Politicobak

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[### Crypto industry amasses colossal war chest for elections

Politico

https://www.politico.com › news › 2025/07/15 › crypto...](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/15/crypto-super-pacs-war-chest-key-house-votes-00452356)

1 day ago — Since the 2024 campaign ended, crypto firms have doubled down: The PAC network has raised $109 million since Election Day. The latest ...

A super PAC group funded by cryptocurrency companies will enter the upcoming midterm elections with more than $140 million in the bank, according to new fundraising data shared first with POLITICO — a mammoth sum that now looms large over an effort to pass industry-friendly legislation in the House this week.

The group, known as Fairshake, raised $52 million in the first half of 2025, piling onto an already huge sum of crypto campaign cash that could be wielded against lawmakers who oppose the industry’s Capitol Hill agenda — and boost the political fortunes of those who support it.

The PAC network’s fundraising highlights how top crypto firms are plowing ahead with a lobbying strategy that overtly uses political spending to get their way from Congress. The group includes three affiliated super PACs — Fairshake, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs — that collectively spent $135 million supporting industry allies and taking down crypto critics in Congressional races across the country last year.

Spending by the group in the 2024 campaigns helped take down key roadblocks to the industry’s policy agenda, including former Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown, who lost his Ohio re-election campaign to Republican Bernie Moreno — a crypto enthusiast who benefited from more than $40 million of crypto PAC spending. The PACs also boosted industry supporters in dozens of other House and Senate races across the country, including the California Democratic Senate primary and hotly-contested House races in Alabama, Arizona and Virginia.

Since the 2024 campaign ended, crypto firms have doubled down: The PAC network has raised $109 million since Election Day. The latest fundraising haul comes as the House is preparing to take up landmark crypto legislation this week that would help legitimize digital assets as mainstream financial products and craft bespoke new rules governing the sector.

“Fairshake is stronger than ever as we remain focused on our mission of building lasting support for crypto and blockchain innovation,” said Josh Vlasto, spokesperson for the PAC group. “We are building an aggressive, targeted strategy for next year to ensure that pro-crypto voices are heard in key races across the country.”

The PAC is primarily funded by three companies: the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, which invests heavily in digital asset startups, and the crypto firms Coinbase and Ripple.

Fairshake’s latest fundraising haul includes $25 million donated by Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, along with previously announced contributions from Ripple Labs, Uniswap Labs, and the crypto entrepreneur Robert Leshner.

Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, said in a statement that “crypto is already woven into America’s financial fabric,” and the company is “committed to fighting for the consumer protections and financial empowerment” that digital asset owners “deserve.”

The top Washington priority for the group’s top donors is a GOP-led crypto market structure bill expected to go to the House floor on Wednesday that seeks to create a first-ever crypto regulatory regime by divvying up oversight of digital assets between securities and commodities regulators.

Republicans leading the push for that bill are seeking to win over as many Democrats as they can ahead of the floor vote in order to show that the measure has political viability in the Senate, where bipartisan support is needed to clear a 60-vote threshold. A similar GOP-led proposal passed the House with 71 Democratic votes last year — as Fairshake was beginning to ramp up for the 2024 campaign — but concerns over the Trump family’s business entanglements in crypto may make matching that figure difficult this week.

Some Democrats are considering voting against the sweeping market structure measure but supporting a second, narrower crypto bill affecting so-called stablecoins that the House is expected to send to President Donald Trump’s desk on Thursday.

The crypto super PACs, though, have signaled that the vote breakdown on the broader bill, led by House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.), will be their primary consideration as they weigh how to deploy their 2026 haul. The group spent more than $30 million benefiting House Democrats during the last campaign.

A non-profit dark money group that is affiliated with the Fairshake PACs called the Cedar Innovation Foundation said in a statement Monday that Hill’s so-called CLARITY Act is “the most important vote members will take this Congress.”

// Trump Border Czar Tom Homan: ‘There Will Be No Amnesty’ | The Conversation

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PETE’S DRAGON — PETE HEGSETH’s week started on shaky ground, but it’s ending on firmer terrain.

This morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” President-elect DONALD TRUMPdefended his embattled pick to lead the Pentagon. Asked by moderator Kristen Welker whether he still has confidence in Hegseth, Trump said, “Yes I do. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him through Fox, but I’ve known him for a very long time. And he’s basically a military guy.” Trump added that he’s “had a lot of senators call me up saying he’s fantastic.” Asked if he is concerned about Hegseth’s drinking: “I’ve spoken to people who know him very well, and they say he does not have a drinking problem.” ***Video from “Meet the Press”***

That came on the heels of Sen. JONI ERNST(R-Iowa) posting on X Friday that she wants to give Hegseth a “fair hearing.” That may sound unremarkable, but it’s a reminder of something that is: No Republican — not even Ernst — is yet willing to publicly and explicitly oppose his nomination.

Now, a new pressure campaignaims to keep it that way.

MIKE DAVIS —the former top Senate GOP aide who is perhaps Trump’s fiercest legal defender — is something of an outside adviser on the transition. And he’s mobilizing his Article III Project to become the tip of the spear in building pressure from the base on Republican senators to confirm Hegseth.

In recent days, after a blitz of appearances on conservative media, Davis has driven tens of thousands of phone calls, emails and social posts targeting senators on not only Hegseth’s nomination, but also that of would-be FBI director KASH PATEL’s.In numbers shared first with POLITICO, as of last night, Davis marshalled 3,481 advocates for Hegseth (people who have seen his media appearances on conservative outlets and gone to Article III’s action page), driving what he says are 9,377 “connections” with senators. Meanwhile, for Patel, he generated 8,059 advocates and delivered 23,729 connections.

But that’s cornhole compared to what Davis is promising next.

The Iowan is amping up his rhetoric— and the stakes — around Trump’s cabinet picks to the point where he’s questioning whether senators operate with a moral double standard. Earlier this week, he posted to X: “Let’s get this straight: Pete Hegseth used to drink too much and couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He’d make a great senator.”

In an interview with Playbook, Davis went further, threatening to hire private investigators to sift through the backgrounds of any potential Senate GOP holdouts.

“The Article III projectis very excited about this new standard that drinking and womanizing is disqualifying for public office,” Davis tells Playbook. “I’m very happy to hire investigators for senators and use that standard.”

HOW WE GOT HERE: However you feel about Davis’ tactics, it’s impossible not to see them as the outgrowth of Supreme Court Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH’s 2018 confirmation process.

In that battle, Republicans effectively “made it the rule” that the accuser must (a)come forward publicly and (b)bear the burden of proof, says Davis.

Now, Hegseth’s team is calling that same play.

On Thursday night, Hegseth’s attorney, TIM PARLATORE, practically dared his client’s accuser to share her story (he said she is not barred by an NDA after accusing Hegseth of rape in 2017, though also said if she publicly makes the accusation, he’ll sue her for defamation).

It’s a sign of a post-Kavanaugh standard.“In order to disqualify a qualified cabinet nominee, you have to come forward,” Davis tells Playbook. “The burden is on the accuser to come forward with clear and convincing evidence that they’re not fit for the current job based upon their prior misconduct. It has to be testimony and not innuendo. It has to be testimony, not anonymous sources.”

Adds Davis, ‘You make an allegation, and then Kavanaugh is guilty until he proves his innocence? I said, ‘Fuck that. We’re gonna do the American presumption of innocence.’”

Davis, interestingly, made no effort todefend Hegseth on the merits, particularly on the alleged rape that took place in 2017 — which Hegseth has denied. “We’re not solving crimes,” Davis says. “We’re not canonizing saints during this process. It’s, ‘Do they have the current character and fitness to serve?’”

Few GOP insiders are better equipped to force the argument for Hegseth. After being radicalized by the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Davis launched the Article III Project, his brass knuckles advocacy group. And he is newly confident — predicting publicly and telling Trump in private — that Hegseth will get confirmed.

He’s not the only one thinking that way on account of the post-Kavanaugh standard and Davis’ new pressure tactics.

STEVE BANNON, speaking on his podcast “The War Room,” said that this technique is already working. “You saw with [withdrawn AG nominee MATT] GAETZ, I said, ‘Stick it out — by Christmas, he’d be drawing fire and they’d be freaking out. You wouldn’t hear Pete’s name. Kash would glide in.’ Fast-tracking works — flood the zone, overwhelm the system. It’s info warfare. … You’ve got to fight back.”

Davis is vowing to do exactly that. Trump, Davis told Playbook, “doesn’t need to fight this, because I’m going to do it for him.”

Is this just Davis’ trademark bluster? Will he actually follow through and hire private investigators to dig into GOP senators’ backgrounds? “Fuck yes I will,” he says.

Good Sunday morning.Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop me a line at awren@politico.com.

an 11 24

four years after losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him — a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In 2024, Marc Elias and other Democratic lawyers fear that if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris, he will try to overturn the election results.

According to Politico reporters Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney, "Many of the people preparing to cast votes for Donald Trump in the Electoral College in 2024 were involved in his plot to subvert the election in 2020."

"Of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states," Crampton and Cheney explain in an article published on November 4, "eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020, according to a Politico analysis. Another five signed similar certificates in 2020 but were not charged. And at least six others played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."

The reporters add, "All told, at least 1 in 5 prospective Trump electors from battleground states this year had some connection to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election."

The fact some of these "prospective presidential electors for Trump," Crampton and Cheney note, hasn't hurt their standing in the Republican Party.

"Rather than being punished or shunted aside for their role in an attempt to overturn a democratic election," the journalists observe, "they've been elevated. The GOP has rewarded those accused of felony crimes with a return to the coveted position they stand accused of abusing four years ago."

*Read Politico's full article at this link.

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Here’s how much Democrats get paid to shill for fossil fuels

Two former Democratic lawmakers made six-figure salaries for falsely promoting methane gas as a climate solution, tax documents seen by HEATED show.

ARIELLE SAMUELSON

JAN 18

In January 2022, only a few years after leaving the elected seat she held for six years, former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota got a new job: convincing climate-concerned liberals to love the fossil fuel industry.

“It’s clear we have an existential threat to the planet,” said Heitkamp, in a December 2022 commercial for the methane gas lobbying group Natural Allies For a Clean Energy Future. “We should be doing everything that we can to help other countries do what we did, which is dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions by using natural gas.”

The ad—titled “Real Talk with Heidi Heitkamp”—was one of a handful of public relations jobs Heitkamp did that year for Natural Allies, some of which she did alongside former Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Together, the notoriously moderate Democrats wrote a sponsored article in Politico claiming that “natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future,” and an op-ed in Newsweek declaring that methane gas can “actually achieve our shared global climate goals faster.” Landrieu also did her own “Real Talk” commercial in March 2022.

For these ads and op-eds, Heitkamp was paid $185,266 and Landrieu was paid $210,690 in 2022, according to IRS 990 tax documents obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute and seen by HEATED. The documents show payments made to Heidi Heitkamp Inc. and to Landrieu’s consulting firm VNF Solutions.

A screenshot of Natural Allies’ 990 tax form from FY2022, showing payments to Landrieu’s consulting firm and Heitkamp. They also show $1 million in payments to Mad Global, a public relations firm that specializes in politics and government, and more than $3.5 million to Omnicom Public Relations Group, a global public relations company.

It’s unclear if these positions represented full-time jobs; both Heitkamp and Landrieu were hired as members of Natural Allies’ “Leadership Council” in early 2022. According to a press release about the hires, the Leadership Council seeks “to bring greater awareness to the foundational role natural gas must play in transitioning to a clean energy future.” Neither Heitkamp nor Landrieu responded to HEATED’s request for comment.

Whatever the case, the numbers are a rare glimpse into the lucrative business of greenwashing the fossil fuel industry. Natural Allies is run and funded entirely by fossil fuel companies, including Williams, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, National Fuel Gas, Southern Company Gas, and Cheniere Energy.

“It's not every day we get to see the price tag of a former U.S. senator’s advocacy,” said Charlie Spatz, a senior researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute.

Spatz said the numbers also highlight one of the reasons it may be so hard to pass truly effective climate policy in Congress.

“It's sending a message to current Senators that maybe you shouldn't be so harsh on the fossil fuel industry, if they're going to take care of you after you finish,” he said.

A six-figure salary to spread climate misinformation

With each passing year, the science on methane gas pollution and climate change becomes more damning. A recently revised analysis from Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, found that greenhouse gas emissions from liquified methane gas “are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 18% to 185% greater for the average cruise distance of an [liquified methane gas] tanker.”

At the same time, with each passing year, more and more former Democratic lawmakers are lining up to tout methane gas as “climate-friendly” in exchange for a paycheck from Natural Allies, which is currently running a seven-figure campaign to target young, liberal, and Black and Latino voters “as effectively as we have messaged to the right.”

In addition to Heitkamp and Landrieu, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek all accepted positions with Natural Allies in 2023.

Those former lawmakers’ salaries were not disclosed on Natural Allies’s 2022 tax forms, as they were not yet hired by the organization. And it’s unclear if they will be disclosed on future forms, as the IRS only requires that non-profits disclose the five contractors with the highest salaries over $100,000.

However much they are making, they are spreading messages about methane gas that climate scientists have roundly decried as misleading.

“Their claims are all either extremely vague or disproved with middle-school-level science,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Project Drawdown, who previously worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Using natural gas warms the climate. Period, full stop,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “There is no world in which natural gas is a long-term ‘solution’ to the climate problem.”

Natural Allies cites multiple “independent studies” to support its claim that methane gas is the best way to solve the climate crisis. But, as we reported last year, all of those studies were funded at least in part by fossil fuel interests, and none were published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Actual peer-reviewed science with no industry backing has shown the opposite of what Natural Allies claims. According to a 2021 systematic review of the scientific literature on methane gas, increasing investments in the fossil fuel carries a long-term risk of delaying the clean energy transition and worsening the climate crisis. That’s because investing in further natural gas development “could lock-out emerging renewable technologies for extended periods.”

Building new gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas-fired power plants “pose a particularly great risk for carbon lock-ins,” scientists wrote this year in the journal Nature Energy.

What Natural Allies is doing is called “solutions denial,” a common form of climate misinformation, as we previously reported:

“It's an absolute tried-and-tested argument within the disinformation playbook to constantly create more interim milestones before we achieve what a real necessary transition looks like,” said [Jennie] King, who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “So taxpayer money [goes] into creating new dependencies on [fossil fuels], which ultimately in the long term, make it much harder for us to achieve an actual clean energy transition.”

But former Democratic lawmakers and mainstream media are still more than willing to spread the misinformation coming from Natural Allies, so long as Natural Allies is willing to pay for it. Since 2020, Natural Allies has spent $10 million on a national PR campaign targeting Democratic voters, including more than $4 million to place ads in E&E News and Politico newsletters, Axios, Newsweek, Vox, the Wall Street Journal, and across cable news stations, according to reporting from the Guardian and Floodlight.

These campaigns are effective, in part, because it is very difficult to tell who is behind them. Readers of these news outlets may not recognize, as we uncovered last year, that Natural Allies’ ads are a form of fossil fuel industry climate disinformation. And that is the real price of Heitkamp and Landrieu’s sell out: a deception not measured in dollars, but in the degrees threatening our livable climate.

This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales

On the January 30 edition of **Tucker Carlson Tonight**,Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”

“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”

Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.

The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”

Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)

Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”

Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”

“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.

Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”

Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.

Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”

Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development

Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.

Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.

On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hostedMeghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.

What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has been**:{bankrolled by T:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}:**:{n:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}:, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.

Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being backed by TPPFin her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.

One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming

During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.

While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”

McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”

Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.

You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/11/2024-presidential-campaign-dark-money-00024241

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2024 ELECTIONS

2024 hopefuls are already in a dark-money arms race

At least a dozen potential candidates for president have nonprofit groups that can raise undisclosed money aligned with them.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaks at the CPAC on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. | John Raoux/AP Photo

By SCOTT BLAND

04/11/2022

When Mike Pompeo announced his political action committee last June, he set off a wave of news stories heralding the move as a potential step toward a 2024 presidential campaign. But the former secretary of State kept his next big launch behind the scenes.

Two months later, Pompeo allies including Ulrich Brechbuhl, a close friend, West Point classmate and former State Department official, quietly formed a nonprofit group — Champion American Values Fund — to work alongside Pompeo’s Champion American Values PAC. According to corporate records from Delaware and Virginia, Brechbuhl serves as president of the organization, which can raise and spend unlimited funds without disclosing its donors — an increasingly popular feature for politicians eyeing the White House.

At least a dozen potential candidates for president in 2024 have active nonprofit groups aligned with them, according to a review of corporate filings, campaign disclosures and financial records obtained by POLITICO. Some of them, like the nonprofits affiliated with Pompeo or Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have never been publicly revealed before. Others, like those supporting President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, have been operating in the open for years.

What they all have in common is the ability to pay staffers, fund polling and policy research, run ads and accept money from megadonors without divulging those funders’ names — or much information about any spending until many months after the fact. It’s the latest escalation in a fundraising arms race that has seen personal benefactors, super PACs and now secret money become common building blocks of presidential campaigns.

Every candidate who seeks the White House in 2024 will have to start disclosing their campaign fundraising and spending once they officially declare their campaigns. But in the meantime, and in the absence of new legislation or an enforcement crackdown from tax or campaign-finance regulators, prospective presidents can use nonprofits to shield their donors — and much about their preparations — from the public eye.

“Anybody thinking seriously about running for president in 2024 needs to have a large, sophisticated soft-dollar operation up and running by no later than this year’s general election,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who runs Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC backing J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate race.

“With a small number of donors, you can do a lot of list-building, a lot of polling and research, and another really valuable thing you can do is keep staff members you’re going to hire and lock them down,” Thompson continued.

It’s unclear just how big many of these groups are now, since they don’t have to file tax returns detailing their financial activities until 11-plus months after the end of each fiscal year. Nonprofits can’t spend more than half of their money on expressly political activity, but they can still make a big mark on the electoral landscape.

Advancing American Freedom, the group founded in 2021 by former Vice President Mike Pence, estimated it would raise $5 million and spend nearly that much last year, according to a filing with state regulators in North Carolina. And the Pence nonprofit announced plans earlier this year for a $10 million TV ad campaign targeting 16 House Democrats. By comparison, Pence’s PAC — Great America Committee, which cannot accept individual contributions of more than $5,000 per year — has raised over $557,000 and spent $787,000 since January 2021.

Pompeo’s Champion American Values Fundand the Scott-aligned Opportunity Matters Network, which also formed in 2021, have yet to make any filings detailing their size. But the Scott-aligned group has taken in $650,000 from its sister group, a super PAC funded by donors including tech billionaire Larry Ellison, according to the super PAC’s campaign finance disclosures. Scott’s political operation declined to comment on its activity.

Pompeo’s political operation also declined to comment.

But one of the larger known 2024-affiliated nonprofits, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America,shows just what potential candidates can do with such a vehicle leading up to a presidential election.

Haley’s group raised $9.3 million in 2020, according to its most recent federal tax filing, which was obtained by POLITICO. The largest donor gave $750,000, and another six donors gave at least $100,000 apiece. But most of the nonprofit’s money came in smaller increments, and it spent big on mail and digital fundraising activities, building up a money-raising program for Haley, who last ran for office in 2014.

Stand for America spent more cash — $9.9 million — than it raised in 2020, including $3.1 million on fundraising expenses, its tax filing says. The group’s biggest vendor was Coldspark Digital, a vaunted Republican consulting firm that boasts on its website of “building a low-dollar fundraising operation from scratch” for the former South Carolina governor. The firm also works with Haley’s PAC, according to FEC records.

“The last time she had been a candidate was 2014 — an eternity in the digital age,” the site notes. Now, she has a growing list stocked with fresh email addresses and engaged supporters. If Haley chooses to run for president, her campaign could rent or buy the list built at Stand for America.

There’s more to the machinery than fundraising, too. The nonprofits are also housing staff and promoting policy that could become foundational pieces of presidential campaigns. Stand for America’s executive director, Timothy Chapman, previously ran the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Haley group published a policy book and sends out daily and weekly policy-focused newsletters to hundreds of thousands of people on its list, and it has worked with GOP members of Congress and Hill staff on policy pushes related to China and other issues, according to the nonprofit.

The top ranks of Pence’s organization include board president Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff as vice president, and executive director Paul Teller, another Pence aide during the Trump years who was Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate chief of staff during his 2016 presidential run. The group has been hard at work developing Pence’s newly released policy platform.

Pence has already given a handful of major policy speeches over the last year and is likely to continue the series working off major themes in his new “Freedom Agenda,” according to a person familiar with Advancing American Freedom’s plans. The group is also convening big donors, like at the retreat it held last year in Jackson, Wyo.

As far-reaching as the 2024 nonprofit activity already is, the track record of similar groups that operated in the 2016 primaries show how much more they can do with dark money.

A dark-money group laid groundwork for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid in secret for a year before he launched his campaign. The nonprofit, Conservative Solutions Project, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rubio’s data-analytics consultants to conduct detailed research on voters in early caucus and primary states. It later spent millions on an ad campaign boosting Rubio and ultimately raised more than $22 million — almost all of it from at most two secret donors, OpenSecrets found.

Before New Hampshire’s 2016 primary, another nonprofit group used pushy “social pressure” tactics to induce people there to vote, generating backlash. But since the group’s origin was unclear, it didn’t generate blowback against John Kasich, the candidate the nonprofit was formed to support.

And the shadows created by the nonprofit world’s scant, time-lapsed disclosure requirements even give cover to supporters of presidential rivals colluding against another opponent, CREW found. Right to Rise Policy Solutions, the nonprofit aligned with Jeb Bush, sent $500,000 in 2016 to the nonprofit linked to then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, America Needs Leadership — which financed mailers in 2016 attacking Rubio and Kasich in New Hampshire.

It was nearly two years later that the pro-Bush group finally disclosed the donation that linked it to the Christie group’s attacks against their mutual rivals.

The biggest of the dark-money groups — also known as 501(c)(4) organizations, after their section of the tax code — associated with 2024 contenders are the ones aligned with Biden and Trump. Building Back Together, the group charged withbuilding public support for Biden’s agenda, has spent at least $22.8 million on advertising since the beginning of last year, according to AdImpact, a TV and digital ad-tracking service.

Then there’s America First Works, the nonprofit group paired with Trump’s super PAC in the 2020 election. It raised $51.3 million that year as Trump ran for reelection and ended the year with $7.7 million in the bank, its latest tax filing showed. The group has also formed an alliance with another newer nonprofit, America First Policy Institute, CNBC reported. America First Policy Institute was launched by Trump White House officials Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow soon after his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s PAC sent a $1 million contribution to the group in June 2021.

With Biden expected to run for reelection, there’s been more nonprofit activity on the GOP side so far. But several prominent Democrats have affiliated dark-money groups, too, which could be involved in a national campaign at some point in the future.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a wealthy former investment banker, immediately raised questions about whether he was considering a future presidential run when some of his closest political aides and his wife launched Stronger Fairer Forward, a new nonprofit, in February. (Murphy already benefits from another supportive nonprofit that has backed his agenda as governor.)

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also has a nonprofit associated with the PAC he launched after ending his 2020 presidential run, though both entities have been quiet since Buttigieg joined Biden’s cabinet.

But the bulk of the build-up has centered around ambitious Republicans. Others with supportive nonprofit groups run by allies include Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Axios reported Rubio, the Florida senator, has used an email list built up by a nonprofit group, Stand Up to China, run by one of the same operatives who helmed his 2016 outside groups.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is term-limited and declined entreaties to run for Senate this year, has said he’s considering seeking the presidency. Meanwhile, a group founded by close political allies in 2019 has been running national digital ads, promoting Hogan as a problem-solver and calling attention to his statement that Trump running for president in 2024 would be bad for the country and the GOP.

The new nonprofit got off to a slow start, raising only $340,000 in 2020, according to its tax filing, as Hogan suspended fundraising efforts for the group to focus on managing his state through the coronavirus pandemic, according to a person familiar with the group’s activity.

But in 2021, the nonprofit aggressively promoted a number of Hogan’s signature policies, including boosting police funding and decrying gerrymandering. The group was also involved in bringing together bipartisan members of Congress to discuss national infrastructure legislation.

Notably, Hogan already had a supportive nonprofit group founded in 2019, Change Maryland, backing his agenda as governor. The two groups together raised between $3 and $4 million in 2021, according to the person familiar with their activity.

But the new group has a name more befitting a politician with national ambitions: An America United.

FILED UNDER: CAMPAIGN FINANCE, MARCO RUBIO, JOE BIDEN,

POLITICO

subpoena w/ kraken, PO at politico

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/jenna-ellis/

no lnx

Following the 2020 presidential election, attorney Jenna Ellis worked closely with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and other members of then-President Donald Trump’s legal team and aggressively promoted Trump’s false, totally debunked claim that the election was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud. Politico is now reporting that Ellis, in two legal memos, claimed that then-Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to count the presidential electors in states that now-President Joe Biden won.

According to Politico reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney, “The memos from then-Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, which contain widely disputed legal theories about Pence’s ability to stop a Biden presidency, underscore Ellis’ promotion of extreme arguments that she promulgated amid Trump's effort to reverse the election results. Her actions have remained largely below the radar as House investigators probe Trump’s inner circle.”

The first memo, Swan and Cheney report, was written on December 31, 2020, and the second was written on January 5 — the day before Congress counted the electoral votes for the presidential election and certified Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“A December 31 Ellis memo delivered to Trump’s office suggested that Pence — who was constitutionally responsible for presiding over Congress’ counting of electoral votes on January 6 — should simply refuse to open envelopes from states whose election results Trump considered to be fraudulent,” Swan and Cheney explain. “That memo was described by ABC reporter Jonathan Karl in his recent book ‘Betrayal.’ Politico is publishing it in full for the first time.”

Swan and Cheney continue, “In a second, previously unreported memo dated January 5, Ellis made a more technical legal argument that she delivered to Jay Sekulow, one of Trump's outside lawyers. Sekulow represented Trump during his first impeachment and in a series of legal battles during his administration, but he had minimal involvement in Trump’s election litigation. The exception was an early November Supreme Court case regarding Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots.’

The Politico journalists note that in the January 5 memo, Ellis “argued that key provisions of the Electoral Count Act — limiting Pence’s authority to affirm or reject certain electors — were likely unconstitutional.”

“She concluded that Pence, while presiding over lawmakers’ counting of electors, should simply halt the process when their alphabetical proceeding reached Arizona,” Swan and Cheney report. “Then, she said, he should declare that the state failed to meet the legal standard for certifying its own electors and ‘require the final ascertainment of electors to be completed before continuing.’”

Ellis has reacted angrily to Politico’s reporting on her December 31 and January 5 memos. The right-wing attorney tweeted:

Wondering how @politico thinks it\u2019s responsible or ethical journalism to publish attorney-client privileged documents.\n\nThey admit they are the first to publish in their entirety the two Ellis memos, which both have the banner \u201cATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED.\u201d\n\nTrump hatred persists.

— Jenna Ellis (@Jenna Ellis) 1639164702

She appeared to confirm the authenticity of the report. Her claim the Politico violated journalistic ethics is baseless.

https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-caller/daily-caller-receiving-money-trump-and-gop-groups-while-its-subsidiary-participates

Daily Caller has been receiving money from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican candidates and organizations for email list rentals while its Check Your Fact division participates in Facebook’s fact-checking program.

The Daily Caller is a right-wing publication with a history of promoting false information and hiring or publishing white nationalists and other bigots. In 2019, Facebook began partnering with Check Your Fact for the social media giant’s fact-checking program. Popular Information's Jugg Legum documented in March how the Daily Caller used “its role as a Facebook fact-checker to boost Trump and discredit a mainstream media outlet, Politico.”

Check Your Fact states on its “about us” page that it is “a for-profit subsidiary wholly owned by The Daily Caller, Inc. Majority owners of The Daily Caller, Inc. are co-founder and publisher Neil Patel and co-founder Tucker Carlson. The Daily Caller’s fact-checking team is funded by The Daily Caller’s general news budget, as well as revenue generated through advertising.” (Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller last month.)

Will Ragland, the research director for Center for American Progress Action, tweeted today:

After that tweet, Media Matters found that The Daily Caller has sent dozens of sponsored emailssince 2016 that were “paid for by Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee.”

The Daily Caller has also received $40,213.75 so far this year from the National Republican Senatorial Committee for list rentals, according to Federal Election Commission records. It has also received $18,171.40 so far this year from the National Republican Congressional Committee for list rentals, according to FEC records.

The Daily Caller has sent numerous other sponsored emails for various Republicans this year. Those emails include Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) reelection campaign; Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign; Bikers for the President political action committee; and the Senate Conservatives Fund.

The Washington Post and the Center for Media and Democracy wrote in 2017 about how The Daily Caller has received money from the Trump campaign for list rentals.

Here are four recent examples of The Daily Caller’s sponsored emails for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee: [screenshots]

on p3 of ggl srch: re claude walker AG vs cei

Virgin Islands AG withdraws Exxon subpoena

By ERIC WOLFF

06/30/2016 10:00 AM EDT

Presented by Chevron

With help from Elana Schor, Darius Dixon, Marianne LeVine, and Anca Gurzu

EXXON DRAWS BLOOD IN CLIMATE FIGHT:The war between ExxonMobil and a coalition of attorneys general investigating the oil giant for alleged misrepresentations of climate science saw the end of a major battle late Wednesday, as Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker agreed to withdraw his subpoena of the company. Pro’s Elana Schor had the scoop on the announcement, which came in a mutual agreement to withdraw a challenge to the subpoena that Exxon had filed in Texas court.

What comes next?Walker argued that the withdrawn subpoena would help the case against Exxon by clearing space for the Justice Department — which has not yet confirmed an official inquiry into the company’s climate record — “to focus on its ongoing investigation, without the distraction of this procedural litigation.”

Walker added in a statement that he would “continue to work with our state partners to advance our common investigation, while preserving our limited resources to address the many other issues that face the Virgin Islands and its residents.” Fifteen state AGs joined Walker and D.C. AG Karl Racine in March to announce a joint climate fight, although only the Virgin Islands, Massachusetts, New York, and California have pursued direct inquiries into Exxon.

CEI: We’ve been freed:The Competitive Enterprise Institute, hit with a subpoena from Walker that was later withdrawn in D.C. Superior Court, cheered the withdrawal. CEI President Kent Lassman said in a statement that the move showed the territory’s anti-Exxon probe was “a baseless fishing expedition from the beginning.”

HAPPY THURSDAY! I'm your host Eric Wolff, and I'm trying to figure out Snapchat (So now you all have a floor for how old I am). I think I understand the mechanics, but now I need some good people to follow. Who's good on Snapchat for energy news? Let me know, along with your tips, quips, and comments to ewolff@politico.com, or follow us on Twitter @ericwolff, @Morning_Energy, and @POLITICOPro.

A message from Chevron:

It’s only human to find inspiration in nature and also find answers. Chevron’s search to transform farm waste into renewable natural gas led to our partnership with California Bioenergy, where we’re working to provide an alternative source of power for a cleaner way forward.

THE THREE AMIGOS AND THE 5,000 MW OF TRANSMISSION:

eric Wolff covers energy policy and politics. Prior to joining POLITICO in 2015, he covered the EPA for SNL Energy, an electric power trade publication. He started at the New York Sun, but he cut his teeth covering the real estate crisis and the emergence of solar power in San Diego County for the late North County Times, a daily newspaper. He is married and living in Washington, D.C. with twin toddlers. He keeps his head above water.

drilled

Beyond Ads: How Politico, Vox and Axios Enable the Fossil Fuel Industry

Some publications are banning fossil fuel ads, but outlets like Vox, Politico and Axios enable Big Oil in ways that go beyond advertising.

BS WT

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/18/white-house-analyst-kashyap-patel-files-lawsuit-ag/

by Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, November 18, 2019

A White House analyst filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against Politico and a reporter for two stories the complaint says falsely accused the analyst of hijacking Ukraine policy-making and intervening with President Trump.

Kashyap “Kash” Patel, a former investigator for Rep. Devin Nunes and now a National Security Council staffer, also says in his suit that Rep. Adam B. Schiff orchestrated press leaks against him.

The lawsuit seeks $25 million in damages and names Politico owner Robert L. Allbritton and reporter Natasha Bertrand.

Brad Dayspring, Politico’s vice president of communications and marketing, issued a statement to The Washington Times: “This lawsuit is high on bombast and low on merit. It is unserious and is a public relations tactic designed to intimidate journalists and media organizations from doing their job.”

The Democrats’ push to impeach Mr. Trump is centered on Ukraine foreign policy.

Linking Mr. Patel to Ukraine ensnares a former close aide to Mr. Nunes, California Republican and the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Patel helped write the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 report that exonerated Mr. Trump in the Russia election investigation.

The two Politico stories stemmed from closed-door depositions by two NSC staffers — Fiona Hill, a former senior adviser and European and Russian affairs specialist, and Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director of European affairs.

The articles, based on leaks and released transcripts, said Mr. Patel went outside his NSC lane and funneled Ukraine material to Mr. Trump. Upon the transcripts’ public release, Mr. Patel said such contact never happened.

Mr. Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is leading the Democrats’ impeachment drive.

Democrats sayMr. Trump committed bribery by holding up military aid to Ukraine until Kyiv opened investigations into the 2016 campaign and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Republicans reject that charge, saying a phone call transcript of Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows no quid pro quo. They say the aid was held up from early July to early September for unrelated reasons..

mma

Politico declared that the $93 trillion figure is "bogus" -- or, in an earlier version of the article published behind a firewall, "essentially vapor."

The fact-checking project PolitiFact also found the $93 trillion figure to be untrustworthy, calling it "only about as strong as a clothespin in high wind." It noted that "the [AAF] report itself is full of assumptions, qualifiers and caveats," and when a fact-checker reached out to Holtz-Eakin, the AAF president "made it clear to us that the report aims to provide very rough estimates on a plan that’s only partially developed." PolitiFact rated as "false" this claim from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA): "At $93 trillion, the Green New Deal would cost more than the entire recorded spending of the U.S. since the Constitution went into effect in 1789."

Other journalists have also pointed out major problems with the AAF analysis. Paul Blest at Splinter noted that AAF used cost estimates for a universal jobs program ("$6.8 trillion to $44.6 trillion") and universal health care ("$36 trillion") that are vastly higher than estimates produced by other think tanks. AAF also failed to account for how much money programs like universal health care could save. According to Blest:

[AAF's] ballpark estimate on a federal jobs guarantee has a range of $38 trillion. The centrist Brookings Institution’s estimate last year, by the way, put the high end on a job guarantee at $543 billion a year, or $5.4 trillion over 10 years.

In case still had faith in the political media machine's integrity, several big outlets have cleared that misconception right up for you. They’ve decided to offer news interviews up for sale at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

This means these outlets not even trying to hide their sleaze anymore. As Lee Fang wrote in a July 1 article for The Intercept, which broke the story:

“For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including The Atlantic and Politico.

And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.”

The Hill newspaper, for example, is sponsoring events at both party conventions and is promising its sponsors who pay $200,000 convention interviews with The Hill editorial staffers for “up to three named executives or organization representatives of your choice,” according to a brochure obtained by The Intercept. “These interviews are pieces of earned media and will be hosted on a dedicated page on thehill.com and promoted across The Hill’s digital and social media channels,” the brochure promises.

The Hill ignored The Intercept’s inquiries, Fang wrote.

Fang's article mentionsThe Economistand its subsidiary CQ Roll Callas having similar deals on the table.

Even for big media, this is a slimy new low. These once-journalistic news organizations are undeniably morphing into paid advertising and PR for the 1-percenter corporations and billionaires who control the political lobby.

People who care even a little bit about the importance of journalistic integrity, or the checks and balances of the press—which are a necessary piece of any healthy democracy—should immediately boycott any news organization willing to stoop this low. This kind of behavior erases the already-too-fuzzy line between the news media and the moneyed class's greedy interests.

Maybe you aren’t shocked by this new low because this is simply a blatant version of what you already knew has been going on behind the scenes for years—but still. That they are so brazen about it is terrifying. What does it say about the state of the press when these well-known, long-time trusted publications are straight-up going, "Hey, rich people: ever wanted to buy off a journalist? Now's your chance!"

It's upsetting on a whole new level.

You can read the full Intercept article here.

not nec a put down?

Earlier this year, Politico declared LePage “the country’s craziest governor,” citing crude sexual remarks about a state senator, the sabotage of a wind energy project and publicly telling President Barack Obama to “go to hell.”

——–

punked by EID? epa fail too, to be fair

=-==

CF Correction: epa blew frack call b/c bound by superfund regs? nb desmog role

Back in 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a startling announcement, shaking up the battle over fracking in one of the nation’s highest-profile cases where drillers were suspected to have caused water contamination.

Water testing results were in for homeowners along Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, where for years, homeowners reported their water had turned brown, became flammable or started clogging their well with “black greasy feeling sediment” after Cabot Oil and Gas began drilling in the area. The EPA seemed to conclude the water wasn’t so bad after all.

“The sampling and an evaluation of the particular circumstances at each home did not indicate levels of contaminants that would give EPA reason to take further action,” EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a press release.

The drilling industry crowed. “The data released today once again confirms the EPA’s and DEP’s [Department of Environmental Protection] findings that levels of contaminants found do not possess a threat to human health and the environment,” Cabot said in a statement.

“It’s obviously very good news for the folks who actually live there and pretty squarely in line with what we’ve known up there for a while now,” Energy in Depth told POLITICOPro.“It’s not very good news for the out-of-state folks who have sought to use Dimock as a talking point in their efforts to prevent development elsewhere, but I’m sure they’ll be working hard over the weekend to spin it differently, notwithstanding the pretty clear statement made by EPA today.”

Now, a newly published report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry(ATSDR), part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), puts EPA’s testing results into an entirely new light.

The water was not safe to drink after all, the ATSDR concluded, after a lengthy review of the same water testing results that EPA used back in 2012.

“ATSDR found some of the chemicals in the private water wells at this site at levels high enough to affect health (27 private water wells), pose a physical hazard (17 private water wells) or affect general water quality so that it may be unsuitable for drinking,” the ATSDR’s health consultation—launched in 2011 and published May 24—concludes.

The new report lists 10 contaminants, including arsenic, lithium and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether, that are “chemicals of health concern,” at the levels found in Carter Road wells, found that five homes were at “immediate risk of fire or explosion” because of methane in their water and another dozen showed lower, but still worrisome, levels of methane and found that the water was laced with elevated levels of metals, salts and total dissolved solids.

The underlying data isn’t new to the residents of Carter Road. The EPA provided it to them individually back in 2012, which is why the EPA’s announcement that the water was safe was so baffling at the time.

“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet—I’m over the thresholds—and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” Nolan Scott Ely, one of the Carter Road homeowners, told ProPublica when EPA made its announcement. “I’m confused about the whole thing … I’m flabbergasted.”

Opposite Conclusions?

So how could two different agencies look at the exact same data and come to opposite conclusions?

“Although the same data set was used, the EPA as a regulatory agency specifically looked at whether or not it was required to take action under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as Superfund, which governs responses to environmental emergencies,” StateImpact, a National Public Radio project, explained. “The ‘health consultation’ looked at the entire data set from a public health standpoint, assessing whether or not it was safe to drink the water.”

In other words, EPA’s findings, which seemed to show that the water was “safe” and which were promoted by drillers as proof that nothing was wrong in Dimock, instead represented a very carefully parsed legal finding that the water did not reach Superfund levels of contamination for the specific substances EPA focused on.

And the EPA’s 2012 findings had left out some of the very contaminants that had caused locals the most concern—including the natural gas or methane, itself. “EPA’s investigation does not include an evaluation of the risk posed by elevated levels of methane—which continue to exist in some homes in Dimock—and which, at extreme levels and if unaddressed, can lead to explosions,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Kate Sinding wrote in a blog post at the time.

The EPA’s strained official interpretation of the data perhaps shows why EPA staff remained concerned even after the agency dropped its Dimock investigation in July 2012, just months after its testing results had been announced in March and April.

In 2013, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that EPA’s own staff had disagreed with the agency’s public statements that the water shouldn’t be considered hazardous. An internal EPA Powerpoint presentation, later obtained and published by DeSmog, showed that agency scientists had concluded that the drilling and fracking process “apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.”

The ATSDR’s new report very specifically notes that it does not look at whether the water hazards stem from drilling or pre-date Cabot’s arrival in the area. In part, that’s because of a lack of pre-drilling testing for gas and other common fracking-related chemicals in the water. “It is important to note that methane was not assessed in residential water wells prior to the initiation of natural gas drilling activities in the Dimock area,” the ATSDR wrote.

Cabot Oil and Gas emphasized their belief that methane in the water was “naturally occurring” and pre-dated their arrival in a statement provided to StateImpact. “This data is consistent with thousands of pages of water data collected by both Cabot and the Pennsylvania DEP and does not indicate that those contaminants detected have any relationship to oil and gas development in Dimock,” Cabot said.

The ATSDR report does often note when substances discovered in the Carter Road water are known to be associated with hydraulic fracturing or drilling industry activities, but does not reach any conclusions about whether the chemicals came from Cabot’s operations.

“It’s not their job to look at who caused whatever contamination there is,” Bryce Payne, a Pennsylvania environmental scientist, told E&E News. “It’s their job to see if there are health implications. They did that and concluded there are health implications.”

The new report is also limited to data from four years ago—and conditions have changed, the ATSDR noted, in part because a state moratorium on fracking along Carter Road was briefly lifted after the EPA dropped its investigation and locals quickly reported more changes to their water, including higher levels of methane.

Cabot Oil Settles

In August 2012—right around the time that EPA abandoned its investigation—Cabot Oil and Gas announced it had settled the vast majority of lawsuits against it by Carter Road residents for an undisclosed amount of money and under terms that barred the plaintiffs from speaking negatively about their experiences with the company.

This March, a federal jury handed down a $4.24 million verdict to the remaining two Carter Road families, concluding that the water was in fact contaminated because of the negligence of the drilling company. Cabot has begun the process of appealing that verdict.

But while the legal filings and agency reports continue to stack up, the problem on Carter Road remains the same as it has for many years now.

While those who settled with Cabot had water treatment systems installed by the company, locals familiar with those systems say that even the treated water seems too contaminated to drink and the water treatment systems break down frequently.

The ATSDR’s report provides recommendations that water should have been treated to address dangerous contamination levels—but those recommendations are not binding and the agency noted that while the state government collected samples more recently, the ATSDR did not have access to the newer data.

Community organizers are still calling for the federal government to resume an active role, arguing that the groundwater remains undrinkable.

“We’re demanding that they reopen the investigation,” Craig Stevens, a local organizer, toldDeSmog after the March verdict was announced, “and also get water to these people.”

http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/03/dimock-water-unsafe-fracking/

Today's Politico Magazine offers up some seriously dope sponsored content for your weary body, in the form of an article called "No, BP Didn't Ruin The Gulf." The piece goes on to insist, at length, that four years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, things down around the Gulf Coast are hunky-dory, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. The punch line is that this piece was penned by Geoff Morrell, BP's "senior vice president of U.S. communications and external affairs," which is a fancy title that means "head of PR shenanigans for BP." What to call this genre of editorial?

Yeah, that sounds about right.

The basic issue, from BP's perspective, is something that Morrell waits until the end of his native advertisement to bring up -- namely, the money that BP has been legally obligated to pay out to claimants as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This matter has been fraught: BP has been fighting the way the law has been interpreted in court, with mixed results. And there have been a number of plainly fraudulent claims, filed simply in an effort to get some BP ducats, that Morrell can legitimately point to. Indeed, this is something Morrell has complained about before.

Such complaints are unobjectionable, if for no other reason than that fraudulent claims impede justice for those who have legitimate ones. This Politico Magazine piece, however, embarks on an entirely different path: It attempts to convince you that the environmental impact of the 2010 disaster was really very slight. Per Morrell:

Make no mistake: The Deepwater Horizon accident was a tragedy. Eleven people lost their lives. Birds, fish and other wildlife perished. And with a camera trained 24/7 on the wellhead, a sense of alarm was understandable while the well was flowing.

That's a pretty neat trick right there: equating coverage of the disaster with the harmful effects of the disaster itself. Morrell's take seems to be that one of the bigger things that damaged the Gulf Coast was the fact that too many people knew the Gulf Coast was being damaged.

Morrell goes on to point out that the most dire predictions of the spill's effects -- that "there will be tar balls all the way up the East Coast, all the way to Europe" -- didn't happen. The Gulf of Mexico, he says, is possessed of an "inherent resilience." The type of oil that poured into the gulf was "Louisiana sweet crude," you guys, which totallyisn't as bad as the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez. (Hashtag: #notallpollutants!) And there was an "unprecedented response" to the disaster. (Because maybe it was an unprecedented disaster?)

"Natural oil seeps release up to the equivalent of nearly six Exxon Valdez spills in the Gulf each year, and microbes in the Gulf have adapted over time to feast on oil," says Morrell, apparently missing the point that maybe those well-adapted microbes weren't prepared to feast on an additional two months' worth of oil seepage that appeared in the Gulf of Mexico all of a sudden.

Beyond all that, Morrell wants you not to worry, because of a study:

But today, it's worth examining what is currently known about the spill's actual impact based on the environmental data that is now available. This includes studies conducted as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) -- the process for determining what harm has been done to natural resources. The Deepwater Horizon NRDA is the most extensive and expensive environmental assessment ever conducted, spanning four years so far and costing BP a billion dollars and counting.

Although the NRDA is not finished, the evidence to date shows the Gulf environment is rebounding and that most of the environmental impact was of short duration and in a limited geographic area.

It's pretty neat how in the space of a few paragraphs, Morrell goes from an insistence that we have to assess the situation based upon data "that is now available," holding up the NRDA as an example of that data (and suggesting that it exonerates BP), to the part where he basically says, Oh, by the way -- minor point here -- the data I'm saying is 'now available' actually doesn't exist quite yet.

As to the claim that "BP Didn't Ruin The Gulf," there are a lot of people are saying, "Nah."

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries reported in September that "commercial catches for several varieties of seafood have decreased since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill." A study published in the July 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "the footprint of the impact of the spill on coral communities is both deeper and wider than previous data indicated." In April, the National Wildlife Federation released a study that attested to the continuing harm being done to key Gulf region species by the oil spill, including dolphins and Atlantic bluefin tuna. (This is something of a recurring theme among those who study the Gulf's wildlife.) On the coast itself, the oil spill continues to foster accelerated erosion. And tarballs containing material from the Deepwater Horizon spill continue to find their way ashore.

Morrell, who is nothing if not persistent, has occasionally popped up to accuse the people who conduct these studies of having a political agenda and "cherry picking" data. In his Politico Magazine piece, though, cherry-picking is evidently OK:

For example, these groups claim the spill harmed the Gulf's oyster population. What they don't say is that government sampling in 2010, 2011 and 2012 did not document a single visibly oiled oyster bed. In 2013, researchers found some tar balls on a single bed in Louisiana, but the government has not yet disclosed if they were even from the spill.

And yet, according to the Gulf Seafood Institute:

From Texas to Florida, the number of oysters harvested in the Gulf is at one of the lowest on record. Three years after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, oyster industry experts have no answers on the cause of the steep decline; especially on public grounds relied upon by commercial fishermen.

Oystermen and processors indicate that Gulf oysters are tough to come by. Various Gulf State fisheries are conducting studies on oyster reproduction and growth, but answers have been elusive.

Right about now, you are maybe wondering how it came to pass that Politico Magazine even gave space to Morrell's meandering bit of hand-waving. The answer, of course, is that Morrell paid for it.

Yeah, son. All that quid eventually yields a hot bowl of the ol' pro quo. If you cast your mind back to Eric Wemple's original Washington Post study on the vagaries of Mike Allen's Politico Playbook and its troubled history with sponsors, you'll find that BP and Morrell shine brightly in the firmament:

Another big name that's gotten a healthy dose of earned media from Playbook is BP, a company that has faced quite a challenge in image-conscious Washington, thanks to the 2010 oil spill at the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by the company. In recent months, BP has blanketed "Playbook" with ads hyping the company's status as "America's largest energy investor." The free BP mentions authored by Allen tell a similar story.

Last June, for instance, Allen found newsworthy an AP story about a BP campaign to challenge settlement claims stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The item quoted from a full-page ad that the company had placed in newspapers, and that the AP story had cited. It also included a link to the ad.

Companies love it when their ads get passed around.

That's just one of many documented examples of the tidy BP-Politico synergy that Morrell has procured. "'This Town,' the defining political book of 2013, notes that Allen and Morrell are close friends," writes Wemple, referring to the best-seller by Mark Leibovich. "And close friends help each other in business."

Today's Playbook sponsor, by the way? It's BP. Sweet and crude.

UPDATE, 4:52 p.m.: A BP spokesman responds: "[Morrell's Politico piece] is an opinion piece submitted by BP to an influential newspaper to counter several op-eds about the Gulf that previously were published in this and other media outlets. It’s no different than any other op-ed by any other company in any other publication.”

this town: "i'm hearing about..." gets picked up up the food chain 123 "driving the conversation" = gossip?

freelance aaaas gmo http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/democrats-have-a-problem-with-science-too-107270.html#.U7xCC_ldUs9

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=F87CCB53-6FC6-42ED-8A3D-664D96C96825

democ alliance apologia for kochs

ken vogel

punked by james o npr, corrected

By the time the Blaze's critique made its way around the internet, though, half the press corps—including many media critics—was headed to the SXSW convention in Austin, and the other half was busy with disasters in Japan and uprisings in the Middle East. Weigel and Smith posted detailed mea [11] culpas [12] (Smith later said he'd been "slipshod"); Poniewozik followed up [13], as did USA Today [14] and The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan [15], but otherwise the major media failed to correct the record until after the defunding vote.*