It was scandalous enough when Politico reported two weeks ago that oil industry executives were writing up presidential executive orders now, in the hopes that Donald Trump will simply sign them if/when he returns to the White House. A few days later, however, The Washington Post took a dramatic next step, reporting on the former president recently huddling with Big Oil leaders at Mar-a-Lago.
If the account is accurate, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee told the oil industry executives that they should raise $1 billion to return him to the White House — and if they did, he’d reward them by eliminating environmental safeguards and approving new tax breaks.
The “deal” that Trump described, the Post added, “stunned several of the executives in the room.”
This has not escaped Democrats’ attention.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, for example, told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that it’s “highly likely” the Democratic-led Senate Budget Committee would examine the revelations. Referencing both the Post’s report and the aforementioned Politico article, the Rhode Island senator concluded, “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt.”
Soon after, the Post reported that House Democrats have launched a probe of their own.
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.
The article added that Oversight Committee Democrats sent the letters to the CEOs of Cheniere Energy, Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, Continental Resources, EQT Corporation, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Venture Global, as well as the head of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s top lobbying arm in Washington.
Those expecting helpful responses should probably keep their expectations low: House Democrats are in the minority, which means they lack subpoena power. The oil industry executives who received the requests for information could throw the correspondence in the trash, and there’s nothing the lawmakers could do about it — at least for now. (If Democrats were to return to the majority, it would be a different story.)
Nevertheless, the outreach from the Oversight Committee’s Democratic members not only reflected the party’s interest in the issue, it also helped keep the story alive.
Similarly, Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared this week at a conference hosted by Pope Francis at the Vatican, where the California Democrat raised the issue anew.
“Open corruption,” Newsom said to an international gathering of religious officials, scientists, and political officials. “A billion dollars to pollute our states, to pollute our country, and to pollute this planet and to roll back progress in the open.” To be sure, I don’t seriously expect this story to lead to Trump’s fifth criminal indictment, but the ongoing Democratic focus is notable, especially in an electoral context. As we discussed the other day, there’s a chunk of the electorate that still believes the presumptive GOP nominee is a “populist” who cares about regular, working-class people. This controversy offers timely evidence to the contrary: An oil billionaire organized a gathering at the former president’s glorified country club, where Trump made a brazenly transactional pitch to oil executives, whom he expects to help put him in the Oval Office, at which point he’ll fulfill their anti-environmental dreams. A “man of the people” he is not, unless the “people” in question are wealthy Big Oil elites. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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