Reporters at Mother Jones broke the original story last week about a $120,000 no-bid contract for “media monitoring” and “shaping” being approved by Environmental Protection Agency officials with one of the tentacles of a Republican-owned firm. The firm makes its money by helping right-wing candidates find and use damaging material about their opponents. They slithered into the job without competition.
Since the MJ story, however, reporters at The New York Times have followed up with the news that one of the principals at that firm has spent a year scrutinizing the activities of numerous EPA employees who have been critical of agency chief Scott Pruitt and/or the Trump regime. In Monday’s issue, Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman took the deepest look yet, finding and interviewing three of those employees who spoke out:
Three different agency employees, in different jobs, from three different cities, but each encountered a similar outcome: Federal records show that within a matter of days, requests were submitted for copies of emails written by them that mentioned either Mr. Pruitt or President Trump, or any communication with Democrats in Congress that might have been critical of the agency.
The requests came from a Virginia-based lawyer working with America Rising, a Republican campaign research group that specializes in helping party candidates and conservative groups find damaging information on political rivals, and which, in this case, was looking for information that could undermine employees who had criticized the E.P.A.
Now a company affiliated with America Rising, named Definers Public Affairs, has been hired by the E.P.A. to provide “media monitoring,” in a move the agency said was intended to keep better track of newspaper and video stories about E.P.A. operations nationwide.
But the sequence of events has created a wave of fear among employees, particularly those already subject to special scrutiny, who said official assurances hardly put them at ease.
One of those employees is Gary Morton. His task is preventing spills from underground storage tanks. After he went to a union rally opposing budget cuts, his emails were the focus of a Freedom of Information Act request from America Rising. “What they are doing is trying to intimidate and bully us into silence,” he said.
Another employee the Times interviewed is Michael Cox, a 25-year veteran in the EPA’s Region 8 Seattle office. He wrote an exit letter to Pruitt in March on the day he retired in which he said he was “increasingly alarmed about the direction of E.P.A. under your leadership,” and suggested Pruitt take a “step back and listen to career E.P.A. staff.”
Ten days later there was a Freedom of Information request from Allan Blutstein, a vice president of Definers, wanting to see all of Cox’s correspondence the day he resigned. There were 62 documents and a note to fellow employees whom he knew were not happy with the way the EPA is being managed.
The Times reporters write:
“That does not make me feel very good,” [Cox] said, knowing that his emails could potentially be used against other employees.
These Definer guys are now chosen by Pruitt to “monitor media,” which no doubt includes social media used by EPA employees. Just one more element in that nice little privatized police state you and the TrumpKochians are building, eh, Scott? Our tax money at work.
But that’s not all. Some of the FOIA requests from America Rising were for correspondence between agency employees and members of Congress. Two of those were Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a climate hawk, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts:
“We have seen a lot of nefarious activities from Trump,” Mr. Whitehouse said. “But hiring a fossil fuel front group that specializes in political hits and is doing F.O.I.A. investigations of your agency’s own employees is a new low.”
This regime specializes in new lows.
Attempts to curb dissent are, of course, nothing new in America. But the techniques and the breadth of the effort always evolves. Close behind the suppression of dissent comes the blacklisting. And the smearing. What The Don and his cronies are really afraid of at EPA (and everywhere else in the executive branch) is the dissenters’ truth will do damage to the deluge of exaggerations and fabrications these marionettes of the polluters and plutocrats spew on us all the time. They intend to stomp out that truth.
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Colorado Blue has a post discussing this subject, too.