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desmog

An Israeli private investigator wanted by U.S. authorities for allegedly carrying out a hack-and-leak operation commissioned on behalf of ExxonMobil is fighting against his extradition to a Brooklyn, NY, detention center.

During a packed hearing last week at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court attended by DeSmog, lawyers for Amit Forlit used a legal strategy that one climate accountability advocate is referring to as “bizarre.”

The defense is arguing that Forlit, who is accused of being hired by the Washington D.C.-based public relations and lobbying firm DCI Group to illegally hack into the emails of environmental activists and others involved with climate change litigation against Exxon, shouldn’t be extradited on the grounds that the charges against him are politically motivated.

Last Wednesday was the first time Exxon and DCI were officially named in connection with the allegations – part of the defense’s claim that Forlit is “a form of collateral damage” in the legal pursuit of ExxonMobil.

To support his case, Forlit’s lawyers sought to present evidence from “expert” witness Scott Walter, president of a conservative U.S. think tank called the Capital Research Center (CRC) that for years publicly argued that the science of climate change is faulty and uncertain – including publishing a post last year disputing that “climate change” is “settled science.”

In his affidavit, Walter claimed that current efforts to hold ExxonMobil accountable in court for lying to the public about the dangers of climate change are at their core a political project connected to the U.S. Democratic Party.

Forlit is facing up to 45 years in prison for allegedly carrying out cyberattacks and hacking against groups and individuals involved with efforts to file lawsuits against ExxonMobil for misleading the public over the impact of burning fossil fuels on the earth’s climate, and spearheading public communications efforts to undermine the science.

Drawing on Walter’s affidavit, Forlit’s UK-based lawyer Rachel Scott stated in court, “we submit that these lawsuits are politically motivated.”

“It’s a bizarre strategy,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center of Climate Integrity, which has been involved with climate litigation. “Trying to claim that this guy is facing political persecution when, in fact, he was allegedly paid large sums of money to execute a massive hacking operation aimed at hundreds of employees at environmental nonprofit organizations and even those people’s spouses and kids.” Davies was one of the 128 individuals targeted by the hackers.

‘Opinion presented as fact’

On a grey January day, journalists packed into the London courtroom gallery where prosecutors representing the U.S. Department of Justice argued that Forlit should be extradited to New York. Upon his extradition, Forlit faces a federal indictment charging him “with three offences consisting of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and wire fraud,” according to prosecution documents. “The maximum sentences are five, 20, and 20 years’ imprisonment, respectively.” The indictment has not been made public.

Wearing casual trousers and a blue shirt, Forlit watched from the side of the courtroom as lawyers argued about the political implications of his case. Acting on behalf of U.S. authorities, lawyer Adam Payter, with the firm 6KBW, took aim at the affidavit from CRC’s Walter, calling it “opinion presented as fact” and arguing that it was “inadmissible” as evidence.

Payter presented written material from the CRC’s website claiming that “environmentalist groups” and others are attempting to “undermine Americans’ freedoms.” The lawyer pointed out that CRC has on multiple occasions professed skepticism about human-caused climate change and advocated against solutions to the crisis by publishing a newsletter titled “Green Watch,” which outlines these positions. Payter then informed the court that, according to publicly available filings, Walter’s group has previously received funding from ExxonMobil – a conflict of interest Walter did not disclose in his affidavit.

In a blow to Forlit’s defense, District Judge John McGarva ruled that Walter’s affidavit could not be admitted as evidence.

Contrary to the defense’s claims that the charges against Forlit are politically motivated, Forlit “has been sought to be prosecuted for straight-forward criminal allegations that he orchestrated the hacking of persons for money,” the prosecution argued in a legal document submitted to the court.

“That Forlit, as the alleged orchestrator of a hacking scheme designed to politicise Climate Change Litigation,” should claim that he cannot be extradited and prosecuted because this Climate Change Litigation is politicised, “may be thought ironic,” stated Payter in a written submission to the court.

While the judge dismissed Walter’s statement, he agreed to consider supplementary reports and other material provided by Walter. This supplementary material included a report by Christopher Horner a former senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), another group whose representatives have historically expressed climate skeptic viewpoints. According to publicly available data, CEI received at least $2.1 million in funding from ExxonMobil between 1997 and 2006. In 2018, when CEI published Horner’s report, five of CEI’s eleven board members had links to groups funded by present or historic players in the fossil fuel industry.

In court, Payter stated that he would like to add further context on CEI on the final day of the hearing scheduled next month.

Paid $16 million

The allegations against Forlit come from a Department of Justice investigation started in 2018. According to federal investigators, Forlit was the leader of several Israeli-based intelligence-gathering firms that specialized in “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, including computer intrusions.”

In a court filing, Payter alleged that Forlit’s firms were paid $16 million between 2013 and 2018 by a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, which, in turn, was acting on behalf of one of the world’s biggest oil companies, a company based in Irving, Texas, that wanted to undermine groups connected to climate litigation.

Scott, the lawyer representing Forlit, filed papers that named the names that Payter, the U.S.government’s lawyer, did not; she wrote that the hacking effort “is alleged to have been commissioned by DCI Group, a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil…”

Some of the specific hacking initiatives were led by another Israeli private investigator named Aviram Azari, who oversaw hackers in India who in turn illegally accessed the electronic accounts of environmental campaigners. Azari was arrested in 2019, and sentencedto 80 months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to computer hacking, identity theft, and wire fraud. (Azari’s sentence incorporated lengthy time in pre-sentence custody, and on January 3, he was released from prison and briefly transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after which he was sent to Israel.)

IFrame Content

Prosecutors contend that DCI provided the hacked documents to Exxon and selected media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Exxon has used the allegedly stolen materials – which include a proposed legal strategy against the company – in its defense against ongoing climate litigation in Hawaii.

Both ExxonMobil and DCI have previously stated that they were not involved in the hacking operation.

Forlit was arrested in April 2024 under an Interpol Red Notice at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was attempting to board a flight to Israel. He was released on bail, forced to surrender his passport and make a security payment of £200,000 ($257,370).

The allegations in this case suggest oil and gas producers are willing to go to extreme lengths to discredit their environmental opponents, explained Robert Brulle,visiting research professor of environment and society at Brown University.

“The climate change countermovement is a sophisticated effort, involving multiple organizations engaging in a wide variety of strategies to obstruct climate mitigation efforts and to maintain business as usual,” he wrote in an email to DeSmog. “Climate litigation represents a threat to the business model of fossil fuel corporations, and so opposition to it is a core part of their efforts.”

The hearing will continue in early February.

*Rebecca John is a research fellow at the Climate Investigations Center founded by Kert Davies, who is mentioned in this story.

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Climate Change Denial Climate liability

DCI Group Subpoenaed on Exxon Climate Denial Fraud Case

Now this is getting interesting… PRWatch just revealed that DCI Group was subpoenaed by the US Virgin Islands as part of the ExxonMobil fraud investigation. This Climate Investigations post contains some things we know about …

By Kert Davies on April 20, 2016

joe bast and liddy bourne invite exxon payees past and present, incl nbcc

https:/:{/climateinvestigations.org:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/dci_group_subpoena_exxon_climate_fraud/

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DCI Coordinates Clean Air Act Counterattack Meeting for Exxon

More clues on DCI’s role as a coordinator for Exxon anti-regulatory campaigns, come from a useful document that was leaked to me by mail at Greenpeace.  The three page document is the invitation on Heartland Institute letterhead includes the agenda and invitation list for a June 2006 meeting convened at the DCI Group Washington DC offices.

The meeting is titled “Strategic Discussion Regarding the Clean Air Act”…in other words, how to slow, stop or derail the implementation of the Clean Air Act’s health and environmental protection provisions.

The invitation was sent by Joe Bast and Sandy Liddy Bourne, the President and VP of the Heartland Institute.

The stated agenda is:

“to discuss public policy challenges related to the Clean Air Act.  We are gathering approximately 50 experts from the free-market think tanks and industry to assist us in developing an action plan to address legislative concerns likely to arise this fall and next spring”

The letter details the threat of federal and state efforts to advance “National Ambient Air Quality Standards, greenhouse gas regulatory programs and new boutique formulas for biofuels”

“Expected outputs include ideas for white papers, identifying opportunities for testimony, outlining educational forums for elected officials and determining a communication strategy for media.”

The Invitation List includes a who’s who of climate deniers and many organizations who were being funded by Exxon at the time and in years prior to 2006.

ExxonMobil funding in 2006:

Exxon staff Four sessions on the agenda were to be presented by ExxonMobil staff:

Heartland Institute staff:

DCI Staff

Competitive Enterprise Institute staff (CEI had been dropped by ExxonMobil by this point after receiving over $2 Million in funding from 1997-2005):

Additional people of interest

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Trump Campaign Manager’s Firm Turned Blind Eye to Burma Rapes

When Jim Murphy was at DCI Group, the K Street firm distributed ‘propaganda’ insisting Burma’s military junta was not using rape as a weapon of war. It was.

[

Betsy SwanFormer Political Reporter

Published Jun. 20 2016

TDB

Since the Orlando shootings, Donald Trump has taken to maligning immigrants as misogynistic and touting his allegedly legendary abilities to protect women. He cherishes them, he loves to say; he will keep them safe.

But his newest big hire is a K Street veteran whose old firm once enthusiastically defended a military junta that used rape as a weapon of war—and tried to malign the reputations of the human rights’ groups that worked to protect women and girls from the military rapists.

Jim Murphy, who became Trump’s new national political director earlier this month, was a managing partner at JLM Consulting when Trump hired him. Previously, he was a managing partner at the DCI Group lobbying firm from June 2002 until June 2012. For his last four years there, according to his LinkedIn page, he was also president. The firm is famous for making fake “smokers’ rights groups” to defend Big Tobacco, and for creating an astroturf campaign in favor of Social Security privatization (a campaign that belly-flopped).

In 2002, when Jim Murphy was a managing partner there, the DCI Group worked for a the Burmese military government. As part of that work, it issued press releases saying the country’s military wasn’t responsible for systematically raping ethnic minority women.

Just one problem: Reports from activists on the ground and from the U.S. State Department indicate that the military was, in fact, using rape as a weapon of war when DCI represented it—and still does so to this day. One former U.S. official who worked in Burma while DCI contracted with the country’s government said the firm’s statements on the issue were “propaganda” and “baloney”—all in defense of a military regime that human rights activists held responsible for the systematic rape, torture, and murder of countless ethnic minority women.

Filings with the Department of Justice, available on its Foreign Agents Registration Act database, show the DCI Group took the Burmese government as a client on May 13, 2002. They terminated the contract on Jan. 31, 2003. DCI spokesman Craig Stevens gave The Daily Beast this statement regarding their work for the government:

“When the company engaged with the government 14 years ago, we required certain benchmarks be met—when they were not, we quit the contract after just a few months. Of course, we abhor the horrors of war and oppression, especially physical or sexual violence against women and children. Today, like all Americans, we are pleased to watch as Myanmar continues to evolve as a democracy and in the expansion of civil and human rights.”

When it was a client of DCI’s, the Burmese government faced accusations that it was responsible for more than 100 brutal rapes of ethnic minority women. The country had been (and still is) embroiled in a decades-long civil war pitting its military junta government against armed groups and militias. And countless innocent women and girls were caught in the crossfire.

On June 19, 2002, the Shan Women’s Action Network and the Shan Human Rights Foundation jointly released a report titled “License to Rape: The Burmese military regime’s use of sexual violence in the ongoing war in Shan State.”

The report concluded that the Burmese military was responsible for acts of sexual violence that are comparable in brutality to what ISIS does today. It documented 173 cases of members of the Burmese military—often officers—using rape or other sexual attacks against women in the country’s eastern Shan state in their efforts to subjugate insurrectionist groups. The examples detailed occurred mostly between 1996 and 2001, before DCI took on Burma as a client.

Military officers committed 83 percent of the rapes documented, and the report found these attacks were often in front of their troops. Only one perpetrator was ever punished. Many victims were subsequently tortured, beaten, and killed. In some cases, military members displayed the women’s dead bodies.

In 10 cases, officers passed on the women they raped to their own troops, who gang raped or killed them. In some cases, troops beat rape victims, held plastic bags over their heads, or cut their breasts off. In one case, they displayed the body of a dead 12-year-old girl they had raped and refused to let her relatives bury her.

“She must be kept like this as an example for your people of Shan State to see,” troops said. “If you bury her you must die with her.”

In another case, 10 soldiers spent eight hours gang-raping a woman who was seven months pregnant. They took away her husband, who she never saw him again, and she gave birth shortly after the attacks. In another case, a soldier tied up and raped a 5-year-old girl, leaving her sexual organs bloodied. He was never punished.

The report drew international outrage. Kelley Currie, a former State Department official who worked on Burma policy and is now a senior fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, said the report had enormous significance.

“It was the first, most authoritative report on that,” she said. “It was so comprehensive—it was so well-researched, to an international standard in terms of human rights research—that it led the State Department to conduct their own investigation of the charges.”

The subsequent State Department investigation corroborated the findings of “License to Rape.”

Adam Simpson, of the Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre at Australia’s University of Adelaide, said no serious criticism of the report ever emerged.

“There’s no credible argument that this report produced anything other than documentary evidence of the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war,” he said.

That didn’t stop DCI. The firm distributed numerous press releases—publicly available on the State Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act database—to try to destroy the credibility of the report, and of the groups that produced it.

For example, the headline of a press release from July 10, 2002, read, “Myanmar Government Denounces Smear Campaign Orchestrated By Groups Allied With Drug Trade: Charges of Rape and Abuse ‘Are Complete Falsehood.’”

The same press release quoted government spokesman Col. Hla Min saying the Shan Human Rights Foundation and the Shan Women’s Action Network had “close ties” to the Shan United Revolutionary Army, which it described as a narco-terrorist group. It concluded by calling the report “horrific and false allegations.”

A July 30, 2002 release also took aim at the Shan human rights groups that produced the report and said the government “never ordered, supported, or condoned rape.” And a release dated Nov. 4, 2002, quoted Burmese government spokesperson Col. Hla Min saying, “Violence against women is not now nor has it ever been a policy or practice of our government.”

A final press release dated Dec. 23, 2002 was titled “Myanmar Government Denounces Rape in Strongest Possible Terms.”

It came out five days after the release of a State Department report that backed the findings of “License to Rape” and criticizing the military junta for using rape as a weapon of war. That report, based on a preliminary investigation, found a dozen women who said credibly that members of the military raped them.

“All of the victims under 15 appeared severely traumatized by their experiences, were disturbed mentally, and spoke in whispers, if at all,” a press release about State’s report said. “The older women sobbed violently as they recalled horrific incidents of their own rapes as well as brutal rapes, torture, and execution of family members. While these interviews are necessarily anecdotal, we note the consistency of the stories across three different locations, among differing groups of women.”

DCI’s press release countered the State Department, saying their report was just a rehash of the Shan rights’ groups allegations to “further attack and isolate Myanmar.”

Priscilla Clapp, who was chief of mission and permanent charge d’affairs at America’s embassy in Burma from 1999 to 2002, said DCI’s assertions that human rights groups were just fronting for narco-terrorists were absurd—and that their assertions that their client wasn’t responsible for the rape of ethnic minority women were “baloney.”

“Some military units clearly viewed rape as a legitimate means of demoralizing and degrading their enemies,” she said. “Yes, that was used. It still is, unfortunately.”

“In reality, the military government was using violence against everybody, not just women,” she continued. “The army was an equal-opportunity violence machine, aimed at men, women, and children.”

Currie added that when Burma’s government signed with DCI, they were among the world’s worst regimes.

“There were almost no authoritarian dictatorships out there that were worse than the Burmese junta 2002,” she said. “They were bottom of the barrel. There weren’t many: Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, a few come to mind. But they were pretty awful.”

On top of that, Currie and Clapp both noted that the military itself profited from narco-trafficking.

Currie noted that DCI had little success selling Congress on Burma’s military junta.

“The Burmese were not happy with the results,” she said. “You can only put so much lipstick on a pig, and they didn’t have a very good story to sell.”

Clapp concurred.

“It basically backfired with the Hill,” she said. “There was no way to paint that military government in a favorable light.”

“DCI was using propaganda they got from Burmese military intelligence, specifically Hla Min, the military intelligence spokesman,” she added. “They weren’t out there finding the information themselves.”

And their information was bad. But that didn’t keep Trump’s political director’s old lobbying firm from using it to malign human rights activists and defend rapists.

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2025

BRUSSELS — European Union diplomats in the United States have hired a prominent Republican-linked lobbying firm with ties to the first Donald Trump administration to advise on trade and investment communication strategy, according to documents seen by POLITICO.

“DCI Group AZ, L.L.C, shall advise the Delegation of the European Union to the USA on communications and public engagement strategy for external stakeholder audiences, with an emphasis on promoting EU trade and investment in the United States,” said the form, filed to the US Foreign Agents Registry (FARA) on Nov. 1, 2024.

The filing came days before Trump’s Nov. 5 election victory, as the bloc’s 27 member countries scrambled to understand whether he would follow through on campaign threats to throw up a protective tariff wall around the U.S. market.

So far he has hit China with universal import duties of 10 percent, while giving Canada and Mexico stays of execution on even higher tariffs. He hasn’t yet targeted the EU directly, but has called its trade policy an “atrocity” and wants the continent to buy more American gas, cars and farm products.

The EU’s top trade official, Maroš Šefčovič, has yet to meet Trump administration officials.

DCI Group said it had signed a contract with the EU delegation, serving under the auspices of the bloc’s diplomatic service, in Oct. 2024, according to the FARA disclosure, which is required of any group taking on work to further the interests of foreign governments.

Hiring a well-connected lobbying outfit follows experiences dating back to Trump’s first term, when the EU delegation lacked access to administration officials and had to rely on national embassies to get a clearer idea of their thinking.

“The D.C. delegation has been accused of intelligence failure in the past,” said one former European trade diplomat, granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. DCI Group might not be able to open doors at the highest level, but would at least be able to explain what is actually going on, and provide introductions to movers and shakers in the Republican party, this person said.

When asked if the EU delegation hired DCI Group preemptively to deal with a second Trump presidency, the bloc’s diplomatic service did not respond.

It’s unclear how long DCI Group will have the contract with the EU delegation and how much the diplomatic service has paid the lobbying firm for their work.

When those questions were put to the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, they said: “The EU Delegation in the U.S. engages different resources to advance public outreach across the United States. DCI is currently advising the Delegation on public communication with an emphasis on promoting EU trade and investment in the United States.”

When asked, the EEAS declined to to say if it had worked with DCI Group previously.

Client list

DCI Group is well known in Washington. In the middle of his 2016 campaign, Trump hired its former president, Jim Murphy, as his national political director.

Since it was founded in 1996, DCI Group has also worked on behalf of the militaryjunta in Myanmar, Azerbaijan’s interests in the U.S., and industries ranging from tobacco, telecoms, hedge funds and energy firms.

The Department of Justice is currently investigating a sprawling criminal case related to the hacking of climate advocates, which occurred allegedly at the behest of DCI Group for Exxon Mobil, one of the firm’s biggest clients at the time of the alleged hacks.

Among DCI Group’s other clients was SCM Consulting Limited, an entity owned by Ukraine’s wealthiest man, Rinat Akhmetov. | Daniel Naupold/EPA;

Neither company has been accused of wrongdoing by U.S. authorities, and both denied any awareness of or involvement with the hacking. “The firm has not been accused of any wrongdoing,” said Craig Stevens, a partner at DCI Group, in a written statement. “We direct all our employees and consultants to comply with the law.”

According to the DCI’s latest filings to the U.S. Senate’s lobbying disclosure, the firm works for EN+ group, an aluminum producer that appeared on a list of 38 Russian entities sanctioned by the U.S. in response to Russian interference in its elections, violence in Ukraine, cybercrimes, and for supplying Syria with weapons. The sanctions against EN+group were lifted in 2019.

Among DCI Group’s other clients was SCM Consulting Limited, an entity owned by Ukraine’s wealthiest man, Rinat Akhmetov. The oligarch was accused by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of staging a coup in Ukraine, which Akhmetov called “an absolute lie.”

DCI Group did not disclose the amount for the contract in the public document. Asked to comment on the duration, scope and precedent for such a contract, DCI Group declined to comment.

Asked how the firm would manage potential conflicts of interest with its mission to represent the EU’s interests, DCI Group again declined to comment.

*Douglas Busvine contributed reporting.

omfg fox expert?!

2015

Partners

fox cheerleader venez

https://www.foxnews.com/world/drug-trafficking-maduro-venezuela

no lnx pix [vid?]

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Drug trafficking keeping Maduro in power in Venezuela, analysts say

Hollie McKay [who?]

By Hollie McKay | Fox News

Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security CouncilVideo

Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security Council]

It has been more than three months since the U.S. accelerated its onslaught of economic sanctions on Venezuela, coupled with the back of a new interim President – heightening official expectation that the Nicolas Maduro-led regime would crumble.

Only the socialist dictatorship has failed to fall. While there an array of factors to blame, analysts are pointing to illicit trafficking rings as a fundamental Maduro lifeline.

:{

“The Venezuelan military forces has become a narco-criminal, armed organization. Most of the top and mid-commanders are deeply involved in corruption, drug operations, and serious human rights abuses,” Johan Obdola, president of Latin America-focused global intelligence and security firm IOSI, told Fox News,}: noting that cartel-led, massive drug operations continue to spawn the country keeping the top echelon well-fed and financed. “Small pro-regime policing agencies and military units across the nation conduct these criminal operations centered on drug trafficking, kidnapping, and robbery to survive the crisis.”

Kevin Ivers, Vice President and Latin America expert at public policy firm DCI Group, pointed out that years ago, the elite of the Venezuelan military was put in charge of the core elements of the domestic economy, such as the importation and distribution of food and consumer goods.

[In this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during an interview at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela. (???????AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

“This has encouraged corruption and profiteering that has made key elements of the military part of what can be called the regime’s ‘mafia,’ and this has extended beyond consumer goods to drug trafficking,” he explained. “Maduro has also spent years systematically splintering the military into factions and playing them off each other to make it difficult for them to unite against him.”

PENCE CONFRONTS VENEZUELAN AMBASSADOR AT UN: ‘YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE’

Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, concurred that many in the upper echelons receive a cut from the regime’s illicit trafficking network – from drugs to food and medicine racketeering.

“There aren’t enough incentives(for military leaders) to leave and disincentives to stay to tip the balance, especially at the top,” he noted.

Indeed, military defections – once considered key to Maduro’s expulsion –  have dipped from 80 to 100 per day earlier this year to just two or three, according to the Washington Post. And of those, very few have come from the highest ranks and thus failed to generate a game-changing ripple effect.

“There were no key defections, roughly 500 members of the military without any real commanders. In a 110,000 military it had no impact,” explained Carlos Ponce, a senior fellow, and director of Latin America Programs at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “There was no real analysis of the military structure and the breaking points.”

Ponce said that former leader Hugo Chavez intentionally dismembered the lines of command to avoid a coup d’état while he was in power. He also pointed out that those who did make the leap have been paying the price.

“The commanders and high-ranking officials allegedly caught in anti-Maduro meetings have been tortured and their families isolated from any social or food program,” Ponce noted. “So there is a disincentive for anyone who showed discontent with the regime – jail or torture and abandonment to their families.”

Maduro’s reign is also being held together by external players. The U.S estimates that more than 20,000 Cuban agents alone are now planted within the Venezuelan military and law enforcement, presiding over internal operations and the movements of the top brass.

“Maduro relies heavily on foreigners to prop up his regime – Cuba, Russia, and Iran.They have a vested economic and political interest in ensuring he succeeds. Economically, to ensure that it is they that control the largest proven oil reserves in the world,” said John Wood, analyst and author of 'Russia, the Asymmetric Threat to the United States.' “Politically, to render the U.S. visibly impotent in its own backyard and thereby lay the groundwork forbuilding a viable military threat to the USA in its own hemisphere.”

[Eight-year-old Franyelis feeds her baby brother Joneiber as their mother Francibel Contreras holds a bowl of scrambled eggs and rice, at a soup kitchen in the Petare slum, Caracas, Venezuela. Contreras brings her three malnourished children to the soup kitchen in the dangerous hillside slum where they scoop in spoonfuls of food in what could be their only meal of the day. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

]

Obdola also underscored that the Cubans have “established an intense regional intelligence and surveillance operation” in bordering areas and in countries that support regime change in Venezuela.

“This operation is intense and mostly in Colombia, Brazil and other nearby nations where a very unique gathering of spies, intelligence and even terrorist operations are very active,” he said.

FIRST SHIPMENT OF RED CROSS AID ARRIVES IN VENEZUELA]

But the U.S., which has vowed to refurbish the rule of law and bring about new leadership in Venezuela, is yet to dramatically change its strategy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that “all options” are on the table when it comes to Venezuela, insisting that the strategy is “not just an American strategy” but the “Venezuelan’s people’s strategy.”

“Sometimes people think Maduro is winning, and yet he’s handed over all his power to the Cubans, to the Russians,” Pompeo told theVoice of AmericaSpanish. “This is weakness from Maduro. And so this weakness will ultimately lead to his departure, and democracy and prosperity will be restored in Venezuela.”

He has also taken aim at China’s role in standing by Maduro financially, mandating that their role is prolonging the protracted crisis in Venezuela.

[People cross the Tachira River into Colombia near the Simon Bolivar International bridge, which Venezuelan authorities only open to students and the sick, in Cucuta, Colombia, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, on the border with Venezuela. People crossing the river are using makeshift bridges as the water level grows with the approaching rainy season. (AP Photo/Schneyder Mendoza)

]

Once awash will oil wealth and deemed the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela has been beleaguered by an economic crisis since 2015 which has since spiraled into a grave humanitarian catastrophe and prompted the exodus of almost four million into now overburdened neighboring nations. Maduro has consistently blamed the U.S. for purporting to wage "economic war," but has largely denied that there are mass problems.

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On the ground in the poverty-plagued Venezuela, it’s a mix of exasperation and desperation with the vast majority continuing to push for change and turn to the U.S. for support as time rolls on.

“There is more room for applying sanctions,” Ivers added. “Anything that cuts off the regime’s ability to generate cash, that disrupts its flow ofcontrabandgoods and drug trafficking finances, and increases the pressure of possible prosecution of senior military and regime figures for crimes against humanity or other criminal acts, will bring the regime closer to the negotiating table to seek an end to the conflict.”

Hollie McKay has a been a Fox News Digital staff reporter since 2007. She has extensively reported from war zones including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, and Latin America investigates global conflicts, war crimes and terrorism around the world. Follow her on Twitter.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/02/15/propaganda-pipeline-front-group-gain-grow-america-infrastructure-now

Although pipelines have been facing a number of setbacks recently, pro-pipeline groups aren’t giving up. One of those is Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN), which came to our attention because it’s recently begun sponsoring the Washington Examiner’s daily energy newsletter.

GAIN’s website simply describes the group as supporting strengthening infrastructure development and only mentions pipelines as one aspect of its focus, which also includes bridges, roads, etc. But the group’s blog, Twitter, and coverage in the mediaare pretty exclusively dedicated to pro-pipeline messaging. Hmmm, almost like it isn’t an all-around infrastructure group, and perhaps may have some ulterior motive …

Which, of course, it does. GAIN was formerly known as the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN), which Steve Horn at DeSmog reported was acting as a front group for DCI. You may remember DCI as the PR firm tied to the GOP: It’s got experiencein creating front groups on behalf of Big Tobacco, it’s known for its role spearheading the modern Tea Party movement, and it’s also worked to discredit Dakota Access pipeline protesters.

And although it seems to have changed names, GAIN is still up to the same tricks.

Back in July of 2017, Eric Hananoki at Media Matters wrote a piece exposing howCNN Commentator James “Spider” Marks was writing op-eds attacking pipeline protestors without disclosing he was on the advisory board of TigerSwan, a company that was hired to provide security for the Dakota Access pipeline. This led to numerous papers updating Marks’ pieces to reflect this. PennLive actually stated “his work will not appear on the website again” due to this failure to disclose.

What’s Marks been up to lately? Well as it turns out, in the past year, he’s been writing more pro-pipeline op-eds, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington Times, and RealClearPolitics. All, of course, without mentioning his position as a Strategic Advisor at GAIN.

GAIN’s latest project is a “fact-checker” tool, designed, as the website says, to push back against the so-called “coordinated disinformation campaigns” that have been leveraged against pipelines like Dakota Access and Keystone XL.

However, GAIN seems unaware of how fact-checkers generally work: The website often just repeats a claim without offering any further evidence and then deems it true.

A recent fact-check from earlier this week has the appearance of offering more evidence, but that disappears once you dig in. The check gives a “False” rating to a claim that a pipeline would negatively impact property values, using evidence in a 2016 study by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA), a trade organization that advocates for the natural gas pipeline industry, which concluded that proximity to a natural gas pipeline has no impact on property value.

Beyond the inherent bias of having a natural gas pipeline advocacy group do this study,some have also pointed outthat the study compared houses next to the pipeline with houses in the same development, a few hundred feet from the pipeline, rather than with the broader market. This means the research may not be accurately portraying the influence of pipelines on property value. After all, if the pipeline depresses value for the whole neighborhood, this methodology wouldn’t notice.

Personal and local accounts suggest that’s exactly what’s happening. One property owner in the path of that Kinder Morgan pipeline — a self-described conservative who supports pipelines — says he’s been trying to sell his property and interest has dropped since the project was announced.

Meaning that unless you own the pipeline or get paid by the people who do, buying into the industry‘s propaganda will be all pain, no GAIN.

==

3 part series, fannie, freddie,

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-anna-nicole-smith-billionaire-in-laws-court-lobbying/

alford

==

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/fossil-fuels-fishy-new-friends

James Short, a retired deputy fire chief, is the founder of an organization called Protect Our Pensions. 

At least that’s what it says on the group’s website.

But ask Short about his role at Protect Our Pensions, formed last year to oppose efforts to push endowments, foundations and pension funds to divest their holdings in fossil-fuel companies, and he has a different take.

Standing in the doorway of a brick bungalow in southeast Washington, D.C., in August, a Cadillac with the license plate “Short 1” parked outside, he refused to answer questions before shutting the door. A follow-up call elicited this response: “That is not me. I do not know who is putting those blogs out.”

Protect Our Pensions isn’t what it appears to be. While Short’s name and those of other coalition members show up on letters to state legislators and opinion pieces, much of the writing is actually done by public affairs firms operating in the shadows, according to documents and emails obtained by Bloomberg News. Instead of an active group of public servants and pensioners eager to discuss an important issue, most of the 41 people listed on the website didn’t respond to emails and phone calls. Some said they were proud to support the cause, but a few couldn’t remember signing up.

“The disturbing thing about this is they pretend to be organic, like it’s just this one firefighter who started it,” said Jim Griffith, a city council member in Sunnyvale, California, who rejected a recent request to join the group. “But it’s not.”

Grass-roots lobbying—the creation of groups of ordinary citizens to advocate for causes—has been around for decades. But when corporations hide their involvement or recruit members indifferent to the issue, tactics known as astroturfing, it can provide an appearance of public support that doesn’t actually exist.

The internet only makes such subterfuge easier. Anyone can set up a website and launch a social-media campaign while disguising who’s behind it. As Congress and federal investigators probe how such tactics helped spread disinformation during the last U.S. presidential election, Protect Our Pensions shows how similar strategies can be used to create an artificial veneer of public support for policies that stand to benefit corporations.

“These campaigns generate a series of problems regarding how political leaders and members of the mass public interact,” said Edward Walker, a University of California at Los Angeles sociology professor who wrote a book about the grass-roots lobbying industry in 2014. “When industry groups or wealthy donors masquerade this way, it allows policymakers to take actions that primarily support the well-heeled patrons funding the effort.”...“You might say he was born to schmooze”... Protect Our Pensions sprang to life in March 2016 as institutional investors, including university endowments and pension plans, debated cutting ties with fossil-fuel companies because of the industry’s role in climate change and its decades-long efforts to cloud the public’s understanding of the issue. More than 800 institutions have agreed to at least a partial divestment, including the ...https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/0213384D:US...Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and Syracuse University....The oil industry was already opposing divestment, funding studies that showed financial peril for investment portfolios that removed oil and coal stocks. The industry also runs websites that offer its views and clearly disclose its backing.... Protect Our Pensions brought a new, sympathetic voice to the debate: longtime public servants worried about their retirement nest eggs. The group’s first piece, http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2016/04/18/pensions-political-fossil-fuel/83218140/...published in the Detroit News under the names of Short and Yolanda Hudson, a retired Detroit science teacher, urged officials to “quit using pensions as political pawns” because “the welfare of too many retirees is on the line.”...>Hudson, who now works as a yoga instructor, didn’t respond to phone calls, emails or a message delivered to her yoga studio. The Detroit News says it has no record of who submitted the article.

The funders behind Protect Our Pensions remain concealed. Six fossil-fuel companies and industry associations, including Exxon Mobil Corp. and the American Petroleum Institute, said they’ve played no role.

But there are clues pointing to the involvement of **DCI Group LLC**, a Washington public affairs firm known for its work with the energy industry and for building grass-roots coalitions that sometimes obscure their funders.

The group’s website, www.helpprotectourpensions.org, is linked to the same internet protocol address as DCI’s corporate website, according to reverse IP lookup tools. Shared IP addresses can sometimes be a coincidence, but of the 11 other sites connected to that address, at least eight are for coalitions or projects related to DCI clients.

There’s also this: Some of the earliest Protect Our Pensions blog posts have web addresses that contain a string of random Latin words. It’s common practice for publishers and website developers to use such strings as placeholders as they design pages. But the combination of words used by Protect Our Pensions, such as “proin in nulla condimentum diam mattis posuere,” are extremely rare. Google, which trawls hundreds of billions of web pages, shows this exact phrase appears on only one other website–BuyingBias.org, which DCI helped develop, according to a former DCI employee familiar with the operation.

Craig Stevens, vice president of media affairs at DCI, declined in an email to either confirm or deny that his company did work on behalf of Protect Our Pensions. But he said linking the campaign to DCI through its IP address “seems like conjecture.” He also said DCI “would never work with someone without their express agreement” and offered a general defense of the work his and other public affairs firms do.

“Our democracy is stronger,” Stevens said, “when citizens act and inform the government of how legislation, regulations, or judicial rulings impact Americans’ lives and provide policymakers with ways—if necessary—to improve them.”

For a typical grass-roots coalition, a national firm like DCI will manage the contract and hire regional public affairs specialists to recruit members and place op-eds in newspapers. For Protect Our Pensions, much of the group’s work has been carried out by two such firms—FSB Core Strategies in Sacramento, California, and Mac Strategies Group Inc. in Chicago—both of which have worked with DCI in the past.

DCI’s Stevens said his firm works with hundreds of professionals around the world but that he couldn’t comment on any specific clients, projects or tactics.

FSB, located a few blocks down a leafy lane from California’s domed state capitol, touts on its website the importance for corporations to build grass-roots coalitions: In “political arenas, strength in numbers isn’t just a goal. Many times it’s the difference between success and failure.”

“What exactly does the organization do or support?”

Around the time Protect Our Pensions’ Facebook page and website were going live, FSB was hunting for members.

“I am working with Protect Our Pensions, a coalition led by Retired Deputy Fire Chief James Short, with the Washington, D.C., Fire Department,” wrote Jerry Amante, FSB’s senior vice president and general counsel, in one typical pitch to a California mayor obtained through a public-records request. “The national coalition is currently working on putting together a group here in California that is concerned about the potential harmful impact/consequences of politicizing pensions.”

FSB Chief Executive Officer Jeff Flint said in an email that everyone it recruited for the group believes in its cause. “We’re proud of the work we do in getting citizens engaged in discussions on important issues,” Flint said. “That’s democracy and their participation is a good thing.” He declined to answer questions about who was funding Protect Our Pensions or whether DCI was involved.

Meanwhile, as the divestment campaign was picking up momentum in Chicago, Protect Our Pensions was cultivating a number of supporters there. One was Shalom Klein, who hosts a radio show called “Get Down to Business with Shalom Klein” and is the founder of a group called Jewish B2B Networking. “You might say he was born to schmooze,” his father, Moshe Klein, once said.

When Bloomberg first spoke with Shalom Klein in August, he said he’d grown concerned about divestment after hearing about it from some friends in academia, and that the phenomenon troubled him as a small businessman. “Social statement aside, it’s a bad business move,” he said.

Months later, he acknowledged in an email that he had been hired by Mac Strategies to recruit Protect Our Pensions coalition members. Several of those he signed up have close ties to Klein, including his mother-in-law and a former employee of his father’s accounting firm. Three other Chicago-area members said they couldn’t recall signing up.

“What exactly does the organization do or support?” asked one of them, Jason Rockhold, who has worked with Klein at a nursing-home company. Another, Marc Brown, a former trustee of West Deerfield Township in Illinois, was so perplexed when contacted by Bloomberg that he stopped by Mac’s office in Chicago for more details.

Ryan McLaughlin, CEO of Mac Strategies, said in an email that his firm “was engaged to build a grass-roots coalition in Illinois of like-minded stakeholders who oppose the politicization of public pension investments.” He said every person his company recruited willingly signed up and agreed with the mission, but he declined to comment about the source of Protect Our Pensions’ funding or whether DCI was involved.

Despite the obfuscation, Protect Our Pensions has had little trouble getting its op-eds published. The coalition’s most prolific author has been Carlos Solorzano, CEO of the Hispanic Chambers of Commerce of San Francisco, whose articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner have urged state officials to fight fossil-fuel divestment bills.

Supporters of a bill to stop New York state pensions from investing in fossil-fuel companies protest in Albany on May 8, 2017.]

After half a dozen attempts to reach Solorzano, he replied in September in a terse email, “Thanks anyway, I moved on from this issue.” A month later, another anti-divestment piece bearing his name was published in the online news site Fox & Hounds.

Many newspapers refuse to disclose who submits the op-eds they publish. But the San Francisco Examiner confirmed Solorzano’s piece was sent by FSB.

Often, these op-eds and letters to state legislators are written almost entirely by the public affairs firms. In January, according to correspondence obtained through a public-records request, FSB emailed Tim Shaw, mayor pro tem of La Habra, California, a draft of a piece the firm wanted to submit to Governing magazine in his name.

“We can edit some language or passages if it’s not quite reflective of your views in some places,” an FSB employee wrote. Shaw didn’t alter a word. “Looks great!” he replied. The article was published online a month later.

Shaw said he didn’t suggest any changes because he agreed with all the content and that he doesn’t know who is funding the coalition.

Mark Funkhouser, the publisher of Governing, said the article was submitted by FSB, and he understood there was a good chance it had corporate funding. But the magazine ran the article, he said, because the “arguments were a reasonable counter to the pro-divestment arguments.”

Brown, the former West Deerfield trustee who didn’t remember sending in a permission form, compared his Protect Our Pensions role to that of someone who signs a petition without paying attention to what the issue is. While he said he’s opposed to divestment, he’s still disturbed that no one will say who’s footing the bill....Something, he said, “seems not kosher.”&... Jeff Green === IPFI https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/25/fossil-fuel-industry-secretly-behind-new-campaign-against-fossil-fuel-divestment... Last week a newly formed organization, The Institute for Pension Fund Integrity (IPFI), published its first “white paper” on the topical issue of...; “getting politics out of pensions”...Reviewing the report, the headline on the ...https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b17tvdfr7bvcc8/new-pensions-group-says-forget-about-climate-change ...;website summed up the main finding: “New Pensions Group Says Forget About Climate Change”...Pension funds should focus solely on getting the best investment returns and ignore issues such as climate change and other political issues”, continued the... nstitutional Investor...Which really is a polite way of saying “forget about your and your kid’s future, make as much money as possible...So what does the report actually say? The...IPFI report warns that “politically driven divestment is a growing movement across the country”. It continues: “Much of the push is for public pensions to divest from industries with negative externalities, including being damaging to the environment; being unhealthy; and otherwise being perceived as a social ‘bad’. While this is not a novel concept, current movements focus on groups pushing for divestment from fossil fuel companies given their perceived negative impact on the climate and environment.” ...Other examples” it adds, “include divesting from tobacco companies, soda companies, gun manufacturers, and the military and nuclear industrial complex.” The report’s final conclusion is clear: “get politics out of public pension management.”...So who is behind the report warning against the burgeoning fossil fuel disinvestment movement?<...The author of the report and founder of the ...Christopher Burnham, a former Treasurer of the State of Connecticut, and former...Undersecretary. He is also a former “energy investment banker” and chairman of an advisory ...Cambridge Global Advisors. He has also, most recently, served as a member of Donald Trump’s Presidential Transition Team at the Department of State....Burnham has previously written for  Advisors on the subject of pensions saying that “a new era of activists, without any regard to fiduciary responsibility, is injecting politics into pension systems, yet again, by trying to make states, counties and municipalities across the country divest of shares in energy companies. Why would we seek to undermine the integrity of a secure retirement for our teachers and government employees?”But let’s dig a little deeper. The IPFA’s address is exactly the same as the...its phone number is the same as Cambridge Global Advisors, although Cambridge does not give out its full address on its website, so it's probably all the same office.

Maybe a greater clue is who is behind the Institute’s website. The IPFI website was set up last month by Burnham himself on March 22. Two days later records show that Burnham was showing as the registrant name. However by April 9, the contact for the website had been changed to Fred Wollenberg from the Bergman Group, which is an advertising company.

According to his biog on Bergman’s website, it says Wollenberg “joined the Bergman Group, where he has developed speciality marketing for ExxonMobil, Sandler Training, CapTech, American Express, Martha Jefferson Hospital...DCI Group, Beaumont Hospitals of Detroit, Wells Fargo, VCU Health System, the National Audubon Society, American Enterprise Institute, the George W. Bush Foundationand Capital One.”

Now this maybe a total coincidence, but Wollenberg just happens to have developed “speciality marketing” for Exxon as well as the DCI Group, the PR firm linked to the Republican Party, which has a long history of being involved in anti-climate change work and also which has been accused of being behind another anti-fossil fuel disinvestment campaign.

As *Bloomberg* reported last year, there is another anti-divestment campaign which is called “Protect Our Pensions isn’t what it appears to be … much of the writing is actually done by public affairs firms operating in the shadows”.

It continued: “But there are clues pointing to the involvement of DCI Group LLC, a Washington public affairs firm known for its work with the energy industry and for building grass-roots coalitions that sometimes obscure their funders.”

Bloomberg noted that the group’s website, “www.helpprotectourpensions.org, is linked to the same internet protocol address as DCI’s corporate website, according to reverse IP lookup tools. Shared IP addresses can sometimes be a coincidence, but of the 11 other sites connected to that address, at least eight are for coalitions or projects related to DCI clients.”

DCI neither confirmed or denied to Bloomberg that they worked on the Protect our Pensions campaign, and they will probably say the same here about another uncannily similar initiative.

by Andy Rowell, crossposted from Oil Change International === http://www.polluterwatch.org/megan-bloomgren Megan Bloomgren is a 2001 graduate of La Salle University where she studied Political Science and Business. From college, she **volunteered for Dick Cheney in the Bush Cheney 2000 ticket.**

Upon graduation, she became a consultant of Government Practice atAccenture,a consulting firm.

Starting in May 2004 she held a variety of government positions during the Bush presidency. Most notably she was the Deputy Press Secretary for the EPA for 7 months in 2005, the Deputy Communications Director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality from July 2005 to March 2006, and from March 2006 to May 2008, she functioned as the Press Secretary and Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy according to her LinkedIn account.

In 2008 she transitioned out of government by working as the :{Vice President of Strategy for the Institute for 21st Century Energy in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce until June 2011, when she joined the [<...DOI) in 2017, as reported by E&E News.](https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2017/02/02/stories/1060049449...

Department%20of%20the%20Interior)}:

It has been reported that she will transitioning out of the DOI and will begin to work for The st Century Energy in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 2008 through 2011.(https://www.axios.com/scoop-oil-lobby-group-taps-top-communications-official-2436202020.html...

 an%20oil%20lobby%20group....EVIDENCE:...Vice%20President%20of%20Strategy%20for%20the%20Institute%20for%2021)

While Bloomgren held a strategic role, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy criticized the Department of the Interior:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:’s Five Year Plan (2012-2017) describing it as a “major step backward for the security of America’s energy future”.

Specifically, they criticized the absence of leases for oil and gas drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts for the 2012-2017 period. They urged the Department of the Interior:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: to sell leases to oil and gas companies so that there can be energy development in these zones.

The Institute for 21st Century Energy continued that the Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) “still leaves billions of barrels of American oil and significant reserves of natural gas under lock and key”. They went on to stress that there should have been more oil and gas:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: leases sold in the Five-Year Plan.

The Institute for 21st Century Energy and Department of the Interior Connections

Megan Bloomgren worked for the Department of the Interior while the agency was ordered through executive order to issue a new Five Year Plan for 2017-2022:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:. The Executive Order calls for all current leases that are scheduled to be sold with the current plan to be honored. The Department of the Interior must reevaluate the decision not to sell leases in select regions and to consider selling additional leases in off-shore areas during the 2017-2022 period. The unusual call for a new Five Year Plan is expected to increase both the number of leases issued and expand the regions included.

The executive order specifically mentions many of the same areas that the Institute for 21st Century Energy urged the Department of the Interior to expand to in the previous Five-Year Plan. This urging came while Megan Bloomgren was working as the Vice President of Strategy in the Institute for 21st Century Energy. She is in some capacity involved in the executive order as evidenced by her role as a senior staff member and further by her role as the Communications Director for the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke.

Direct Involvement in Pro-drilling and Anti-Regulation Efforts

Megan Bloomgren:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background-image:url("):}: participated in working meetings hosted by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry to discuss the Gulf moratorium efforts while involved with the Institute for 21st Century Energy. Her involvement was even specifically mentioned on the Institute for 21st Century Energy’s website. 

While Megan Bloomgren:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: was employed by the Institute for 21st Century Energy, they released a “Roadmap for Energy Policy Action” which called for the end of all “limitations and moratorium on exploration and production of domestic resources on our lands and on the Outer Continental Shelf…permanently”. She has been in some capacity involved in the executive order to evaluate regulations as evidenced by her role as a senior staff member and her role as the Communications Director for the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, and a meeting :{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:with the Western Energy Alliance (an oil funded front group).

The Department of the Interior has been mandated to identify two regulations for removal when attempting to add an additional regulation, following a January executive order:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:. This specifically impacts oil and gas companies since many of the regulations overseen by the Department of the Interior involve oil and gas companies and leases. While Megan Bloomgren worked for the Institute for 21st Century Energy, they called for the permanent removal of all limitations on exploration and production by oil and gas companies – which included regulations. Megan Bloomgren has been involved in this executive order as evidenced by her role as a senior staff member and by her role as the Communications Director for the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, and a meeting:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: with the Western Energy Alliance (an oil funded front group).

Second-Rate Science Used as Justification

The Science Applied International Corporation (SAIC) and the Gas Technology Institute partnered to report greater concentrations of natural gas and oil reserves on US land than was previously determined by the Department of Energy.  In response, the Institute for 21st Century Energy stated, “We are hopeful that the results of this study will serve as an impetus for the Department of Interior to revisit its stance on oil and gas exploration”.

But the report was (1) not blind peer reviewed, (2) not published in an accredited scientific journal, (3)openly subsidized by the Institute for 21^st Century Energy:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:, (3) conducted in part by the Gas Technology Institute with aBoard of Directors:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: dominated by oil and gas company employees and its Chairman is an employee at WGL Holding, INC., a natural gas company.

The Institute for 21st Century’s Opposition to Oil Taxes

After additional taxes on oil companies were proposed in 2011, the Institute for 21st Century Energy stated, “We urge Congress to reject those new taxes, and to do what it can to open up more areas of exploration”. They have frequently made many similar statements during the time Megan Bloomgren:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: was employed as their Vice President of Strategy.

The Institute for 21st Century’s Opposition to Increased Oil Spill Liability

When the federal government considered removing the cap on liabilities that oil companies would have to face after an oil spill, following the 2010 BP oil spill, spokeswoman for the Institute for 21st Century Energy stated that holdingoil companies:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: liable “might make it difficult for companies to finance new exploration in the United States”. Implying the future of oil investments are more important than oil companies paying for the damages they caused.

The Institute for 21st Century’s Opposition to Initial Research before Drilling

The Department of the Interior:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: announced that it wanted to first study the water, power and land-use issues before selling oil and gas leases in select parts of the Mountain West, promised by the previous administration. Following this announcement, the Institute for 21st Century Energy criticized this action by stating “despite the valuable progress being made in the development of new energy sources and technologies, there is still no viable substitute for oil”, stressing their disapproval of the lack of drilling despite the known but not yet understood risks.

Partner for the DCI Group from 2011 to 2017.

Between 2011 and 2016 Exxon Mobil:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background-image:url("):}: has paid a total of 1.62 million dollars for DCI’s lobbying efforts.

With the following payments: $320,000 (2011), $320,000 (2012), $320,000 (2013), $320,000 (2014), 320,000 (2015), and $20,000 (2016).

In 2016, Peabody Energy:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background-image:url("):}:, the world’s largest private coal company, filed bankruptcy. In their filing the creditors that received funding were published including DCI group. The uniqueness of this document disclosure was the link between Peabody Energy and their vast financial ties to a large proportion of the groups that promote disinformation about climate change.

The DCI Group:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}: has a history of promoting disinformation aboutclimate change:{:{(link is external):(style="clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="background:url("):}:. Between 2003 and 2006, DCI Group created and ran a phony news site, Tech Central Station, to promote climate change denial and skepticism.

==

MeganBloomgrenDepartment of the InteriorCommunicationsDCI Group; U.S. Chamber of CommerceDCI Group represented Exxon Mobil; U.S. Chamber of Commerce receives Koch funding.Additional information on Bloomgren's ties to industry can be found here.Exxon; oil and gas; Koch; fossil fuel

==

https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/15/dakota-access-pipeline-fake-twitter-accounts-dci-group

==

OMG

As previously reported by DeSmog, the GOP-connected firm DCI Group led the forward-facing public relations efforts for Dakota Access via a front group called Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN). Today MAIN has morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN).

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/07/20/emails-bush-iraq-war-pr-delve-off-the-record-strategies-dakota-access-pipeline

By Steve Horn and Curtis Waltman, MuckRock

Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters.

Emails show that the firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies, apparently working on contract with the National Sheriffs’ Association, worked in secret on talking points, media outreach, and communications training for law enforcement dealing with Dakota Access opponents mobilized at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. This revelation comes from documents obtained via an open records request from the Laramie County Sheriff's Department in Wyoming.

As previously reported by DeSmog, the GOP-connected firm DCI Group led the forward-facing public relations efforts for Dakota Access via a front group called Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN). Today MAIN has morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN).

Delve is an opposition research firm run by Jeff Berkowitz, former Republican National Committee research director and official in the George W. Bush White House. His company led research efforts on behalf of the National Sheriffs' Association.

Off the Record Strategies, meanwhile, guided the sheriffs’ behind-the-scenes communications strategy. Mark Pfeifle runs the secretive firm, Off the Record Strategies, and served as communications advisor in the George W. Bush administration, leading PR efforts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The National Sheriffs’ Association, a trade group for sheriffs, has been lobbying the federal government for additional surplus military gear from the Department of Defense under the auspices of its 1033 program. The association was also the central organizing vehicle which brought hundreds of out-of-state cops to Standing Rock via the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC).

Law enforcement present at Standing Rock underEMAC came under fire for a heavy-handed and overtly military-like response to pipeline protesters.

'Guns, Knives, Etc.'

According to an October 4, 2016 email sent by Chelsea Rider, content strategist for the sheriffs’ association, Pfeifle drafted the talking points used by law enforcement in an attempt to discredit the anti-Dakota Access movement. Representatives of that movement referred to themselves as “water protectors” because they opposed the pipeline crossing Lake Oahe and the Missouri River, a source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux and others downriver.

The document attached to that email, according to its metadata, indicates it was indeed written by Pfeifle, and then given to the acting public information officer, Donnell Hushka of the North Dakota Association of Counties, who handled information related to the protests at Standing Rock.

The talking points purported that the movement was led by “out-of-state agitators” with gang and drug-dealing ties, had connections to “anarchists” and “Palestinian activists,” used violence, and possessed “guns, knives, etc.” In addition, the messaging included calls to “follow the money” in pursuit of potential funding support from liberal elites such as George Soros and Tom Steyer.

Credit: Laramie County Sheriffs' Department

On October 5, Pfeifle sent a follow-up email to Hushka and other sheriffs’ association staff, including its executive director Jonathan Thompson, in response to an email sent by Thompson. Thompson’s email recommended changes for a press conference script drafted by Hushka.

“Importantly, we need to make sure we are pushing the primary message before the actual press conference begins, we want questions asked about who is [sic] protesters,” wrote Thompson in his email. “Must focus on the why this happening. This not for altruistic reasons, but nothing less than a desire to ‘occupy, threaten and intimidate,’ not peaceful protest. There those that want nothing more than using thug-like tactics, rumors and outright lights to distort what is really happening.”

Pfeifle agreed in his email, and suggested following the press conference with outreach to friendly media outlets to amplify the message.

Credit: Laramie County Sheriffs' Department

One of those outlets was the Say Anything Blog, run by Rob Port, who the next day, October 6, ran a blog post featuring many of the themes found in the talking points: “Over 85 Percent of Arrested #NoDAPL Protesters Are From Outside of North Dakota.”

In his email, Pfeifle had suggested reaching out to Port, who also hosts a radio show on WDAY AM-970 and regularly wrote blog posts in support of Dakota Access during the Standing Rock stand-off. When Port's piece went online, Pfeifle wrote an email that same day to the Delve team, sheriffs' association staff, Hushka, and others asking an association staffer to share the piece on social media.

Credit: Laramie County Sheriffs' Department

Though since removed from his blog, the Web Archive shows that Port formerly served as a policy fellow for the North Dakota Policy Council, a defunct think-tank that was part of the conservative and corporate-funded State Policy Network (SPN). SPN, as reported in 2013 by DeSmog, was actually created as a message-force-multiplier by and for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), another conservative and corporate-backed group which produces model legislation that is disseminated to predominantly Republican state legislators nationwide.

Scott Hennen, another conservative radio show host Pfeifle suggested the sheriffs' association target for outreach, actually copied and pasted the association's memo into a Facebook post, which was then shared by the association. In prefacing the talking points, Hennen also posted a photo of a Palestinian flag which was on the protest site depicted.

“For those who still believe the #NoDAPL protests are all peaceful and prayerful…read this,” read Hennen's Facebook post. “It will help you awaken to smell the coffee. And note the Palestine flag in the photo.”

On October 7, Hennen also invited Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier on his show to disseminate a similar set of talking points as those conveyed in Hennen's Facebook post.

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Iraq War 'Damage Control'

Pfeifle, who heads Off the Record Strategies, specializes in “damage control,” according to a 2005 Baltimore Sun story profiling the Bush White House communications strategy to fend off domestic critics of the Iraq War.

“Pfeifle's specialty is damage control. And at the moment, there is more than enough damage surrounding Bush,” The Sun wrote of the campaign Pfeifle co-ran with the host of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Nicolle Wallace, who then was a top communications advisor to President Bush. “With public alarm about the war mounting and public trust of Bush plummeting, the White House has gone on the defensive [sic OFFENSE] with a public relations push designed to discredit his opponents. The operation has all the trappings of a political campaign — including rapid-response statements targeted at opponents, using carefully compiled research.”

Pfeifle isn’t the only person with ties to the Iraq War who did public relations for Dakota Access. James “Spider” Marks led intelligence-gathering for the 2003 “shock and awe” campaign for Operation Iraqi Liberation. Today, he serves as a consultant to Energy Transfer Partners and sits on the advisory board of TigerSwan, the company’s private security firm and a funder of the National Sheriffs’ Association.

With a tagline of “Private Council/Public Results,” Off the Record Strategies does all of its business behind the scenes and rarely issues public comments.

“If we told you exactly what we do, we’d have to go on the record,” reads its website. “We’re strategic counselors with decades of high-level experience and a no-holds-barred approach to meeting — and exceeding — our client’s needs through personal and confidential service.”

Off the Record Strategies 'Here to Help'

In a May 7 webinar convened by the sheriffs’ association, Sheriff Laney and Pfeifle pointed to the October 2016 press conference as an instance of going on the offensive and turning the tables on the “North Dakota nice” attitude. Their webinar was titled “Protest on the Prairie: Law Enforcement Response and Lessons Learned.”

Laney appears to be a prominent figure within the National Sheriffs’ Association. He sits on its Board of Directors, formerly served on its Special Operations Committee, and won association awards in 2017 and2012. Within his more than hour-long webinar speech last May, Laney also gave a 17-point “DAPL Lessons Learned” presentation.

On top of his other affiliations, Sheriff Laney is a member of the Board of Directors for the North Dakota Association of Counties, which received the talking points from Off the Record Strategies and the sheriffs’ association in the October 4 email.

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In October 10 last year, Morton County, North Dakota — center of the pipeline protests — sent out a request under EMAC for 40 additional law enforcement officers to come to Standing Rock. Laney, and not Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, is listed as the point of contact on that request. An October 13 article in the Billings Gazette, taking note of how little time Laney had been spending at home in Cass County, refers to Laney as the Dakota Access “operations chief” in Morton County.

The National Sheriffs’ Association and Off the Record Strategies also show notable ties among personnel.

Patrick Royal, a media strategist who was director of media affairs for the Republican National Committee in the 2008 election, is actually listed as an employee by both the sheriffs’ association and Off the Record Strategies. Further, Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, formerly worked in the Bush White House with Pfeifle. They both went on to work together at a public relations firm named S4 Inc. P. Edward Leffler — listed on his LinkedIn page as the director of presidential transition project for the sheriffs’ association — also lists himself as a communication and media relations specialist for Off the Record Strategies.

Royal, Thompson, and Pfeifle also worked together on a crisis communications reaction to the popular Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer. According to an email obtained by USA Today, Manitowoc County Sheriff Rob Hermann consulted with the three of them on best practice response ideas to the hit 10-part series. Neither Royal, Thompson, nor Pfeifle responded to multiple requests for comment.

In an interview with Royal in May about the sheriffs’ association’s coordination of the Standing Rock law enforcement response, Royal responded, “I wouldn’t quite characterize it that way [and] I would say that what we tried to do was work with the local sheriffs to coordinate for them, to get people who would make themselves available.”

According to the sheriffs' association website, Royal was invited to speak alongside Pfeifle at the association's recent annual meeting held in Reno, Nevada, where they were slated to give two three-hour seminars titled, “Communicating in a:{ Crisis:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.” Eventually, the agenda changed and it appears the two did not end up speaking at the meeting, replaced instead by Sheriff Kirchmeier, Sheriff Laney, and a representative from TigerSwan in a seminar bearing the same title as the May one given by Laney and Pfeifle.

In his May 7 webinar presentation, Pfeifle told those listening to consider his firm a “resource” to be tapped if necessary during prospective future pipeline battles.

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“Consider us a resource of the National Sheriff’s Association. This is not the end of our activities to help and support law enforcement in areas where the pipelines could be under protest attack in the next days, months and years. But it’s a continuing activity that we will be available to support you in ways necessary and learn what we learned in North Dakota for areas that might be seeing protesters coming in doing much the same thing across the country,” said Pfeifle. “So, use us as a resource. We’re here to help.”

Pfeifle, in fact, has remained a resource for other pipeline fights, including the long-contested Keystone XL. According to Laney’s May 7 webinar presentation, he, Pfeifle, and Thompson all traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 14 to meet with the state’s Attorney General, Doug Peterson. Keystone XL, if constructed, would pass through the Cornhusker State.

Research “Delve”

In the October 4 talking points email, several Delve employees were also included in the email chain, though it is unclear how or if they responded. The email only arose through the records request because it was forwarded to Laramie County Sheriff Danny Glick, who did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Delve principals in the email included Matt Moon, Jeff Berkowitz, Foster Morss, Lloyd Miller, and Dan Mintz. Moon is the former deputy research director for the Republican National Committee (RNC), where he worked with Berkowitz. Morss led the research and policy team for 2016 Republican Party presidential candidate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and formerly served as deputy research director for the RNC under Berkowitz. Berkowitz and Morss also worked together on Rudy Giuliani’s run for president during the 2008 election cycle.

Miller worked as a research consultant for the GOP Super-PAC American Crossroads, founded by former President George W. Bush's chief of staff Karl Rove, while Mintz has since transitioned into a new job and works as the speechwriter for U.S.Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). The Daily Beast reported that Berkowitz also ghostwrote some of the campaign policy positions for Donald Trump’s 2016 run for the White House, doing so through another firm he runs named JBC Research LLC.

“Delve provides breakthrough insights for winning causes through competitive intelligence, opposition research, media and subject monitoring, policy analysis, and issue management,” Delve says on its website. “Our clients include fortune-listed corporations, major industry associations, Republican political campaigns, independent expenditure groups, and advocacy and educational groups.”

For Delve’s work on Dakota Access — which is owned by Energy Transfer Partners founder and CEO Kelcy Warren, a major Republican Party donor — the firm maintained a special email address, “pipeline@delvedc.com.” Representatives from Delve did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Delve’s “delve” into helping the National Sheriffs’ Association at Standing Rock appears to have paid off, though, at least according to Sheriff Laney’s May webinar presentation.

“It wasn’t until we had Mark and his people, Matt and Dan [of Delve] and Chelsea [of the National Sheriffs’ Association], [who] all came [and] spent probably way more time than they thought they ever would in their lives in North Dakota, but they spent months with us,” said Laney.

“And they were a godsend for us because we were finally about to fight them. You know, their professional media service we know was coming out of Seattle and it was highly funded. And to combat that with our own experts and I don’t have the time to go into all of that, but I can tell you without them, we would’ve been in serious trouble.”

Dakota Access, pending an ongoing federal court review of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental review process for the pipeline’s Missouri River crossing and potential spill impacts on the Standing Rock Tribe, is now open for business. Obtained from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the Bakken Shale basin, the oil contained within Dakota Access is now moving at a rate of half of North Dakota's entire production supply chain to market.

TAGS:

Donald Trump

fracking

DCI group

Rob Port

ALEC

american legislative exchange council

SPN

State Policy Network

Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now

Bakken Shale

Cass County

Morton County

North Dakota

hydraulic fracturing

george w bush

Dakota Access

emergency management assistance compact

EMAC

Energy Transfer Partners

Kelcy Warren

National Sheriffs' Association

tim hyde ur TP 1990 memo?

==

TRUMP club

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/15/dakota-access-pipeline-fake-twitter-accounts-dci-group

A DeSmog investigation has revealed the possibility that a front group supporting the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) — the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) — may have created fake Twitter profiles, known by some as “sock puppets,” to convey a pro-pipeline message over social media. And MAIN may be employing the PR services of the firm DCI Group, which has connections to the Republican Party, in order to do so.

DeSmog tracked down at least 16 different questionable Twitter accounts which used the #NoDAPL hashtag employed by protesters, in order to claim that opposition to the pipeline kills jobs, that those protesting the pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's encampment use violence, and that the pipeline does not pose a risk to water sources or cross over tribal land.

On September 13, people began to suspect these accounts were fake, calling them out on Twitter, and by September 14, most of the accounts no longer existed.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is set to carry oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the Bakken Shale basin in North Dakota across the Dakotas, Iowa, and Illinois. Its owner, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), says it plans to talk to the Obama administration and “reiterate [its] commitment to bring the Dakota Access Pipeline into operation.” It will do so despite the administration requesting that the company halt construction “voluntarily — particularly around the contested sacred tribal sites located 20 miles east and west of Lake Oahe and the Missouri River — until further notice.”

In his memorandum announcing his company's plans to do so,ETP CEO Kelcy Warren espoused many of the same arguments that were deployed by the Twitter sock puppets,which calls into question whether his company helped spearhead the social media campaign behind the scenes in order to create the appearance of grassroots support, a technique known as “astroturfing.”

In that memo, Warren said his company plans to engage more aggressively in the PR sphere.

“It has not been my preference to engage in a media/PR battle,” wrote Warren. “However, misinformation has dominated the news, so we will work to communicate with the government and media more clearly in the days to come.”

Vicki Granado, a spokesperson for the company, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the meantime, as all stakeholders in the debate await a definitive next move from the Obama administration, protests both on-site and nationwide have continued, with a militarized police presence at the Sacred Stone Camp intensifying. U.S.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)spoke at a September 13 Washington, DC protest against the pipeline, while U.S.Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) that same day called for a congressional oversight investigation of the hotly contested permitting issues which have arisen in the ongoing saga over the pipeline's future.

With that backdrop, in came the “sock puppets” for their own September 13 day of action on Twitter — and with MAINlikely pulling the strings.

The Sock Puppets

The sock puppet profiles had names such as Ashley Lovinggood, Garnett Vreeken, Yong Fetner, and Ying Baars, and all of the profile pictures featured women. Besides tweets promoting the Dakota Access Pipeline, what links all of the bogus profiles together is that they all “follow” (similar to “liking” a page on Facebook) the company Hootsuite.

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Image Credit: Twitter

Hootsuite serves as a social media platform management tool which allows an administrator for many different social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, to toggle quickly between accounts and send out posts in the form of tweets and other status updates. One of those accounts, that of Angla Dullea, formerly followed MAIN — and like all of the other pages — also followed Hootsuite; that is, until the account became suspended.

Dullea's profile photo bore an identical resemblance to the Twitter profile for Palma Mackerl, another bare-bones Twitter account.

 

Image Credit: Twitter

Dullea also retweeted a tweet from a group called Standing Rock Fact Checker, which on its website describes itself as a project of MAIN. The website also states it is “dedicated to promoting the truth” and battling “misinformation about the approved — and nearly complete — Dakota Access project.” Five other suspicious Twitter profiles also shared Fact Checker tweets.

MAIN members include the South Dakota Petroleum and Propane Marketers Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, Petroleum Marketers, Convenience Stores of Iowa, and others.

Reverse photo searches on Google revealed that the pictures used for other sock puppet profiles also appeared on a dermatologist website, a mail order bride website, and a hairstyle website featuring a photo of Eva Longoria, as well as images of Chinese model Crystal Wang Xi Ran, singer Keri Hilson, and the late singer Amy Winehouse.

Eva Longoria doppelgänger; Photo Credit: Twitter | Oliver Keyes

The use of political bots and sock puppets is nothing new and in fact, has become normalized by political factions worldwide, explained Norah Abokhodair of the Political Bots research program based at the University of Washington and Oxford University.

“There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spamming, phishing, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), or other nefarious activities,” Abokhodair explained, pointing to examples such as the Syrian CivilWar bots and bots used in Turkey. “They can also be deployed for sophisticated activities like astroturfing, misdirection (botnet that tries to get the audience to attend to other content by spamming the hashtag) and smoke screening (serves to hide or provide cover for or obscure some type of activity).”

MAIN and DCI Group

MAIN was the only industry group to issue a press release in response to the Obama administration's September 9 announcement halting construction on a portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Its press release contained a statement attributed to spokesperson Craig Stevens. Stevens also recently did an interview with KVLY-TV, the NBC and CBS affiliate for Fargo, North Dakota. When on TV, however, he was billed as the “spokesperson for a pipeline sort of group, if you will” by segment host Chris Berg.

Despite the lack of disclosure by KVLY and Berg, it turns out that Craig Stevens actually works as Media Affairs and Crisis Management Lead for DCI Group.His DCI Group contact information is listed for MAIN's profile page on the websitePR Newswire.

Image Credit: PR Newswire

DCI is a PR firm tied to the GOP and with roots in creating front groups on behalf of Big Tobacco, spearheading the modern Tea Party movement, and representing oppressive dictatorial regimes such as that of Burma and oil- and gas-soaked Azerbaijan. Stevens formerly worked for the George W. Bush presidential campaign, served as spokesperson for U.S.Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman for the George W. Bush Administration, and also worked on Mitt Romney's 2012 Republican Party presidential campaign.

Jim Murphy, the political director for Donald Trump's Republican Party presidential campaign, formerly served as President and Managing Partner for DCI Group. Beyond the DCI Group connection, Continental Resources — whose founder andCEO Harold Hamm is one of Donald Trump's top energy advisers and a potential candidate for U.S. Secretary of Energy under a Trump presidency— said in a recent investor statement that a significant chunk of the company's Bakken oil will flow through Dakota Access.

Before DCI Group began working on Standing Rock-related projects for MAIN, it appears thePR firm LS2Groupmaintained the PR account for Dakota Access. A MAIN press release from November 2015 lists LS2's Kayla Day as the contact person and her LS2 work number is also listed, while metadata for the press release's PDF shows the document was last saved by former LS2 staffer Alex Shaner.

DCI's Role

As DeSmog has previously revealed, LS2 also did PR work in support of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline. The group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement published emails from 2014 (obtained via a public records request) showing LS2 also doing advocacy work in support of Dakota Access.

LS2's Day told DeSmog that LS2 still does some work on behalf of MAIN, but declined to comment further on how the work is divvied up between LS2 and DCI Group. Stevens was first listed as a spokesperson for MAIN in a September 6 press release, two days after the now-infamous dog biting incident took place at the protesting Standing Rock Siuox Tribe's Sacred Stone Camp. The Standing Rock Fact Checker website was registered the day before, and it also sent out its first tweet that same day.

Image Credit: WhoIs.net

Stevens declined to comment on who funds MAIN, referring to the membership list and confirming he was brought on in the past couple weeks to do PR work on behalf of the coalition, “as the whole public discussion has increased and been elevated” surrounding the pipeline. He also confirmed he runs the Fact Checker portal.

Asked about whether his firm or MAIN had anything to do with the sock-puppet tweets, Stevens denied he or MAIN had any involvement.

“It's frustrating to me because we're working to be respectful in tone and fact-based and any tactics like these are a distraction for what we're trying to do and that's to bring facts and contexts to this discussion,” Stevens said. “I don't know about the tactics themselves and I don't know who or what is behind it, but as someone who's trying to get facts out and trying to be respectful in tone, it was incredibly frustrating that this was going on. As far as I know, and think I know, theMAIN Coalition had nothing to do with them.”

However, noted environmental advocate and co-founder of climate group 350.org, Bill McKibben, doubts the authenticity of such claims from PR firms with a record like DCI, saying:

“There's a word for this kind of thing, and that word is: lying. The invention of fake people to make fake arguments perfectly exemplifies the tactics Big Oil has been reduced to. They can't win an argument on the merits, so they've given up trying. Instead, they literally make things up. The contrast with the steadfast straightforwardness of the tribes, and of the climate scientists, couldn't be more stark.”

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vulture-fund-lobbying_us_57350001e4b077d4d6f2a374

Harvard-trained political economist, Shapiro is the head of a consulting firm called Sonecon. That business card doesn’t do it for you? He’s got a few more in his wallet:

Senior fellow at the Georgetown University School of Business.

Adviser to the International Monetary Fund.

Director of the Globalization Initiative at NDN, a progressive think tank.

Shapiro, a Democrat, has advised presidents and presidential candidates, and has held powerful government posts. It stands to reason, then, that when he has thoughts on public policy, he can find an outlet ready to publish them.

Recently, he’s had ideas on how the government can address the debt crisis in Puerto Rico and how it can end the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by moving them into the private market. Before that, he had a take on how to deal with Argentina’s debt crisis. For all three, he produced academic-looking papers, complete with footnotes and charts.

All three situations have one thing in common: If they were resolved the way Shapiro suggested, a variety of bets placed by a select group of the most politically powerful hedge funds would pay off in a huge way. In the case of Argentina, they mostly have. Fights over how to resolve the other two issues are still raging in Washington.

For this article, we called Shapiro to ask on whose behalf he has been waging these intellectual battles. His answer was surprising in its honesty: He’s working with DCI Group, a political dark arts master known to be advocating on behalf of a group of powerful hedge funds that are changing how Washington works.

Shapiro, it turns out, is but one foot soldier in the hedge fund infantry. A review of public documents, tax filings and interviews with people involved finds that in each of the three campaigns, hedge funds have enlisted the same set of lobbyists, political operatives, dark money groups and think-tank experts spanning the political spectrum.

No single document or set of disclosures ties all of these groups together. They don’t put out joint press releases, parade themselves around Washington as part of a coalition, or chat together on conference calls. Finding the players in this game, instead, is more a process of deduction. For a group of firms and experts to be working for vulture funds on the issue of Argentine debt is normal Washington practice. (Vulture’s meaning here isn’t pejorative: it refers to an investment strategy that feeds off of assets the market has left for dead.)

For the exact same people and groups to be working on the next big issue that these funds care about — the Puerto Rican debt crisis — could be a coincidence. But now, the hedge funds are focused on a third issue — government-sponsored enterprise reform, which refers to the effort to establish new housing finance policy in the wake of the federal takeover of lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And it’s the same political firms and the same independent experts that are once again weighing in — coincidentally, all on the side of the hedge funds.

Maybe it’s all coincidence, but let’s run the traps either way.

The band that has gotten together for the big three hedge fund jam sessions includes some unlikely allies: There’sDCI Group, the powerhouse lobbying firm. Then there’s theRaben Group, operatives whose specialty is working in the progressive space and lobbying Democrats. There’s the American Continental Group, a bipartisan lobbying firm. There’s 60 Plus and the Center for Individual Freedom, two groups that call themselves part of the conservative movement, but in reality are dark money groups known to run whatever campaign they’re paid to run, and that are happy to conceal the source of the funding. All these groups have roughly nothing in common, other than that they all have united in advocacy campaigns that alternately go up against the Argentinian people, Puerto Ricans and the rest of the American public.

Each of these campaigns appears to have been run by or aided by the DCI Group. We say “appears” because DCI is one of Washington’s great black boxes — news articles that involve DCI routinely include a line informing readers that the organization did not respond to a request for comment. This article is no different.

Old Washington hands involved in these particular fights say that nothing they’ve seen before in politics has prepared them for the mercenary campaigns the hedge funds are now waging.

“There’s something about this that’s almost more disturbing, because you get an issue that’s not particularly a big public issue and people can spend and spend and spend,” said a veteran policymaker who found himself on the wrong end of the hedge funds. “And I don’t know how anybody can compete with it. And then you start losing the narrative and you see groups on the left get bought out and corrupted — really corrupted. I don’t know what to do about it.”

What is being done only exacerbates the situation. Current tax policy allows hedge fund managers to pay billions less every year than competitors who don’t get the same advantage. And tax-exempt pension funds — teachers, nurses, firefighters — invest heavily in hedge funds, hoping to make up big shortfalls with risky investments. The generous tax policy leaves hedge funds flush with cash. What money they’re not stashing off shore, they’ve been spreading freely around Washington.

They may have finally gone too far. A backlash is brewing, threatening not just their current bets, but their various tax benefits too. One senior House Republican aide who’s worked closely with the hedge funds says that members of Congress have seen enough. “I think on the Fannie stuff, they’ve hurt themselves,” he said. “We’re like, fuck em. If they’re not your friends, they’re your enemies.”

And the hedge funds may be losing a crucial progressive ally. Responding to concerns from the Hispanic advocacy community, the Raben Group dropped its work on Puerto Rico two weeks ago.

***

When big banks squared off against merchants such as Walmart in 2011 over the cost of debit card and credit card swipe fees, Washington saw a spending spree and a dirty campaign the likes of which it hasn’t seen since. But at least the arguments on both sides of the swipe fees issue made some rational sense.

“This one, I feel just disgusted by it,” said one GOP Senate aide who witnessed both.

With the hedge fund battles, a group of rich investors simply picks a side and then spends endlessly to tilt the battlefield to make sure that side wins. And in true Washington fashion, people are annoyed that the sellouts have sold low. As the same Senate GOP aide put it: “Sure, I’ll go after a few individuals, and help make Congress dysfunctional, so we can have Donald fucking Trump as our nominee, just so I can make $25,000. That’s just sad for our country.”

JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS

John Paulson, billionaire head of Paulson & Co., stands to make massive profits if lobbying campaigns on Puerto Rican debt and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go his way.

Not everybody sells out that cheaply. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday ran a piece on the hedge-fund lobbying around reform of government-sponsored entities, or GSEs.

Last year, The Raben Group, a Washington lobbying firm, offered a minority trade association $25,000 contingent on the association signing its name to an editorial arguing that Fannie and Freddie should be recapitalized and returned to private hands, said Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

“They said, ‘If you won’t say exactly what you need to say, we’re not going to sponsor you,’” Mr. Acosta said. He said the association declined the offer.

Raben Group founder Robert Raben said the firm frequently matches funding from corporations with nonprofits that share a position but doesn’t ask them to change their stance. He declined to disclose the source of the money offered to the association.

What makes the hedge fund pressure campaign distinctive is the ambivalence, or even nihilism, that lies behind the public policy suggestions. Hedge funds want whatever policy outcome will make their leveraged bet pay off. It makes gauging the merits of a particular policy extraordinarily difficult. The targets of the campaign are largely beside the point: It’s not personal, it’s just business. Hedge funder Bill Ackman’s very public lobbying and PR campaign against Herbalife serves as the clearest example of the influence strategy deployed by hedge funds. But in that case, Ackman was only taking on a single company, so the damage to potential bystanders was limited. The same playbook applied to entire countries, a commonwealth or the housing industry itself amplifies the threat exponentially.

This one, I feel just disgusted by it.

And it’s not ideological, either. If a big group of hedge funds decided to short the health insurance industry, it could easily be in their interests to fund a dark money campaign on behalf of single-payer health care. If they short the big banks, they’ve now become allies with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

It’s less far-fetched than it might seem. Today, billionaire hedge fund managers are working the halls of Congress with civil rights groups and affordable housing advocates. The progressive groups have long wanted any GSE reform to include big money to make housing more affordable for the working class. Now that the hedge funds are in the game, the groups suddenly have an additional demand: Make sure any final plan pays out the shareholders (i.e., the hedge funds) handsomely.

The hedge funds bought a mountain of Fannie Mae stock after the government took it over and declared it worthless. The funds are trying to revive the share price by pressuring the government to let Fannie keep its profit and ultimately re-privatize the company. The alliance is understandable: For years, the progressive groups have been outmatched and out-funded, and along come some billionaires willing to back their effort. All these new advocates want is for their property rights to be protected. Why not?

“We knew we were getting in bed with people who wanted to see [Fannie Mae] pay them off,” Potomac Coalition founder Larry Parks told The Wall Street Journal for Thursday’s article. “It wasn’t anything we were so ideologically against.”

In Argentina, things didn’t work out so well for the folks on the other side of the hedge funds. In 2002, Argentina bucked years of social pressure from the International Monetary Fund and defaulted on its debt. No longer would it have its public policy dictated by international lenders backed by what became known as the Washington consensus — the notion that the best way for countries to grow was to slash spending, privatize whatever they could, cut taxes and make way for business investment. After defaulting, Argentina negotiated with lenders to resolve the debt, making deals with 93 percent of its creditors. A few American hedge funds held out, and waged a guerrilla campaign to recoup 100 percent of the value of their bonds, even though they bought them for pennies.

It took 15 years, and a pressure campaign against Argentina that linked it to terrorism and other atrocities, but the hedge funds could eventually land a $5 billion-$10 billion payout. It’s even reasonable to say the hedge funds helped bring down the Argentine government. Along the way, they blew up the international system of credit, as negotiations between sovereign borrowers and their creditors are no longer possible without 100 percent buy-in from creditors.

In Puerto Rico, the group of hedge funds waging the biggest lobbying campaign own debt that is first in line to be paid off in case of any calamity. (That’s not to say there aren’t other hedge funds that own different sets of Puerto Rican debt lobbying so that they’re the first to be paid; more on them later.) They’re now betting that they can stop Congress from rescuing Puerto Rico by amending bankruptcy laws to allow Puerto Rico to cover its basic expenses before paying out the hedge funds.

Betting that Congress does nothing is often a smart wager. If the island government is forced to pay off creditors first, it will have to take those funds from vital programs threatening the livelihoods of people who live there.

In a trip to the commonwealth this week, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew emphasized the human impact that the hedge fund lobbying campaign is already having on Puerto Ricans. “The financial crisis is not just a question of bondholders, but a question of the lives that are being led by 3.5 million Americans who live on Puerto Rico,” Lew said during a visit to an elementary school in the heart of San Juan.

The school, Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary, looked like something out of a Third World country. Children studied in crumbling classrooms with termite-ridden walls, no air conditioning, and inadequate lighting. The only source of cooling from the 80-degree weather outside was fans and open windows. The TVs, laptops, desktop computers all appeared pointless. Teachers said that if they tried to run more than one simultaneously with another classroom, the electricity would go out. Faulty circuit breakers also mean the classroom lights stay off whenever it rains, and since it was drizzling that day, the students sat in the dark.

On the next stop, Lew saw Centro Medico, the primary medical center for the commonwealth and the Caribbean region, and home to the third-largest Level 1 trauma center in the U.S. and its territories. The center is preparing to reduce services by July if no relief comes. Already, a lack of personnel makes it nearly impossible to keep accurate supply inventory for children being treated for cancer or receiving dialysis. “We are hanging by a thread,” explained Dr. Juan Nazario, the hospital’s executive director.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ

The walls in this kindergarten classroom at Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary in San Juan, Puerto Rico are crumbling due to termite infestation.

That’s not to say that there isn’t lobbying on the other side of these issues. An entirely different group of hedge funds and investment firms want relief for Puerto Rico so that the bonds that they’ve purchased will be paid in full. Legislation that they support has received the backing of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and has moved through a favorable committee. On GSE reform, big banks like Bank of America and Citigroup have lobbied for legislation that would eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a system of government insurance for bank loans. The banks employ dozens of lobbyists, but do not appear to be engaging in the kind of surreptitious campaign the hedge funds are conducting on the other side.

***

Corporate lobbying is often constrained by the need to play the long game. Sometimes a company, or an entire industry, realizes it needs to take a loss today, but will be back tomorrow to fight again. That can encourage corporate actors to rely more on carrots: Campaign contributions and cushy jobs are in store for staffers and members of Congress who play nice.

But because the hedge funds are fighting over a different bet each time — Argentina today, Fannie and Freddie tomorrow — the most bang for the buck may come from a run ofnegative TV ads in key congressional districts, or targeted campaigns against leading members of Congress on the wrong side.

Or even against staffers. In the midst of the debate over how to restructure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in early 2014, Jim Millstein was sitting down on Capitol Hill with Michael Bright, an aide to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who was working on the legislation. Millstein, like other hedge-fund titans lobbying on the bill, had a set of structural recommendations he thought the Senate should take up.

Millstein was worth listening to: While a top Treasury Department official, he had overseen the successful restructuring of AIG after the government bailout. But Millstein had an extra recommendation: The Fannie Mae shareholders needed to be paid out — shareholders like Millstein.

The aide told Millstein he didn’t see why shareholders, who bought Fannie stock for pennies when the government had already bailed it out, needed a windfall. The meeting turned tense.“Don’t worry kid, you’re about to get yours,” Millstein said, according to a Democratic committee staffer later briefed on the episode. Bright, reached for comment, declined to speak for this article.

A week or so later, the conservative Free Beacon dropped a story headlined, “Banker Who Helped Crash Housing Market Helped Crafting Mortgage Reform.”

The headline was absurd — Bright had been a low-level trader at Countrywide Financial Corp. right out of college, hardly in a position to blow up the housing market. But the facts didn’t matter. With the story in print, political operatives could now put the claim on the airwaves, and for cover source it back to the Free Beacon, a neat trick since the same operatives may well have been the ones who fed it to the Beacon. Two weeks later, the 60 Plus Association, a conservative dark money group, put out an attack ad repeating the allegation that “a former Countrywide financial executive is even helping craft the legislation.” The ad ran in North Carolina, Virginia and Idaho, targeting specific lawmakers involved in the legislation.

The aggressive tactics appear to have included ethics complaints, too. Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog founded by former employees of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed complaints against Corker, the leading Republican sponsor of housing reform legislation with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). The complaints, filed in November, allege Corker engaged in suspicious stock trades.

The next month, Campaign for Accountability called for a Department of Justice probe of former Obama administration officials David Stevens, Michael Berman and Jim Parrott for allegedly breaking revolving-door laws banning them from lobbying their former offices. Stevens is the former Federal Housing Administration official under Obama who left to head the Mortgage Bankers Association. Berman and Parrott both worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development as it shaped housing policy before leaving for the private sector.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was the leading Republican proponent of legislation to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that was opposed by the hedge funds.

In February, National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative ethics watchdog group, filed a complaint against Stevens over the same revolving-door laws. Stevens is a leading proponent of the Warner-Corker legislation.

Then, in March, Campaign for Accountability filed another complaint against Corker over omissions of large assets from his financial disclosure reports.

It’s not possible to prove that hedge fund money is driving these complaints. But let’s work backward again. Campaign for Accountability is run by operatives from the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. Last year, CREW took $40,000 from Herbalife, which was under assault from hedge funder Ackman. CREW pushed back, filing an ethics complaint against Ackman. When the $40,000 donation came to light, CREW promised to return it, citing the appearance of a conflict of interest.

CFA doesn’t release information on its donors. Former CREW honcho Melanie Sloan, who now does some work with CFA, said the group doesn’t take hedge fund money. But CFA itself might not even know if it takes hedge fund money: If a hedge fund gives to a foundation, which gives to a civil rights group, which then gives to CFA, it can be hard to track.

Either way, the Raben Group immediately circulated the complaints against Corker and Stevens around Washington by email. People close to Corker said they believe the ethics complaints were motivated by the hedge fund lobbying campaign. (Of course, the complaints might also have merit; in fact, both things could be true at the same time.)

When he was on the Hill pushing for GSE reform, Millstein had company. Michael Waldorf, with Paulson & Co., has been in the Senate to lobby on the GSE bill, as has Chris Katopis of the Association of Mortgage Investors, and Shawn Smeallie of American Continental Group, which works for DCI and Paulson, according to congressional sources.

Julie Chon, a former Democratic Banking Committee staffer, a top aide to Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), left the committee for Perry Capital Management, run by big-time Hillary Clinton donor Richard Perry. In early April, Chon organized a Clinton fundraiser that Senate banking staffers co-hosted. But at the height of the battle over Corker-Warner, she was a fixture on Capitol Hill — though she does not appear to have registered as a lobbyist.

“She wasn’t even shy that she was advocating for a payout,” said one of the former colleagues Chon lobbied in the Senate. As she’d roam the Senate halls, she’d cheerily greet staffers with a line that is such a perfect combination of talking point, banality and sarcasm that it could have been written by the creators of HBO’s “Veep.” “Just here trying to defend our property rights,” she’d repeat.

***

The American people, of course, are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Political hedge funds, though, aren’t leaving things in God’s hands alone. For that, there’s the DCI Group.

The DCI Group most famously built its reputation doing the dirty work of the tobacco industry. That long-running operation involved funding “experts” who would question the medical science around smoking, and targeting individual advocates and lawmakers. It pioneered the use of shadow groups that concealed the true source of funding for the campaign, and can be seen as a blueprint for the hedge fund campaigns.

According to the lobbying disclosure records that do exist, DCI Group hired the Raben Group, American Continental Group and others to lobby on the Puerto Rico issue. American Continental Group is Paulson’s personal lobby shop, and also has a political intelligence arm heavily active in Argentina. Political intelligence differs from traditional lobbying in that its practitioners are not required to register their activities (thanks Eric Cantor) and it is not focused on influencing policy, but rather on learning in advance about upcoming policy changes or investigations, so that companies or hedge funds can get a jump on trades and business decisions.

DCI also ran a lobbying campaign against the Puerto Rican government on behalf of Doral Financial, a now-bankrupt Puerto Rican bank, and BlueMountain Capital. They brought Shapiro on board and hired Liberty International Group, a lobbying firm of former Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.).

Back in 2007, DCI was instrumental in killing legislation that would have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a doomed effort that may have prevented the lenders from melting down. It earned $2 million from Freddie Mac for its work.

DCI was also part of American Task Force Argentina, the hedge-fund backed effort that battled Argentina over its default. Raben Group’s Robert Raben and Shapiro led the task force, and Shapiro’s consulting firm was paid at least $450,000. While there are no public filings today, the group is helping run the Fannie hedge-fund operation, according to DCI managing partner Justin Peterson, who has privately talked about DCI’s work. Shapiro, too, said he was working with DCI for his housing policy work.

All that work, even if it’s behind the scenes and unregistered, has to leave a trace. Here are two Facebook posts, one from late 2014 and another from early 2015, that have DCI organizing Fannie-related press events on the Hill for Investors Unite, a group of investors united to get a payout.

FACEBOOK.COM

A Facebook post by Wirestream Media shows that DCI Group is working with Investors Unite, an investment fund backed group lobbying on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform.

FACEBOOK.COM

A second Facebook post by Wirestream Media shows DCI Group’s involvement with Investors Unite.

Former DCI lobbyist Douglas Davenportis also on the hedge fund payroll, registered on behalf of both American Task Force Argentina and the Puerto Rican bondholders.

The same lawyer has suited up for all three causes, too. Matthew McGill represents the hedge fund BlueMountain, which owns some $400 million worth of Puerto Rico debt. He successfully persuaded a judge to throw out a Puerto Rico law that stood in the way of the hedge funds. “Now we have a real negotiation where the bargaining power is essentially even,” McGill said afterward. BlueMountain also employed DCI Group in 2014 and 2015 on the Puerto Rico debt fight.

McGill represents Perry Capitalin its shareholder lawsuit related to Fannie and Freddie. He participated in at least one PR event with Investors Unite, a Fannie-fighting group that DCI also represents.

And finally — or, firstly — McGill represented NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliott Management, the hedge fund connected with GOP megadonor Paul Singer, in the lawsuit against Argentina, along with Aurelius Capital Management. That lawsuit allowed the hedge funds to extract billions from the Argentinian people. It came after the years-long slash-and-burn campaign run from the  American Task Force Argentina — a lobbying coalition of Covington & Burling, DCI Groupand the Raben Group.

Rob Shapiro, meanwhile, doesn’t appear on any lobbying reports or disclosures, but he was publicly attached to a pressure campaign that DCI Group ran on behalf of Doral Financial. The bank, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took into receivership on Feb. 27, 2015, was suing the island government over a disputed $229 million tax refund. A website DCI Group created — Doral Puerto Rico Facts — promoted Shapiro’s study on the island’s debt problems. But it wasn’t just the bank that wanted to get the money back. Its hedge fund creditors wanted to get paid.

Who is paying who isn’t always easy to tell. Take the paper by Shapiro and Elaine Kamarck, touted as the independent views of officials from both the Obama and Clinton administrations, that comes to the conclusion that the hedge funds ought to be paid dollars for the shares of Fannie Mae they bought for pennies.

Neither Shapiro nor Kamarck are housing finance analysts or experts. Kamarck isn’t even an economist — her work is in the field of political science, studying election and turnout trends. The paper itself offers a rather stunning giveaway: The three pillars of housing finance have long been Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. In the Shapiro-Kamarck paper, Ginnie Mae is twice referred to as “Ginny Mae.” Anybody can make a mistake. But nobody with a housing policy background would do that twice.

“It would be like somebody claiming to be writing as a progressive journalist and calling it The Huffington Globe. It just gives away the game,” said one policymaker who read the paper.

When we asked Shapiro who was funding his work on the GSEs, he said it “was sponsored by a low-income housing coalition.” The report thanks The Potomac Coalition, an African-American business and advocacy group. The Potomac Coalition’s Parks told The Wall Street Journal that his group indeed did pay for the paper, but that “Fannie and Freddie shareholders suggested the authors.” Parks added, in the Journal’s paraphrase, “the contents of the paper were drafted and negotiated by the authors, his group, shareholders and their lobbyists.”

Shapiro said he hasn’t been otherwise very active in the housing policy fight. “That’s all I did, and I haven’t taken any other role and I’m very proud of that analysis because it would provide more funding for low-income housing than any program in American history,” he said.

But what about the Fix Fannie & Freddie website, which exists to promote the study?

“I don’t have a website about fix Fannie and Freddie,” Shapiro said. “It’s not my website. That’s not true.”

The website specifically says it is “sponsored by Sonecon,” which is Shapiro’s consulting firm. Just above that, it says, “About Dr. Shapiro.”

FIXFANNIEFREDDIE.COM

The top of the Fix Fannie & Freddie website promoting Dr. Robert Shapiro’s paper on the subject.

FIXFANNIEFREDDIE.COM

The bottom of the Fix Fannie & Freddie website indicates it was sponsored by Dr. Robert Shapiro’s consulting firm Sonecon LLC.

Shapiro asked for the web address so he could check it out himself. But he was having a hard time finding it, so he read it back. “F-A-N-N-Y ...”

“No, F-A-N-N-I-E,” we told him, which unlocked his path to the site with his company’s name on it.

“Well, I will tell you it is not sponsored by me,” Shapiro said when he found it. He then added a new admission about the link to DCI. “But, I have worked with DCI on this. I’m not surprised that they’re promoting the study and myself and Dr. Kamarck.”

==

==

no links

http://www.climateinvestigations.org/dci_group_subpoena_exxon_climate_fraud

DCI Group Subpoenaed on Exxon Climate Denial Fraud Case

Posted by Kert Davies 16sc on April 20, 2016 · Flag

Now this is getting interesting...Screen_Shot_2016-04-20_at_4.58.06_PM.png

PRWatch just revealed that DCI Group was subpoenaed by the US Virgin Islands as part of the ExxonMobil fraud investigation.

This Climate Investigations post contains some things we know about Exxon and DCI Group and its work on climate change.

First, we know there was a contract.  DCI Group was retained by ExxonMobil for many years for probably a range of services. 

On OpenSecrets we find records of ExxonMobil retaining DCI Group for years, for example: 2005 $140,000   2006 $160,000

We also know ExxonMobil funded some of DCI's specific work that was directly related to climate change (see Tech Central Station below).  And we know DCI was involved in other efforts around the climate change policy and science 'debate'.  We don't know how much of this was work that was under the ExxonMobil contract.

So what might turn up from the Virgin Islands subpoena?  Answer, lots.

In an expose published several years ago over at PolluterWatch, we dug intoAndrea Saul, then Senator McCain's press secretary who used to work for DCI Group on the climate counter attack account.  Lots of details on DCI Group are to be found in that blog.

Meanwhile, below are a few examples of climate denial episodes starring DCI Group...

Send us more if you have them. Any documents too!

The Penguin Army video

Screen_Shot_2016-04-20_at_4.58.06_PM.pngIn May of 2006, a YouTube video emerged, made to look like a spontaneous "viral" video, poking fun at Al Gore and his film "An Inconvenient Truth". 

The video was revealed to be the work of DCI Group by the Wall Street Journal, who sleuthed out that the video was produced on a computer at DCI Group and set up to look like it was made by a dude in his basement. 

ABC News even covered the caper on Good Morning America

Wikipedia has a well sorted page on the Penguin Army caper with all the deets.

Was this done for Exxon?  Maybe someday we will know.

Tech Central Station

Nicholas Confessore wrote in December 2003 Washington Monthly about a clever new paid journalism vehicle called Tech Central Station (TCS). Tech Central Station became a hub for climate deniers including Willie Soon, Patrick Michaels, Steve Milloy, Chris Horner, Marlo Lewis, Kenneth Green, Richard Lindzen, Sallie Baliunas, David Legates, Tim Ball, Bob Carter.

Screen_Shot_2016-04-20_at_4.39.38_PM.png

Coincidentally, we have an ExxonMobil Foundation grant in the records for 2003, the year TCS was launched.  The grant is to the Tech Central Science Foundation for $95,000 for "Climate Change Support".  It will be very interesting to see the proposal, the contract and the report back on deliverables for this grant.

Here is an ExxonSecrets map of some of the people associated with TCS:

Screen_Shot_2016-04-20_at_4.24.08_PM.png

And here is a snapshot of the TCS firehose of counterattacks on climate policy and climate science.

See this article by Soon, Baliunas, Legates and Taylor October 2005, for example.  Much more of this is available.

Hurricane Katrina counter science attack

In June 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, Tech Central Station produced and distributed aVideo News Release (VNR)that called into question the science linking hurricanes with climate change.  Was this work on the ExxonMobil contract?  Again, maybe now we will find out.

The VNR itself, along with a known newscast that used the piece, preserved by the Center for Investigative Reporting:

Dr. William Gray, the hurricane scientist and climate change denier in the video, passed away just last weekend at the age of 86.

VNRs are pre-produced news segments, contracted generally by corporations, edited and sent out to news stations in small markets in hopes of filling airtime within the actual newscast. And they often do.  This one was aired on at least one station.

Materials sent to TV stations with the video listed "TCS Daily Science Roundtable" as the producer.

The press release for the VNR video said:

    "Some scientists say it's part of a naturally occurring cycle, while others have made the claim global warming is to blame. Two of the foremost weather and ocean scientists believe that this is all part of the cycle of nature.

The voiceover in the video included a similar message:

    "There’s a lot of debate as to what’s been causing all of these hurricanes. Some scientists say it’s part of a naturally occurring cycle, while others have made the claim global warming is to blame.

    "Dr. William Gray and Dr. James O’Brien,two of the nation’s top weather and oceans scientists, point to scientific data for the answer [...].

    "Gray and many of his colleagues believe it’s not global warming that’s creating these massive hurricanes, but the cycle of nature itself."

DCI Coordinates Clean Air Act Counterattack Meeting for Exxon

More clues on DCI's role as a coordinator for Exxon anti-regulatory campaigns, come from a useful document that was leaked to me by mail at Greenpeace.  The three page document is the invitation on Heartland Institute letterhead includes the agenda and invitation list for a June 2006 meeting convened at the DCI Group Washington DC offices. 

The meeting is titled "Strategic Discussion Regarding the Clean Air Act"...in other words, how to slow, stop or derail the implementation of the Clean Air Act's health and environmental protection provisions.

The invitation was sent by Joe Bast and Sandy Liddy Bourne, the President and VP of the Heartland Institute.

The stated agenda is:

    "to discuss public policy challenges related to the Clean Air Act.  We are gathering approximately 50 experts from the free-market think tanks and industry to assist us in developing an action plan to address legislative concerns likely to arise this fall and next spring"

The letter details the threat of federal and state efforts to advance "National Ambient Air Quality Standards, greenhouse gas regulatory programs and new boutique formulas for biofuels"

    "Expected outputs include ideas for white papers, identifying opportunities for testimony, outlining educational forums for elected officials and determining a communication strategy for media."

The Invitation List includes a who's who of climate deniers and many organizations who were being funded by Exxon at the time and in years prior to 2006.

Screen_Shot_2016-04-20_at_9.55.07_PM.png

ExxonMobil funding in 2006:

    Heartland Institute $115,000

    National Black Chamber of Commerce $50,000

    National Taxpayers Union $70,000

    CEI $0

    George Marshall Institute $85,000

    Frontiers of Freedom $180,000

    Manhattan Institute $30,000

    American Enterprise Institute $240,000

    ALEC $86,000

    Science and Env. Policy Project $0

    Cato Institute $20,000

    ACCF $15,000

Exxon staff

Four sessions on the agenda were to be presented by ExxonMobil staff:

    Walt Buchholtz a key operative in Exxon's DC offices

    Don Clarke

    Lauren Kerr

    Scott Nauman

    Robert Nolan

Heartland Institute staff:

    Joe Bast

    James Taylor

    Sandy Liddy Bourne

    Jay Lehr

DCI Staff

    Diane Miller "DCI Group, Tech Central Station"

    Justin Peterson, "DCI Group Tech Central Station"

    "plus DCI field directors and staff"

Competitive Enterprise Institute staff (CEI had been dropped by ExxonMobil by this point after receiving over $2 Million in funding from 1997-2005):

    Myron Ebell

    Chris Horner

    Marlo Lewis

    Steve Milloy

    Fred Smith

Additional people of interest

Harry Alford, NBCC

    Daniel Simmons, ALEC

    Margo Thorning, ACCF

    George Landrith, Frontiers of Freedom

    Fred Singer, SEPP

    David Montgomery, CRA International

Let’s take a quick stroll through the resume of Jim Murphy, hired Monday by Donald Trump’s campaign as national political director, according to the New York Times:

The Daily Beast points out that in addition to representing repressive military regimes and using fake “volunteers” to push for privatization of social security, DCI has gone to bat for both Big Tobacco and Big Oil. The firm has represented Exxon since 2005 according to the most recent data available from the Center for Responsive Politics. That collaboration, according to documents, involved working with the Exxon-funded Heartland Institute and conservative think tanks to counter greenhouse gas regulations, promoting a climate denial website called called Tech Central Station, and using Exxon money to produce a parody of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators sent Exxon a letter in 2006 demanding it “end any further financial assistance” to groups “whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth.”

DCI has also had dealings with the coal industry; from 2013 to 2014, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity paid some $5 million to the firm for its lobbying services. And earlier this year, both DCI and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were served subpoenas from the U.S. Virgin Islands U.S. attorneys’ offices as part of an investigation into companies — particularly Exxon — and organizations accused of funding of climate change denial.

That’s quite a resume.

==

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13092/dci-group-subpoenaed-expanding-exxon-climate-denial-investigation

DCI Group, a Washington DC public relations and lobbying firm, is the latest group subpoenaed in an expanding investigation by state attorneys general into the funding of climate change denial by ExxonMobil, according to court filings reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

ExxonMobil has now received separate subpoenas from both the New York and U.S. Virgin Islands U.S. Attorneys' Offices. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and DCI Group have also been subpoenaed by the U.S. Virgin Islands for records relating to their role in helping ExxonMobil with climate change denial.

Seventeen state attorneys general—calling themselves "AGs United for Clean Power"—held a press conference on March 29, announcing increased collaboration between the states in investigating the opposition to tackling climate change.

"The scope of the problem we are facing, the size of the corporate entities and their alliances, the trade associations and other groups, is massive and it requires a multistate effort," said New York Attorney General Schneiderman.

ExxonMobil has become the focus of attention from state attorneys general, after separate investigations by InsideClimate News and the LA Times/Columbia School of Journalism revealed it had known internally about the threat of climate change for several decades. InsideClimate News was a finalist for a Pulitzer for its work on the story.

Those investigations uncovered internal Exxon documents, some dating back to the 1970s, proving the company knew from its own scientists about the serious dangers to the planet from continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Despite this knowledge, Exxon poured millions of dollars into climate change denial and to groups working to obstruct any action to reduce carbon pollution.

The Greenpeace project Exxon Secrets, which tracks spending by ExxonMobil, has documented over $30 million in funding to U.S. climate denial groups from 1998-2014.

ExxonMobil continues to fund climate denial through groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). CMD has documented Exxon's grants to ALEC and that group's work to promote climate change denial in a letter sent to the New York Attorney General in November 2015.

Why DCI?

DCI Group is a DC-based public relations and lobbying firm, with a client base that has included big tobacco, the Koch-founded and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and several foreign governments with appalling human rights records, including Azerbaijan and the Burmese junta.

DCI currently works with the coal industry trade association, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).The group has paid $5 million over a two-year period from 2013-2014 (most recent available data) to DCI.

CMD has a profile on DCI, which is available here.

Exxon has been a DCI client for many years. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, DCI has represented Exxon every year between 2005-2015 (data for 2016 is not yet available).

Although DCI and Exxon have a long history, the subpoena could reveal more about what DCI has being doing for Exxon.

Some details have leaked out over the years.

DCI created Tech Central Station, a now-defunct website which promoted climate change denial and which received funding from Exxon. A bipartisan group of Senators wrote to Exxon about its funding of the website in 2006.

The Senators' letter also asked Exxon to "come clean about its past denial activities," which Exxon has not done.

In 2006, an invitation was leaked to Greenpeace about a strategy meeting hosted at the DCI office.

The meeting--titled "Strategic Discussion Regarding the Clean Air Act"--was sponsored by the Exxon-funded Heartland Institute.

Numerous non-profit organizations that receiving funding from Exxon were invited, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Just one corporation was represented—Exxon—and it dominated the room with 5 staff on the attendee list. DCI also had numerous named staff present as well as additional unnamed "field directors and staff."

According to the invitation, the meeting was intended to help develop an "action plan" to help push back against legislation mandating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The leaked agenda is revealing but its does not show the full picture and, with Exxon having ignored previous requests to "come clean," this is something that can result from a subpoena.

Most of the groups at the 2006 DCI strategy discussion, including ALEC and CEI, continue to fight against any action to tackle climate change. In particular, both these groups are heavily involved in the push backagainst the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.

As a possible signal of things to come, the Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh named ALEC in his remarks during the AGs United for Clean Power press conference in March. "We want them to tell the truth so we can get down to the business of fighting climate change," said Frosh.

CMD has documented Exxon funding to ALEC in a letter to the NY Attorney General, which is available here.

ALEC Exposed

Energy

Environment

Climate Change

Public Relations

News

==

2x?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/6/233833/-

aug 06

Recently a video appeared on You Tube which was a stab at Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth",  which, if one were the "right" mind set, could discourage a person from going to see it.  It was an unverbalized critical review,  using images each with their own message.  The fact that the video itself has gotten such lousy ratings says more about the  intelligence of the You Tube community than it does about the "quality" of the production.

If this video were linked on some of the right wing nut sites and it might get rave reviews just based on the residual hate for The Clinton Adminstration and the "Gore as Boring" talking points of the 2000 (un)democratic ejection of our constitution. ...First of all, the video was anonymously posted on You Tube, implying it was made by some Middle American just poking fun at Gore's documentary.  This implies that the maker of the video is just like you and me, creating a bond of  ordinary guyism.... ;the video depicts Gore as a nemisis of Batman, The Penguin, complete with top hat and umbrella.  The Penguin, if you remember, is the villian with the irritating voice and multipurpose weapon,  escape tool and hypnotizing umbrella.  So right away Gore is presented as the gentleman BAD GUY, without ever even calling him one.

The audience is a SMALL flock of penguins, wide eyed and cute, who get progressively less wide eyed as the video  drones on.  That drone is  Penguin Gore's voice.  There are no words, only a drone of nonsense that is indecipherable.

Pictures flash on a tiny movie screen and Penguin Gore  points with his umbrella, as there are flashes back to the diminishing  flock of penguins... The few that are left go completely asleep.  This says...>again without saying so... "Penguin Gore is BORING, even other penguins don't want to watch him."...Then there's a juxtaposition between  X-men Part Three and An Inconvenient Truth. It shows enthralled crowds at X-men, and three people snoozing at "An Inconvenient Truth".  This shouts: "Hey, go see something really exciting with everyone else... You'll be bored and ALONE at "An Inconvenient Truth."

Words in this video are flashed so quickly on the screen they are nearly subliminal, and indeed at the end Gore Penguin rotates his umbrella hypnotizing the three penguins left.  This leaves the impression that dumb birds  just can't think  for themselves.  They are hypnotized.

Holy Global Warming, Batman,  Who made this diabolical filmette?

Apparently it's a  Public Relation's firm whose clients include such notables as GH Bush,  Exxon, BIG Pharma,  McDonalds and the junta government of Burma...... But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film "Al Gore's Penguin Army" -- listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old -- they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement...>The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

Exxon denies knowing anything about the film, and DCI says, "We do not disclose the names of our clients, nor do we discuss the work we do on behalf of our clients."

http://abcnews.go.com/... RSSFeeds0312

The media analyst Sourcewatch Group has this to say about the DCI Group :

The DCI Group calls itself a "strategic public affairs consulting firm" and boasts that it handles corporate issues like political campaigns. "We are a political firm and all of our partners have political campaign experience. We thrive in competitive circumstances, and are used to fluid situations and tight deadlines," their website claims. DCI Group offers services that include national, state and local lobbying; coalition building; and generating "grasstops" and constituent support for issues. The firm has been linked to several industry-funded coalitions that pose as grassroots organizations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise as DCI advertises its ability to provide "third party support" to clients. "Corporations seldom win alone," the group's website says. "Whatever the issue, whatever the target--elected officials, regulators or public opinion--you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best."[2]

snip

Viral Videos and Global Warming

In August 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported on a short video (http://youtube.com/...) titled "Al Gore's Penguin Army," which belittled the threat of global warming (suggesting viewers "stop exhaling") and made fun of the former vice-president, whose 2006 movie "An Inconvenient Truth" stressed the need for action on global warming. The video was posted on the video-sharing website YouTube and had a "home-made, humorous quality." Yet the filmmaker's email "originated from a computer registered to DCI Group," reported the Wall Street Journal. [11] (http://online.wsj.com/...)

The video was promoted by ads that appeared when people searched for the phrases "Al Gore" or "Global Warming" on the Google search engine, but these ads "were removed shortly after The Wall Street Journal contacted DCI." The firm "declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video," but an Exxon Mobil spokesperson said they "did not fund" and "did not approve it." What is certain is that "political operatives, public relations experts and ad agencies" are increasingly using video-sharing websites like YouTube to shape public opinion. Ogilvy & Mather "plans to post amateur-looking videos on Web sites to spare word-of-mouth buzz about Foster's beer," and AT&T has used YouTube to post videos against net neutrality. [12] (http://online.wsj.com/...)

DCI's Tech Central Station website has also "sought to raise doubts about the science of global warming and about Mr. Gore's film." [13]

DCI Group tends to take on clients who need some heavy duty redirection of public opinion to further their interests.  It doesn't seem to matter to this outfit  if what they publish is TRUE or not, only that it influences people to BELIEVE what their clients want them to believe.  Do you remember the book Fast Food Nation that created such a public disturbance and impacted the bottom line of Fast food restaurant all over the country?   McDonalds hired DCI to handle the public awareness created by that book... Big tobacco and Big drugs have also used their services:

DCI Group specializes in what the Washington Monthly describes as "corporate-financed grass roots organizing" campaigns. Group principals have a long history of opposing public health initiatives, working on behalf of the tobacco industry, and relying on "front groups" that masquerade as independent and objective organizations. According to the New York Times, Chris LaCivita, a DCI associate, worked for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as a media adviser. Timothy N. Hyde, a DCI founding partner, was the senior director of public issues at R. J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997. Hyde oversaw all of RJR's PR campaigns. The Associated Press reported in June 2001 that Tom Synhorst, the chairman of DCI, "has been linked to South Carolina push polls in the 2000 Republican primary that attacked candidate John McCain as 'a cheat, a liar and a fraud.'"

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/...

DCI has lobbied for Burma as well:

The brutal ruling junta of Burma dropped its last foreign-agent lobbyists, the Republican PR firm DCI Group, in 2003. Neither Syria nor North Korea has an active foreign-agent lobbying contract, according to Justice Department records.

So fellow Kossaks don't be fooled by the plastering of false images on people like Al Gore who have the guts to speak Inconvenient (for some BIG INTERESTS) Truths..  Look beyond the spinning  by PR firms that provide an umbrella of protection for the fallout created when the public becomes aware, informed and active. Whenever the truth is being spun, look for the source.  You may just find the REAL criminal elements.

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