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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Open Thread: The House Will Investigate Trump’s Oil Barons

Open Thread: The House Will Investigate Trump’s Oil Barons

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Open Thread: Investigating Trump's Oil Barons

(Ann Telnase via the Washington Post)

 

Per the Washington Post, “House Democrats launch probe of Trump’s dinner with oil executives”:

… The probe comes after The Washington Post on Thursday first reported the fundraising dinner, where Trump said that giving $1 billion would be a “deal” because of the taxation and regulation the oil companies would avoid thanks to him, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

In letters sent Monday evening, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee asked nine oil executives to provide detailed information on their companies’ participation in the meeting. The Democrats voiced concern that Trump’s request at the dinner may have been a quid pro quo and may have violated campaign finance laws, although experts say his conduct probably did not cross the threshold of being illegal.

Lawmakers sent the letters to the CEOs of Cheniere Energy, Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, Continental Resources, EQT Corporation, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and Venture Global. They also fired off a missive to the head of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s top lobbying arm in Washington.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, asked the executives to provide the names and titles of any company representatives who attended the Mar-a-Lago dinner, copies of any materials shared with the attendees, a description of any policy proposals discussed at the event, and a list of any contributions to the Trump campaign made during or after the event.

Raskin also asked the executives to provide a copy of any draft executive orders or policy paperwork that their companies have prepared for Trump or his campaign. Politico reported that oil industry lawyers and lobbyists have drawn up executive orders for Trump to sign in a possible second term, including directives aimed at boosting natural gas exports and offshore oil drilling.

Asked about the letter, Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, said in an email: “The premise of Mr. Raskin’s letter is patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future — one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas. As the leading voice for America’s energy workforce, API regularly meets with policymakers and candidates and shares our priorities.”…

Experts said Trump’s remarks at the dinner probably didn’t violate campaign finance laws as currently interpreted by the Federal Election Commission and the Supreme Court. They said a violation would need to involve a clear quid pro quo in which Trump promised to take a specific policy action in exchange for a specific campaign contribution…

 
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire, with more details — “Donald Trump Has Put a Literal Price on the Future of the Planet”:

One billion dollars.

For that bargain price, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago will sell you this planet and the lives of everyone living on it now, as well as the lives of every generation to come, for as long as there are generations to come…

Basically, the former president* proposed a gentler form of the proposition “Nice planet you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.” The difference is that the people he was talking to were making the same offer to the rest of us.

Trump vowed at the dinner to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports—a top priority for the executives, according to three people present. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the recollection of an attendee. The roughly two dozen executives invited included Mike Sabel, the CEO and founder of Venture Global, and Jack Fusco, the CEO of Cheniere Energy, whose proposed projects would directly benefit from lifting the pause on new LNG exports. Other attendees came from companies including Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, according to an attendance list obtained by The Post.

Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a priority that several of the executives raised. He railed against wind power, as The Post previously reported. And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. “You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives, according to the recollection of the attendee. At the dinner, Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s “mandate” on electric vehicles—mischaracterizing ambitious rules that the Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized, according to people who attended. The rules require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes, but they don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called the rules “ridiculous” in the meeting with donors.

This is not climate denialism. This is deliberate destruction for profit. As we have learned over the past several years, the executives in the extraction industry knew the nature of the damage, and the extent of it, long before the rest of us did, and they lied like tobacco experts about what they knew. That probably is still the case, despite the attention the climate crisis has drawn. They simply don’t care, and they’ve cultivated politicians who either don’t care or are too stupid to know why they should, as the small towns back home get blown across state lines by what appears to be an endless chain of tornadoes. With his predator’s instinct for quid pro quo, the former president* was simply honest enough to name his price.

From Laurie Garrett’s helpful reminder thread (‘History may not repeat itself, but it *rhymes*’):

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    Spanky

    Funny how the WaPo states that “experts” say this isn’t illegal without ever saying who they are or what makes them such great experts.

  2. 2.

    Betty Cracker

    Good for the House Dems. Absurdly, the openly corrupt quid pro quo proposition may not be legally actionable, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops regardless.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    Biden, by contrast, won’t even name his price for green policies.

    Speaks volumes.

  4. 4.

    Joe Falco

    The 90’s kid in me can appreciate how Trump talks like a villain from the Captain Planet cartoon.

  5. 5.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Baud: Biden, by contrast, won’t even name his price for green policies.

    If you have to ask you can’t afford it. /s

  6. 6.

    smith

    They said a violation would need to involve a clear quid pro quo in which Trump promised to take a specific policy action in exchange for a specific campaign contribution…

    I don’t see how what he said doesn’t meet these criteria. He named his price and listed the specific policy actions he would take in return. Seems at least as clear cut as the hush money case to me. But, IANAL…

  7. 7.

    TaMara

    How is it only f-ing Wednesday? I feel like this week has been two weeks long. Of course, I’m sleep-deprived because of that excellent Nuggets game last night. But, seriously, have all my clients forgotten how money works?

    And I know he’s cute, but my house looks like it was hit by a hurricane despite my best efforts.

    /whining

  9. 9.

    CaseyL

    SCOTUS has defined corruption as saying, specifically, “If you give me X, I will do Y for you.” Money changing hands and policies changing to suit whoever made the payment isn’t bribery unless it is specifically called a bribe by one of the participants. This was an outrageously bad faith opinion, as everyone knew at the moment it dropped.

    It says something about Trump’s stupidity, or arrogance, that he has pretty well crossed even that dumbshit threshold. But since he didn’t reference a specific bill by name and the date it’s submitted to Congress, SCOTUS will say it’s not a bribe.

  12. 12.

    BruceFromOhio

    “The premise of Mr. Raskin’s letter is patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future … “

    ISWYDT.

    These two-bit soulless ratfuck criminals know they done bad.  Now its gonna be twisty twisting tryna undo what’s done. At least they know someone is watching , let it be a warning to others.

  13. 13.

    Quadrillipede

    I’m a strong/hard agnostic myself, but this Unitarian Church sermon resonated with me on some level regarding current circumstances, and might be of more general value:

    Today, though, I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality. I think maybe something similar happens to a lot of you also, but we tend not to talk about things like this, so I don’t really know.

    The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.

    […]

    Ever since February I’ve been wandering around asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over.  So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Get a good night’s sleep. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody. Snuggle with a pet.

    […]

    I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out how to organize humanity to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it’s even bending that way at all. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.

    […]

    My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

  15. 15.

    moops

    Well, MY experts say this is soliciting bribes, and should result in an indictment.

     

    At least the House Dems are attacking, and that might be enough to blunt some of the money the oil industry will channel to Trump.  It will cost the oil industry a lot of money to shut up the Democratic party about this.

  17. 17.

    Honus

    @smith: IAAL and I’d bring that case.  I’m with Spanky, who are these legal experts and what’s their basis for it not being illegal?

  18. 18.

    TBone

    @Honus: sounded pretty specific to me, especially with the oil company attorneys writing up the specific legislation they want in return for one billion dollars.

    The federal bribery statute prohibits both actual and attempted bribery, and it imposes penalties for both the party offering the bribe and the party receiving it (in the event of an actual, rather than attempted, bribe). We’ll cover the provisions of the statute that apply to “giving,” “offering,” or “promising” a bribe first: …

    https://federal-lawyer.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-federal-bribery-statute/?amp

  20. 20.

    Quadrillipede

    @Martin: I really should put some time aside to watch Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I tend to balk at anything that’s more than an hour long these days. OTOH there is such a thing as a pause button… 📺👀🤔

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    @Betty Cracker: The rationale, as I remember and understand it, is that they didn’t want elected officials being locked up in a room where they couldn’t talk to people and couldn’t do the people’s business.  That every conversation they had would be scrutinized by bad-faith actors for possible corruption, every elected official would be in court all the time and wouldn’t be able to do their jobs.

    Yeah, it made no sense to me, either.  Bob McDonnell was clearly selling his office.  He was blatant about it.  Grr…

    But even if one accepts that rationale, it doesn’t apply to TIFG because he’s not an elected official.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    Honus

    @TBone: and trump saying “give me this much money and I’ll do this” Usually you don’t have such a specific ask for a bribe, which may be perplexing the “experts”  How can it be a bribe if it’s so obviously a quid pro quo bribe?  It boils down to trump being so obviously and openly corrupt that people can’t believe it.

  23. 23.

    moops

    I fully expect $1B to show up in Trump’s super PAC over the next month, and nothing will be done about it.

     

    I hold out the small hope that Trump will rob this PAC to spend on lawyers instead of campaigning.

  24. 24.

    smith

    @Another Scott: Of course, at the time of the ruling we were unaware of the extent to which some members of SCOTUS were themselves receiving extravagant gifts. Could be the bar was set so high for reasons?

  25. 25.

    TBone

    @Honus: at the link I posted: solicitation for bribery is also illegal.

    They can call it whatever fancy cockamamie bullshit names they want to gin up, but it’s plain for all to see who have eyes and a functioning brain.

  26. 26.

    smith

    Thinkng about it, it’s strange that the Defendant thought this would be a good way to extract money from them. The fact is, any Republican president would make those policy  changes in their favor — it’s just what Republicans do. Any Republican president would expect generous campaign donations from them as well, but there’d be no need to speak of a quid pro quo. It would just happen, because it’s business as usual in that world.

  27. 27.

    Elizabelle

    At least Warren G. Harding had the grace to die two and one half years into his first term as POTUS.

    WRT the Supreme Court:  pretty sure Biden will work to expand it in his second term.  You cannot have all your hard work and the common good come undone by corruption and malfeasance.

  28. 28.

    Ken

    @Betty Cracker: The McDonnell decision was unanimous too. Makes no sense to me.

    Hypothetically, if members of the Supreme Court were themselves accepting generous gifts from persons with business before the court, and later ruling in their favor — would it then make sense?

    EDIT: I see smith got there first.

  29. 29.

    Brachiator

    @Quadrillipede:

    My hope at the time was that if you remembered anything from that talk, it would be this: Hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future, but hope is an attitude towards the present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise you an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying.

    I very much like this concluding sentiment. I am not afraid of bad news and don’t need to bathe in feel good news.

    But I do believe in Hope and in trying to make things better.

  30. 30.

    Betty Cracker

    @Ken: Justice Kagan (and all the liberals on the court at the time) signed onto that piece of shit decision, and she’s so scrupulous about respecting ethical boundaries that she turned down a bagel basket gift from high school friends. So no, the unanimous decision still doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not a lawyer though.

  32. 32.

    Jackie

    @moops: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is also interested in investigating the potential quid pro quo – which IMO is important as MAGA House Rep Comer isn’t likely to assist Raskin…

    Because Democrats are in the minority, Raskin’s investigation is likely not to have teeth without the cooperation of Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., a close ally to Trump and no friend to Raskin. But Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has expressed interest in a similar investigation armed with subpoena power.

    The reported billion dollar ask is “practically an invitation to ask questions about Big Oil’s political corruption and manipulation,” Whitehouse said in a statement to the Post. “Fossil fuel malfeasance will cost Americans trillions in climate damages, and the Budget Committee is looking at how to ensure the industry cannot simply buy off politicians in order to saddle taxpayers with the bill.”

    https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/05/14/raskin-democrats-trump-billion-oil-industry

  34. 34.

    trnc

    @Betty Cracker: Good for the House Dems. Absurdly, the openly corrupt quid pro quo proposition may not be legally actionable, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops regardless.

    Possibly also useful to let people know what the current SC considers a direct request for money in exchange for particular policies NOT to be quid pro quo.

  35. 35.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Elizabelle: At least Warren G. Harding had the disgrace to die two and one half years into his first term as POTUS.

    FTFY.

    e.e. cummings’ elegy for President Warren Gamaliel Harding:

    the first president to be loved by his
    bitterest enemies ” is dead

    the only man woman or child who wrote
    a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
    errors ” is dead ”
    beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding
    ” is ” dead
    he’s
    ” dead ”
    if he wouldn’t have eaten them Yapanese Craps**

    somebody might hardly never not have been unsorry, perhaps.

    (Apologies for any mangling in transcription – not an easy thing to fix with cummings.)

    ** Refers to the then-current belief that Harding died from ingesting tainted Japanese crab meat.

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Asked about the letter, Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, said in an email: “The premise of Mr. Raskin’s letter is patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future — one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas.

    Anyone involved in the American Petroleum Institute should be exiled to Rura Penthe.  Have the Klingons get some honest work out of them.

  39. 39.

    wjca

    @Villago Delenda Est: Anyone involved in the American Petroleum Institute should be exiled to Rura Penthe.

    Better yet, exiled to a very low-lying island, with no way off.  Just sit and watch the sea rise and the island shrink.

  41. 41.

    RevRick

    A vote for Trump and the GOP is to spit on the 14 million graves of those who fought in the struggle to crush fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan. A vote for Trump and the GOP is to give the middle finger to all our children and grandchildren, because they will let the fossil fuel companies burn the world down.

  45. 45.

    prostratedragon

    From Ryan Goodman et al. at Just Security:

    Comprehensive Timeline on False Electors Scheme in 2020 Presidential Election

    Among the findings:

    • The Trump team planned, directed, and coordinated the false alternate slate of electors scheme.
    • The false alternate slate of electors was a “critical” part of the Trump-John Eastman conspiracy, according to a federal district court opinion issued in June.
    • The false alternate slate of electors was a central part of the Trump-Jeffrey Clark scheme to use the Justice Department to try to overturn the election.
    • The Trump team publicly suggested these alternate slates were to preserve an option if courts vindicated Trump’s legal challenges.
    • Trump and his alleged co-conspirators privately pursued the false electors scheme in an effort to get VP Pence to overturn the election – even if court challenges failed and had been exhausted, state legislatures rebuffed the Trump effort, and the electors came with no certification.
  47. 47.

    terraformer

    I mean, the only thing T***p did here was say it out loud.

    This is Citizen’s United: we’re deluding ourselves if we think this exact statement hasn’t been uttered many, many times in private. PACs aren’t allowed to “coordinate directly” with candidates, or something. Pinky promise it’s not happening!

    Good grief.

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