Response to a story first broken by reporters at Mother Jones magazine and later expanded by them and in several follow-ups by The New York Times has pushed the Environmental Protection Agency and Republican-owned Definers Public Affairs to cancel a no-bid $120,000 contract.
One of the founders of Definers, Joe Pounder, said in a statement confirming the cancelation that even though the firm had offered the EPA a better deal than a previous vendor, all the public attention was making the contract a “distraction.”
The deal had been for Definers, founded by Pounder and Matt Rhoades, to monitor and shape the media narrative about the EPA. Rhoades was Mitt Romney’s campaign manager in 2012, and Pounder was a staffer for Sen. Marco Rubio researching Democratic candidates for damaging material that could be used against them at election time.
But, starting last Friday, the Times reporters learned that a principal in the firm—which is a tentacle of the right-wing political action group the two men also founded, America Rising—had filed more than 40 Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year for emails and other documents from EPA employees who have been critical of management at the agency since Scott Pruitt was appointed to run the place.
America Rising had also tracked and videotaped climate hawks Bill McKibben and Tom Steyer. Earlier this year, another tentacle, America Rising Squared, had created ConfirmPruitt.com, the goal obviously being to get the aggressively anti-EPA Pruitt approved in the Senate for the EPA post.
Since climate science denier Pruitt took over the job, he has alienated many EPA veterans, both retired and still on the job, given himself round-the-clock protection with a team of 30 bodyguards, sought to roll back existing regulations and not promulgate others proposed by the Obama administration, charged the taxpayers for a “cone of silence” so nobody can hear his phone calls, and generally shown through talks and policy statements and relaxed enforcement of regulations that it is polluters the EPA serves, not people harmed by pollution nor the environment damaged by it.
The revelations about EPA’s contract and Pruitt’s apparent relationship with the multi-tentacled partisan hit organization have added to a picture of an EPA leadership determined to do everything possible to hollow out the 47-year-old agency.
At Mother Jones, reporters Rebecca Leber, Andy Kroll, and Russ Choma reported:
Part of what makes the contract so unusual is the unabashedly partisan work of Definers, which is tied to a network of overtly political groups that share the same staff and office. [...]
Another affiliate of America Rising is the Need to Know Network, a website that has run unbylined, favorable content on Pruitt’s work at the EPA. The agency in turn has promoted NTK Network’s work on its social media feeds and from Pruitt’s accounts.
While most of the FOIA requests that Definer vice president Al Blutstein made were for correspondence by EPA employees to other employees, a few were for exchanges between members of Congress and the agency. These included Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And on Tuesday, Whitehouse and Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California wrote a five-page letter to Pruitt asking that he terminate the Definers contract with the agency. They wrote:
“EPA’s contract with Definers risks further politicizing the agency and is another instance of EPA under your tenure becoming captured by the industry it regulates. At a minimum, it presents an appearance of impropriety to which you as administrator should never be a party. For the reasons that follow, you should terminate this contract immediately.
Definers shares an address and staff with America Rising, a political action (PAC) that has been described as the “unofficial research arm of the Republican Party.” America Rising has branded itself as an organization on the right founded “for the sole purpose of exposing the truth about Democrats through video tracking, research, and communications.” Their group spends its time attacking Democrats, progressives, and environmentalists and lists Definers as one of its largest vendors. America Rising also operates the 501 (c)(4) organization America Rising Squared, a dark money organization whose contributors are anonymous. The leadership teams of America Rising share numerous individuals. [...] These organizations may have corporate forms, but we should all be clear that they are merely different parts of the same multi-faceted partisan operation. Any claim they are distinct is a sham.
What’s more, America Rising and Definers received significant funds from interest in the energy sector as well as other industries you regulate as EPA Administrator. While this cabal of Republican opposition research and electioneering organizations can raise much of its money anonymously so that the identities of many of its donors are unknown to the public, press reports about Definers’ work and Federal Election Commission (FEC) disclosed from the America Rising PAC make it abundantly clear that companies you regulate are driving much of its work. [...]
Your representatives have claimed that EPA’s contract with Definers is for “media monitoring/newsclip compilation” and that it was retained “at a rate that is $87,000 cheaper than our previous vendor and they are providing no other services. All of the above information about Definers, its activities, clients, and role within a much larger ecosystem of partisan, industry-funding operations research and electioneering groups cast significant doubt on these statements.
It’s been apparent since before Pruitt was confirmed that he was already a marionette of fossil fuel and other industries, and that far from being a captive once in his post as administrator, he would willingly surrender the EPA. Canceling this contract won’t change that.