There is even more bad news for the cabal of climate alarmists and crony capitalists hoping to abuse the legal system to silence dissenters. The rogue prosecutors behind the persecution of climate-change skeptics became embroiled in yet another scandal last week, this time getting caught conspiring to evade freedom of information laws to conceal their scheming from public scrutiny.
It turns out that the coalition of more than a dozen alarmist state attorneys general, styling itself “AGs United for Clean Power,” sought to hide their machinations from the public by concocting a “common interest agreement” among themselves and their allies.
However, legal experts behind the discovery are crying foul and calling for the officials implicated in the scandal to be reined in before more people are victimized. The experts also warned that the AGs involved have subjected their offices to potential civil-rights lawsuits by the victims they targeted in the quest to quash free speech.
“We have confirmed that the Democratic AGs are citing a Common Interest Agreement to avoid releasing crucial information to the public, as they continue their abuse of power,” explained Legal General Counsel David Schnare with the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), which uncovered the scandal while pursuing public records related to the prosecutors’ witch-hunt. “The earlier draft we obtained showed the desire to exempt AGs’ correspondence, which are deemed public records by their legislatures, from open records laws if they related not just to defense of the Obama administration’s EPA rules, but to investigations and nearly anything else they might not want released involving ‘fossil fuels,’ ‘renewable energy,’ or ‘climate.'” The terms of the deal seem to have made it into the new, still-secret agreement, the organization added.
Of course, it is hardly the first time the state AGs involved in the crusade have found themselves under fire for their controversial attack on free speech. Indeed, according to University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the rogue prosecutors appear to be engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” to deprive their victims of constitutionally protected rights in violation of federal law. “In pursuing this action, they are betraying their oaths of office, abusing their powers and behaving unethically as attorneys,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for USA Today, the largest newspaper in America by circulation. The penalty for such criminal conspiracies under the relevant statute includes up to a decade in prison, or even death if a kidnapping or death results.
