The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is a quasi-judicial committee which has historically gone to great lengths to remain, if not totally apolitical, at least nonpartisan. Charged with making important decisions about energy infrastructure, it is legally obligated to remain impartial when making energy decisions.
Down south, for example, Florida’s Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA) is asking FERC to examine whether or not is has the authority to step in and free it from a contract with Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plants. Behind schedule and $20 billion over budget, JEA no longer wants anything to do with the nuclear plant expansion, and is hoping FERC can help.
The Trump administration’s decision to support losers like nuclear (and coal) means that if FERC is to make a decision, JEA would rightly want it to do so without taking such political matters into consideration. That Georgia can’t build a nuclear plant on time or on budget is bad news for the industry Trump wants to prop up, but that shouldn’t matter for a committee like FERC.
Unfortunately, FERC’s chief of staff is Anthony Pugliese, a Trump appointee whose behavior has been raising concern about an injection of partisanship on the committee. He’s made supportive comments about FERC’s support of Trump’s coal and nuclear bailout, for example, potentially calling into question the commission’s impartiality on such matters.
Emails released by FOIA to E&E’s Sam Mintz last week revealed that in addition to highly political appearances on the Sunday radio program of white nationalism-smuggling Breitbart, Pugliese was also in correspondence with a British gentleman named Raheem Kassam.
Who’s that? Well, Raheem Kassam was a Steve Bannon ally and former Breitbart UK editor, as well as a former advisor to the far-right UKIP party’s Nigel Farage. Kassam wrote a fearmongering book about Sharia law, and told Breitbart it was “an honor” to have won an anti-hate group’s “Islamaphobe of the Year” award. More recently, Kassam has been speaking out in defense of the anti-Muslim English Defense League founder Tommy Robinson.
Pugliese apparently met Kassam at a party, and later, using FERC email address, asked Kassam for an introduction to Nigel Farage (which Pugliese told E&E never happened.) Later, Pugliese would again email Kassam, this time asking for an introduction to Matteo Salvini, Italy’s staunchly anti-immigrant Interior minister who recently came under fire for tweeting a phrase made popular by Mussolini, on the dead fascist dictator’s birthday.
That Pugliese seems so enamored with these openly racist figures shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that his primary qualification for FERC consists mainly of formerly being a Trump aide to the Department of Transportation.
But that doesn’t make his political posturing less worrisome, which is why even some Republicans are calling on Pugliese to step down to prevent politicization of the committee. Specifically, Alison Silverstein, who was chief of staff under a FERC commissioner appointed by George W Bush, told The Hill that “had I made statements like that that brought question to the agency, I would have felt obligated to resign.”
Given that this is the Trump administration, though, Pugliese’s association with far-right Islamaphobes and blatant political partisanship is unlikely to spur a resignation.
If anything, he’ll probably get promoted.
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