Late last week, PoliticoPRO ran a story detailing how EPA air chief Bill Wehrum would regularly meet with his old colleagues for lunch, coffee, and other informal gatherings. Normally this wouldn’t be much of a story--except that Bill Wehrum’s old colleagues are lawyers representing the coal industry Wherum’s now supposed to be regulating.
Wehrum told Politico’s Alex Guillén that the “lunch crew,” as it is affectionately known by its pollution-protecting members, was supposedly “purely and completely social,” and that’s why they’re not on his official calendar.
Apparently, this group has been eating lunch together “virtually every single day for the last 10 years,” and Wherum “thought it’d be fun to get together for lunch with the crew again.”
Wehrum insisted that conflict of interest rules don’t say his “friends can no longer be [his] friends,” because “we don’t have to talk about work. And we don’t need to talk about work; there’s no reason.”
And the worst part is, he may be telling the truth. Wherum doesn’t NEED to hear from his friends who defend polluters because he used to be one of them. As we talked about back in February, Wehrum was one of the lobbyists responsible for developing the utility industry’s deregulatory agenda in the first place, so it’s not like he needs to get marching orders from his former co-workers.
Why, then, were these lunches not disclosed on official calendars? As Sierra Club’s Matthew Gravatt rhetorically asked Politico, “If these meetings were purely social, why go through the trouble of hiding them?”
Maybe it’s because Wehrum’s now fully on board with the EPA’s mission to protect the public from his former clients, making him just oh-so-ashamed of the band of pollution-profiteering public health threats that are his friends in low places.
Or maybe this post was written on April Fool’s.
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