Pay To Pay Or Pay To Sue: Liberal Donors Planting Environmentalist Attorneys In State AG Offices
Inside Sources cited CEI’s Senior Fellow Christopher Horner on “Law-Enforcement for Rent” report.
“It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda,” Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Senior Fellow Christopher Horner, who described the emails as laying out a “law-enforcement-for-hire” scheme.
He noted that the offices specifically had to promise that the attorneys would be used for work that “would not get done but for this private funding.” These privately-funded prosecutors played essential roles in many of the major environmentalist lawsuits filed over the past several years.
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CEI’s report primarily focuses on the cozy relationship in New York between Bloomberg’s money, NYU’s law school and the state’s attorney general’s office. However, New York is one of six states, which, along with the District of Columbia, were awarded these fellows. Requests by other groups, including Power the Future, for information about the application process and the terms of their postings have been stonewalled. And at least one state legislature, Oregon, is raising questions about the legality of these issues. According to a letter from Dexter Johnson, the state’s Legislative Counsel, this outside payment arrangement may violate Oregon state law.
Perhaps this is why the attorneys general are trying to keep their communications secret. Correspondence revealed only after fierce legal fights under open records laws by CEI show that the offices discussed trying to hide their coordination through a purported “Common Interest Agreement” in the spring of 2016.