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

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

[

Betsy SwanFormer Political Reporter

Published Jun. 20 2016

TDB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clapp concurred.

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

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

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

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[### Grass-Roots Lobbying Tactics Evade Public Eye

Roll Call

https://rollcall.com › 2013/03/21 › grass-roots-lobbying...](https://rollcall.com/2013/03/21/grass-roots-lobbying-tactics-evade-public-eye/)

Mar 21, 2013 — “We didn't come anywhere near the threshold for lobbying,” DCI Group spokesman Craig Stevens said. “We are very diligent to honor the letter ...

2017-alford-national-black-chamber-commerce

[### When Harry Alford Speaks Up, a Washington Firm's Clients ...

Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com › graphics › 2017-alford-na...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-alford-national-black-chamber-commerce/)

Sep 14, 2017 — Craig Stevens, a DCI vice president, said the firm is proud of its role getting people involved in the democratic process. “Our democracy is ...

BloombergTipping the Scales: Part III

When Harry Alford Speaks Up, a Washington Firm’s Clients Gain

By Zachary R. Mider

September 14, 2017

...

By Washington standards, the National Black Chamber of Commerce is a shoestring operation, run by a husband-and-wife team out of an office on the edge of the city.

But Harry Alford, the group’s founder and chief executive officer, matters in this town. When he’s not testifying before Congress or appearing on Fox News, lawmakers are citing his research on the Senate floor, or federal judges are pondering his court briefs. He speaks out on an astonishing range of issues, some of which have only the fuzziest connection to his stated goal of promoting African-American entrepreneurship.

Alford has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in recent years challenging Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith’s claim to an oil fortune, backing a finance executive’s quest for a $7 million severance and siding with Samsung Electronics Co. in a patent dispute with Apple Inc.

Outside the courtroom, he has endorsed a phosphate mine, opposed gambling expansion in Maryland and advocated for the owners of Argentine debt. He has weighed in on a rum-tariff dispute involving the U.S. Virgin Islands and favored restrictions on solar power in Florida. He has both invited and opposed a shutdown of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Image of Harry Alford

Harry Alford in 2009. Photographer: Andrew Councill/MCT/MCT via Getty Images

The common thread: Someone with deep pockets stood to gain from Alford’s words. Many of his efforts also coincided with campaigns run by DCI Group LLC, a Washington consulting firm that gets paid to generate just the sort of advocacy Alford provides. While the chamber doesn’t disclose all of its contributors, it has acknowledged taking money from many companies that benefit from its advocacy.

Alford declined to comment for this story. Craig Stevens, a DCI vice president, said the firm is proud of its role getting people involved in the democratic process.

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

Collecting Checks

A former University of Wisconsin linebacker, Alford, 69, ran a minority chamber of commerce in Indiana before founding the national group in 1993 and moving to Washington.

At first, he got headlines for accusing businesses of discrimination, as he had in Indiana. He objected to a casino being built over a slave graveyard in Louisiana, urged a bank to increase lending in black neighborhoods and sued a telephone company, U.S. West, claiming bias against minority vendors.

“He was very helpful in the beginning,” said Herman Malone, a Denver businessman who once served as the chamber’s chairman and urged it to pursue the U.S. West suit.

As time went on, Malone said, Alford seemed to grow more interested in collecting checks from corporate executives than cajoling them.

“He kind of lost his way in who he was truly representing,” Malone said. “He used it as a vehicle to get into the corporate world.”

In a book about the U.S. West case, Malone wrote that some plaintiffs grew suspicious of Alford’s motives after he urged them to settle during a meeting in Colorado and then caught a ride back to Washington on the U.S. West company jet.

“They claimed I sold them out,” Alford wrote in a 2014 syndicated column defending his work. “Nothing bad happened on that plane—the NBCC did not receive a nickel.”

Alford testified against the Kyoto Protocol in Congress in 1998, arguing that limits on greenhouse-gas emissions would harm minorities. By the next decade, the chamber was as prominent for its pro-fossil-fuel advocacy as anything else it was doing.

Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council have accused the chamber of shilling for the industry. Exxon Mobil Corp., a DCI client, has said it gave the group more than $1 million since 2002. Alford has said he’s proud to take fossil-fuel money.

“Of course we do and it is only natural,” he wrote in a column in black newspapers in 2015. “The legacy of blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel.”

Supporting Role

The National Black Chamber of Commerce has backed many causes that benefit big companies and wealthy investors.

NBCC Action	Beneficiary	Hired DCI	Donated to NBCC
Opposed Puerto Rico bankruptcy bill	Investors in Puerto Rico bonds	Check mark
Criticized government handling of Fannie Mae	Investors in Fannie Mae shares	Check mark
Opposed limits on swipe fees	Visa		Check mark
Opposed pollution regulations	Exxon Mobil	Check mark	Check mark
Bought ad supporting phosphate mine	Mosaic
Backed Samsung at Int'l Trade Commission	Samsung in dispute with Apple	Check mark
Advocated for Argentine bondholders	Investors in Argentine bonds	Check mark
Supported solar measure backed by utilities	Gulf Power		Check mark
Opposed Anna Nicole Smith's claim on fortune	Heirs of billionaire J. Howard Marshall II	Check mark
Opposed casino expansion in Maryland	Penn National Gaming	Check mark	Check mark
Fought "gainful employment" rule	For-profit college operator EDMC	Check mark	Check mark
Defended rum tariff rules in U.S. Virgin Islands	Fortune Brands and Diageo

Source: Bloomberg News reporting

White Paper

Alford, who’s also on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, branched out into other issues. In 2011, he campaigned against a proposed Department of Education rule that would cut off student aid at schools that saddle graduates with too much debt relative to earnings.

Alford released a white paper, held media conference calls, started a website and testified before Congress, arguing that the rule would diminish opportunities for minority students. Education Management Corp., one of the schools affected by the rule and a DCI client, was listed as a sponsor of the National Black Chamber’s annual convention in 2014 and 2015.

Another convention sponsor was Penn National Gaming Inc. In 2012, the company hired DCI to torpedo a ballot measure that would expand gambling in Maryland, threatening Penn casinos. The measure passed despite Alford’s syndicated column in black newspapers urging a “no” vote. A spokesman for Penn said the gambling company has been a member of the chamber since 2008.

In recent years, Alford has taken an interest in the rights of investors in securities, an emerging DCI specialty. In 2009, he urged Congress to punish Argentina for refusing to repay bonds whose owners included hedge fund manager Paul Singer. And last year, he wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to consider the rights of holders of Puerto Rican bonds.

Alford filed legal briefs in two court cases that indirectly helped shareholders of the mortgage company Fannie Mae, another DCI cause. They are among more than a dozen the chamber has filed as a friend of the court in the past decade on issues ranging from retirement advice to labor unions. They include two that supported another DCI client, the family of Texas billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, in feuds with his widow Anna Nicole Smith and the Internal Revenue Service.

Feeding Lines

Sometimes, Alford’s public statements leave clues that someone else is feeding him lines. The Huffington Post pointed out that his 2015 op-ed in the Hill defending Education Management contained a parenthetical note to Alford from the piece’s actual author that hadn’t been removed.

A 2010 chamber press release about the Marshalls’ battle with Smith was written by a junior DCI employee, whose name appears as the electronic document’s author. The same goes for a 2013 Alford letter to the U.S. International Trade Commission defending Samsung in the patent dispute with Apple.

Alford’s campaigns haven’t always meshed with DCI’s. He’s a critic of the Durbin Amendment, which limits debit-card swipe fees. DCI’s retailer clients support it. In 2014, Visa Inc., one of the biggest opponents of Durbin, sponsored a reception at the chamber’s convention in Chicago.

DCI was founded in 1996 by three public relations executives who had worked for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. They’d pioneered the use of smokers’ rights groups to promote the industry’s message. At DCI, their client base expanded to include companies such as AT&T Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The chamber isn’t the only nonprofit that has frequently worked alongside DCI. The public-affairs firm recruited the 60 Plus Association, which bills itself as a conservative answer to the AARP, to lead a campaign in favor of holders of Puerto Rican bonds, according to the New York Times. The Center for Individual Freedom, created by a tobacco operative in 1998, has taken positions on behalf of Fannie Mae shareholders, Puerto Rico bondholders and the Marshall family.

The chamber has just two executives, Alford and his wife, according to a 2014 IRS filing. A man who answered the door one morning in August at the group’s otherwise unoccupied office in Washington’s Friendship Heights neighborhood said Alford wasn’t there and meets by appointment only.

Although the chamber says it has 140 local chapters and “reaches” 100,000 black-owned businesses, revenue from membership dues was just $2,114 that year. “All other contributions,” a category that can include corporate donations, provided $1.3 million, almost all of the chamber’s annual budget. The chamber isn’t required to disclose its donors.

Last year the Checks and Balances Project, a pro-clean-energy watchdog group, complained to the IRS that the chamber’s “primary activity appears to have been direct and grassroots lobbying to advance the agenda of its various corporate sponsors.” The IRS hasn’t acted publicly on the complaint.

Correction to include a comment from DCI Group

Design and development: Hannah Recht

6278-Informational-Materials-20161220-6

KABILA

AKIN GUMP MOISE KATUMBA DRC

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[### DCI Prescribes PR for Turing, Shkreli - Tue., Dec. 22, 2015

O'Dwyer's PR

https://www.odwyerpr.com › story › public › dci-prescr...](https://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/6030/2015-12-22/dci-prescribes-pr-for-turing-shkreli.html)

Dec 22, 2015 — DCI VP Craig Stevens has been defending Shkreli since his arrest on securities fraud charges last week. "It is no coincidence that these ...

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GUEST VIEW: Trump energy pick signals new direction

Guest View

November 30, 2024

By Taylor Millard

InsideSources.com

Energy groups and advocates described President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as energy secretary as a return to normalcy for an agency that, under the Biden administration, has been more of an obstacle than an ally.

“There’s nobody more qualified, intelligent, passionate and also deeply caring about people and the consumer, and understands both the complexities of energy and cost to consumers,” said energy consultant Trisha Curtis of PetroNerds.

A self-described tech nerd, Wright entered the energy industry by founding Pinnacle Technologies. The company pioneered hydraulic fracture mapping that revolutionized shale gas production. In 2010, he founded Liberty Energy, now valued at more than $2.8 billion. Trump called Wright an energy pioneer whose work in shale “fueled American energy independence.”

Wright isn’t the first energy executive to lead the Energy Department. That was Samuel Bodman, who was Cabot Corp. CEO in the 1980s.

Craig Stevens, partner at DCI Group and a former senior adviser to Bodman, said Wright and Bodman share a similar philosophy, embracing the “all of the above” energy approach.

“(They see) we have tremendous untapped energy resources in the U.S. that we should be able to develop and deploy to help grow our economy, create jobs, and support our allies,” Stevens said.

“What’s also important is that these men both recognize that they were not elected, but that they serve at the pleasure of the president,” Stevens added. “Having a cohesive energy strategy, that is driven from Trump’s stated goal of establishing U.S. energy dominance will help create the technical and regulatory pathways for increased energy production to combat energy poverty and support economic growth around the world.”

American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Mike Sommers said Wright’s experience as an energy CEO gives him a perspective typically not seen within the Department of Energy.

“We look forward to working with him, once confirmed, to bolster American geopolitical strength by lifting DOE’s pause on LNG export permits and ensuring the open access of American energy for our allies around the world,” Sommers said.

Trump made energy development a vital plank in his campaign platform. He hammered Vice President Kamala Harris for endorsing a fracking ban and supporting the Green New Deal in 2019.

Like his future boss, Wright isn’t shy about expressing his views.

Two years ago, Wright purchased billboards in Denver criticizing The North Face for refusing to do business with energy companies despite using synthetic oil-derived materials. “That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fossil fuels,” the billboards read.

Wright also criticized the Biden administration and other governments for setting unrealistic climate goals and demonizing fossil fuels. He called the Net Zero 2050 campaign “unachievable and, frankly, unadvisable” due to its cost and reliance on unreliable technology.

Environmentalists aren’t happy.

Greenpeace USA Deputy Climate Program Director John Noel likened Wright’s nomination to “putting a pyromaniac in charge of the fire department.” He suggested the appointment was part of a disturbing trend of oil and gas executives being nominated for critical government roles.

“This pattern not only threatens to derail the urgent transition to a clean energy future, prioritizing fossil fuel profits over the health and well-being of Americans,” Noel said.

Although portrayed as a climate change skeptic, Wright acknowledged last year the Earth was getting warmer and that sea levels were rising. “Since the end of World War II, human burning of fossil fuels has increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 50 percent,” he said.

However, Wright argued that the danger of climate change through energy consumption was “clearly overwhelmed” by its benefits to the human race through increased life expectancy, wealth and health.

He’s also advocated for politicians and advocates to stop using phrases like “climate crisis,” “dirty energy” and “clean energy,” and suggested they cause regulators to oppose the construction of pipelines and liquid natural gas export terminals. Wright argued that such terms create unnecessary anxiety in children and distract them from practical, solvable problems.

“The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity squelching policies justified in the name of ‘climate change,’” Wright said.

He thinks the green energy push resulted in higher prices, destabilized grids and displaced high-paying jobs.

Curtis defended Wright’s comments by pointing toward Germany. The European country has experienced energy price shocks as it pivoted from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables. “(Americans) don’t want to be that,” she said.

Stevens, now a spokesman for Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, a coalition that wants to protect U.S. energy security, lauded Wright as the perfect person for energy secretary. He said Wright would reduce regulations and unnecessary delays in critical energy projects.

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storm

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Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican firms run even further

AUTHOR’S NOTE #1: This is an update to a previous blog post about Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican front groups.*

*AUTHOR’S NOTE #2: I have made edits to the blog post in order to ensure that the blog post is 100% accurate.

Since my last blog post about Nation Consulting’s ties to Republican organizations, I’ve had an individual point out to me via a Facebook group that Coalition for the New Economy (CftNE), a group that opposes government-owned broadband internet services in areas where the private sector operates broadband services, had paid DCI Group, a mostly right-wing public relations, lobbying, and consulting firm, a total of $666,957 for work that DCI Group did for CftNE as an independent contractor, per a 2012 IRS 990 filing by CftNE (you can find that filing here; the information I mentioned in this paragraph comes from page 9 of the PDF file). CftNE was led by Thad Nation at the time of the filing; Nation is also the founder of Nation Consulting, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based consulting firm.

While DCI Group supported the effort to allow openly-LGBT people to serve in our nation’s Armed Forces, something which should have been done sooner, a lot of the other things they’ve been involved with is, in my opinion, clearly against the best interests of the American people.

:{DCI Group has been behind anti-climate change campaigns, including an infamous YouTube video in 2006 that spoofed the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, in which Gore, who was Vice President of the United States during the presidency of Bill Clinton, talked about how serious of a threat climate change is to this planet. While DCI Group has never actually acknowledged its role in the Gore parody, multiple media outlets reported that a Yahoo! email from the same person who uploaded the YouTube video originated from a computer registered to DCI Group.

:{DCI Group’s officials include, among many others, Doug Goodyear, the CEO of the firm and a former political director of the Colorado Republican Party, and Craig Stevens, who worked on two Republican presidential campaigns and also worked for Tommy Thompson when he was U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under Republican President George W. Bush.

Perhaps the worst thing that DCI Group has associated itself with is the former military junta in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, also known as Burma. DCI Group conducted public relations work on behalf of the Burmese junta from 2002 to 2003. The Burmese junta was known for flagrant human rights violations, including the politically-motivated house imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi. DCI Group’s work with the Burmese junta became a major controversy in the 2008 presidential election here in the U.S., as Goodyear worked with the McCain campaign prior to the media publishing reports about DCI Group’s work with the Burmese junta.}:}:

It’s 100% clear to me that Thad Nation, who is the founder of Nation Consulting and either is or was the head of CftNE, plays both sides of the street politically. While their founder, Thad Nation, has at least indirectly funded right-wing organizations, Nation Consulting, which Nation himself founded, also employs Jason Rae, who also happens to be a Democratic National Committee (DNC) member and a candidate for Chairperson of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW). That is an inconvenient truth for Rae, as it’s at least an apparent conflict of interest, if not an outright one, for Rae to be DPW chair and working for a firm led by someone who either is or was also the head of a different organization that gave money to Republican and Republican-leaning organizations simultaneously.

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Juul hires top Trump operative as it shells out money for SF ballot fight

By Dominic Fracassa,

Assistant Metro Editor

:{Updated May 21, 2019

E-cigarette maker Juul spent lavishly on lobbyists, opinion researchers and political consultants last month ahead of what could be a bruising fight with city officials over its ability to do business in San Francisco.

The company spent nearly $465,000 in April, public records show, to hire a stable of both local and national political operatives — including Fabrizio Ward, a Florida firm with ties to President Trump.

Tony Fabrizio, the firm’s namesake, was a key pollster for Trump’s presidential campaign and was previously a business associate of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Fabrizio, who did not respond to a request for comment, was interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team in 2018, CNN reported in January.

Juul paid Fabrizio Ward $183,200 for opinion research, according to records filed with the city’s Ethics Commission. Juul said Monday that the firm’s other named partner, Bob Ward, is doing the work on the contract.

Juul versus San Francisco

E-cigarette maker Juul tries to get ahead of SF restrictions on vaping products

FILE - In this Dec. 20, 2018, file photo Juul products are displayed at a smoke shop in New York. Under scrutiny amid a wave of underage vaping, Juul is pushing into television with a multimillion-dollar campaign rebranding itself as a stop-smoking aid for adults trying to kick cigarettes. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Juul seeks San Francisco vaping ballot measure

Walid Rahman holds a Juul cartridge container while working behind the counter at The Town Smoke Shop in the Mission district of San Francisco, Calif. Thursday, March 21, 2019.

Juul, growing despite backlash, seeks to buy San Francisco office tower

123 Mission St. (middle), an office tower in Transbay, seen on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, in San Francisco, Calif.

Juul growth slowed by youth vaping crackdown, Altria says

Signs for Juul electronic cigars are seen on the outside of a smoke shop in Hoboken, N.J., Thursday, Dec. 20, 2018. Altria, one of the world's biggest tobacco companies, is spending nearly $13 billion to buy a huge stake in the vape company Juul as cigarette use continues to decline. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Juul has also hired prominent Washington, D.C., public affairs firm DCI Group. The firm was paid $219,200 for “grassroots lobbying” and consulting services. The firm has a bevy of major corporate clients and mostly Republican political ones. In 2002, it drew scrutiny for its work helping to rehabilitate the image of the Burmese military junta, which ruled the country until 2011. The junta was condemned internationally for widespread and systemic human rights abuses.

DCI Group spokesman Craig Stevens said in an email that, “When the company engaged with the government 16 years ago, we required certain benchmarks be met — when they were not, we quit the contract after just a few months.[EIGHT MOS, AFTER HILL FAIL] Of course, we abhor the horrors of war and oppression, especially physical or sexual violence against women and children.”

Juul’s moves in April appear to have been a prelude to an unfolding political battle between the company and San Francisco officials. Last week, the company filed paperwork signaling an intent to put a ballot measure before voters that could override pending legislation to effectively ban the sale of e-cigarettes in San Francisco altogether.

That legislation, authored by City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Supervisor Shamann Walton, seeks to curb the rise of vaping by teenagers. Companies like Juul insist their products can help adults wean themselves off traditional cigarettes and the toxic chemicals associated with smoking. But detractors of e-cigarettes, including Herrera and Walton, have lambasted Juul for using predatory marketing practices and kid-friendly flavors to get young adults and teenagers addicted to nicotine.

Walton has said previously that he would prefer to see Juul booted from San Francisco altogether. The company has its corporate headquarters in the Dogpatch neighborhood, a part of the district that Walton represents.

Juul’s proposed ballot measure, called “An Act to Prevent Youth Use of Vapor Products,” would tighten the restrictions around the sale of e-cigarettes — but allow them to be sold in San Francisco. The initative would limit the number of devices and nicotine cartridges that can be purchased at one time, require online retailers that ship to San Francisco to get an additional permit and require e-cigarettes sold in stores to be behind the counter or in a locked box. It’s still unclear whether the initiative would go before voters in November or March.

“We have grown our team to engage with lawmakers, community groups, retailers who want to prevent youth access, and former adult smokers who have successfully switched to the vapor products that could be banned by this extreme measure — which would also leave combustible cigarettes on store shelves,” Juul spokesman Ted Kwong said in an email.

Kwong added that the company shares San Francisco’s goal to “severely” restrict youth access to e-cigarettes, “but in a way that preserves the opportunity for adult smokers to switch away from combustible cigarettes, which are still the number one cause of preventable death in the world.”

The company has also hired several veteran San Francisco campaign consultants to help steer its ballot initiative, assuming Walton and Herrera’s legislation passes the Board of Supervisors: Mark Mosher, who recently worked on Catherine Stefani’s successful election to the board, received $12,500 from Juul last month for consulting work. Nate Albee, a former campaign consultant for Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Rafael Mandelman, received $20,000. Albee is also a former legislative aide to Ronen.

Mosher and Albee said they had personally used e-cigarettes to transition away from combustible ones and stressed that, like alcohol and cannabis, vapor products should be tightly regulated, but not banned outright. Veteran Chinatown tenant organizer and campaign consultant David Ho has also been hired. Ho did not respond to a request for comment.

A separate Ethics Commission filing shows that Juul also paid $20,680 in April to the San Francisco firm New Deal Advisers to lobby lawmakers directly about Walton and Herrera’s legislation. Lobbyist Chris Gruwell with the firm made direct contacts with the entire Board of Supervisors or their staffs on Juul’s behalf — with the exception of Ronen and Walton, records show.

Gruwell declined to comment.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa

May 20, 2019|Updated May 21, 2019

GAIN Statement on DAPL Environmental Assessment Ruling

March 25, 2020

The U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, ruled this afternoon that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the already approved and operational Dakota Access Pipeline. As we have stated exhaustively, The Army Corps met or exceeded all guidelines when conducting its review of the Environmental Assessment and permitting of the line. North Dakota also conducted a 13-month review before they allowed construction to move forward.

Below is a statement that you can attribute to me, Craig Stevens, spokesperson for the GAIN Coalition and former senior advisor to U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman:

“This is a stunning decision that flies in the face of decades of widely accepted practice. The Dakota Access Pipeline is already the most studied, regulated, and litigated pipeline in the history of our country and has been safely operating for nearly three years. These companies that invest and support large scale infrastructure projects want certainty from the government; and those who built and now operate the pipeline followed every applicable local, state, and federal rule – but now a court is putting their work in potential peril. Not only does this decision risk one company’s investment, but it could also jeopardize our nation’s economic and energy security moving forward.”

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sock Puppets

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

img

*Image Credit: Twitter

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

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

Image Credit: Twitter

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

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

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

*Eva Longoria doppelgänger; Photo Credit: Twitter | Oliver Keyes

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

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

MAIN and DCI Group

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

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

*Image Credit: PR Newswire

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

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

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

DCI's Role

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

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

*Image Credit: WhoIs.net

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

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

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

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

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

===

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MMA

A retired general wrote numerous op-eds attacking pipeline protesters without disclosing his financial ties to the pipeline industry, including to a security contractor that has used “counterterrorism measures” against those protesters. That deception has led at least one publication to prohibit him from writing in its pages in the future.

James “Spider” Marks serves as a CNN military analyst after retiring from the Army under the rank of major general. He is also the advisory board chair for the international security firm TigerSwan.

Energy Transfer Partners hired TigerSwan to provide security for the Dakota Access Pipeline. As The Intercept has documented in past months, TigerSwan used “military-style counterterrorism measures” against protesters and conducted “sweeping and invasive surveillance of” them. In interviews with Grist, several legal experts “described the contractor’s tactics as highly disturbing and perhaps unprecedented.”

The North Dakota Private Investigative and Security Board filed a lawsuit in June against TigerSwan for operating without a license in the state. In Louisiana, regulators cited that suit this month when they denied a license for the firm in their state, which is considering a proposed 162-mile Bayou Bridge pipeline.

A spokesperson for Energy Transfer Partners told Media Matters in a July 21 email that “TigerSwan is one of our security advisors.” The company added that its specific work with TigerSwan in North Dakota has endedand declined to comment beyond that regarding the “details of our security efforts.”

The internal documents given to The Intercept also revealed that in the past year, “TigerSwan agents stressed the need to change the public narrative established by protestors and to swing public support in favor of the pipeline.”

Marks has been an integral part of a nationwide pro-pipelines P.R. effort to swing public support for pipelines, including writing numerous pieces for outlets across the country. Those pieces include:

a November 17 op-edin the Omaha World-Herald headlined “Pipeline smear campaign must end”;

a November 18 op-ed in the Washington Examiner headlined “The Army Corps of Engineers deserves thanks, not attacks, for Dakota Access Pipeline work”;

a February 8 Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA) op-ed headlined “Bayou Bridge pipeline: Bringing safety and security to Louisiana”;

a May 24 PennLive.com op-ed headlined “Here's why Pa. should be wary of professional pipeline protesters”;

a July 1 Washington Examiner op-ed headlined "Qatar blockade underscores America's world opportunity in natural gas"; and

a July 12 Daily Caller op-ed headlined “Protect Our National Economy By Harnessing Our Natural Gas Supply.”

None of those pieces included disclosures about Marks’ position with TigerSwan. Both The Interceptand DeSmogBlog have reported that Marks’ op-eds have run in media outlets without disclosures to readers.

John L. Micek, opinion editor for PennLive, said that Marks misled the publication and if he had disclosed his ties to TigerSwan, the piece never would have run.

“At no time did Gen. Marks nor his public relations people disclose their ties to TigerSwan,” Micek told Media Matters on July 20. “Had I been aware of those ties, the piece categorically would not have run. PennLive is in the business of being transparent with its readers and we object strongly to this tie being obscured by Mr. Marks and his public relations firm.”

PennLive posted an update to its piece on July 20 stating: “The author is advisory board chair to TigerSwan, a private security firm monitoring the pipeline's construction. He failed to disclose these ties to PennLive. His work will not appear on the website again.”

Media Matters asked TigerSwan whether Marks should have disclosed his connection. A spokesperson responded via email: “Mr. Marks was not representing TigerSwan.”

Marks has also worked as a paid adviser for the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN), whose members include oil and gas companies. According to DeSmogBlog, that organization has “morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN),” which also includes Marks as an adviser and oil and gas interests as members. (Both MAIN and GAIN have been fronted by Craig Stevens, who is vice president of the Republican public relations firm DCI Group.)

The Daily Caller and Examiner's July 1 piece included disclosures that Marks works for GAIN but they did not disclose that the coalition includes oil and gas interests. The World-Herald, Examiner on November 18, Daily Advertiser and PennLive (originally) just identified Marks as a retired major general and the head of the consulting firm The Marks Collaborative.

By Eric Hananoki

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[An Ounce of Grace is Worth a Pound of Frustration

:{[\Doug Goodyear\](

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ACoAAADar9cBFZ6EE24GBmgfdAPo9dekKWmbdoY), one of [DCI Group]

(https://www.linkedin.com/company/dci-group/)’s founding partners, would remind us several times a year to “let people off the mat”. With that admonition he was saying that everyone deserves a second, or third chance at success. Explaining that part of our role as managers was also to teach and be understanding as people learn.}:

In defining grace, [Dictionary.com](http://dictionary.com/) uses "favor or goodwill".

We’ve all needed another’s favor or goodwill at some point, whether on the job, in a personal relationship, or maybe even while driving.

I've found many times my immediate frustration is lightened by taking a step back, taking a deep breath, and giving some grace.

At DCI Group, we work at the high stakes intersection of policy and politics. Our culture demands excellence. But excellence only comes through practice, error, remediation, and learning. Mistakes happen – we all fall short of our high expectations sometimes.

What's important is to ensure mistakes are corrected before they leave the building and leverage those experiences as learning opportunities with emerging colleagues.

Sometimes, it’s just remembering that I’ve been writing message points, press releases, and op-eds longer than half of my colleagues have been alive! With that perspective, it’s incumbent upon me to share constructive feedback in a humble, understanding, and direct way.

For me, every boss I’ve ever had, and certainly many colleagues and friends continue to show me grace.

Living on the razor’s edge as a government spokesperson, the goal to be quoted sometimes got me in some hot water. Fortunately, I had principals who were patient, resilient, and battled-tested. And, they provided me grace...

Energy Secretary Sam Bodman put me in timeout over a quote that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. In paying my penance, he reminded me, “The people who are upset about your quote call me…not you.” And then there was HHS Secretary Thompson, who was ready to put my mistake behind him and recommended I do the same, advising me “that when you’re in a hole, quit digging”.

In my nearly 15 years at DCI Group – and certainly as a parent – I hope that I’ve grown and learned to provide grace. But I know that I don’t do it often enough. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, we should “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” Sometimes that feels downright impossible.

But it’s something that I aspire to.

President Bush said, “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.”

Whether it’s groups or individuals, coming at challenging situations, disagreements, or growth opportunities with grace and understanding can help us all move forward.](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7162893542036594688/)

---

INTERCEPT

The Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report.

Exxon Mobil did not return The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment. In an email, PPI Executive Director Lindsay Lewis said the money was used for general support and that “we only accept general support funding from corporate interests, we do not do paid for work/research or have any donor run programs.”

Lewis also confirmed that this is the first time Exxon Mobil has donated to the Third Way Foundation.

Though it’s a first, PPI’s new donor isn’t so dramatic a shift from its fundraising record. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy has also found that PhRMA — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has annually donated between $25,000 and $75,000 to the Third Way Foundation since 2009, upping its donation to $265,000 in 2016 — the same year that Medicare for All, which the trade group and PPI both oppose, entered the national spotlight. Donations dipped back to normal levels in 2017, although documents were not yet available for 2018 when the piece was published in late April.

[

Bernie Sanders’s Climate Plan Is More Radical Than His Opponents’ — And More Likely to Succeed](https://theintercept.com/2019/08/22/bernie-sanders-climate-policy/)

In the last couple years, Exxon has taken up softer messaging on climate than either the Koch brothers or the Mercer family. With business all over the world, Exxon — like every other multinational oil company — is well-accustomed to operating in environments where denying the reality of the climate emergency outright is politically unthinkable. As climate concerns spike around the U.S., the company is still plenty opposed to environmental regulations and the lawsuits being lobbed its way from climate-vulnerable communities and attorneys general, who are each calling into question Exxon’s rule in fueling both the climate crisis and misinformation campaigns about it. Rather than paying people to say that there’s no problem at all, it can rebrand as a good-faith actor in the climate fight with paeans to carbon capture technology, low-carbon fuels (algae!), and carbon taxes that also conveniently exempt it from some of the lawsuits and regulations it’s most worried about. The decades of climate denial Exxon helped fund — and now the Trump administration — have dragged the national debate on climate change so far into the gutter that there are influential liberals willing to give the company credit simply for not denying the science.

This all dovetails well with a centrist approach to climate politics that’s long sought common ground with industry and harbors both temperamental and ideological opposition to big, confrontational proposals like the Green New Deal. The upshot is that they’ve started to sound a lot alike. Carbon capture, R&D, and carbon pricing — while not mutually exclusive with the Green New Deal framework that the Sunrise Movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have begun to flesh out — have reliably been wielded as a cudgel by establishment types against calls for more sweeping action.

Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, noted that the report indicates the money PPI received was through a “corporate” grant, rather than through the ExxonMobil Foundation. “We have never sussed how these two black boxes of money are managed or dolled out. So if you grab the ExxonMobil Foundation 990s, there are sometimes different descriptions or breakdowns of the funding, but this grant won’t be there,” he wrote in an email. “There is no need for public accounting of such grants. No obligation. But they have seemed compelled to disclosed them through the years.”

Of course, $50,000 is not an enormous amount of money either for PPI or Exxon Mobil. But it may well signal a shift in the fossil fuel industry’s relationship to climate politics.

$50,000 is not an enormous amount of money either for PPI or Exxon Mobil. But it may well signal a shift in the fossil fuel industry’s relationship to climate politics.

:{:{For years, Exxon Mobil prolifically funded climate denier groups like the Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. Under pressure, the company pledged to stop funding deniers in 2007, although it kept bankrolling politicians who deny the reality of the climate crisis. Exxon also still support right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, which received $970,200 from Exxon between 2008 and 2018.}:

As recently as 2011, MI Senior Fellow Robert Bryce said “the science is not settled” on climate change. Another MI Senior Fellow, Oren Cass, last year — the year after three of the five most expensive hurricanes to have ever hit the Atlantic — authored a report arguing that the potential costs of climate change are overblown, suggesting that many people prefer warmer temperatures and could adapt easily to global warming.

In addition to Exxon, MI is — like other flagrant denier groups — funded by the Mercer Family Foundation; Rebekah Mercer, a key financier of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, runs the foundation and sits on the MI board. Exxon also continues to give large donations the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and remains a member of the American Petroleum Institute, each of which has fought hard against environmental regulations and climate measures. The oil company only left the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in 2017, four years after it pushed model legislation in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona that described global warming as a “theory.”}:

Itai Vardi reported at DeSmog this summer that Phil Goldberg, director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, has come out swinging against climate lawsuits being brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies. The law firm at which Goldberg is a partner — Shook, Hardy & Bacon — defended the tobacco industry for decades and was the inspiration for the fictional firm Smoot, Hawking in the 2005 film “Thank You For Smoking.” As a slew of lawsuits has begun to call into question fossil fuel companies’ role in fueling and spreading misinformation about the climate crisis, the industry has stepped into high gear to fight off litigation.

Goldberg is a former lobbyist for the coal company Peabody Energy who was brought on as special counsel by the National Association of Manufacturers in January as part of its Manufacturers Accountability Project, founded in 2017 to take on “activist litigation” against big oil companies; Exxon Mobil is a NAM member, and the MAP project has been among the most active bodies fighting off climate-related legal action. Both Peabody and NAM have also donated generously to climate denial groups over the years. Both, for instance, were members of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, which through the 1990s sought to undermine U.N. climate negotiations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Goldberg has also been an adviser for ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. In addition to the model legislation on global warming, ALEC has vigorously opposed climate and clean energy legislation around the country.

Lewis said that Goldberg works with PPI in a volunteer capacity and is not employed by the Third Way Foundation, despite his lofty title. Evidently, he’s vocally defending fossil fuel companies out of the goodness of his heart.

:{:{In March, Goldberg co-authored a report for the industry front group Grow America’s Infrastructure Now on how to bring legal action against anti-pipeline organizers. “Allowing vigilante regulation to go unchecked undermines our democracy. We honor civil protests in this country, but we should not have to accept improper efforts to overturn the rule of law,” Goldberg said in a press release. “People who violate the law by improperly interfering with legitimate business activities, even to advance a political or public policy preference, can be held accountable for their actions through civil litigation.”}:

While not disclosed on the group’s website, GAIN spokesperson Craig Stevens is a partner at the DCI Group, which specializes in astroturf campaigns that have fought everything from anti-smoking laws to climate legislation. From 2005 through 2016, Exxon Mobil was a DCI client. In another detail not mentioned on the GAIN site, the group’s strategic adviser is James “Spider” Marks, who as of 2017 was the advisory board chair of the security firm TigerSwan, which — as The Intercept has documented extensively — engaged in “military-style counterterrorism measures” against anti-pipeline protesters.}:

Asked whether Goldberg’s positions on climate litigation were also PPI’s, Lewis replied, “PPI, which has long advocated for cap and trade, a carbon tax, and other polices to combat climate change, believes such policies should be made in representative legislatures, not the courts.” In short, yes.

Throughout the 2020 campaign cycle, PPI strategic adviser and Clinton White House insider Paul Bledsoe has commented frequently about the dangers of candidates being too hard on fossil fuels. “[Joe] Biden and other moderate candidates must emphasize that the market is already phasing out coal over time, but that their climate policies still allow a role for natural gas as a low-carbon transition fuel for some time,” he told the Washington Examiner in August. “This distinction is crucial to success in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” In a New York Times piece about Biden’s critics on the left, Bledsoe said, “Indulging in ideological purity is great until you actually want to solve the problem.”

“Happily,” he wrote in a February Forbes op-ed attacking the Green New Deal, “there is no need to eliminate fossil fuels in the next decade or require only renewable energy or guarantee public sector jobs to meet our climate goals.” We might never find out what Exxon Mobil’s money got up to at PPI last year. If its experts keep sounding like Bledsoe and Goldberg, though, it’ll probably keep coming.

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POLITICO

...HOOPLA, DANCING, CHAMPAGNE CORKS A-POPPING: The Paris Climate Agreement goes into force today, officially launching the 195-nation agreement that aims to stem the rising tide of climate change. To date, about half of those countries, responsible for 66 percent of global emissions, have ratified the agreement, more than enough to clear key accord thresholds, according to the World Resources Institute. “Humanity will look back on November 4, 2016, as the day that countries of the world shut the door on inevitable climate disaster and set off with determination towards a sustainable future,” Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Salaheddine Mezouar, the Moroccan President of COP22, wrote in an op-ed released Thursday night.

Party’s over, now get to work:After years of urgently working toward an international climate agreement, a speedy ratification has left negotiators suddenly over their skis. The first meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement will take place on Nov. 15, but it will have to be suspended while negotiators work out the rules and guidelines for future discussions. In addition, the nations that have not yet ratified the agreement cannot participate in negotiations (though they can observe). Negotiators will work through an ad hoc group that can include these countries to lay out the rules and wait for more ratifications to take place.

The hard part:Climate negotiations that kick off next week in Marrakech, will dig deep into how best to implement the agreement. The U.S. will keep up the pace, hoping to get the procedural issues resolved in time for a key 2018 reassessment of national goals. “Paris was the beginning,” U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing said in a conference call Thursday. “We’re on a rapid time table.”

Not so fast, say GOP senators: Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe and 13 of his GOP colleagues sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry insisting that “the administration has not been forthright in acknowledging the legal limitations of the president’s domestic climate actions.” The letter says the majority of the U.S. Congress opposes the agreement, and “any future administration will have numerous options to forego President Obama’s political commitments under the Paris Agreement and the fact that it will soon be in force is of no consequence.”

ENERGY GROUPS STAY AWAY FROM POTUS RACE:Hillary Clinton raised just more than $61,000 from energy and environmentalist PACs, out of her overall haul of $513 million, while just $21,000 of Donald Trump’s $255 million total came from energy PACs. Clinton’s biggest energy donations include $10,000 from FuelCell Energy, $7,700 from Renewable Energy Systems Americas and $7,500 from St. Louis-based utility Ameren. Trump did well with coal groups, adding $10,000 to his coffers from Murray Energy’s PAC, $2,700 from coal mining equipment maker JH Fletcher & Co. and $1,000 from the Ohio Coal Association. Pro’s Alex Guillén has more on how energy and environmental interests spent their political cash in the latest edition of Energy Influence.

Speaking of campaign spending, the League of Conservation Voters is out with a memo today detailing their most extensive spending in an election cycle to date. The green group says it spent $45 million (up from an earlier estimate of $40 million), knocked on 2.5 million doors and aired more than 20 TV and digital ads.

EXXON LAWYERS WARN GROUPS: KEEP YOUR EMAILS:Lawyers with Exxon Mobil recently warned nonprofit groups targeting the company over its climate change record that all of their communications with the media could become part of the court record in its legal battle with New York’s and Massachusetts’ attorneys general, Pro’s Elana Schor reports. In an Oct. 20 letter to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Exxon lawyer Justin Anderson expressed particular interest in records between the group and “members of the press,” former Vice President Al Gore, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, climate activist Kenny Bruno, and lawyers Sharon Eubanks, Matt Pawa and Linda Singer.

Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon, tells ME: “We have no choice but to defend ourselves against politically motivated investigations that are biased, in bad faith and without legal merit. We did not start this, but we will see it through and will vigorously defend ourselves.”

INDUSTRY SCOFFS AT DAKOTA ACCESS REPORT:Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the pro-pipeline Midwest Alliance of Infrastructure Now Coalition, is not impressed by a report released Tuesday calling the Army Corps of Engineers’ review of the Dakota Access pipeline “seriously deficient.” Dakota Access opponents released the report, prepared by a consultant who has worked with industry and environmental groups and who sits on a federal pipeline advisory committee. It would be “ludicrous” to consider those findings with the same weight as government analysis of the project, Stevens told ME in a statement. “Had this been an industry-funded screed it would be immediately dismissed. This should be given that same value,” said Stevens, a vice president at the DCI Group....

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