLAPP laws to shield themselves from legal accountability. After a Massachusetts court ruled that Attorney General Maura Healey’s climate fraud lawsuit against Exxon could proceed in state court, the oil giant told the state’s supreme court that the case was actually a conspiracy to silence Exxon’s views on climate policy in violation of the state’s anti-SLAPP statute.But so far, the idea that Exxon’s fraud is protected free speech has not gone over well with judges.

“We have seen that the industry is trying to build up this argument around a conspiracy against them, and it’s coming up in things like anti-SLAPP motions in courts. But they have continued to fail in that effort so far,” Herbertson of EarthRights International said. Raskin’s newly proposed federal legislation, he said, is clearly and explicitly designed to be used by real peopleand organizations that have been victim to SLAPP suits,and will be harder for corporations to use in their own defense.

But if you ask Padmanabha of Greenpeace, the industry’s tactics are on thin ice. “There is this recognition and an increasing awareness that speech should not be bought,” she said. “And I think that the [Oversight Civil Rights and Civil Liberties] hearing and the bill that followed it are really just emblematic examples of how these attempts to control the narrative are crumbling.”

Emily Sanders writes ExxonKnews, a newsletter covering climate accountability and the oil and gas industry. She is editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, and is based in New York City. This piece was co-published by DeSmog and ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/katie-porter-corporate-greed-inflation/

charts

https://theintercept.com/**2022/09/**16/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-free-speech/

REPS. JAMIE RASKIN, D-Md., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., probably didn’t plan for their committee hearings to run at the exact same time this week, but the hearings sure were talking to each other.

In her Committee on Natural Resources hearing, Porter highlighted the role PR firms play in blocking climate policy. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, and his selected witness, Amy Cooke, CEO of the conservative John Locke Foundation,expressed concern that preventing companies and their hired PR firms from spreading misinformation about climate change would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Raskin, focused on free speech attacks against environmentalists, digging into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to curb citizens’ speech rights via strategic litigation and laws that criminalize protest. Taken together, the two are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens.

raskin’s free speech hearing focused on two key tactics: the increased filing of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs— defamation suits aimed at penalizing citizens or citizen groups for exercising their First Amendment rights — and theproliferation of so-called critical infrastructure bills, which pile on fines and criminal sentences for those caught trespassing or vandalizing near pipelines, power plants, railroads, or other infrastructure. These anti-protest bills were a direct industry backlash to the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017. Starting with a law passed in Oklahoma in 2017, they proliferated with the help of the industry group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts and disseminates pro-corporate model legislation for adoption by state governments. Seventeen states now have critical infrastructure laws on the books, with several more considering proposals.

####

“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace and a witness at Raskin’s hearing. “They’re tactics used by the same corporate actors to quash dissent. They’re pushing legislation to silence us, to criminalize our critiques through anti-protest bills. And they’re also filing SLAPP suits to silence dissent.”

Greenpeace has dealt with both. Greenpeace USA activists were arrested in 2019 under Texas’s felony critical infrastructure law for unfurling banners on a bridge, which temporarily blocked shipping. The goal of the action was to highlight the connection between the oil industry and climate change.

Greenpeace is engaged in active litigation in a couple of SLAPP suits too. In one, Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued the organization for its role in the Standing Rock protests. The suit was initially filed in federal court and invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, orRICO, a law designed to prosecute organized crime. “Energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy work to uplift Indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime,” Padmanabha said.

Because RICO allows for damages to be tripled if a defendant is found guilty, Greenpeace faced a $1 billion fine. Losing that suit would have had a truly chilling effect on free speech. A federal judge threw out the case, but Energy Transfer filed again in North Dakota (minus the RICO charge), a state that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law on the books.

:{

“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin.”

}:

Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants a quick way to get SLAPP suits dismissed, minimizing the time and money spent on meritless cases. Currently, 31 states and the District of Columbia have adopted anti-SLAPP statutes, which makes it fairly easy for corporate entities to go venue shopping for a court in a state without such a law. To address that gap, Raskin proposed new legislation this week to create federal anti-SLAPP protection. While some players in the fossil fuel industry may oppose Raskin’s bill, others have actually sought to avail themselves of anti-SLAPP protections. Exxon Mobil, for example, in its final attempt to thwart the fraud case against it in Massachusetts, argued that the suit was a SLAPP.

The oil company’s attorney Justin Anderson maintained that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s fraud complaint against Exxon was not valid because the company’s public statements on climate policy should be considered political opinion (“petitioning activity,” in legal parlance), not misleading advertising — even when Exxon falsely claimed that climate change wasn’t real and overstated the company’s investments in low-carbon technology.

When one judge asked why Exxon would file an anti-SLAPP complaint rather than make a First Amendment argument in court, Anderson made clear that the point was to avoid discovery, when the corporation would be asked to hand over files and make its executives available for depositions. “The anti-SLAPP statute provides a mechanism to have a case that is brought against someone for petitioning activity dismissed at the outset before burdensome discovery is imposed on the party,” he argued.

The “petitioning activity” argument is one that the industry and its allies have trotted out repeatedly, both in court and in congressional hearings like those held this week. It’s a broad interpretation of free speech rights for corporations, the very sort of protection these same companies are opposed to extending to individuals. In his testimony before Raskin’s subcommittee, Daren Bakst, a senior research fellow on environmental policy and regulation for the Heritage Foundation, said, “The chilling effects are states bringing lawsuits against people for their speech.” It’s hard to tell because he said “people,” but he meant oil companies. Which he made clear by immediately referencing “what municipalities are doing, the government is doing against these fossil fuel companies. And I also see that Massachusetts is doing.”

This view of an oil company as a person who is being silenced for simply sharing their views on climate policy is the basic argument oil companies are making in dozens of cases across the country. These cases, brought by both municipalities and states, hinge either on fraud or nuisance claims and effectively ask that fossil fuel companies pay up for delaying action on climate, which increased both the impacts of the climate crisis and the price of adapting to a warming world. In all of them, the corporate defendants make some version of a free speech argument. They maintain that their public speech about global warming differed from their internal knowledge because their public statements were “petitioning speech,” related to their political views and desires and thus, protected. The industry has been building the foundation for such an argument for about as long as it has known about climate change — since the late 1960s.

:{

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws.”

}:

The argument arose out of a situation not unlike the one playing out today, with war driving up prices at the pump and oil companies desperate to control public perception.

According to documents from Mobil’s corporate archive at the University of Texas at Austin, the company’s longtime PR whiz Herbert Schmertz and then-CEO, Rawleigh Warner, came up with an idea to help wrestle back control of the narrative. Using Mobil’s PR and advertising budget, they would create “idea advertising” to push the company’s take on key issues of the day and create the sense of Mobil as a citizen with a distinct personality.

They ran weekly :{advertorial:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:s in the New York Times as well as regular placements in a wide range of other publications, from the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal to Time and Fortune. Then Schmertz proposed TV and radio too. Why not?

In the early 1970s, Mobil took their TV and radio advertorials to all the big broadcast stations and only one, NBC, agreed to run them. CBS and ABC said they preferred to have their journalists cover energy issues. For Schmertz and Warner, it was a battle they had to win. What if the newspapers, or PBS, started to rethink playing nice with Mobil? In a media blitz, the two blasted CBS and ABC from every angle, in their NYT spot, on radio and TV programs, at events. Warner went to various business clubs to talk about the importance of protecting corporate free speech. Schmertz testified before Congress in 1978, urging First Amendment protection for Mobil’s ads and arguing that there was no difference between Mobil advertorials and New York Times editorials, because after all the Times was a business too.

Mobil helped rally support and funding for the first big Supreme Court case on the matter, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the precursor to Citizens United. The court ruled that corporations could spend whatever money they wanted to influence politics, overruling a Massachusetts statute that said otherwise. “If the restricted view of corporate speech taken by the Massachusetts court were accepted,” Justice Lewis A. Powell wrote, “government would have the power to deprive society of the views of corporations.”

How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content

“I don’t think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of speech in the public space,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle said. “Now, suddenly, corporations could use their budgets — which are enormous, you know, much larger than individuals — to advocate their position in the public space. … It allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space that gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else’s.”

The 2010 Citizens United ruling, of course, intensified that dynamic. Whereas Bellotti allowed corporations to publicly campaign for particular ballot initiatives or candidates, Citizens United allowed political speech of any sort without disclosure of who was paying, who was actually speaking. Oil companies have been working to broaden corporate free speech rights even more in recent years, as their arguments in climate litigation and before Congress show.

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws,” said Brulle, who has co-authored briefs in some of these cases.

Robert Kerr, who’s researched Mobil’s role in the corporate free speech movement for years, said to side with the oil companies’ arguments in these cases, the Supreme Court would have to turn its back on about a century’s worth of legal precedent. “It’s really deeply established even by some of the members of the current Supreme Court that the First Amendment will never protect expression that is fraud,” he said. “The worry now is that with this court there seems to be a majority that wants to say yes to almost any question the corporate interests raise.”

It makes sense then, that the industry and its allies would be working hard to rebrand climate denialism as simply a difference of opinion, to put some distance between greenwashing and fraud, to collectively gasp about the “chilling effect” (a phrase that came up so often in minority witness testimony this week that it’s hard to believe someone somewhere wasn’t disseminating talking points) that tackling misinformation might have on free speech. The fact that those efforts are happening alongside coordinated attempts to criminalize protest is more of the same: corporations drowning out the public.

https://naturalresources.house.gov/subcommittees/oversight-and-investigations

COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS

Chair- KATIE PORTERCALIFORNIA’S 45TH DISTRICT

NYDIA M. VELÁZQUEZ

NEW YORK 7TH DISTRICT

JESÚS G. “CHUY” GARCÍA

ILLINOIS 4TH DISTRICT

STEVE COHEN

TENNESSEE’S 9TH DISTRICT

JARED HUFFMANCALIFORNIA 2ND DISTRICT

Email the whistleblower hotline at NRDemsTips@mail.house.gov or call us at (202) 225-6065. [2017 Matthew Muirragui and Vic Edgerton, of the House Natural Resources Committee, at (202)-225-6065.]
Mail documents and information to the Director of Investigations, House Natural Resources Committee Majority Staff, 1324 Longworth House Office Building,

4/19

Chair Grijalva Announces House Natural Resources Committee Senior and Professional Staff for the 116th Congress

Washington, D.C. – Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has announced his senior and professional staff team for the House Natural Resources Committee during the 116th Congress. This is not a comprehensive staff list.

Staff Director – David Watkins

Chief Counsel – Sarah Lim

Deputy Chief Counsel – Luis Urbina

Chief Clerk – Nancy Locke

Deputy Staff Director – Steve Feldgus, Chris Kaumo

Director of Investigations – Vic Edgerton

Director of Public Engagement – Chris Espinosa

Office of Insular Affairs

Director – Brian Modeste

Professional Staff – Margarita Varela Rosa

Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources

Staff Director – Steve Feldgus

Professional Staff – Peter Gallagher, Becky Cairns, Katie Harris (AAAS Fellow)

Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States

Staff Director – Chris Kaumo

Professional Staff – Naomi Miguel

Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands

Staff Director – Brandon Bragato

Professional Staff – Henry Wykowski, Chris Rackens, Scott Simmons (Bevinetto Fellow)

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations

Staff Director – Vic Edgerton

Professional Staff – Lindsay Gressard, Julie Lillie

Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife

Staff Director – Matthew Muirragui (Water)

Professional Staff – Carlee Brown, Marnie Kremer

Staff Director – Lora Snyder (Oceans and Wildlife)

Professional Staff – Rachel Gentile, Zachary Cress (NOAA Detailee), Michelle Chow (Sea Grant Fellow)

Communications Director – Adam Sarvana

Deputy Communications Director – Monica Sanchez

Press Contact

Media Contact: Adam Sarvana

(202) 225-6065 or (202) 578-6626 mobile

9 22

Vic Edgerton 3rd degree connection3rd

Director of Investigations at U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources

U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources

Yale School of Epidemiology and Public Health

Washington, District of Columbia, United States Contact info

500+ connections

Message

ActivityActivity

528 followers528 followers

Vic hasn't posted latelyVic hasn't posted lately

Vic’s recent posts and comments will be displayed here.Vic’s recent posts and comments will be displayed here.

Show all activity

Experience

Staff Director, Oversight and Investigations SubcommitteeStaff Director, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee

U.S. House Committee on Natural ResourcesU.S. House Committee on Natural Resources

Jan 2015 - Present · 7 yrs 9 mosJan 2015 - Present · 7 yrs 9 mos

U.S. House of Representatives logo

Legislative Director and Senior Policy Advisor, Rep. Keith Ellison Legislative Director and Senior Policy Advisor, Rep.Keith Ellison

U.S. House of RepresentativesU.S. House of Representatives

Apr 2013 - Jan 2015 · 1 yr 10 mosApr 2013 - Jan 2015 · 1 yr 10 mos

U.S. House of Representatives logo

Chief of Staff, Rep. Dennis KucinichChief of Staff, Rep. Dennis Kucinich

U.S. House of RepresentativesU.S. House of Representatives

2010 - 2013 · 3 yrs2010 - 2013 · 3 yrs

U.S. House of Representatives logo

U.S. House of RepresentativesU.S. House of Representatives

2 yrs 1 mo2 yrs 1 mo

Legislative Director, Rep. Dennis KucinichLegislative Director, Rep. Dennis Kucinich

2007 - 2009 · 2 yrs2007 - 2009 · 2 yrs

Senior Legislative Assistant, Rep. Dennis KucinichSenior Legislative Assistant, Rep. Dennis Kucinich

2007 · Less than a year2007 · Less than a year

U.S. House of Representatives logo

Legislative Assistant, Rep. Dennis KucinichLegislative Assistant, Rep. Dennis Kucinich

US House of RepresentativesUS House of Representatives

2004 - 2006 · 2 yrs2004 - 2006 · 2 yrs

Education

Yale School of Epidemiology and Public HealthYale School of Epidemiology and Public Health

Master of Public Health (M.P.H.), Environmental EpidemiologyMaster of Public Health (M.P.H.), Environmental Epidemiology

2000 - 20032000 - 2003

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Master of Environmental Management, Environmental Policy, Politics and LawMaster of Environmental Management, Environmental Policy, Politics and Law

2000 - 20032000 - 2003

UC Irvine logo

UC IrvineUC Irvine

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Appied EcologyBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Appied Ecology

1987 - 19921987 - 1992

SkillsSkills

Legislative RelationsLegislative Relations

Endorsed by 2 colleagues at U.S. House of RepresentativesEndorsed by 2 colleagues at U.S. House of Representatives

19 endorsements19 endorsements

LegislationLegislation

10 endorsements10 endorsements

Environmental PolicyEnvironmental Policy

8 endorsements8 endorsements

A “Permanent Campaign Strategy”

FTI’s work for its fossil fuel clients goes far beyond creating billboards, online ads, or TV commercials, as a run-of-the-mill PR firm might do.

“You only hire a PR company when you have a problem to solve. And you hire an FTI when you’ve got real problems. You need dirty tricks. This is not just like selling a hamburger,” Kert Davies, founder and director of Climate Investigations Center, told DeSmog. “This is designing an influence campaign. It’s like designing a whole intelligence operation.”

The head of FTI’s Strategic Communications for the Americas is a man named Brian Kennedy, who was the communications strategist for drilling contractor Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Kennedy, who “is best known for his expertise in crisis management,” as hisbio on the FTI website says, headed up Transocean’s PR work during the disaster and in the litigation that followed.

The campaigns waged by FTI for its fossil fuel clients are extensive and wide-ranging. As the New York Timesreported in 2020, FTI helped set up regional astroturf websites for its oil industry clients, such as Texans for Natural Gas, New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity, Citizens to Protect PA Jobs, Western Wire, and the Arctic Energy Center. The websites artificially created the appearance of grassroots political energy, and shared misleading “news” that downplayed environmental damage from fracking while simultaneously promoting the benefits of pro-drilling policies.

“FTI remains a major, major contractor to the fossil fuel industry. They run front groups, fake news channels, they pose as reporters, they write reports about activists.”

– Kert Davies

The most high-profile climate denial project FTI is involved in is Energy In Depth (EID), a pro-fracking constellation of websites that spreads industry talking points. Ostensibly a project linked to the Independent Petroleum Association of America, EID — which promotes fracking, attacks climate scientists and environmental activists, and plays up the benefits of fossil fuels — was jointly launched with FTI back in 2009.

The website wasn’t just a project of small and medium-sized independent oil producers. In 2011, DeSmogrevealed that Energy In Depth had the early backing of some of the largest oil companies, including BP, Anadarko, Halliburton, Chevron, Shell, XTO Energy (owned by ExxonMobil), and several other oil companies and trade associations. Without that financial backing from major oil companies, the project “would not be possible,” according to a 2009memo DeSmog found.

In 2019, Huffington Postreported that the Independent Petroleum Association of America spent close to $2 million annually on Energy In Depth. That amounts to roughly afifth of the trade group’s budget.

“We know some of the contracts FTI has with various trade associations,” Davies said. “But the truth is, we don’t know the half of it.”

Earlier this year, DeSmog published a 2015 FTI presentation in which the firm bragged about its deep connections with the oil industry and trumpeted its work on behalf of its fossil fuel clients. FTI’s presentation highlighted its work, through Energy In Depth, at “debunking” peer-reviewed studies that link fracking to water contamination, as well as providing “facts” to media about how methane emissions from oil and gas were in decline.

A screenshot from FTI Consulting’s 2015 presentation.]

Energy In Depth acts as “a public-facing clearinghouse” and a “permanent campaign strategy” for the oil industry, Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, told DeSmog in an email.

“FTI works for oil and gas clients by trying to shut down the conversation about climate-related problems before they happen – or especially, before they become a problem for their clients,” Aronczyk said.

The firm took the lessons learned with Energy In Depth around the world. FTIboasted at an industry conference in Brazil in 2014 that Energy In Depth had the ability “to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.”

In another instance that has not previously been reported, FTI gave a presentation at a 2012 industry conference in Canada, in which it shared its experience “generating pro-gas news” in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, and how the firm intended to do the same in Quebec. At the time, the gas industry was facing publicopposition to fracking in the Canadian province, and FTI, via Energy In Depth, wanted to shift public opinion in the industry’s favor. That included proactively creating pro-gas news in the media, as well as a sponsored trip for Quebec farmers to travel to fossil fuel-rich Alberta to learn about how shale gas is produced.

A screenshot of a 2016 Earth Day message from Energy In Depth, a fracking industry project of FTI Consulting and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.]

“FTI remains a major, major contractor to the fossil fuel industry. They run front groups, fake news channels, they pose as reporters, they write reports about activists,” Davies said. “They do all manner of strategic communications work to defend the honor of fossil fuel companies and trade associations.”

The House Committee has also sent a letter to a separate PR firm called Story Partners. Established in January 2010 by well-known PR executive Gloria Dittus, Story Partners has also run multiple influence campaigns for the fossil fuel industry in recent years. The firm led the American Petroleum Institute’s Vote for Energy campaign, which sought to equate drilling for oil and gas with jobs. Story Partners also ran campaigns for Venture Global LNG, a Gulf Coast LNG export company. And it also helped Noble Energy defeata ballot measure in Colorado that would have increased setback distances between fracking operations and homes and businesses, a measure that would have encroached upon Noble Energy’s assets.

As it happens, Gloria Dittus previously founded Dittus Communications, which was acquired by FTI in 2005. In 2009, the Energy In Depth website was registered by “FD Dittus Communications,” a unit of FTI, according to the website’s registration.

According to a Story Partners spokesperson, “Gloria Dittus left FTI Consulting in early 2009 after the 2005 sale of Dittus Communications was finalized to Financial Dynamics (FD) and fully integrated into FTI Consulting at the end of 2008. Any Energy in Depth work was outside her tenure and likely launched following her leave from FTI.” Story Partners did not respond to questions from DeSmog about their role running climate disinformation campaigns for fossil fuel companies.

Arena said that FTI is among a small group of “pariah” PR firms that “do not represent the majority of the PR and ad industry, but they are our industry’s biggest reputational liability.”

[twt ca]

"But the bigger point here is that these are deceptive practices that no ethical marketing firm should engage in, for any client. They muddy public understanding and suppress the truth by design and should therefore be repudiated by the PR and ad industry at large,” she added. “The silver lining here is that this moment of reckoning has the potential to change the communications industry for the better.”

Ultimately, FTI’s mission has been “to preserve the reputation of the fossil fuel industry as it has come under pressure around climate change,” Davies said. Referring to FTI’s direct involvement in spreading climate disinformation, he added: “In doing so, you are now part of the effort to hide the truth.”

In a statement to DeSmog, Matthew E. Bashalany, a spokesperson for FTI Consulting, said: “Our company takes the Subcommittee’s request very seriously. We continue to be in regular contact with subcommittee staff as we progress our efforts to be responsive to the chair’s request in a manner consistent with our legal obligations to preserve our clients’ confidentiality and privileges. FTI Consulting is called upon by clients in dozens of industries globally, including those involved in traditional, renewable and alternative energy development, and we are committed to ensuring that all professional services we deliver align with our firmwide position to support action to address climate change.”

It is unclear what will happen next, but the House Committee could subpoena documents or have executives appear before the congressional panel. The August 24 deadline came and went, and now the firm faces a potential subpoena. In an email to DeSmog on August 25, a day after the deadline, a spokesperson for the Committee said: “The Committee has not yet gotten an adequate response from FTI.”

Another spokesperson for the Committee told DeSmog, “stay tuned.”

david watkins

ref ltr grijalvachair,

katie porter

https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2022.06.12%20Grijalva%20Porter%20letters%20to%20PR%20firms_combined.pdf

i imagine she is tired of rope-a dope?

an 6 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/katie-porter-heritage-witness-perjury/

**Rep. Katie Porter** (D-CA) accused a representative of the right-wing **Heritage Foundation** of falsely testifying under oath during Wednesday’s House hearing on gun violence. Congresswoman Porter, popular especially among policy wonks, is a Harvard Law graduate and a law professor.

“I respect that we have different opinions,” Rep. Porter told Amy Swearer, a Heritage Foundation legal fellow, “but we cannot have different facts. We have a duty to debate the merits of proposal. You falsely testified under oath.”

Swearer interrupted Rep. Porter, asking: “Would you like the explanation of why?”

Porter declined.

“You falsely testified under oath,” Porter repeated, when a Republican interrupted with “point of order.”

Sounding outraged, Swearer said: “I have been accused of falsely testifying under oath and I would like to address it.”

The Republican, off-camera, continued.

“The gentlewoman has accused her of perjury. Is she going to hold to that or are you going to allow the witness to respond to that accusation of criminal conduct?”

The chair was not impressed and ruled the Republican lawmaker did not have a significant point of order.

“I asked you if that bill was correct,” Rep. Porter continued. “If the bill would allow any gun owner to maintain possession and you said ‘yes.’ Yet you testified that the bill would allow people to become felons overnight. Earlier today, you testified that you hoped that this was the last time you testify before Congress. For the sake of our nation and the integrity of this Congress, I do too.”

Again outraged, Swearer declared, “I said after a mass shooting. How dare you?” she challenged Porter.

“How dare you misstate the law?” Porter replied.

Watch clip:

ref off BS

https://www.heritage.org/staff/amy-swearer

no lnx

Amy Swearer

Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies

Areas of Expertise

Firearms

REQUEST AN INTERVIEW

Download Headshot

TESTIMONY

We Have Effective Gun Violence Solutions. You Just Won't Listen.

Amy Swearer Jun 8, 2022 39 min read

COMMENTARY

Raising Red Flags on Federal Red Flag Gun Laws

Amy Swearer Jun 3, 2022 6 min read

COMMENTARY

11 Examples of Defensive Gun Use Dispel NYC Mayor’s Concerns on Public Carry

Amy Swearer May 18, 2022 6 min read

COMMENTARY

These 10 Incidents Highlight Importance of Second Amendment for Women

Apr 21, 2022 6 min read

COMMENTARY

These 11 Defensive Uses of Guns Didn’t Target “Deer in Kevlar Vests,” Mr. Pre...

Mar 15, 2022 6 min read

COMMENTARY

11 Examples of Defensive Gun Use Highlight Importance of Second Amendment

Feb 8, 2022 5 min read

COMMENTARY

8 Problems With San Jose’s Gun Insurance Mandate and Gun Ownership Tax

Feb 2, 2022 5 min read

COMMENTARY

14 Examples of Defensive Gun Use at End of 2021

Amy Swearer Jan 13, 2022 5 min read

COMMENTARY

12 Incidents of Defensive Gun Use Prove Armed Civilians Make Situations Safer

Amy Swearer Dec 23, 2021 6 min read

COMMENTARY

Here Are the Facts About Spikes in Crime That Sen. Dick Durbin Didn’t Want Me...

Amy Swearer Dec 16, 2021 8 min read

Page9 …Next pageNext ›

Other Heritage ExpertsSee all experts

Daren Bakst

Senior Research Fellow, Environmental Policy and Regulation

@darenbakst

Theodore R. Bromund

Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D.

Senior Research Fellow in Anglo-American Relations

@Bromund

Peter Brookes

Senior Research Fellow, Center for National Defense

@Brookes_Peter

Steven P. Bucci

Steven P. Bucci, Ph.D.

Visiting Fellow, Truluck Center for Leadership Development

@SBucci

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/katie-porter/

no lnx

Rep Porter (D-Calif.) recently blasted Johnson & Johnson for moving to split its baby powder from the rest of the company amid a highly publicized class-action lawsuit from thousands of women.

Since the group of plaintiffs, some of whom have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, are alleging that the corporation's baby powder and other talc products were contaminated with asbestos, Porter is criticizing the company's push to treat its baby powder as a separate company, Business Insider reports.

On Tuesday, October 19, the Democratic lawmaker questioned the corporation's decision and criticized its attempt to shield assets from litigation.

"Johnson & Johnson filed in court last week to split its Baby Powder from the rest of the company," the congresswoman tweeted. "Why? J&J knew asbestos laced some bottles but kept it a secret for decades. Tens of thousands of women with ovarian cancer are suing, and the company wants to shield its assets."

"J&J sold the powder for 60 years, and now that it has to pay for these women's medical bills, it wants the courts to treat 'Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder' as a separate company," the California congresswoman continued.

Linda Lipsen, who works for the American Association for Justice, also released a statement criticizing the corporation's actions, according to ABC News.

"There are countless Americans suffering from cancer, or mourning the death of a loved one, because of the toxic baby powder that Johnson & Johnson put on the market that has made it one of the most profitable pharmaceutical corporations in the world," Lipsen said in the statement. "Their conduct and now bankruptcy gimmick is as despicable as it is brazen."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-response/?rs=182

Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?

The instinct to forget pandemics, as I've pointed out when it came to the 1918 "Spanish flu," has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington's failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.

In the end, that's why I wrote my new book *Virus* — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better.

In the early months of 2020, as rumors of distant death morphed into announcements of an imminent pandemic, followed by a patchwork of state and local lockdowns, most Americans were too stunned by daily events to absorb the bigger picture. Memories of those days still click by like surreal snapshots: prepper shopping, toilet-paper hoarders, forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks, and a capricious leader on TV night after endless night talking about quack cures, his own ratings, and how he "liked the numbers low." Meanwhile, he left desperate states to compete with each other for badly needed protective gear.

What looked like chaos or ad hoc decision-making by an improbably elected fraudster president was, in fact, deeply rooted in ideology; specifically, in the belief that the job of the government was neither to exercise leadership, nor activate government agencies to assist the American people. It was to promote private industry and its profits as the solution to anything and everything pandemic.

That ideology led to profiteering, politicized science, and mass death. Now, as the pandemic wanes (at least for the time being, though not necessarily for the unvaccinated) in this country, it deserves an investigation. Somewhere between almost 600,000 and more than 900,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19, a significant number of those deaths unnecessary, as even the former administration's medical expert, Dr Deborah Birx, has said.

The virus arrived in America after the Trump administration — steered by right-wing Heritage Foundation policy wonks and their donor-class comrades — had already laid waste to key agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control. Their instant response to the pandemic was to similarly sideline government emergency-management experts, put inexperienced 20-something volunteers in charge of finding and distributing protective gear, and circulate lists of possible suppliers — one of whom, typically enough, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no medical contracting experience, snagged a cool $86-million contract from the state of New York for ventilators he would never deliver.[// kodak?]

While most of the country hunkered down in a state of stunned paralysis, a faction of Trumpworld recognized the pandemic not for what it took away — human lives and livelihoods — but for what it offered. The chaos of the moment allowed them to road-test their dream system, to prove once and for all that the forces of supply and demand, the instinct to make a buck, could do a better job managing a natural disaster than the government of the United States and its bureaucrats.

Is any of this likely to be investigated? Will anyone be held accountable for what appears to have been a response deliberately mismanaged by religious zealots and crony capitalists, crews equally cynical about expertise, science, and the government's ability to prevent or ameliorate disaster?

What We Don't Know About the Trump Pandemic Disaster

Here, as a start, is a rundown of where inquiries into that disaster now stand.

Buried in the alphabet soup of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act is the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), established in March 2020 to keep track of the federal money (by now $5.5 trillion) that was to be spent on the pandemic. It's a consortium of agency inspector generals, headed by Michael Horowitz, a career Department of Justice lawyer. His name will be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigations. He produced a report in 2019 that — to the dismay of Trump's supporters — failed to conclude that the FBI had begun investigating connections between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Trump campaign without legal cause and as a political dirty trick.

PRAC is authorized to conduct oversight of pandemic-related emergency spending of any sort. Its inspector generals have already issued nearly 200 pandemic-related oversight reports and charged 474 people with trying to steal more than $569 million. (Details in its quarterly reports are available online.)

While PRAC has been genuinely nonpartisan in its acts, its focus so far has been on the small fry of the pandemic era, not the truly big fish. In its most recent semi-annual report, for example, it makes clear that 55% of its charges had to do with fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and 40% were related to fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. Among the bigger PRAC successes: charging a Texas man in a $24-million Covid-relief fraudulent loan scheme last October and seven men in another fraud scheme in which they used their ill-gotten pandemic gains to buy, among other things, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

The CARES Act also authorized the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor the federal response to the pandemic. Its most recent semi-annual report included 16 recommendations in selected public-health areas like testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, only one of which has so far been implemented. A source at the GAO told me that a report on some contracting irregularities can be expected this summer.

So far, such government self-assessments have shown little appetite for dealing with the true cronyism, profiteering, and disastrous politicization of the federal pandemic response by Trump's minions. Among the schemes begging for a deeper look is Operation Airbridge. Led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it was an attempt to use federal funds to underwrite the air-shipping costs of private companies in an effort to speed the delivery of the kinds of personal protective equipment that were in such short supply last spring. That unorthodox effort included large no-bid contracts granted to a small group of private health-care companies without restrictions on pricing or even on where the desperately needed products were to be delivered.

In the spring of 2020, as hospital workers began popping up on social media and network news programs clad only in garbage bags and makeshift or reused face masks, sometimes in tears and pleading for help, the White House maintained its focus on private enterprise as the way out of the disaster. The administration called for volunteers to staff what would become another public/private bonanza, the White House Covid-19 Supply Chain Task Force, also helmed by Trump family fixer, Jared Kushner.

We don't know what, if anything, Kushner's group actually accomplished. The audacity of the former administration's disregard for federal rules and regulations coupled with the scale of the no-bid contracts they issued certainly attracted political pushback at the time. Democrats and civil-society groups in Washington filed requests for more information about how such contracts had eluded federal guidelines, and where the supplies actually went.

It's possible, however, that we may never know.

Ventilating Money

In April 2020, a group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren, citing the administration's secrecy, opened an investigation into the operation. They sent a letter to the six Operation Airbridge beneficiary health-care giants — Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor — requesting explanations for reports of "political favoritism, cronyism, and price-gouging" in the ongoing supply effort. "Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars on this secretive project and they deserve to know whether it actually helped get critical supplies to the areas most in need," Warren said that June.

Three of the six suppliers did, in the end, give the senators copies of memorandums of agreement (MOAs) indicating that they "had complete discretion about how to distribute supplies across hotspot counties" and that "nothing in the MOAs appears to prevent a supplier from sending all of its supplies designated for hotspots to just a single customer in one of the hotspots." The government hadn't, in fact, put any kind of conditions on the cost for that protective equipment and the Trump Justice Department would insist that it was none of its business how suppliers arrived at the prices they charged for it.

Using taxpayer funds to grease private enrichment was, of course, a Trump family tradition, going back to the Eisenhower years when Donald's father, Fred, fleeced the government of millions of dollars in loans aimed at housing World War II veterans. Hauled down to Capitol Hill to explain himself, the New York builder was unrepentant, arguing that a loophole in the law allowed for his private gain and, under such circumstances, only a fool would have left all that money on the table.

What, from the outside, came to look like White House-inspired chaos — of which Operation Airbridge was just one example — should, in fact, be seen as a deliberate effort to disengage the federal government and leave the blame and the logistics problems to Covid-afflicted states, at the time mostly run by Democrats.

On March 24, 2020, for instance, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begged the federal government to help get more ventilators for what was clearly going to be a surge of coronavirus patients. (New York City's health-care system was already overwhelmed by then.) At the time, hooking patients up to ventilators seemed like the best way to go, though doctors later realized that, for many patients, the tricky disease could be foiled earlier with anticlotting and steroid medication.

"How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator?" asked Cuomo. Three days later, Trump tweeted, "General Motors must… start making ventilators, now! Ford, get going on ventilators, fast!"

Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer for tech firms like Google, tweeted back at the president, "We can supply ICU ventilators, invasive and non-invasive." Within days, he turned up on a list vetted by Kushner's team of volunteers and, at their recommendation, officials in New York closed a deal with him.

The only problem: Oren-Pines had no ventilators and had never been in the medical supply business. When he failed to deliver on the $86 million deal, Wells Fargo froze his account and New York canceled the order, demanding the money back, though by summer 2020, it had yet to collect a final $10 million.

The Great Forgetting?

In addition to making various large or politically well-connected health-care companies far wealthier, the administration also lavished staggering billions on a small group of Big Pharma firms for Operation Warp Speed, the project it backed to develop vaccines and medicines to treat Covid-19. Those contracts, too, were written outside normal government channels and the companies themselves were chosen by a panel of industry insiders without any oversight. Many of them stood to (and did) profit from the soaring stock prices of those firms when the news about clinical trial successes was released.

In November 2020, to launch an investigation into that situation, Senator Warren teamed up with Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) to request copies of all federal contracts for Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines. "The American people," they stated, "deserve to know that the federal government is using their tax dollars to develop Covid-19 medical products at the best possible price for the public — not to line the pockets of wealthy companies by cutting corners in consumer protection, pricing, and quality."

Warren raised questions about a Department of Health and Human Services deal with Gilead Sciences for the pandemic therapeutic remdesivir (part of the "cocktail" of drugs administered to Donald Trump and other Republican insiders like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when they got Covid). HHS had indeed acquired a large supply of remdesivir at an exorbitant cost to American taxpayers and Gilead itself would charge American hospitals $3,200 per treatment for it, $860 more than its price in other developed countries.

In addition to Warren, who sent a letter to the administration requesting information on HHS's pricing negotiations with Gilead for the drug, other people also stood up. Whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), for instance, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Dr. Robert Kadlec, a Trump HHS political appointee, had engaged in multiple schemes to funnel contracts to politically connected companies — and that this had begun even before the pandemic was even a reality. According to Bright, Kadlec then pushed him out of the government, despite the fact that federal law officially protects whistleblowers.

In his complaint, among other things, Bright alleged that in 2017, a Kadlec friend and Big Pharma consultant pressured the agency to maintain a contract with a company owned by a friend of Jared Kushner's, even after an independent review determined it should be cancelled. Bright testified before Congress, and the fate of his whistleblower suit remains to be litigated.

As for the rest of the inquiries, so far, money and power appear to have eluded the investigators. It's unclear whether Senator Warren's and Representative Porter's requests met with any response from the former administration, or even whether they've continued their inquiry into Big Pharma and no-bid contracting. They have made no further announcements and neither office replied to requests for updates.

You won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that the name "Jared Kushner" is so far not to be found in GAO or PRAC reports.

The best chance for public accountability — if not legal liability — might be the House of Representatives, especially its Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, launched in April 2020.The Trump administration blew off its subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to testify in December 2020, and blocked documents and witnesses related to politicized data, testing, and supply shortages, among other areas of inquiry. But the subcommittee did manage to expose emails from Trump political appointees, revealing efforts to skew CDC data. It is also investigating some whopping no-bid or sole-contractor deals that the former administration cut with preferred businesses. One was a $354-million four-year contract awarded on a non-competitive basis to PHLOW, which was incorporated in January 2020 to manufacture generic medicines to fight Covid. It's the largest contract ever awarded by BARDA and includes a 10-year option worth $812 million.

And the House has continued to seek transparency. According to a Brookings House Oversight Tracker, as of March 2021, 30% of congressional oversight letters and 40% of its hearings were related to the federal government's pandemic response. But there are signs that the Biden administration, while more cooperative, is not eager to force agencies to comply with requests the previous administration ignored.

My sense is that the emergency created by the insurrection at the Capitol last January and the desperate need of the new Biden administration to have palpable policy achievements in order to do well in election 2022 has taken the steam out of any inclination to dig deeper into the profiteering, cronyism, political scheming, and chaos with which the Trump administration met the Covid-19 virus. It went far deeper than an article like this can possibly indicate, leaving so many hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in its wake.

Think of it as a memory hole, still brimming with schemes and money.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

**Nina Burleigh**, a TomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America's pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Brazen abuse of taxpayer dollars’: Rep. Katie Porter accuses airlines of using COVID-19 bailout funds to fight consumer protections

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Rep. Katie Porter is accusing major U.S. airline companies of violating the law by spending Covid-19 bailout funds on a lobbying campaign.

an 720

Katie Porter demands resignation of Trump small business chief for enabling ‘abuse’ of COVID-19 relief funds

oreos

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/here-are-5-of-the-most-ridiculous-and-humiliating-moments-from-ben-carsons-political-career/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/ocasio-cortez-bathes-in-republican-tears-gop-congressman-triggered-by-attack-on-big-pharma

After taking back the House in the November midterms, in large part because of health care, Democrats held their first hearing in January on the rising and often exorbitant cost of prescription drugs. This week, the House majority followed up with a package of legislation aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs and reversing the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

Essentially, Democrats dared Republicans to vote against lower drug prices because of their longstanding opposition to Obamacare. The gambit worked, with the trio of bills passing on Thursday with the support of five Republicans. Furthermore, this move made clear that some in the GOP are quicker to cry tears in defense of corporate profits than for the Americans dependent on lifesaving medicine that is many times more expensive in the U.S. than other developed nations. At a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing this week, Republicans howled in bitter protest after Democrats dared to question the massive profits claimed by leading pharmaceutical companies while millions can’t afford lifesaving medications.

Daniel O’Day, the chairman and CEO of Gilead, was grilled by Democratic lawmakers on Thursday. Although Gilead is the leading US manufacturer of HIV drugs, only about 18% of the 1.1 million people in the U.S. at risk for HIV infections are currently taking its prevention drug Truvada. Democrats contended that that means preventable infections are occurring every day because of Gilead’s business model.

Gilead charged $800 a month for Truvada when it was introduced in 2004. It now costs nearly $2000 a month and has earned Gilead about $36 billion since it was approved in 2004.

“How can Gilead do this?” Oversight Committee chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md., asked O’Day. “This treatment was developed as a result of investment made by the American taxpayers.” Cummings then answered his own question, saying that “the problem is that Gilead, the company that now sells the drug, charges astronomical prices.”

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) originally filed a patent application for Truvada in 2006, after it discovered the drug’s ability to prevent HIV infection in a federal primate lab in Atlanta.

“How can our system allow a company to take a drug treatment that was developed with taxpayer funds and abuse its monopoly to charge such astronomical prices?” Cummings pressed O’Day.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also piled on O’Day. “You’re the CEO of Gilead. Is it true that Gilead made $3 billion in profits from Truvada in 2018?” she asked.

“The current list price is $2,000 a month in the United States, correct?” she continued. “Why is it $8 in Australia?”

“There’s no reason this should be $2,000 a month,” Ocasio-Cortez insisted. “People are dying because of it and there’s no enforceable reason for it.”

O’Day argued that the astronomical price difference is due to government regulation, not corporate greed.

“Truvada still has patent protection in the United States and in the rest of the world it is generic,” he replied. “It will be generically available in the United States as of September 2020.”

“We the people developed this drug!” Ocasio-Cortez shot back.

After another freshman Democrat, Rep. Katie Hill of California, questioned the CEO about the company’s revenue, which she quoted at $22 billion in 2018, and the compensation of its highest-ranking executives, including O’Day’s recent $30 million signing bonus, Republicans lost it.

“I just cannot understand why we are spending time sitting here listening to people lecturing companies about making money.I hope you make a lot of money,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said in a two-minute outburst.

“But to sit here and attack the capitalistic system that produces and distributes medicine that is saving lives around the world? I mean it is just offensive!”

Roy, a freshman Republican who won election last November by just 3 percentage points, continued with his sour-faced, hand-waving tirade: “I hope you make a lot of money! … How much cash on hand does Apple have? $245 billion. How much has Apple done to go cure health?”

He was later joined in indignation by the committee’s ranking Republican member Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.

“Rather than applaud Gilead for manufacturing this miracle drug, they wish to demonize the company for making a profit,” said Jordan, who complained in Aprilin letters to the drug companies that he believed his committee’s investigation was a partisan attempt to influence stock prices. “I fear that my colleagues are using today’s hearing as a platform to strong-arm private companies making breakthrough discoveries, all because they are upset at how markets work. The reality is that while Gilead has made money on this drug there doesn’t seem to be genuine issues with access.”

Medical experts, however, appear to disagree.

“I believe that the root cause of low access is the high price of the medication,” testified Dr. Robert Grant, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

not 1st time?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/watch-rep-katie-porter-uses-basic-budget-math-expose-jamie-dimon-starvation-wages

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Katie Porter used the financial struggles of one of her constituents to grill JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon over the vast worker-executive pay gap and low wages at his bank.

"What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

—Rep. Katie Porter

Porter, a Democrat from California, outlined the monthly expenses of her constituent, a single-mother working full-time as a JPMorgan Chase teller for $16.50 an hour.

After paying for rent on her one-bedroom apartment, food, utilities, child care for her daughter, and other basic needs, Porter estimated that her constituent has a $567 budget shortfall each month.

When Porter asked Dimon—who earns $31 million a year—how his employee should manage this shortfall while working 40 hours a week at his bank, the Wall Street CEO had no answer.

"I don't know, I'd have to think about that," Dimon said three times after Porter asked whether her constituent should take out a JPMorgan Case credit card and run a deficit or overdraft at the bank.

After Dimon said he would like to be "helpful," Porter responded, "What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

"Mr. Dimon, you know how to spend $31 million a year in salary, and you can't figure out how to make up a $567 a month shortfall," Porter said. "This is is a budget problem you cannot solve."

In response to Dimon's suggestion that her math may not be correct, Porter hit back on Twitter.

"Jamie Dimon said he didn't know if all my numbers were accurate," the California Democrat wrote. "Here's the math so he can check."

...

PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon privately met with Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., a fierce Wall Street critic who now heads the powerful House Financial Services Committee, CNBC reported.

The two banking tycoons met with Waters to offer their views on various economic topics as she prepared to take over the committee that oversees their firms after the Democrats won back the House majority in November.

Waters did not mention the banking executives by name but told CNBC that she has an “open-door policy.”

“I frequently meet with advocates for consumers, investors and vulnerable families, representatives of large banks, regional banks, community banks, and credit unions, and other stakeholders. They are all welcome in my office to share their concerns,” she said.

Dimon and Solomon have good reason to have concerns. Waters recently added Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., to her committee. All four are freshman members elected as progressives, who repeatedly hit out at Wall Street billionaires during their campaigns.

Ocasio-Cortez said at an event on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that “a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” The self-declared Democratic socialist has proposed rectifying some of that inequality by taxing income above $10 million at a 70 percent marginal rate. CNBC reported that billionaires attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were “scared” by the proposal and even more concerned by the “momentum” the proposal may have by next year’s presidential election.

“It’s wild that some people are more scared of a marginal tax rate than the fact that 40% of Americans struggle to pay for at least one basic need, like food or rent,” Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter in response to the report.

Pressley has vowed to combat “entrenched disparities” caused by banking and housing laws. Tlaib has embraced Sen. Bernie Sanders’ calls for corporations to pay their “fair share.” Porter, a former law professor who represented California families in foreclosure cases during the Great Recession, has been compared to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a longtime consumer rights advocate and now a 2020 presidential candidate.

Waters herself vowed to fight Wall Street lobbying efforts to weaken financial regulations like the post-recession Dodd-Frank bill in her first policy speech as the committee’s head.

“All of these reforms were designed to help prevent a future financial crisis,” she said. “The committee will be paying close attention to whether financial regulators try to weaken these important reforms, and keeping an eye on the big banks and their activities, including by holding many hearings.”

Waters has had run-ins with Dimon in the past over JPMorgan’s millions in lobbying efforts to derail parts of Dodd-Frank in 2012. Waters grilled Dimon on why he lobbied for reduced regulations overseas even though he admitted that might harm shareholders at home.

“Lobbying is a constitutional right,” Dimon replied.

“Well, I’m not questioning your right to lobby. I’m questioning what’s in the best interest of the American public,” Waters shot back.

AN 119

Porter, Katie Rep 96%

2025 Man of the Year: Katie Porter’s Ex-Husband

Early life and education

Career

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2020

2022

Tenure

Help America Run Act

Congressional questioning

Impeachment of Donald Trump

Infrastructure bill

Committee assignments

Caucus memberships

Other political roles

Political positions

Abortion

Electoral history

Related

How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content

COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS

Chair Grijalva Announces House Natural Resources Committee Senior and Professional Staff for the 116th Congress

Press Contact

A “Permanent Campaign Strategy”