RICHMOND, Va. (Legal Newsline) - Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares has been ordered to perform an additional search for documents related to billionaire climate litigation advocate Michael Bloomberg requested by a watchdog.
Judge C.N. Jenkins Jr. found last week that former AG Mark Herring did not adequately search for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records in Christopher Horner and the Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
“Petitioner had reason to believe that more documents existed and were being withheld,” Jenkins wrote in his April 15 order. “Respondent responded that their searches were done in good faith and in accordance with the language of the FOIA request…These documents were not produced nor provided to petitioners.”
Horner filed the FOIA lawsuit in 2018 seeking information about privately hired special assistant attorneys general (SAAGs) whose salary and benefits are paid through an entity created by Bloomberg.
As previously reported in Legal Newsline, State Energy & Environmental Impact Center (SEEIC) is funded by Bloomberg and has placed lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general that helped file more than 130 regulatory and legal challenges against Trump-era federal environmental policies.
“Virginia’s former Attorney General applied for and was subsequently approved for a privately funded special prosecutor for climate and renewable energy to be paid $81,500 per year as an employee of Mr. Bloomberg’s Center established at New York University (NYU),” according to an April 20 Climate Litigation Watch (CLW) article. “The outfit was created for this purpose of placing employees in Office of Attorneys General that committ to advancing progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions favored by Mr. Bloomberg.”
A transcript of deposition testimony revealed that what was originally deemed privileged "working papers" by former Attorney General Mark Herring in a previous FOIA complaint, was actually a "GOLD Decision Memorandum," used in the aborted process of hiring of SAAGs.
“Herring’s Office previously denied that memo existed,” according to an article posted by watchdog Government Accountability and Oversight (GAO). “Herring’s Office pursued — then later struck an agreement, all in writing —to bring one or more privately hired activist lawyers in-house to do an activist group’s bidding, a pursuit which was abandoned over the telephone after the Office began receiving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for correspondence and memos about the venture.”
The previous complaint was filed by Horner against former AG Herring seeking access to the legal analysis that lead Herring’s office to assert that it had the legal authority to permit the hiring of a SAAG whose goal is to "advanc[e] progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions" as stated in an Aug. 25, 2017, SEEIC email from David J. Hayes who, currently serves in the Biden administration as special assistant to the president for climate policy.
The court denied Herring's office, which had argued that no further records existed concerning NYU and the Bloomberg-funded Center.
"When the Court rejected the Plea of Nulla Bona, the Attorney General at long last filed an answer, and the case was set for trial. Following trial, the Court has now ordered the Attorney General to search for and produce the documents it has long stated do not exist," the GAO article states.
The Virginia House and Senate are seeking to ban special interest groups from planting activist litigators in the state Attorney General's office by revising budget appropriations under HB 30 in a way that prohibits the employment of SAAGs.
HB30 directs that compensation paid to employees of the AG for performing legal services on behalf of the Commonwealth will derive only by way of appropriation.
“In this case, the Office will have to acknowledge that this memo and other documents in a computer folder also revealed in discovery do exist, and decide whether to release the record of how the Office came to be used in that way and the plans for these SAAGs, or continue to hide the documents by pressing this very limited claim of privilege,” the CLW article states.