ICYMI: Internal EPA Emails Show They Knew They Had No Evidence in Clean Energy Grant Smears, Phony Investigations
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Washington, D.C. — This week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin ranted at reporters for reporting that his attacks on GGRF grants have no evidence, despite the fact that throughout an extensive series of court hearings and legal filings, even his own lawyers admitted that they did not have any under repeated, direct questioning from the judge. Indeed, a senior federal prosecutor at DOJ previously resigned rather than move forward with demands to gin up phony political investigations because of the lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
Now, with new shocking reporting from Politico based on internal emails from top EPA and DOJ lawyers, we know that even as EPA was taking their lawless actions to pressure Citibank to freeze grantees’ funding, they attempted to terminate the grants with no legal basis for doing so. Even their own internal lawyers warned that there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that moving forward would put taxpayers at risk for billions of dollars in liability. As one legal expert notes, this demonstrates that Zeldin’s obsession is not about protecting taxpayer dollars at all, but rather all about politics and making himself a MAGA star – with the only waste, fraud, and abuse being his spending of taxpayer dollars on frivolous legal actions.
The Trump administration’s effort to regain control of $20 billion in already-distributed funding could expose the agency to billions in damages, a career lawyer wrote in an internal message obtained by POLITICO.
Trump administration attorneys knew they were on uncertain legal ground as they strategized ways to keep eight nonprofit groups from spending $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants that had already left the federal coffers, according to internal government emails obtained by POLITICO.
The fight to squash the spending could expose the Trump administration to billions of dollars in damages if a court later finds its actions to be unlawful, one Environmental Protection Agency lawyer warned as part of a series of Sunday night emails last month — less than 48 hours before EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin terminated the grants altogether.
In the same email chain, government lawyers acknowledged that they did not know whether criminal and civil investigations launched by the Trump administration would uncover evidence of the waste, fraud or conflicts of interest that Zeldin has publicly alleged in his frequent attacks on the climate grants. Their “short-term objective” was to block the money while those probes play out, a senior Justice Department attorney wrote in one email.
The government’s approach “is believed to have significant legal vulnerabilities,” veteran EPA career attorney Jim Payne wrote to 14 career staff and political appointees at the environmental agency, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department late on the night of March 9.
The emails, never before made public, offer a rare glimpse at the administration’s internal qualms as EPA, DOJ and Treasury wage one of the most aggressive battles in President Donald Trump’s campaign to throttle his predecessor’s clean energy and climate agenda.
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[T]he career EPA lawyer’s email warning about “significant” risk already offered agency leaders a red flag about their strategy, according to one legal expert who reviewed the emails for POLITICO.
“To me, this is a signal that they think this is probably a loser,” said Gary Jonesi, who retired in January after a 39-year career in enforcement at EPA under administrations of both parties.
An EPA attorney would not use that adjective “very lightly,” said Avi Garbow, who served as the agency’s general counsel in the Obama administration.
“It is not unusual at all that for policy directives … there is some assessment by the Office of General Counsel that it presents some legal vulnerability,” he said. “It is less normal, I think, to phrase it as having ‘significant’ legal vulnerabilities.”
Other legal experts who reviewed the emails for POLITICO called it striking that they show the administration trying to block the money before finding certain evidence of wrongdoing to back it up. In one of the March 9 emails, Matthew Galeotti, a career official who at the time was serving in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, shared DOJ’s analysis of the situation after interagency discussions throughout the day.
“The short-term objective is to prevent disbursement of the grant funds, so that ongoing criminal and civil investigations into the program can proceed without risk that the funds will permanently disappear,” Galeotti wrote, outlining DOJ’s position.
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Participants in the email exchange included a mixture of career employees and political employees, with other staffers copied as recipients. One person who chimed in was Emil Bove, a former Trump defense attorney who is now the principal associate deputy attorney general, and who had pressed for a criminal investigation of the climate grants. Copied on the emails was Blanche, another Trump defense attorney who had been sworn in as deputy attorney general just days before.
The emails show that the officials were concerned with stopping the climate grants, not with stopping any specific, evidence-based incidents of waste, fraud or abuse, government watchdog group executive Jillian Blanchard argued after reviewing the messages for POLITICO.
“It just seems to me that this is end-justifies-the-means logic, that there’s no evidence that’s being cited,” said Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a group that has criticized the grant terminations. “It’s just, ‘how do we protect ourselves in this moment, while we terminate grants without evidence?’”
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If the courts found that EPA’s withholding of the funds was unlawful, the agency could be on the hook for that money, “and perhaps interest or related relief,” [Yaakov Roth, the acting assistant attorney general for civil matters] added.
In an interview, Blanchard said it was “wild” to see the Trump administration acknowledge — and apparently dismiss — the risk of being liable for damages when Zeldin routinely says he terminated the grants to protect taxpayer money.
“It isn’t about the money,” said Blanchard. “They’re doing it, I believe, to be able to say they stopped this program, they stopped what the Biden administration wanted to do. That’s the main goal, to be able to say they stopped this.”
Garbow, the former EPA general counsel, said he would have been wary of such extreme risk.
“I cannot envision a scenario, had I been the general counsel, where my office had determined there were significant, multibillion-dollar damage claims, and I had not received substantial reassurance from the Justice Department about the merits of our potential defenses — that certainly, in my experience, would have warranted a conversation directly with the administrator to ensure that he or she was comfortable proceeding this way,” Garbow said.