Has been a long ongoing process. The fascists have nearly won, but America continues to resist. Case in point...
Exxon’s Inquisitors Feel the Heat
Court filings reveal the true aim of this ‘fraud’ case: silencing conservatives.
ENLARGE
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey with other state attorneys general announcing an effort to combat climate change, March 29. Photo: Reuters
By
Kimberley A. Strassel
June 16, 2016 6:44 p.m. ET
319 COMMENTS
The first thing to know about the crusade against Exxon XOM -0.55 % by state attorneys general is that it isn’t about the law. The second thing to know is that it isn’t even about Exxon. What these liberal prosecutors really want is to shut down a universe of their most-hated ideological opponents.
That became startlingly clear this week, with Exxon’s latest filing in federal court. The oil company revealed that it has received another subpoena for documents, this one from Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. But Ms. Healey, whose fervor exceeds her political sense, gives away the game.
The 17 attorneys general participating in this cause have always been careful to identify Exxon as their only target. It’s easier to accuse a big, bad oil company of nefarious deeds, so they make the bogus claim that Exxon somehow “defrauded” the public and its shareholders by engaging in “climate denial.” All the better if they can beat Exxon into cutting a giant check to settle any future charges—a payoff for their states (and for the trial lawyers helping them).
But the Healey subpoena shows that Exxon is a front. The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points—and that therefore must (as the left sees things) be muzzled. This is clear from the crazy list of organizations Ms. Healey asked for information about in her subpoena. She demanded that Exxon turn over decades of correspondence with any of them.
Take Americans for Prosperity. AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon. But its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections, and it receives funding from the left’s favorite boogeymen, Charles and David Koch.
Or, closer to home: Ms. Healey named the Beacon Hill Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Boston. My sources confirm Beacon Hill has also never seen Exxon dollars. But it is a perpetual thorn in the side of liberal Massachusetts politicians like Ms. Healey.
Also named: the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate. The group is, however, one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation, having written hundreds of model bills that states use in their efforts to reduce taxes, cut regulations and reform tort laws. Democratic activists have, for the past five years in particular, waged a vicious campaign to run ALEC out of business, and Ms. Healey is now doing her bit.
The same tactics were on display in a subpoena to Exxon from Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker. He appears to have cut-and-pasted from an anti-Exxon website maintained by Greenpeace, since his subpoena lists the same groups in pretty much the same order. The exercise was so sloppy that Mr. Walker named numerous organizations that have been defunct for years, listed several targets twice, and misidentified others.
The goal of the Exxon probe isn’t to protect consumers or help the environment. It’s a message: Oppose us, and we will marshal our terrifying government powers to intimidate and threaten you, to force you to spend millions defending yourself, to eat up the time you’d otherwise use speaking out.
The Exxon investigation is “pure harassment,” civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate told the Boston Herald this week. “It is outrageous for any law enforcement official,” he continued, “to be seeking to win this battle for minds by flexing law enforcement muscle and trying to shut up the other side.”
That goal is all the more clear given the dishonesty of the legal claim. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pursuing Exxon under his state’s sweeping Martin Act, which covers securities fraud. Yet at a recent panel discussion in New York, Columbia Law Professor Merritt B. Fox noted that Exxon’s actions were irrelevant in a market already “well supplied with information about climate change.” He skewered Mr. Schneiderman for pursuing a case “so unlikely” to “be a winner.” This was even as he expressed solidarity with concerns about global warming.
The attorneys general are feeling so much pushback that Mr. Schneiderman felt compelled to give a speech last week delineating his own made-up limits on free speech. Groups that question his harassment of them are engaged in “First Amendment opportunism,” he said, and any right they claim is trumped, apparently, by his righteous, self-defined calling to pursue “fraud.” He clearly sent this memo to his persecutors-in-arms, since Ms. Healey was parroting the same lines this week in response to questions about her subpoena.
The Exxon campaign is only the latest in liberals’ broad, coordinated strategy to shut down conservatives. We’ve seen it in the IRS targeting, the Wisconsin John Doe probe, the campaign against ALEC, the harassment of conservative donors. And the only way to stop it is for targets to speak out—even louder.
Ms. Strassel is the author of “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech,” out next week from Twelve. Write to kim@wsj.com.
Exxon’s Inquisitors Feel the Heat
Court filings reveal the true aim of this ‘fraud’ case: silencing conservatives.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey with other state attorneys general announcing an effort to combat climate change, March 29. Photo: Reuters
By
Kimberley A. Strassel
June 16, 2016 6:44 p.m. ET
319 COMMENTS
The first thing to know about the crusade against Exxon XOM -0.55 % by state attorneys general is that it isn’t about the law. The second thing to know is that it isn’t even about Exxon. What these liberal prosecutors really want is to shut down a universe of their most-hated ideological opponents.
That became startlingly clear this week, with Exxon’s latest filing in federal court. The oil company revealed that it has received another subpoena for documents, this one from Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. But Ms. Healey, whose fervor exceeds her political sense, gives away the game.
The 17 attorneys general participating in this cause have always been careful to identify Exxon as their only target. It’s easier to accuse a big, bad oil company of nefarious deeds, so they make the bogus claim that Exxon somehow “defrauded” the public and its shareholders by engaging in “climate denial.” All the better if they can beat Exxon into cutting a giant check to settle any future charges—a payoff for their states (and for the trial lawyers helping them).
But the Healey subpoena shows that Exxon is a front. The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points—and that therefore must (as the left sees things) be muzzled. This is clear from the crazy list of organizations Ms. Healey asked for information about in her subpoena. She demanded that Exxon turn over decades of correspondence with any of them.
Take Americans for Prosperity. AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon. But its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections, and it receives funding from the left’s favorite boogeymen, Charles and David Koch.
Or, closer to home: Ms. Healey named the Beacon Hill Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Boston. My sources confirm Beacon Hill has also never seen Exxon dollars. But it is a perpetual thorn in the side of liberal Massachusetts politicians like Ms. Healey.
Also named: the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate. The group is, however, one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation, having written hundreds of model bills that states use in their efforts to reduce taxes, cut regulations and reform tort laws. Democratic activists have, for the past five years in particular, waged a vicious campaign to run ALEC out of business, and Ms. Healey is now doing her bit.
The same tactics were on display in a subpoena to Exxon from Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker. He appears to have cut-and-pasted from an anti-Exxon website maintained by Greenpeace, since his subpoena lists the same groups in pretty much the same order. The exercise was so sloppy that Mr. Walker named numerous organizations that have been defunct for years, listed several targets twice, and misidentified others.
The goal of the Exxon probe isn’t to protect consumers or help the environment. It’s a message: Oppose us, and we will marshal our terrifying government powers to intimidate and threaten you, to force you to spend millions defending yourself, to eat up the time you’d otherwise use speaking out.
The Exxon investigation is “pure harassment,” civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate told the Boston Herald this week. “It is outrageous for any law enforcement official,” he continued, “to be seeking to win this battle for minds by flexing law enforcement muscle and trying to shut up the other side.”
That goal is all the more clear given the dishonesty of the legal claim. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pursuing Exxon under his state’s sweeping Martin Act, which covers securities fraud. Yet at a recent panel discussion in New York, Columbia Law Professor Merritt B. Fox noted that Exxon’s actions were irrelevant in a market already “well supplied with information about climate change.” He skewered Mr. Schneiderman for pursuing a case “so unlikely” to “be a winner.” This was even as he expressed solidarity with concerns about global warming.
The attorneys general are feeling so much pushback that Mr. Schneiderman felt compelled to give a speech last week delineating his own made-up limits on free speech. Groups that question his harassment of them are engaged in “First Amendment opportunism,” he said, and any right they claim is trumped, apparently, by his righteous, self-defined calling to pursue “fraud.” He clearly sent this memo to his persecutors-in-arms, since Ms. Healey was parroting the same lines this week in response to questions about her subpoena.
The Exxon campaign is only the latest in liberals’ broad, coordinated strategy to shut down conservatives. We’ve seen it in the IRS targeting, the Wisconsin John Doe probe, the campaign against ALEC, the harassment of conservative donors. And the only way to stop it is for targets to speak out—even louder.
Ms. Strassel is the author of “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech,” out next week from Twelve. Write to kim@wsj.com.
