HAMM, Harold Contin

==

capt 718

SEE TRUMP B3 TAXBRK

chair pruitt campaign comm

promoted primary caps, poster boy for crony capitalism

losing $ private equity

NOT MBS DINNER

no bak

AN 2 26

MS NOW co-anchor Jacqueline Alemany says House Democrats are so convinced they will stampede the chamber in November that they are already planning to investigate U.S. companies that paid President Donald Trump millions for political favors.

Trump may thump his chest over Democrat-led House investigations, but tech giants, oil companies, defense contractors and Fortune 500 CEOs still fear congressional subpoenas and congressional scrutiny.

“Now, as House Democrats plot a return to the majority, they are pledging to probe the deals, mergers, settlements and regulatory favors that flowed to corporations doing business with the Trump administration,” reports Alemany.

Democrats are currently in the minority and limited to issuing “strongly worded letters and … toothless investigative authority,” but Alemany said they are already “laying the groundwork for a sweeping expansion of oversight targeting the companies and CEOs who have done business with the Trump family, or sought favorable regulatory treatment, merger approval, or policy changes from the administration — from Paramount to Palantir.”

“Trump’s running the presidency like a mob boss and everyone who has agreed to bribe him is a target for an investigation,” said a senior congressional staffer, speaking anonymously to MS NOW. “And although there’s a spectrum of wrongdoing with Elon Musk at one end and not much more than small businesses trying to get by on the other, there are very wealthy CEOs who know better. And we’re taking names.”

Critics may consider this retaliation against Trump’s corporate enablers but Democrats say this is a strategy that could “reshape corporate America’s relationship with Trump,” by making CEOs “think twice before opening their wallets or bending to presidential pressure.”

Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with senior Democratic officials in December and encouraged them to hold the private sector more accountable as Trump embraced a more blatantly “transactional and retributive [form of] governance,” according to three sources in the meeting.

The idea caught on as a result of backlash to members of the national security community who have been fired or blacklisted by companies fearful of retribution from Trump. But the conversation quickly expanded to how completely companies have folded under pressure from the administration, said Alemany.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are already sending inquiries to chief executives of at least four oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Continental Resources, demanding information to determine “who stands to privately or personally benefit from President Trump’s actions and whether corrupt motives were a driving force in U.S. foreign policy decision.”

9 25

ICYMI: Trump’s Big Oil Donors Are Cashing In | Climate Power

Washington, D.C. – Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece highlighting the Trump administration’s closeness with oil and gas executives — who donated tens of millions of dollars to re-elect the president — and the fulfillment of their wishlist. This comes after Republicans voted to kill clean energy jobs and raise utility rates for millions of Americans.

The administration is not only capitulating to the requests of the executives by opening wilderness land and federal waters to drilling and axing environmental protections, but also has installed at least a dozen former Big Oil executives and lobbyists across the administration. Industry CEOs now enjoy direct phone calls and personal access to the Oval Office, while American families are left with higher prices, dirtier air, and a future mortgaged to Big Oil’s profits.

The Wall Street Journal: Oil Tycoons Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off.*

{“Oil billionaire Harold Hamm high-fivedDonald Trumpon election night as results trickled in at the Mar-a-Lago watch party.*}:

Hamm, founder of family-owned oil-and-gas company Continental Resources, had good reason to celebrate. He and other oilmen haddonated tens of millions of dollarsto help re-elect Trump, betting that his pro-fossil-fuel agenda would stave off a long-term shift away from fossil fuels and keep the country hooked on gasoline.

That wager is paying off. The Trump administration is opening swaths of wilderness land and federal waters to drilling, approving new terminals to export natural gas and proposing to ax environmental regulations, including an Obama-era rule used to curb emissions from power plants, tailpipes and oil-and-gas production. His One Big Beautiful Bill is expected tohobble renewable-energy projectsandstunt the adoption of electric vehicles.

Oil executives now enjoy extraordinary access to the White House. Trump has taken to phoning oil bosses whose TV appearances he enjoys, such asChevronCEO Mike Wirth, according to White House and industry officials.

“No doubt, this administration understands how important energy is,” said Toby Rice, CEO of natural-gas producerEQT. Rice andExxon MobilCEO Darren Woods sat at Trump’s table during a Julyenergy summit in Pittsburgh.

So far, however, the industry’s policy wins haven’t flowed through to the companies’ bottom lines. Trump’s shifting positions on trade, coupled with an increase in crude supplies globally, have depressed oil prices,cost energy firms billions of dollars in stock-market valueand contributed to layoffs across the industry. And new tariffs on steel and aluminum are making drilling more expensive.

U.S. oil prices are hovering near $62 a barrel—below the break-even point for many of the industry’s smaller players—down from about $76 the week Trump took office. Yet some oil bosses see the turbulence as a price worth paying to see the president implement their agenda.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the oil-and-gas industry is the backbone of the American economy and the source of “millions of good-paying jobs,” and that the president is delivering on his promise to “make America energy dominant again.”

Trump’s unabashed support for the industry has left environmentalists aghast. They contend the administration’s moves will translate into higher energy prices for consumers, fuel climate change and make the U.S. less competitive with other nations that are embracing renewable energy….. (Read the resthere)*”*

===

ONLY NOT JRL FAIL

TV news barely covered Trump's Big Oil “quid pro quo” last year. Now that it's come to fruition, networks should give the scandal the attention it deserves.

Big Oil lands $1 billion tax break in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” as EPA staff are to “pause” oil and gas enforcement

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

:{Published 06/20/25

Last May, The Washington Post published an exclusive story on a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in which Donald Trump promised to reverse then-President Joe Biden's actions on climate change as he asked Big Oil executives to fundraise $1 billion for his presidential campaign, assuring that they would be getting a “deal” due to the “taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.” Reportedly, oil and gas executives did make “significant contributions to the Trump campaign.”

Over a four-day period, MSNBC was the only major TV network to cover the story, which All In host Chris Hayes described as “a political quid pro quo.”

Now, two new stories emerged this week that give more context to the promised “deal” the oil and gas industry is getting under Trump’s second term. National TV networks should inform their audience about how Big Oil is benefitting under Trump.

Bloomberg reported on June 17 that the Senate version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” now includes a tax break for the oil and gas industry “estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.”

The provision would allow energy companies subject to a 15% corporate alternative minimum tax to deduct certain drilling costs when calculating their taxable income. Companies including ConocoPhillips, Ovintiv Inc. and Civitas Resources, Inc. lobbied in favor of it.

The change was included in the legislation released Monday by Republicans on the Senate tax writing committee, which would slash tax credits for wind, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen.

…

Other supporters of the measure, which wasn’t included in the House version of the bill, include the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, founded by oil billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm.

The same legislation would repeal tax credits for the clean power industry, which would threaten more than 800,000 jobs and raise energy prices for consumers.

In fact, clean energy technologies constituted93% of new power generation capacity added to the grid last year alone, and the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Actwhich Trump wants repealed, “have spurred the highest levels of factory construction in American history, with more than 400,000 new jobs announced across the country.”

Meanwhile, CNN reported on June 16 that “the Environmental Protection Agency has told staff overseeing the country’s industrialized Midwest — a region plagued by a legacy of pollution — to stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.”

Four sources with knowledge of the situation at the EPA’s Region 5 office, which oversees six Midwestern states, told CNN that enforcement officials were informed that “there is a pause on oil and gas enforcement” at staff meetings.

“That is how our regional management is interpreting signals from the president,” the EPA enforcement staffer said.

Officers stopped being able to issue notices of violation or send information requests to fossil fuel companies suspected of polluting, the sources told CNN. A violation notice is a prerequisite for taking a company to court for alleged violations of environmental laws.

These instructions are on top of other administration efforts to radically reduce safeguards that protect Americans from fossil fuel-related pollution and open up more land for oil and gas drilling.

Earlier this month, for example, the EPA announced plans to eliminate Biden-era regulations limiting the amount of carbon emissions and other pollution released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-fired power plants. CBS reported the rule the EPA seeks to revoke “is projected to reduce 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by 2047, as well as eliminate tens of thousands of tons of other harmful air pollutants that are dangerous to public health” — an amount of pollution “equivalent to driving more than 320 million gas-powered cars for a year, according to an EPA estimate.”

The new CNN report also notes:

An early snapshot of enforcement data from Trump’s start of his second term shows the overall number of EPA enforcement cases initiated or closed across sectors has dropped by 32% compared with the first three months of the Biden administration, according to publicly available EPA data analyzed for CNN by environmental watchdog Environmental Integrity Project. The same data shows nearly 60% fewer cases have been initiated or closed compared with the first three months of Trump’s first term.

Taken together, these reductions in taxes, regulations, and enforcement for the fossil fuel industry are essentially what Trump promised to deliver for Big Oil in exchange for backing his 2024 campaign.

At the time, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham described the proposition as “undeniably scandalous.” Now that these gifts to Big Oil are being delivered, TV networks should inform their audience about the dirty “deal” between Trump and Big Oil playing out at the expense of the booming clean energy industry, our health, and our climate.

//

1. ### National TV news, with the exception of MSNBC, failed to cover Trump's scandalous Big Oil proposition

05/14/24 5:01 PM EDT

2. ### Trump's corrupt offer to Big Oil executives almost entirely ignored in top local newspapers and TV markets in battleground states

05/17/24 2:58 PM EDT

3. ### Alex Jones says he's “very, very sad” about Trump's “big, big mistake” in striking Iran

06/23/25

---

2 25 heated email

At a dinner for Big Oil executives last year, Donald Trump promised to give the fossil fuel industry essentially anything it wanted in exchange for $1 billion toward his re-election effort. The dinner was organized by Harold Hamm.

The fossil fuel industry went on to donate $96 million directly to Trump’s campaign; spend $80 million on political advertising; and pour God-knows-how-much cash into dark money groups that don’t have to reveal their donors. Most of the fundraisers were organized by Harold Hamm.

After the election, Trump quickly nominated North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to lead the Department of Interior, which oversees fossil fuel and renewable development on federal lands and waters. Burgum is close personal friends with Harold Hamm.

Trump went on to nominate fracking executive and climate denier Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy, which oversees energy policy and research. Wright was hand-selected for the position by Harold Hamm.

While most national media has be understandably fixated on Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal bureaucracy, another billionaire’s influence on the Trump administration has slid by largely unnoticed. Hamm, the founder and executive chairman of fracking company Continental Resources, has been instrumental in driving Trump’s full-speed campaign to deregulate the fossil fuel industry and crush its main competition: renewables.

HEATED is 100 percent reader-supported, independent climate journalism. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today.

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Long-deemed Trump’s “energy whisperer,” Hamm enjoys a close personal relationship with the president. “He’s my original oil guy that taught me so much about oil,” Trump said at a fundraiser last year. The fracking tycoon had dinner with Trump during his New York hush money trial, and offered to help pay Trump’s $454 million bond during his civil fraud case. Hamm also partied with Trump on election night, and toasted with soon-to-be-Interior-Secretary Burgum—who happens to make about $50,000 a year leasing 200 acres of farm land to Hamm’s fracking company.

Donald Trump points to Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Now, just weeks into the new administration, Hamm is watching as his personal wish-list is fulfilled. In May, a Trump advisor told the New York Times that Hamm “wants that LNG pause gone, he wants the California waiver and the tailpipe rule gone.” On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that targeted all three of those things.¹

In addition, in August, the Washington Post reported that Hamm’s policy priorities for a Trump administration would include “opening up more federal lands to drilling, easing the Endangered Species Act and curbing numerous regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency.” Coincidentally, on his first day in office, Trump’s signed another executive order that targeted all those things, too.²

Hamm also encouraged other oil executives to share their policy priorities with Trump, the Post reported, and they did. Since then, Hamm’s hand-picked Cabinet leaders have issued a slew of Big Oil-approved policies designed primarily to boost fossil fuel industry profits and destroy competition from renewables. They include:

• The Interior Department suspended all clean energy development on federal land, while continuing development for oil and gas. (Heatmap, Jan. 24)

• The Energy Department abruptly stopped paying out grants from its climate and clean energy programs, halting billions of dollars in funding for states and companies to protect the environment and advance renewables. (E&E, Feb. 7)

• Burgum, on his first day as Interior Secretary, issued a seven-page directive weakening protections for national monuments, migratory birds, endangered and threatened species in order to further fossil fuel development. (Inside Climate, Feb. 5)

• Burgum also issued an order reversing the Biden administration’s protection of most of the U.S. coastline and parts of Alaska from oil drilling. (E&E, Feb. 4)

• Wright said the Department of Energy has started re-started the permit consideration process for new liquified methane gas facilities. The process had previously been paused so the government could consider whether the projects were in the best interest of the climate. (Oil and Gas Journal, Feb. 7)

I point out Hamm’s influence in these areas for three reasons. The first is that it’s a necessary, yet often overlooked, way to expose Trump’s lies about his energy agenda. The president and his supporters love to frame Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies as some sort of benevolent act for ordinary Americans—simply a means to lower inflation. But aside from the fact that that argument doesn’t actually make sense, it’s a distraction from the bigger picture. The primary goal of Trump’s energy policies is to drive profits for Hamm and the other oil billionaires who donated lavishly to his campaign. Let’s keep our eye on the oligarchical ball.

The second is to encourage other media outlets and creators to remember that Musk isn’t the only billionaire whose self-serving actions may have devastating consequences for the rest of us. Dismantling renewable energy development and climate regulation doesn’t just pose a threat to the United States. It poses an existential threat to the ecological and economic stability of the world.This deserves equally frequent and urgent coverage, if not more.

The third is simply to remind everyone that the people destroying the planet have names and faces. Hamm has said he does not want a job for himself in the administration, and enjoys his current set-up, in which Trump “calls on me for advice and help.” This is a clear indication he’d prefer to remain in the shadows. That alone feels worth bringing his influence to light.

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Some spare thoughts:

• Hamm is not the only oil billionaire with influence over Trump, he just appears to be the closest. You can read about some of the others here.

• During his Senate confirmation hearing to lead the Department of Energy, Wright said he still stands by previous comments that ‘wildfires are just hype.’

• Seven Democrats in the Senatevoted in favor of confirming Wright to lead the Department of Energy, despite Wright’s outspoken climate science denial. They are: Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennett, Ben Ray Luján, Martin Heinrich, and Ruben Gallego.

• Wright tried to walk back his climate denial during his confirmation hearing, saying he thinks climate change is real but that global energy poverty is a more urgent issue. This is an incredibly tired and well-debunkedtalking point. The two problems are not mutually exclusive.

• Wright’s oil services company, Liberty Energy, is public. I don’t know what can be done with that information, but it felt like something worth pointing out.

---

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an 11 24

Watchdog groups are warning that the Cabinet that President-elect Donald Trump is assembling is already showing signs of being a pay-for-play arrangement in which his biggest backers are rewarded with the ability to shape government policy in their favor.

According to a Tuesday report in the Guardian, the president-elect is raising red flags with several of his Cabinet picks, who are slated to oversee agencies regulating the industries in which they have a significant financial stake. In one example, Interior Secretary-designate Doug Burgum – the current Republican governor of North Dakota with close ties to fracking magnate Harold Hamm — will be in charge of issuing oil and gas drilling licenses.

Hamm himself donated roughly $4 million to Trump's election effort, while soliciting additional donations from others in the industry. The Guardian reported that the oil and gas industry put up approximately $75 million toward sending Trump back to the White House. Hamm was also at the Mar-a-Lago meeting in which Trump asked the oil industry to pony up $1 billion to his reelection bid in exchange for favorable policies.

READ MORE:Trump raged at billionaire donors during private dinner and called Harris a slur: report

Other Trump Cabinet appointees, like Department of Commerce secretary-designate Howard Lutnick and Department of Education secretary-designate Linda McMahon, also donated millions of dollars to Trump's bid for the presidency. According to the Guardian's calculations, they donated $6 million and $21 million to his campaign and allied super PACs, respectively. Both are also the co-chairs of his presidential transition.

Meanwhile, billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who spent more than $200 million of his own money to get Trump elected — is chairing a so-called "government efficiency" advisory board in which he'll be recommending steep, draconian budget cuts to the agencies regulating his businesses.

"Trump has taken the cliche that ‘all politics is local’ and turned it into ‘all politics is about personal payback’," former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble told the Guardian. "The naked transactional nature and potentially dangerous conflicts of interests reflected in Trump’s ongoing paybacks are unprecedented in modern times."

The president-elect was particularly open in his promises of exchanging policy for campaign cash while he was running his third campaign for the White House. In October, the New York Times reported that Trump has flip-flopped on numerous issues after being faced with the prospect of bringing in additional donations from wealthy contributors. This includes cryptocurrency, tobacco, marijuana and TikTok, among others.

READ MORE:Two right-wing billionaires outline plan for mass firings and cuts to antipoverty programs

Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center decried Trump's rewarding of political donors with Cabinet posts, saying his "transactional approach to governing epitomizes corruption and will sadly ensure that in his second term, big donors’ interests will continue to come before the needs of millions of Americans.

“Major donors have had a hand in shaping policy in every recent administration, but the unprecedented role that Musk and certain other donors, especially from the tech and finance industries, played in the campaign and are now playing in the transition means that their influence over the incoming administration’s agenda is likely to be unprecedented,” said Brennan Center for Justice director of elections and government Dan Weiner.

Click here to read the Guardian's report in its entirety.

READ MORE:Trump probed over $1 billion 'quid pro quo' deal with Big Oil

---

heated

A Courtside View of Scott Pruitt’s Cozy Ties With a Billionaire Coal Baron](https://substack.com/redirect/4ef29ed1-401a-4051-b41a-d3757c978a0f?j=eyJ1IjoiMW42ZTYifQ.vyvZ_z0oLghKX6Zag1WJ71bIfqAlxqUD_SD6A_ZPsUM). The New York Times, June 2018.}:

Mr. Pruitt’s attendance at the game … followed a year of regulatory victories for Mr. Craft, who maintains close ties to Mr. Pruitt even as he has lobbied the E.P.A. on issues important to his company, Alliance Resource Partners. And unlike other executives with whom Mr. Pruitt is known to have close ties — like the oilman Harold Hamm or the coal mogul Robert E. Murray — Mr. Craft has stayed relatively under the radar.

Summit Carbon hearings: Who's behind the curtain?

Thursday, Sep 21 2023Nancy Dugan2 Comments

Nancy Dugan lives in Altoona, Iowa and has worked as an online editor for the past 12 years.

Last week, North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley denied a request from three counties in the state to investigate Summit Carbon Solutions’ investors. A new statute in North Dakota, which went into effect on August 1, tightens restrictions on foreign ownership of land in that state, among other measures.

But Summit Carbon Solutions, LLC as it exists today was formed in Delaware in 2021, according to the Iowa Secretary of State’s database of business entities. (That database shows the Summit Carbon Solutions, LLC created in Iowa in 2020 as “inactive.”) Wrigley explained in a recent letter to county commissioners that the effective date of the new legislation means “this office is unable to conduct a civil review of the company.”

Wrigley’s argument underscores one of the more disturbing aspects of the Summit Carbon matter, which is the false premise that state and local governments are powerless to regulate a Delaware LLC whose ownership structure remains largely a mystery, and whose own legal arguments identify the pipeline it proposes to build as a security threat.

Continue Reading...

:{https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/27/politics/joe:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{-manchin:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{-coal-interests/index.html:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

no paste

hamm kinder morgan chief 400K$ 1 qtr FEC

5m$ in 10 yrs from coal brokerage biz (son has more diversified one frack?)

==

hamm and kelcy etp in bakken (tho might want to bleed out wildcat indep smaller?)

cf antonia juhaz bakken bailout? oil -40$ bakken, 200b$ debt; in 2008 oil 150$, many poor cty could not afford, helped trigger Gt Recession?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ref 1 ltr

december 2, 2022 The Honorable Deb Haaland Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, D.C. 20240

Dear Secretary Haaland: On May 11, 2022, the House Committee on Natural Resources (Committee) presented evidence of likely bribery involving former U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary David Bernhardt and Villages at Vigneto developer Mike Ingram, in the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). 1 The Committee has now uncovered another potential incident of bribery involving Ingram and senior Trump administration officials through its review of documents obtained in that investigation. In 2012, ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson on federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). 2

According to DOJ, the Hammonds informed BLM that a fire they had started on Hammond's private property to burn off invasive species had inadvertently spread to public lands. However, witnesses, including a relative, later came forward and testified that Steven Hammond had instructed companions to drop lit matches on the ground, with the effect of destroying evidence that a Hammond hunting party had illegally slaughtered deer on the BLM lands. By law, arson on federal lands carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.3 The district court in the Hammonds’ case ordered sentences far below this requirement, citing Eighth Amendment concerns, but a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the illegal sentences and ordered the district court to resentence the Hammonds in compliance with the law.4 The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert, 5 and on October 7, 2015, the district court imposed five-year prison terms on each of the Hammonds,...

p2

credit for time already served.6

On July 10, 2018, President Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency

(Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.7

Documents obtained in the Committee’s Vigneto investigation indicate that Mike Ingram used his unique

access to high-ranking Trump administration officials to advocate for these pardons. In an email dated

May 25, 2018, Mr. Ingram’s executive assistant sentBen Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for

External and Intergovernmental Affairs, two articles on the topic, including an op-ed arguing for pardons

for the Hammonds (see Attachment 1).

8

On Sunday, July 1, 2018, a vocal proponent for pardoning the Hammonds shared in a tweet that

“President Trump called me to say he is 'seriously considering' pardoning Dwight and Steven

Hammond.”9

This was the first public acknowledgement that a pardon was under consideration.10

On Monday, July 2, 2018, the next business day, the Federal Election Commission database shows that

Mr. Ingram made a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.11 The

America First Action, Inc. Super PAC describes itself as “dedicated to supporting President Trump | We

are the only Official Pro-Trump Super PAC.”12 On Tuesday, July 10, 2018, President Trump signed

Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.13

Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election

cycle.14 That donation was the subject of the Committee’s criminal referral regarding the Villages at

Vigneto development. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal

or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump

Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee on the same day or within just a few days that a

major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.All other donations from Ingram

during this election cycle were $5,400 or less.

House Rule X(1)(m) provides the Committee with jurisdiction over the subject matters within DOI’s

authority. The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns

about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.

notes

6 Department of Justice. (2015, October 7). Eastern Oregon Ranchers Convicted of Arson Resentenced to Five Years in Prison

[Press Release]. https://www.justice.gov/usao-or/pr/eastern-oregon-ranchers-convicted-arson-resentenced-five-years-prison

7

“Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

8 Attachment 1 is also included as Attachment 59 in the Committee's referral to the Department of Justice regarding the Villages

at Vigneto incident, available here: https://naturalresources house.gov/media/press-releases/chair-grijalva-rep-porter-referformer-interior-secretary-bernhardt-villages-at-vigneto-developer-to-justice-department-alleging-criminal-bribery

9 Walden, G. [repgregwalden]. (2018, July 1) Late Saturday afternoon, President Trump called me to say he is ‘seriously

considering’ pardoning Dwight and Steven Hammond. [Tweet]. Retrieved from

https://twitter.com/repgregwalden/status/1013455435502964738.

10 The Congressional Research Service (CRS) completed a search on November 9, 2022 for news reports that indicated the White

House was seriously considering a pardon for the Hammonds before July 2, 2018. They found none.

11 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

12 America First [AmericaFirstPAC]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Twitter. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from

https://twitter.com/AmericaFirstPAC

13 “Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

14 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

To assist the Committee’s investigation of this issue, please provide the following documents and

information as soon as possible, but no later than December 15, 2022:

1. All documents and communications relating to Dwight or Steven Hammond between all

presidential appointees requiring the advice and consent of the Senate (PAS), presidential

appointees not requiring appointments (PA), noncareer Senior Executive Service (SES), or

Schedule C appointees at DOI or the Bureau of Land Management for any part of 2017 or 2018

and

a. Mike Ingram or Michael Ingram;

b. Any representative ofEl Dorado Holdings,including but not limited to ,

Michael (Mike) Reinbold, Jim Kenny, Dennis Krahn, Eric Hollensbe, Deb Bricker, Chris

Grogan, Linda Cheney, and June Prinz.

c. Any person representing the America First Action Inc. and America First Policies, Inc.

PACs, including but not limited to:

i. Brian O Walsh;

ii. Thomas O Hicks, Jr.;

iii. Roy W Bailey;

iv. Harold Hamm;

v. Jonathan T Proch;

vi. Joseph Ahearn;

vii. Erin Montgomery;

viii. Sean Spicer;

d. Any White House Office personnel;

e. Dwight Hammond;

f. Steven Hammond;

g. Anyone from Lawrence Matasar PC;

h. Anyone from Ransom & Blackman LLP; and

2. All documents relating to a pardon for Dwight or Steven Hammond.

Please contact the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee staff at (202) 225-6065 with any questions

about this request. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Raúl M. Grijalva Katie Porter

Chair Chair

Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and

Investigations

Committee on Natural Resources

ref 2

12.02.22

Chair Grijalva, Rep. Porter Seek Documents on Another Incident of Potential Bribery under the Trump Administration

Washington, D.C. – House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter (D-Calif.) today sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland requesting documents regarding a second incident of potential bribery between senior officials in the Trump administration and real estate developer Mike Ingram. Previously, the lawmakers sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleging potential bribery regarding a Trump administration decision about Ingram’s proposed real estate development, the Villages at Vigneto in Benson, Arizona.

The full letter to DOI is available :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}:.

In their letter, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter describe evidence that Ingram, a businessman with unique access to high-ranking Trump administration officials, may have unduly influenced former President Trump’s decision to pardon convicted public lands arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond in exchange for a sizeable donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The letter lays out the following timeline of events:

• May 25, 2018 – Ingram’s executive assistant sends an email to Ben Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for External and Intergovernmental Affairs, with two articles arguing for pardons for the Hammonds, including anop-ed by Trump-era Bureau of Land Management Director William Perry Pendley.
• July 1, 2018 – A proponent for pardoning the Hammonds tweets that President Trump is “seriously considering a pardon.
• July 2, 2018 – Ingram makes a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.
• July 10, 2018 – President Trump pardons the Hammonds.

Ingram’s only other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election cycle was the donation that triggered the Committee’s investigation into—and subsequent criminal referral about—the Villages at Vigneto development. As the letter points out, “The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.”

Background on the Villages at Vigneto Criminal Referral

On May 11, 2022, after a years-long investigation, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to DOJ outlining evidence of potential bribery between Trump administration officials, including then-DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, and Ingram regarding the Villages at Vigneto (Vigneto) real estate development.

The Committee’s investigation began in April 2019 when the Arizona Daily Star reported that Steve Spangle, a now-retired Field Supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Arizona office, claimed he was directed by a “high level politico” to reverse the agency’s decision about Vigneto in late 2017. Later reporting revealed that then–DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt was the “politico.”

The investigation found that—shortly after holding asecret breakfast meeting with Dep. Secretary Bernhardt—Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with him, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee. All of the donations occurred on or near Oct. 6, 2017, the same day that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.

Weeks later, on Oct. 26, 2017, Spangle officially reversed FWS’ decision on Vigneto, marking the final greenlight for the development.

Concurrent with standard practice, DOJ has not yet commented on whether they have pursued the investigation.

Press Contact

Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

202-225-6065 | cell: 202-740-4715

==

paywall

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-pledges-support-for-embattled-oil-industry-11585952507

trump Pledges Support for Embattled Oil Industry

The president promised sector leaders the government would help revive the industry during a much anticipated White House meeting Friday.

By Timothy Puko and Christopher M. Matthews

Updated April 3, 2020 6:40 pm ET

WASHINGTON—President Trump promised oil-industry leaders the government would help revive the sector during a much anticipated White House meeting Friday.

Chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. and leaders of seven other energy companies joined the president as the new coronavirus pandemic slows the economy and ravages the energy business. Dwindling demand has helped to halve crude prices since January and more than 70 U.S. oil companies, already heavy with debt, are at risk of bankruptcy, energy analytics...

TO READ THE FULL STORY

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40 gop reps and sen urge oil bailout, djt WH mtg w/ 8 ceo's? exxon shell? HAMM?!

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aha ish // disaster cap'l, never waste a crisis to dustoff wishlist

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/will-an-oil-tycoon-who-donated-500000-to-support-trumps-re-election-get-bailed-out-by-his-administration

no lnx

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 12, 2020

With oil prices plunging during the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is weighing a federal bailout for oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted a fracking boom under his administration, but oil and gas companies have seen profits drop amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“Alarmed” by the prospect that some of these companies, many of which are already in debt, [see desmog]could go out of business, White House officials have pushed for a federal bailout in the form of low-interest government loans, The Washington Post reported.

Among those pushing for the bailout is Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump adviser who owns Continental Resources, an energy company which lost half of its market value Monday.

Hamm told The Post that although he had not made “direct” contact with the president, he advised the administration to consider “any action that the administration might take to protect and preserve American interests at this time from being unfairly disadvantaged.”

Hamm has given more than $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election effort since 2017, the government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted.

Some Trump advisers told The Post that the administration was eyeing “targeted assistance” for the companies. Though under consideration, another official warned that “political blowback over the idea may eventually lead campaign advisers and others in [the] administration to talk Trump out of it.”

Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the outlet that he expects significant political backlash.

“It’s difficult when governments selectively target individual industries,” he said. “And there’s going to be pushback on it, because it’s political and may be tied to the administration’s contacts and the people it knows.”

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett, who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on economic policy, added that it was ridiculous to look out for big fracking companies while millions need relief.

“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt,” he said. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”

Trump also said that he was looking at bailing out airlines, cruise lines and the hospitality industryTuesday, as they reel from the impact of COVID-19, the disease spread by the novel coronavirus. But the bailout proposals have received public pushback from Republicans.

“They can take care of themselves,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Washington Examiner. “Why do you overreact just when there’s a little pain? That doesn’t make sense.”

Nick Loris, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said such a bailout “would not sit well” with fiscal conservatives.

“Not only would it potentially put taxpayers on the hook for future potential losses and bankruptcies, it would distort the risk-taking process that is so critical in making these investments,” he told the outlet. “We’ve seen the resiliency in the industry before, and I believe we’ll see it again.”

However, Alex Doukas, the lead analyst for advocacy group Oil Change International, predicted that Trump’s big-money donors would heavily pressure the administration to ignore the criticism.

“With oil prices in free fall, expect oil companies to turn to their age-old tactic of bullying governments for even more subsidies on top of the hundreds of billions they benefit from annually,” Doukas said. “Instead of more handouts to polluters, governments should make big investments in high-quality green jobs that will put people to work and ultimately end our dependence on the volatile fossil fuels that create climate chaos.”

Journalist David Cay Johnson described the lobbying effort as “corporate socialists” seeking “welfare from the Trump administration.”

“Bailing out the oil industry won’t help the workers who have to choose between their health and their paychecks. It won’t help the people who could go into medical debt from COVID-19,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted. “We need paid family leave and Medicare expanded to every American.”

“The American people are worried about missing paychecks, affording coronavirus tests, & being able to afford healthcare period. But [Trump] wants to bail out the oil industry?” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., added. “Leave it to Trump to prioritize his friends over the American people.”

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

==

Fundraising meeting, October 2017

In October 2017, America First Action met at the ranch of oil industry executive T. Boone Pickens to strategize fundraising and satellite spending for the 2018 midterm elections. According to and October 2017 report in Politico:[2]

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But Energy Transfer did announce on October 22 that it is exploring the prospect of boosting throughput capacity for Dakota Access from 500,000 barrels to 570,000 barrels per day. Oil which flows into Dakota Access comes primarily via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)in North Dakota's Bakken Shale basin.

One of the companies which has oil flowing through that pipeline, Continental Resources, was founded by its CEO Harold Hamm, a major donor to President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and to his 2020 campaign via the America First Action Super-PAC and a maximum allowable individual contribution. Hamm has also given tens of thousands of dollars to Republican Party congressional candidates for the 2018 midterm elections.

Kelcy Warren, the CEO and founder of Energy Transfer, also donated to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and has given tens of thousands of dollars to GOP congressional candidates for the 2018 midterm cycle. Energy Transfer, too, has donated tens of thousands to Republican Party candidates for the 2018 election cycle.

omfg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

some lnx below

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

May 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey,James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Image

President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

:{

}:

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

:{

}:

Image

The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]

:{

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“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

:{

}:

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer,the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

:{

}:

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

:{

}:

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

Image

William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

:{

}:

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

:{

}:

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

:{

}:

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

ImageThe Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]

...

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pal of ebell trump transition energy lead?

Soon they find themselves lavishing Trump with compliments. “When people ask us what Donald Trump is really like in person, the one word we have found best described him was ‘authentic,’” they write of a man who has been described by his own aides as a compulsive liar.

Kudlow, Moore, and Laffer are unusually fixated on tax cuts,but they are merely extreme examples of the entire Republican Establishment, which shared their broad priorities. “The consolidation of the party behind Trump was greatly facilitated by the attractiveness of the Trump tax plan,” they report.

Greed is the glue that holds their story together. A large segment of their narrative consists of Trump turning over control of his agenda to various plutocrats.They tell how they wrote a memo defining the administration’s energy strategy during the transition period, drawing on three sources: oilman Harold Hamm; the Institute for Energy Research (a “partner organization” of the American Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel lobby); and Jack Coleman, an oil and gas lobbyist. They do not report consulting on any information sources not controlled by the fossil fuel industry. They describe a coal executive advising Trump, “if you want to make America great again, put a muzzle on the regulators.” At another meeting, one energy executive suggests natural gas, coal, and nuclear power should each have 30 percent of the power grid, with renewables splitting the remaining 10 percent. “That sounds about right,” Trump replies, “except for the ten percent for renewable energy.”

==

lesser praire chicken? grouze?

Lawsuit with energy group seeks to block new wildlife conservation rules.

Mr. Pruitt filed a lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014, arguing that the federal government had improperly expanded its oversight of threats to certain animal species. He was joined in the suit by the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit run by oil and gas companies that had been looking for a powerful partner in its effort to curb new wildlife restrictions.

==

Continental Resources, Inc. (NYSE:CLR) Q4 2017 Earnings Call February 22, 2018 12:00 PM ET

Executives

J. Warren Henry - Continental Resources, Inc.

Harold G. Hamm - Continental Resources, Inc.

Jack H. Stark - Continental Resources, Inc.

John D. Hart - Continental Resources, Inc.

Gary E. Gould - Continental Resources, Inc.

Neal D. Dingmann - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Adam Longson - Continental Resources, Inc.

Pat Bent - Continental Resources, Inc.

Tony Barrett - Continental Resources, Inc.

Analysts

Drew Venker - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC

Arun Jayaram - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Leo P. Mariani - National Alliance Securities LLC

Paul Grigel - Macquarie Capital (NYSE:USA), Inc.

Doug Leggate - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Kashy Harrison - Simmons / Piper Jaffray

Brad Heffern - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Derrick Whitfield - Stifel Financial Corp.

David Earl Beard - Coker & Palmer, Inc.

1/15

Oklahoma fracking billionaire Harold Hamm’s ex-wife cashed a check he sent her to cover the almost $1 billion awarded as alimony in their divorce, his lawyer said.

State Court Judge Howard Haralson in Oklahoma City ordered Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources Inc., on Nov. 10 to pay $972 million of his then-estimated $16.1 billion oil industry fortune to Sue Ann Arnall, his wife of 26 years. Arnall had appealed the award as too small. Hamm also appealed.

Arnall’s cashing of the check, which includes interest since the ruling, doesn’t necessarily mean the case is settled, Michael Burrage, Hamm’s lawyer, said today in a phone interview.

“Normally when someone accepts the benefits, the appeal is dismissed,” he said. “If she doesn’t voluntarily dismiss the appeal, we’ll ask the court to.”

Ron Barber, Arnall’s attorney, didn’t immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment. Burrage wouldn’t comment on whether Arnall’s accepting the check would end Hamm’s appeal.

Hamm had sought a reduction in Haralson’s award, contending the order giving him Continental stock and her cash and real estate means she’s getting more than the judge intended because of the company’s shrinking market value.

Declining oil prices and Continental’s falling share price have eroded Hamm’s fortune since the divorce trial ended Nov. 10, as oil hit a five-year low and company shares have dropped 35 percent. As measured by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index,Hamm’s net worth has been reduced nearly 40 percent to $9.9 billion. Continental rose 5.6 percent to $35.47 today in New York trading.

At a Jan. 6 hearing, Haralson rejected Hamm’s and Arnall’s requests to revise the alimony order, telling the couple, “It is what it is.” Haralson said he had taken falling oil prices into account when determining the award...

=-

World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, Says Cornell Scientist

In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than ...

https://www.ecowatch.com/wall-street-fracking-revolution-2566742237.html

         How Wall Street Enabled the Fracking 'Revolution' That's Losing Billions

By Justin Mikulka

The U.S. shale oil industry hailed as a "revolution" has burned through a quarter trillion dollars more than it has brought in over the last decade. It has been a money-losing endeavor of epic proportions.

In September 2016, the financial ratings service Moody's released a report on U.S. oil companies, many of which were hurting from the massive drop in oil prices. Moody's found that "the financial toll from the oil bust can only be described as catastrophic," particularly for small companies that took on huge debt to finance fracking shale formations when oil prices were high.

And even though shale companies still aren't turning a profit, Wall Street continues to lend the industry more money while touting these companies as good investments. Why would investors do that?

David Einhorn, star hedge fund investor and the founder of Greenlight Capital, has referred to the shale industry as "a joke."

"A business that burns cash and doesn't grow isn't worth anything," said Einhorn, who often goes against the grain in the financial world.

Aren't investors supposed to be focused on putting money toward profitable companies? While, in theory, yes, the reality is quite different for industries like shale oil and housing.

If the U.S. financial crisis of 2008 has revealed anything, it is that Wall Street isn't concerned with making a "shitty deal" when it means profits and bonuses for its traders and executives, despite their roles in the crash.

Wall Street makes money by facilitating deals much like a Vegas bookie makes money by taking bets. As the saying about Las Vegas goes: "The house always wins." What's true about casinos and gambling also holds true for Wall Street.

Wall Street caused the 2008 financial crisis, with some of its architects personally benefiting. However, while a few executives profited, the result was a drop in employment of 8.8 million people, and according to Bloomberg News in 2010, "at one point last year [2009] the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy."

JP Morgan (along with much of Wall Street) required large sums of money in the form of bailouts to survive the fallout from all of the bad loans made, which brought about the housing crisis. Is JP Morgan steering clear of making loans to the shale industry? No. Quite the opposite.

As shown in this chart of which banks are loaning money to shale company EOGResources, while all of the big players in Wall Street are in on the action, JP Morgan has the biggest bet.

To understand whyJP Morgan and the rest of these banks would loan money to shale companies that continue to lose it, it's important to understand the gambling concept of "the vigorish" or the vig. Merriam-Webster defines vigorish as "a charge taken (as by a bookie or a gambling house) on bets."

Wall Street makes money by taking a cut of other people's money. To a gambling house, it doesn't matter if everyone else is making money or losing it, as long as the house gets its cut (the vig)—or as it's known in the financial world—fees.

Understanding this concept gives insight into why investors have lent a quarter trillion dollars to the shale industry, which has burned through it. If you take the vig on a quarter trillion dollars, you have a big pile of cash. And while those oil companies may all go bankrupt, Wall Street never gives back the vig.

Trent Stedman of the investment firm Columbia Pacific Advisors LLC explained to The Wall Street Journal at the end of 2017 why shale producers would keep drilling more oil even when the companies are bleeding money on every barrel produced:

"Some would say, 'We know it's bad economics, but it's what The Street wants.'"

And "The Street" generally gets what it wants, even when it is clear that loaning money to shale companies that have been losing money for a decade and are already deep in debt is "bad economics." But Wall Street bonuses are based on how many "fees" an employee can bring to the bank. More fees mean a bigger bonus. And loans—even ones that are clearly bad economics—mean a lot more fees.

Shale Oil Companies Are "Creatures of the Capital Markets"

In 2017 "legendary" hedge fund manager Jim Chanos referred to shale oil companies as "creatures of the capital markets," meaning that without Wall Street money, they would not exist. Chanos is also on record as shorting the stock of heavily leveraged shale oil giant Continental Resources because the company can't even make enough money to pay the interest on its loans.

And he has a point. In 2017 Continental spent $294.5 millionon interest expenses, which is approximately 155 percent of its 2017 adjusted net income generation. When you can't even pay the interest on your credit cards, you are broke.

And yet in 2017, investor capital was still flowing, with Continental Resources among those bellying up to the Wall Street trough for another billion in debt.

"In 2017, U.S. [exploration and production] firms raised more from bond sales than in any year since the price collapse started in 2014, with offerings coming in at around $60 billion — up nearly 30 percent from 2016, according to Dealogic. Large-cap players like Whiting Petroleum, Continental Resources, Southwestern, Noble, Concho and Endeavor Energy Resources each raised $1 billion or more in the second half of 2017."

How big of a problem is this business of loaning money to an industry burning through billions and burying itself in debt? So big that the CEO of shale company Anadarko Petroleum is blaming Wall Street and asking its companies to please stop loaning money to the shale oil industry. Yes, that's right.

In 2017, Anadarko CEO Al Walker told an investor conference that Wall Street investors were the problem:

"The biggest problem our industry faces today is you guys. You guys can help us help ourselves. It's kind of like going to AA. You know, we need a partner. We really need the investment community to show discipline."

The Wall Street Journal reported that Walker maintains: "Wall Street has become an enabler that pushes companies to grow production at any cost, while punishing those that try to live within their means."

Imagine begging banks to stop loaning you money. And being ignored.

Growing production at any cost is the story of the shale "revolution." The financial cost paid so far has been the more than $280 billion the industry has burned through—money that its companies have received from Wall Street and, despite the plea from Al Walker, continue to receive.

The Economist summarized the situation in 2017:

"It [the shale industry] has burned up cash whether the oil price was at $100, as in 2014, or at about $50, as it was during the past three months. The biggest 60 firms in aggregate have used up $9 billion per quarter on average for the past five years."

Higher oil prices are now being touted as the industry's savior but, as The Economist noted, the shale industry was losing money even when oil was $100 a barrel.

Still Wall Street keeps giving the shale industry money and the shale industry keeps losing it as it ramps up production. To be clear, this arrangement makes shale company CEOs and financial lenders very rich, which is why the trend is likely to continue. And why Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm will continue to repeat the myth that his industry is making money, as he did at the end of 2017:

"For anybody to even put forth the suggestion we haven't had great expansion and wealth creation in this industry with horizontal drilling and all the technology that's come about the last 10 years, I mean, it's totally ridiculous."

No one will argue that Hamm and his partners on Wall Street are not extremely wealthy. That has happened despite Hamm's company and the rest of the fracking industry losing epic sums of money. The same year Hamm made that statement, his company couldn't even cover its interest expenses. To put that in perspective, Continental Resources couldn't even make the equivalent of the minimum payment on its credit card.

Watch What the Industry Does, Not What It Says

Higher oil prices are yielding more storiesabout how 2018 will be the year that the shale industry finally makes a profit. Harold Hamm refers to it as Continental Resources' "breakout year." Interesting how potentially not losing money for a year is considered a "breakout year" in the shale industry.

As reported on DeSmog, the industry certainly got a huge boost from the recenttax law,which will help its companies' short-term finances. Continental Resources alone took home $700 million in tax relief.

Recent reports in the financial press detail how the new approach in the shale industry will be to focus only on profitable oil production, not just producing more barrels at a loss. As The Wall Street Journal put it in a headline: Wall Street Tells Frackers to Stop Counting Barrels, Start Making Profits.

In that very article, Continental CEO Hamm assures that he is on board with this new approach, saying, "You are really preaching to the choir."

But has Continental actually embraced this new approach of fiscal responsibility and restraint?

Not so much.

The fracking firm appears to have done the opposite, increasing production to record levels along with the rest of the shale industry. Continental recently reported plans to drill 350 new wells at an estimated cost of $11.7 million per well, which adds up to over $4 billion in total costs on those wells. The company currently holds more than $6 billion in debt and less than $100 million cash.

How will Continental fund those new wells? Hamm has promised that going forward, there would be "absolutely no new debt." Perhaps Continental will fund it by selling assets because without more debt, Continental does not have the money to fund those new wells. However, if past is prelude, then Wall Street will happily lend Continental as much money as it wants.

Why would Hamm say one thing and do another? Well, he personally has accrued billions of dollars while his company has burned through billions.

Despite leading Continental to another money-losing year in 2017, Hamm took home a fat raise.

Continental Resources Announces Rory R. Sabino As New Vice President For Investor Relations
:{Mr. Sabino Comes to the New Role from Bank of America Merrill Lynch OKLAHOMA CITY, Feb. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Continental Resources, Inc. (NYSE: CLR) (the "Company") today announced it has named Rory R. Sabino as Vice President of Investor Relations, effective March 12, 2018. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120327/DA76602LOGO Mr. Sabino has more than two decades of institutional equity experience, most recently serving Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) as a financial advisor and Senior Energy Sector Specialist.  Mr. Sabino has more than 13 years of energy sector experience. At BAML, he worked with numerous traders, research analysts and salespeople, in addition to BAML's banking and capital markets teams, developing ideas and cultivating client releationships. He led the firm's messaging across the energy sector. Over the last eight years, he worked closely with Energy Banking teams globally, offering guidance and ideas to the trading desk and clients, and worked with institutional clients across buy-side organizations. He also advised corporate clients on the performance of their equities, as well as intelligence on investor sentiment.  Prior to BAML, he worked in various energy and equity roles at ICAP, Citigroup, Hambrecht and Quist, and Salomon Smith Barney. Mr. Sabino maintains his registration with FINRA as a broker. Mr. Sabino earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. "We're very pleased to have Rory join the Continental team," said Harold Hamm, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "He brings a depth of knowledge and expertise in communicating with investment professionals about the U.S. energy industry, as well as a passion for exploration and production. "He's a great match who will serve our shareholders very well," Mr. Hamm said. "It's great to have him on board." Warren Henry, who established Continental's IR department soon after the Company went public in 2007, is retiring. "Warren has done an outstanding job, and we sincerely appreciate his leadership over these transformative years. We wish Stephanie and Warren and their pup, Winston, all the best in their retirement," said Jack Stark, President. He noted that Mr. Henry will remain with the Company through the end of March to help with the leadership transition. About Continental Resources Continental Resources (NYSE: CLR) is a top 10 independent oil producer in the U.S. Lower 48 and a leader in America's energy renaissance. Based in Oklahoma City, Continental is the largest leaseholder and the largest producer in the nation's premier oil field, the Bakken play of North Dakota and Montana. The Company also has leading positions in Oklahoma, including its SCOOP Woodford and SCOOP Springer discoveries and the STACK plays. With a focus on the exploration and production of oil, Continental has unlocked the technology and resources vital to American energy independence and our nation's leadership in the new world oil market. In 2018, the Company will celebrate 51 years of operations. For more information, please visit www.CLR.com. }:

==

am 1st

another question from February, as shown in the above screenshot from one of the group's reports, respondents were reminded that large companies had given out employee bonuses before they were asked if they agreed with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's comment that worker bonuses were "crumbs" compared with corporate windfalls. The results were surprising: A plurality of voters agreed with Pelosi, despite the lopsided question. This would suggest that for Republicans, using the "crumbs" comment as an attack line against Democrats in 2018 campaigns, which Trump has suggested they do, may not be a good idea.

Over the past six months, CNBC monitoredAmerica First Policies' website and found hundreds of pages of polling and research paid for by donors whose names are permitted to be kept secret. Much of this polling has since been removed from the site, but a portion of the removed documents are still available online.

America First Policies is not the first nonprofit group created to advance a president's priorities, nor is it the first to conduct intensive polling. Two Obama-linked groups, Priorities USA and Organizing for Action, did the same thing. Priorities USA did not disclose its donors, but OFA did voluntarily, releasing quarterly donor lists.

But by hiring the Trump campaign's pollsters to conduct such a large and secretive Trump-focused data operation, and paying for it with dark money, America First Policies is going well beyond what previous outside nonprofit groups have done.

While a political committee such as the RNC is designed and expected to collect information that helps to win elections, a nonprofit group such as America First Policies — permitted to operate tax-free and accept unlimited donations from donors whose names can be kept secret — is not.

"So you have a situation where large donors are contributing to America First Policies with the understanding that their secret donations are going to be seen as valuable by the president, because this group appears to work so closely with the White House," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "And because these donors are secret, the public and Congress will never know if the White House later took action to advance a donor's interests."

In addition to a slew of senior advisors with ties to Trump, America First Policies has three board members, all of whom are also close to the Trump White House. Its chairman, Tommy Hicks Jr., is the son of a billionaire and a good friend of Donald Trump Jr. He has also reportedly brokered White House introductions for companies seeking business with the Trump administration.

Another board member, Dallas financial executive Roy Bailey, serves as managing director and founding partner of Giuliani Partners LLC, along with former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. The newest board member is Harold Hamm, a shale oil billionaire who was Trump's top pick for energy secretary but reportedly turned down the job.

==

==

picks mercer over koch?

Among the donors who have been briefed on — or expressed interest in — the coalition being assembled by Mr. Bannon and the Mercers are several who have given to the Kochs’ efforts over the years, including the high-frequency trading pioneer W. E. “Ed” Bosarge of Houston, as well as the Oklahoma oilman Harold Hammand the Dallas businessman Thomas O. Hicks Jr.

http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-cabinet-hamm-palin-2087888339.html

2x?

...

Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, who yesterday advised Trump to "just scrap" Obama's energy industry regulations, is considered a leading contender for Secretary of Energy.

According to Politico:

Hamm, an Oklahoma billionaire who has been a friend of Trump's for years, has been the leading influence on Trump's energy policy during the campaign. If Hamm passes, venture capitalist Robert Grady is also seen as a top candidate, though he could also be in line for Interior.

Forrest Lucas, the 74-year-old co-founder of oil products firm Lucas Oil, is favored as a top choice to lead the Department of the Interior.

==

As Barack Obama moves out of the White House to thunderous applause from the scientific community, what's on the energy and environment docket for Day One of the Trump Administration? Trump aides have promised swift and aggressive action on a long list of various campaign priorities, but remain opaque about the process and order of possible immediate changes.

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Regardless, climate hawks should keep an eye out: Bloomberg reported this morning that advisors have prepared an energy/enviro "short list," which includes reversing Obama administration guidelines on factoring climate change into pipeline construction and steps to suspend the social cost of carbon. 

And campaign advisor and oil CEO Harold Hamm told CNBC he projects energy deregulation will be a "Day One agenda" item. [trying to gin the mkt?]The GOP got an early start moving their deregulation goals Thursday, as Rep Evan Jenkins, R-WV, introduced a resolution to permanently block the Obama administration's stream protection regulations.

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:{

}:

"Trump has threatened to roll back so many hard-won progressive gains, including those on climate, but he can't take away our resolve to fight back at every turn," 350.org Executive Director May Boeve said.

"The impacts of extreme weather in a warming world already costed the U.S. hundreds of human lives and $46 billion in damages during the past year alone. While globally the concentration of climate changing CO2 in our planet's atmosphere continues to rise to new record levels with the World Meteorological Organization confirming 2016 was the hottest year on record. Now more than ever, elected officials worldwide need to heed to the urgency of the climate crisis and stand with science to safeguard a livable planet for communities worldwide."

For a deeper dive:

Obama: Climate Central

Trump day one:Washington Post, Reuters, AP, WSJ

Energy/enviro list:Bloomberg

Hamm: CNBC

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000032848

only reported lobbying 2005?

[trisha minnesota?)

2016

==

omg

http://www.alternet.org/environment/meet-oil-billionaire-quietly-shaping-donald-trumps-energy-policy-video

Meet the Oil Billionaire Shaping Donald Trump’s Energy Policy

no img tweets

...He spoke after businesswoman Michelle Van Etten and before unsuccessful Republican presidential hopefuls Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), as well as Eric Trump, Newt Gingrich and Gingrich's wife Callista. Trump's vice presidential pick, Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN), spoke, too.

"Make America One Again" night (formerly known as Thursday) will feature retired quarterback Fran Tarkenton, investment company CEO Tom Barrack and Trump himself.

Last night's line-up had no shortage of oddballs and extremists, but there's a reason Harold Hamm's name sticks out.

Hammis straight out of the fossil fuel industry's central casting.

He's a climate-denying serial liar who made his billions at the expense of the Earth and its people. A genuine (as opposed to merely asserted) billionaire, Hamm is the 13th child of a cotton sharecropper who worked his way up through the oil business and whose company—Continental Resources—now controls much of the carbon-rich Bakken Formation in North Dakota.

In one of Trump's hazardous forays into actual policy in May, he borrowed an often-told yarn about overly-zealous regulators. The story strayed from truth when Hamm told it; Donald inevitably Trump-sized the distortions. In Trump's version, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has assessed corporations "multi-billion dollar fines" for causing the death of migratory birds.

(Fact check on that: it was not the EPA, it was theU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The proposed fine—eventually dismissed by a judge—was $420,000. To reach the nearest multiple billion, the unlevied fine would need to be multiplied by 4,761. No worries, if Trump is elected, those fines won't happen anymore, he guarantees it. Even though they never did).

Hamm not only originated Trump's talking points for that speech, he introduced him at the event in North Dakota.

But Hamm's fingerprints on Trump's energy "policy" don't stop there.

The area where Hamm's influence is perhaps most apparent is fracking.

In late 2013—when it became clear that liquid waste from fracking operations like Hamm's injected deep underground were causing increasingly frequent, powerful earthquakes—Hamm acted decisively. Not to stop the waste injection and thus the earthquakes, but to silence the Oklahoma state geologists who made the fracking-seismic link.

The state's lead seismologist was summoned to a "coffee" with Hamm and Oklahoma State University President and former Republican Sen. David Boren to discuss the matter (and, apparently, the seismologist's career). By last summer, all of Oklahoma's state seismologists decided to pursue other employment.

Trump, meanwhile has outspokenly supported fracking throughout his campaign, even referring to Hamm as "the king of energy."

Hamm was also the top energy advisor to Mitt Romney in 2012 and pushed hard for the Keystone XL pipeline. Trump, as you probably guessed by now, is also a fan.

In fact, one of the only areas where Trump and Hamm diverge is in the reception they've received from the **Koch brothers**. The Kochs and the Hamms go back years (and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars), while the Kochs—by some accounts the most influential conservative political donors and tireless funders of climate denial—have not warmed to Trump.

When it comes to energy, it's Hamm all the way for Trump. And that's terrible news for the environment.

Mark Floegel is the research director with Greenpeace USA. He has been working on public advocacy issues since 1987.

http://www.ecowatch.com/harold-hamm-oil-billionaire-shaping-donald-trump-energy-policy-1935709726.html

==

http://www.nytimes.com/**2014/**12/07/us/politics/energy-firms-in-secretive-alliance-with-attorneys-general.html

abbot pruitt epa clean air plan

1st time majority gop, backroom deals

12/14 lipton:

Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General

The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state.

But Mr. Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon’s chief of lobbying.

“Outstanding!” William F. Whitsitt, who at the time directed government relations at the company, said in a note to Mr. Pruitt’s office. The attorney general’s staff had taken Devon’s draft, copied it onto state government stationery with only a few word changes, and sent it to Washington with the attorney general’s signature. “The timing of the letter is great, given our meeting this Friday with both E.P.A. and the White House.”

Mr. Whitsitt then added, “Please pass along Devon’s thanks to Attorney General Pruitt.”

Courting Favor

Articles in this series examine the explosion in lobbying of state attorneys general by corporate interests and the millions in campaign donations they now provide.

The email exchange from October 2011, obtained through an open-records request, offers a hint of the unprecedented, secretive alliance that Mr. Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general have formed with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Attorneys general in at least a dozen states are working with energy companies and other corporate interests, which in turn are providing them with record amounts of money for their political campaigns, including at least $16 million this year.

They share a common philosophy about the reach of the federal government, but the companies also have billions of dollars at stake. And the collaboration is likely to grow: For the first time in modern American history, Republicans in January will control a majority — 27 — of attorneys general’s offices.

The Times reported previously how individual attorneys general have shut down investigations, changed policies or agreed to more corporate-friendly settlement terms after intervention by lobbyists and lawyers, many of whom are also campaign benefactors.

But the attorneys general are also working collectively. Democrats for more than a decade have teamed up with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to use the court system to impose stricter regulation. But never before have attorneys general joined on this scale with corporate interests to challenge Washington and file lawsuits in federal court.

Out of public view, corporate representatives and attorneys general are coordinating legal strategy and other efforts to fight federal regulations, according to a review of thousands of emails and court documents and dozens of interviews.

“When you use a public office, pretty shamelessly, to vouch for a private party with substantial financial interest without the disclosure of the true authorship, that is a dangerous practice,” said David B. Frohnmayer, a Republican who served a decade as attorney general in Oregon. “The puppeteer behind the stage is pulling strings, and you can’t see. I don’t like that. And when it is exposed, it makes you feel used.”

For Mr. Pruitt, the benefits have been clear. Lobbyists and company officials have been notably solicitous, helping him raise his profile as president for two years of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a post he used to help start what he and allies called the Rule of Law campaign, which was intended to push back against Washington.

That campaign, in which attorneys general band together to operate like a large national law firm, has been used to back lawsuits and other challenges against the Obama administration on environmental issues, the Affordable Care Act and securities regulation. The most recent target is the president’s executive action on immigration.

“We are living in the midst of a constitutional crisis,” Mr. Pruitt told energy industry lobbyists and conservative state legislators at a conference in Dallas in July, after being welcomed with a standing ovation. “The trajectory of our nation is at risk and at stake as we respond to what is going on.”

DOCUMENT

A Window Into a Secret Alliance: Attorneys General and the Energy Industry

The New York Times submitted open-records requests for correspondence between certain energy industry executives and attorneys general who are helping lead an effort they call the Rule of Law campaign to combat Obama administration regulations. Thousands of pages of correspondence emerged. Here is a sampling of the documents, showing how the regulated industries and their lobbyists have secretly worked with the attorneys general to combat Washington.

 OPEN DOCUMENT

Mr. Pruitt has responded aggressively, and with a lot of helping hands. Energy industry lobbyists drafted letters for him to send to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, The Times found.

Industries that he regulates have also joined him as plaintiffs in court challenges, a departure from the usual role of the state attorney general, who traditionally sues companies to force compliance with state law.

Energy industry lobbyists have also distributed draft legislation to attorneys general and asked them to help push it through state legislatures to give the attorneys general clearer authority to challenge the Obama regulatory agenda, the documents show.

“It is quite new,” said Paul Nolette, a political-science professor at Marquette University and the author of the forthcoming book “Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policy Making in Contemporary America.” “The scope, size and tenor of these collaborations is, without question, unprecedented.”

And it is an emerging practice that several former attorneys general say threatens the integrity of the office.

“It is a magnificent and noble institution, the office of attorney general, as it is truly the lawyer for the people,” said Terry Goddard, a Democrat who served two terms as Arizona’s attorney general and who, like Mr. Frohnmayer, reviewed copies of the documents collected by The Times. “That independence is clearly at risk here. What is happening diminishes the reputation of individual attorneys general and the community as a group.”

Mr. Pruitt, who has emerged as a hero to conservative activists, dismissed this criticism as misinformed.

“Those kinds of questions arise from the environment we are in — a very dysfunctional, distrustful political environment,” Mr. Pruitt said in an interview. “I can say to you that is not who we are or have ever been, and despite those criticisms we sit around and make decisions about what is right, and what represents adherence to the rule of law, and we seek to advance that and try to do the best we can to educate people about our viewpoint.”

In a state dominated by the energy industry, Mr. Pruitt’s stands have been widely popular. “Attorney General Pruitt has been a champion for our state,” said State Senator Mike Schulz, a Republican who is the majority floor leader. “The State of Oklahoma is in a better position than the E.P.A. to regulate drilling.”

But Mr. Pruitt’s ties with industry are clear. One of his closest partners has been Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire chief executive of Continental Resources, which is among the biggest oil and gas drilling companies in both Oklahoma and North Dakota.

GRAPHIC

A Letter From Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Written Almost Entirely by Energy Company Officials

Devon Energy’s lawyers and lobbyists drafted letters and provided them to Attorney General Scott Pruitt to send to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and even President Obama directly. Most of those letters were signed by Mr. Pruitt and sent with few changes. Here is one example, obtained through open-records requests.

 OPEN GRAPHIC

This year, Mr. Pruitt joined with a group aligned with Mr. Hamm to sue the Interior Departmentover its plan to consider adding animals such as the lesser prairie chicken to the endangered species list, a move that Mr. Hamm has said could knock out “some of the most promising land for oil and gas leases in the country.” The suit was filed after Mr. Hamm announced that he would serve as the chairman of Mr. Pruitt’s re-election campaign.

“Time and time again, General Pruitt has stood up and bravely fought for the rights of Oklahomans in those instances when the federal government has overextended its hand,” Mr. Hamm said as his role in Mr. Pruitt’s re-election effort was announced.

A Potent Ally

Energy industry executives and lobbyists from across the United States saw great potential in Mr. Pruitt, a gifted politician who had been a state legislator and a minor-league baseball team co-owner and executive before running for attorney general.

Among them was Andrew P. Miller, a patrician 81-year-old former Virginia attorney general. Mr. Miller is a regular at gatherings of state attorneys general at resort destinations, and his client list includes TransCanada, the backer of the Keystone XL pipeline; the Southern Company, the Georgia-based electric utility, which has a large number of coal-burning power plants; and the investor group behind the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska.

For the energy industry, Mr. Pruitt was an easy choice.

“There’s a mentality emanating from Washington today that says, ‘We know best,’ ” Mr. Pruitt said during his 2010 campaign. “It’s a one-size-fits-all strategy, a command-and-control kind of approach, and we’ve got to make sure we know how to respond to that.”

Among Mr. Pruitt’s first acts was to create a “federalism office,” which challenged the Obama administration’s plan to reduce haze in southwestern Oklahoma by requiring coal-burning electricity plants in the state to install new pollution control equipment.

His interaction with the industry, Mr. Pruitt said during an interview at his Oklahoma City office, has been motivated by a desire to gather information from experts, while defending his state’s longstanding tradition of self-determination.

That ethos, he said, is depicted in a large oil painting in his office that shows local authorities with rifles at the ready confronting outsiders during the land rush era. “The founders recognized that power concentrated in a few is a bad thing,” Mr. Pruitt said.

More of Nation’s Attorneys General Are Republican

Aided by record fund-raising by the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republicans, for the first time in modern history, will control a majority of state attorney general posts in 2015.

Party of incoming attorneys general by state, 2015

Money raised by attorney general associations

Number of attorneys general by party

CHART

Sources: Republican and Democratic Attorneys General Associations (fund-raising numbers); Paul Nolette, department of political science, Marquette University (attorneys general by party and state)

By Alicia Parlapiano

Mr. Miller made it his job to promote Mr. Pruitt nationally,both as a spokesman for the Rule of Law campaign and as the president of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

“I regard the general as the A.G. best suited to take this lead on this question of federalism,” Mr. Miller wrote to Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff in April 2012. “The touchstone of this initiative would be to organize the states to resist federal ‘overreach’ whenever it occurs.”

To Mr. Miller, having Mr. Pruitt as an advocate fit a broader strategy. He wanted state attorneys general to band together the way they did when they challenged the health care law in 2010. In that effort, they hired a major national corporate law firm, Baker Hostetler, to argue the case, with much of the bill being paid through donations from executives at corporations that oppose the law.

In his initial appeal to Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Miller insisted that his approach was not “client driven.” But he soon began to name individual clients — TransCanada and Pebble Mine in Alaska — that he wanted to include in the effort. The E.P.A. has held up the Pebble Mine project, which could potentially yield 80 billion pounds of copper, after concluding it would “threaten one of the world’s most productive salmon fisheries.”

“This strike force ought to take the form of a national state litigation team to challenge the E.P.A.’s overreach,” Mr. Miller said in an email to Mr. Pruitt’s office. “Like the Dalmatian at the proverbial firehouse, it could move out smartly when the alarm sounded.”

A Call to Arms

Mr. Miller’s pitch to Mr. Pruitt became a reality early last year at the historic Skirvin Hilton Hotel in Oklahoma City, where he brought together an extraordinary assembly of energy industry power brokers and attorneys general from nine states for what he called the Summit on Federalism and the Future of Fossil Fuels.

The meeting took place in the shadow of office towers that dominate Oklahoma City’s skyline and are home to Continental Resources, a leader in the nation’s fastest-growing oil field, the Bakken formation of North Dakota, as well as Devon Energy, which drilled 1,275 new wells last year.

More liberal attorneys general, such as Douglas F. Gansler, Democrat of Maryland, did not participate.

“Indeed, General Gansler would in all likelihood try to hijack your summit,” Mr. Miller wrote to Mr. Pruitt in an email. “At best you would be left to preside over a debate, rather than a call to arms.”

Top Individual Recipients of Energy Industry Money Since 2004

Many attorneys general collect contributions directly from energy industry donors, in addition to money passed on from party associations. Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, for example, has received at least $215,574 from companies and industry employees since 2010, even though he ran unopposed in his most recent election.

Attorney generals highlighted in gray

will be in office in 2015

ATTORNEY

GENERAL

ELECTION

YEARS

PARTY

STATE

CONTRIBUTIONS

Greg Abbott

R

Tex.

$2,459,204

2006, 2010

Tom Corbett

R

Pa.

577,192

2004, 2008

Ken Paxton

R

Tex.

488,411

2014

R

Mike DeWine

Ohio

321,033

2010, 2014

Luther Strange

Ala.

279,200

R

2010, 2014

Gary K. King

D

N.M.

228,018

2006, 2010

Scott Pruitt

R

Okla.

215,574

2010, 2014

Chris Koster

D

Mo.

202,419

2008, 2012

Bill Schuette

R

Mich.

190,516

2010, 2014

R

Kenneth T.

Cuccinelli II

Va.

174,638

2009

Notes: 2014 data is incomplete. Scott Pruitt was unopposed in 2014.

Source: National Institute on Money in State Politics (energy industry contributions)

By Alicia Parlapiano

Oklahoma energy companies were there, according to an agenda, joined by executives from Peabody Energy of Missouri, the world’s largest private-sector coal producer, as well as the SouthernCompany, which has aggressively challenged federal air pollution mandates.

The nation’s top corporate energy regulatory lawyers were there, too, includingF. William Brownell,a senior partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams, which has spent more than 25 years fighting the enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

The event was organized by an energy-industry-funded law and economics center atGeorge Mason University of Virginia. The center is part of the brain trust of conservative, pro-industry groups that have worked from the sidelines to help Mr. Pruitt and other attorneys general.

And there was nothing ambiguous about the agenda.

“Suggested Responses to Assaults on Federalism” was the topic of one breakfast meeting, moderated by Attorney General Wayne K. Stenehjem of North Dakota, that showcased Mr. Brownell and three other top corporate regulatory lawyers. Mr. Hamm was the featured dinner speaker.

“We need to ensure the robust role of the states,” said Paul M. Seby, another coal industry lawyer who attended. “And as the chief law enforcement officers, it is not surprising this is becoming a cornerstone of attorney generals’ attention.”

Attorneys general said they had no choice but to team up with corporate America. “When the federal government oversteps its legal authority and takes actions that hurt our businesses and residents, it’s entirely appropriate for us to partner with the adversely affected private entities in fighting back,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida, whose top deputy attended the meeting.

A ‘Strike Force’

The impact of the gathering was immediate. A week later, a new Federalism in Environmental Policy task force was established by lawyers in the offices of 19 state attorneys general, according to email records obtained from the office of Attorney General Timothy C. Fox of Montana, who had participated in the Oklahoma meeting.

“This message is in follow-up to the excellent environmental conference put on last week by George Mason University and hosted by the Oklahoma attorney general’s office,” said one email sent byKatie Spohn, the deputy attorney general in Nebraska. “In order to continue our coordination of efforts regarding Federalism in Environmental Policy, I am seeking input from each state who participated in the conference.”

PATRICK MORRISEY The West Virginia attorney general got a draft bill from a coal industry lawyer. 

Mr. Miller was pleased. “Just the kind of strike force I was talking about,” he said in an interview.

And the input poured forth. The states worked to detail major federal environmental action, like efforts to curb fish kills, reduce ozonepollution, slow climate change and tighten regulation of coal ash. Then they identified which attorney general’s office was best positioned to try to monitor it and, if necessary, attempt to block it.

Follow-up by Mr. Pruitt’s federalism office often came after coordination with industry representatives, especially from Devon Energy. The company, one of the most important financial supporters for the Republican Attorneys General Association, is guarded about its public profile. But it readily turned to Mr. Pruitt and his staff for help, setting up meetings for the attorney general with its chief executive, its chief lobbyist and other important players.

“We have a clear obligation to our shareholders and others to be involved in these discussions,” John Porretto, a Devon spokesman, said in a statement.

While some of the exchanges were general in character, others were quite explicit, especially the communication about the E.P.A.’s methane regulations that had prompted Mr. Whitsitt, the Devon official, to propose that Mr. Pruitt send a letter to the agency.

“Just a note to pass along the electronic version of the draft letter to Lisa Jackson at E.P.A.,” said one September 2011 letter to Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff from Mr. Whitsitt. “We have no pride of authorship, so whatever you do on this is fine.”

Mr. Pruitt took the letter and, after changing just 37 words in the 1,016-word draft, copied it onto his state government letterhead and sent it to Ms. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator.

That was just one of his challenges to Washington. Devon officials also turned to Mr. Pruitt to enlist other Republican attorneys general and Republican governors to oppose a rule proposed by the Bureau of Land Management that would regulate hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on federal land.

“As promised, we are sending you the attached draft of the R.G.A./RAGA follow-up letter to President Obama opposing B.L.M.’s proposed rule,” Brent Rockwood, Devon’s director of government affairs, wrote to Mr. Pruitt’s staff in late 2012, in an email marked “confidential.”

Weeks later, that letter was sent to Mr. Obama without only a few word changes, signed by Mr. Pruitt and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who was the head of the Republican Governors Association at the time.

ANDREW P. MILLER A version of the lobbyist’s bill was approved by the West Virginia Legislature. 

Company officials again expressed their pleasure to Mr. Pruitt.

“I’ve learned that we’re having an effect — and may be able to have more, perhaps even to having the rule withdrawn or shifted to almost a reporting-only one,” Mr. Whitsitt wrote, in another email marked “confidential.”

The rule — which the industry claims would cost $346 million a year to comply with — has still not been issued.

Coordination between the corporations and teams of attorneys general involved in the Rule of Law effort also involves actual litigation to try to clear roadblocks to energy projects, documents show.

Energy producers, for instance, wanted to sue the Interior Department as it considered adding animals such as the sage grouse — which nests near sites of oil and gas drilling — to a list of endangered species, a move that could put tens of thousands of acres off limits to new drilling.

The energy companies could have sued on their own, but their executives believed that the case would be more potent by bringing in Mr. Pruitt and the weight of the State of Oklahoma.

“We just came to the conclusion he would be the best person to be the lead attorney on this,” said Mike McDonald, an owner of Triad Energy, a small oil and gas exploration company, and the president of a group that calls itself the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance. “He has exceeded our expectations.”

For the industry, the state is an extremely valued partner because states are granted “special solicitude” from the federal courts, a critical advantage to private companies that helps confer legal standing and means that a matter is less likely to be dismissed.

Mr. Pruitt’s office, in a statement to The Times, rejected any suggestion that the attorney general has been wrong to send to Washington comment letters written by industry lobbyists, or to take up their side in litigation.

“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” the statement said. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”

HAROLD G. HAMMThe oil drilling executive was the chairman of Mr. Pruitt’s re-election campaign.

Persuading lawmakers to offer legislation has been another effective lobbying tool. In West Virginia, Mr. Miller handed Attorney General Patrick Morrisey a draft of legislation that he argued would put West Virginia in a better position to sue the Obama administration over proposed regulations to tighten pollution controls on power plants, emails show.

“I trust you will find the legislation acceptable in its present form,” Mr. Miller wrote to Mr. Morrisey in February, referring to a private meeting the two had had in the law library of Mr. Morrisey’s office in Charleston. “If so, I would appreciate your having it introduced by your friends in both the Senate and the House.”

A version of the bill was introduced and passed by the West Virginia Legislature in March. Delegate Rupert Phillips Jr., the chief sponsor of a second bill that also contained language identical to what Mr. Miller had requested, said in an interview that he had acted with Mr. Morrisey’s support, an account supported by William B. Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association.

“It is nice to have everybody singing from the same sheet of music,” Mr. Raney said.

A spokesman for Mr. Morrisey disputed this account, saying that while he supported the effort to challenge the rule, he did not play a role in promoting the legislation.

Blurred Lines

The work in Mr. Pruitt’s office has sometimes seemed to blur the distinction between his official duties and the advancement of his political career.

Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, Crystal Drwenski, served as gatekeeper to his office, arranging meetings and helping companies get Mr. Pruitt and his staff to intervene with the federal authorities. But Ms. Drwenski also played an important supplemental role for the attorney general: fund-raising aide.

“A.G. Pruitt is working with the Republican Attorneys General Association on their national meeting in Washington,” Ms. Drwenski wrote to Mr. Whitsitt. “The benefit of membership and participation is having 25 Republican A.G.s in a room to discuss policy issues.”

Ms. Drwenski wanted Devon Energy’s help in enlisting the American Petroleum Institute, and Mr. Whitsitt agreed.

“I’ve put in a plug to A.P.I.,” Mr. Whitsitt wrote back to Ms. Drwenski, a few hours after her request, having reached out to the organization’s senior lobbyist, Marty Durbin. “He is expecting a call.”

In addition to the American Petroleum Institute, major energy companies — ConocoPhillips, the oil and gas company; Alpha Natural Resources, a coal mining giant; and American Electric Power, the nation’s biggest coal consumer — have recently joined the Republican Attorneys General Association, bringing in hundreds of thousands of additional dollars to the group, internal documents show.

By last year, the association was starting to pull in so much money under Mr. Pruitt’s leadership that itdecided to break free from its partnership with the Republican State Leadership Committee, a group that represents state elected officials. Within months, the association also set up the Rule of Law Defense Fund, yet another legal entity that allows companies benefiting from the actions of Mr. Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general to make anonymous donations, in unlimited amounts. Fund-raising skyrocketed.

The $16 million that the association has collected this year is nearly four times the amount it collected in 2010, money it used mostly to buy millions of dollars’ worth of television advertisements in states like Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado and Nevada, all places where Republican candidates for attorney general won election.

The fund-raising has taken place on the state level as well. Oklahoma Gas & Electric — a for-profit utility that Mr. Pruitt joined with in federal court to fight the E.P.A. — invited its employees to the Petroleum Club in downtown Oklahoma City late last year for a fund-raising event for Mr. Pruitt, drawing donations from about 45 company employees, including the chief executive. Four days later, Mr. Pruitt filed a new appeal in the case — timing that the utility said was a coincidence.

While Mr. Pruitt’s efforts to raise money for the Republican Attorneys General Association have been an unqualified success, the lawsuits and regulatory appeals he has filed have yielded mixed results.

In May, the Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal on the Oklahoma Gas & Electric matter, meaning the company is now moving ahead on retrofitting its coal-burning plants. But other lawsuits are pending, including Mr. Pruitt’s challenge of the Dodd-Frank law, which rewrote the nation’s financial regulations, and, perhaps most important, his challenge of the tax subsidies that are a critical part of the Obama administration’s health care law.

Mr. Pruitt’s staff has juggled various duties — helping major corporations push their challenges against Washington, and then turning to these same executives, at times, to ask them for financial support.

For example, Ms. Drwenski, who is no longer Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, asked Devon Energy in 2012, on a workday afternoon, for help in signing up the American Petroleum Institute as a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

She used her personal email account to send out the initial request. But the subsequent exchange took place on her work email account, even though Oklahoma state law prohibits state officials from using state property or time to solicit political contributions. A spokesman for Mr. Pruitt said, “It is entirely possible she could have been taking a late lunch.”

Mr. Pruitt, whoran unopposedto win a second term, has not needed much of the money himself, but his fund-raising efforts have greatly benefited other Republicans running for the job.

That explains the partylike atmosphere late last month in South Florida, where members of the Republican Attorneys General Association held their fall meeting at the chic Fontainebleau Miami Beach, along with hundreds of lobbyists, lawyers and corporate executives, whose companies had paid as much as $125,000 for the privilege to celebrate with them.

During the opening reception, on a giant terrace overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, with red, white and blue lights beaming onto the walls and rock music blasting, the Republican attorneys general strode to the stage to trumpet their new majority in the states.

Mr. Pruitt was there for the weekend’s festivities, an event at which Devon Energy served as a corporate host, with banners hung in the hotel hallways featuring the corporate logo.

The Oklahoma attorney general’s stay was brief. The Rule of Law campaign had a new and urgent target.

“Our president sees himself as above the law,” Mr. Pruitt said from Oklahoma City as he announced several days later yet another front in the campaign, a lawsuit he planned to file to challenge the Obama administration’s new immigration policies. “We will take action to hold him accountable.

 ==

http://grist.org/news/oklahoma-scientists-pressured-to-downplay-link-between-earthquakes-and-fracking/

:{Oklahoma scientists pressured :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:to downplay link between earthquakes and fracking

Oil company execs and university bigwigs leaned on the Oklahoma Geological Survey so it wouldn’t blame quakes on fracking techniques.

Oklahoma has been experiencing an earthquake boom in recent years. In 2014, the state had 585 quakes of at least magnitude 3. Up through 2008, it averaged only three quakes of that strength each year. Something odd is happening.

But scientists at the Oklahoma Geological Survey have downplayed a possible connection between increasing fracking in the state and the increasing number of tremors. Even as other states (Ohio, for example) quickly put two and two together and shut down some drilling operations that were to blame, OGS scientists said that more research was needed before their state took similar steps.

Now, though, emails obtained by EnergyWire reporter Mike Soraghan reveal that the University of Oklahoma and its oil industry funders were putting pressure on OGS scientists to downplay the connection between earthquakes and the injection of fracking wastewater underground. In 2013, a preliminary OGS report noted possible correlation between the two, and OGS signed on to a statement by the U.S. Geological Survey that also noted such linkages. Soon after,OGS’s seismologist, Austin Holland,was summoned to meetings with the president of the university, where OGS is housed, and with executives of oil company Continental Resources. Continental CEO Harold Hamm was a major university funder, while the university president David Boren serves on Continental’s board, for which he earned $272,700in cash and stock in 2013. From EnergyWire:

“I have been asked to have ‘coffee’ with President Boren and Harold Hamm Wednesday,” [Holland] wrote in an Nov. 18, 2013, email to a co-worker.

The significance was not lost on his colleague, OGS Public Information Coordinator Connie Smith.

“Gosh,” Smith responded. “I guess that’s better than having Kool-Aid with them. I guess.”

A meeting with such powerful figures in the state would be intimidating for a state employee such as Holland, said state Rep. Jason Murphey of Guthrie.

“Wow. That’s a lot of pressure,” said Murphey, a Republican whose district has been rattled by numerous quakes. “That just sends chills up your spine if you’re from Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma geologist Bob Jackman, who has tried to get the word out about the connection between fracking and the quakes, recalls Holland saying last year that he couldn’t do the same. According to Jackman, Holland, when pressed, blurted out, “You don’t understand —Harold Hamm and others will not allow me to say certain things.”

Holland says Jackman misremembered the conversation. Holland publicly denies being pressured by the university or industry.

Other scientists at OGS weren’t happy to see the agency downplay the link between one oil and gas project, called the Hunton dewatering, and an earthquake swarm near Oklahoma City. One wrote to a family member, “I am dismayed at our seismic people about this issue and believe they couldn’t track a bunny through fresh snow!”

Even the USGS picked up on something fishy when Holland suggested alternative hypotheses to explain earthquakes instead of linking them to fracking processes. A science adviser with the federal agency wrote to Holland saying one alternative theory was “unlikely” and “could be very distracting from the larger issue of earthquake safety in Oklahoma … and the role that wastewater injection may be playing.”

In July 2014, Holland told Bloomberg that if a link between fracking and the quakes were to be discovered, he’d have to advise the state to shut some drilling operations down. “If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection — and consequently production — in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” he said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”

The research is there, even if UO President David Boren or Continental CEO Harold Hamm aren’t pleased about it. Let’s see what those politicians and regulators do next.

==

==

Harold Hamm is the CEO of oil giant Continental Resources. He was acknowledged at theprivately held Koch seminar inJune 2011 in Vail, Colorado for donating at least $1 million to Koch-related causes.^[1]

The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamm generated “almost all” of his $12 billion wealth in Continental from 2010-2012; he ranks at No. 36 on Forbes 2012 list of richest Americans.

In March 2012, theRomney campaign announced that Hamm would lead the candidate’s energy policy, joining a team that already includes coal lobbyist Jim Talent and tar-sands lobbyist David Wilkins.^[2]

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Gavin Aronsen, Exclusive: The Koch Brothers' Million-Dollar Donor Club, Mother Jones, September 6, 2011
2. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Rebecca Leber, "Harold Hamm joins Team Romney," Think Progress, March 2, 2012.

==

Romney advisor and oil billionaire Harold Hamm is just a humble patriot

By Philip Bump

Remember Harold Hamm? Hamm is the billionaire oil executive who serves as an advisor to the Romney campaign while hethrows a million bucks or so into a pro-Romney super PAC. He’s basically the epitome of the worst of oil industry politics.

He’s up on Capitol Hill today, talking to politicians. But, not as an oil man, or a Romney backer, or a Romney advisor, or as a guy whose company has contributed almost $1.3 million to political campaigns so far this year. Nope.

I am not here representing Continental Resources, any political campaign or political party. I am here as an American patriot that loves my country and a person that is grateful for the opportunities I have been given by being an American.

Top Candidate Recipients, 2011-2012

Mitt Romney (R)	$38,500
Rick Berg (R-ND)	$11,650
Steve Fincher (R-TN)	$10,000
Kevin :{Cramer :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:(R-ND)	$10,000
Jeb :{Hensarling (:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:R-TX)	$7,500

All contributions to candidates from Continental Resources

Meet Harold Hamm, the billionaire oil tycoon who’s advising Mitt Romney on energy

By Philip Bum

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Harry Hamm, subject of a very warm profie in the *Washington Post* this weekend. (To be fair, I don’t know that he goes by Harry, but the name “Harry Hamm” is hard to pass up, except at a diner.)

[T]he 66-year-old Hamm is a multibillionaire who could buy [his hometown of Lexington, Okla.] several times over. An early believer in the notion that the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing could be merged to unlock new layers of oil, he is the chief executive of Continental Resources, the leading exploration company in the booming Bakken Formation, which stretches across Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. His 68 percent stake in the company is currently worth $7.7 billion, and Forbes recently ranked him the world’s 76th-richest person.

Harold Hamm,a figure who detoured from a Horatio Alger novel straight into Dallas. Be warned, humble reader: “His public relations person jokes that once people talk to the upbeat, personable oilman, they’re ‘Hammanized.’ Even many of his political foes say he’s hard not to like.” Seems like that should have been “Hammered,” but, fine. You meet the guy, you like him. Fair enough.

Well, I haven’t met him. And based on this profile, he doesn’t exactly seem like the sort of guy I’d like to hang out with.

First, there’s his politics.

He hosted a fundraiser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and recently donated $985,000 to Restore Our Future,a super PAC devoted to supporting Romney’s candidacy. While super PACs are supposed to be independent, the former cotton picker has also become a member of Romney’s energy advisory team, feeding the candidate optimistic assessments about U.S. oil production. Hamm is trying to take the lessons of the Oklahoma and North Dakota oil patches and apply them in Washington for the nation’s benefit — and his own.

Super PACs are supposed to be run completely separately from candidates’ campaigns. Candidates are bound to fundraising limitations and disclosure guidelines; super PACs are not. If a super PAC knows where a campaign is spending its money and what its plans are, it basically becomes an adjunct to the campaign, investing in the holes the campaign leaves behind. If the two could coordinate, a candidate wouldn’t need to fundraise for an official campaign at all, but could just append a super PAC that takes billions in anonymous donations. The legal separation is meant to protect what paper-thin campaign finance regulations we still have in place. The Post doesn’t mention this. Guess it got Hammanized!

As for Hamm’s goal of turning America at large into a reflection of a North Dakota oil field for his own profit, you can judge that on its own merits.

Next, the Post explores Hamm’s views on oil reserves.

Hamm promotes a vision of oil plenty. “There are two separate camps,” Hamm said. “One of them is that the oil and gas resource is very scarce and running out; that the glass is not half full; that it is drying up. And the other [camp] being one of abundance and what’s really here.”

He said, “The one of scarcity, that’s just wrong. It’s been overtaken basically by the technology that’s gone on with horizontal drilling.”

So those are the two camps. One side, presumably ours, simply says: Oil will run out! His says: We have plenty! Therefore, he wins.

Hm. But what if we present the two sides this way. One says: Continued use of fossil fuels is destroying the planet! The other: Who cares! Granted, it’s a less “upbeat” formulation, but perhaps a valuable point to raise. (It is not raised.)

Then, there areenvironmental regulations. Despite Continental Resources’ stock price more than tripling since Obama took office, Hamm of course opposes the president and EPA’s efforts to curtail pollution.

“Our air was polluted, and we cleaned it up,” says Hamm. “Our rivers were polluted, and we cleaned them up. What’s going on with fracking? What’s the problem? There’s not a problem. The regulatory aspects should be with the states, with the North Dakota Industrial Commission. … None of us wants to pollute any of our water. If it meant not fracking another well, I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t safe.”

Last July,Continental Resources reached a settlementwith the government for improperly dumping volatile organic compounds into the air [PDF]. Last September, the company was fined for dumping 200 gallons of oil in Kentucky [PDF]. That’s after about five minutes spent searching for violations.

To be fair, the Post does note that Hamm’s rhetoric often doesn’t sync with reality.

Many of the things Hamm says in casual conversation might not stand up to greater scrutiny. He once said that the Dickinson, N.D., McDonald’s was the second-busiest in the world, which isn’t the case. More important, he says that the U.S. government could make $12 trillion in royalties from oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters. Assuming the current 13 percent royalty rate, production on federal lands and waters would have to exceed current worldwide oil production for the next 25 years.

But overall, I suspect that this profile will make its way into regular rotation by the Continental Resources media relations department. And I suspect that the Post’s readers will have a newfound respect for a man who worked his way up from nothing to build an empire deeply committed to wringing every red cent out of the last days of the environment as we’ve known it.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.