The office of Kentucky’s governor failed to provide documents through an open records request that show the Democrat’s staff collaborating with the White House and leading environmental activists on a controversial anti-coal regulation, according to a conservative legal group.
The Energy and Environment (E&E) Legal Center filed an appeal to that request, but the office of Kentucky’s attorney general, also a Democrat, says it never received that appeal. Additional E&E FOIA requests show it did, the group says.
The back-and-forth between E&E and Kentucky officials has taken place through open records requests and related communications since July. The group is seeking information on collaboration between federal and state officials and activists pushing new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations designed to restrict carbon emissions from power plants.
Those regulations are expected to be especially burdensome on states such as Kentucky that rely heavily on the coal industry and the thousands of people it employs.
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D.) has publicly criticized those regulations, calling them "disastrous for our declining coal economy and equally disastrous for our very important manufacturing economy."
However, emails previously obtained by E&E show that at least one official in Beshear’s office was privy to behind the scenes advocacy efforts to promote the EPA’s regulations. Those efforts involved aides to at least 10 governors, senior White House officials, and groups founded by billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer, according to open records requests previously filed by E&E.
Those requests came by way of other states, but showed that Rebecca Byers, the director of Beshear’s Washington, D.C., office, was privy to discussions of EPA regulation strategy sessions involving the executive vice president of Steyer’s group Advanced Energy Economy.
E&E filed an open records request with Beshear’s office that should have turned up that and other emails, the group said. Instead, the office told E&E that there were no records responsive to its request.
"Thanks to other governors’ offices who did provide records, E&E Legal possesses numerous examples of emails to or from the Office of the Kentucky Governor that respond to this request," E&E said in a Tuesday statement.
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
In a previous report on emails obtained through open records requests filed in numerous states, E&E identified Kentucky as one of three states that had failed to provide documents in response to the group’s filings.
That report detailed an extensive state-level network of policymakers and activists seeking to smooth the implementation of the EPA’s new power plant regulations. Discussions behind that network involved aides to as many as a dozen governors, including disgraced former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D.), White House climate and energy officials, and key Steyer lieutenants running arms of his political advocacy network.
In its report, E&E accused officials in Kentucky, California, and Virginia of "slow-walking and outright stonewalling."
The group attempted to appeal Kentucky’s "no records" response in July, calling its response "demonstrably inadequate in light of responsive public records in our possession."
Kentucky officials never responded to that appeal. When E&E followed up, officials in the state attorney general’s office said they had never received the appeal and blamed it on a broken fax machine.
In an attempt to investigate that claim, E&E filed another open records request. It asked for documentation showing incoming faxes around the time of its appeal. The group says that records obtained through that request suggest that the AG’s office did receive the appeal, and declined to act on it, a claim that the office vigorously denies.
"These records … confirm that that office received a fax of 14 pages beginning 9:20 a.m. eastern on July 21, 2015, from, coincidentally, the same number that E&E Legal’s fax confirmation shows succeeded in sending a 1.9 minute transmission of 14 pages concluding at 9:22 am eastern on the same date," E&E wrote in its statement.
"That is, Kentucky’s OAG received an appeal it insists it didn’t receive, challenging the governor’s claim that records do not exist that in fact do exist and seeking that office’s ruling on the demonstrably false claim."
The AG’s office insisted that it never received the fax in an emailed statement.
"We believe the machine may have malfunctioned and the fax never printed," spokeswoman Allison Martin said. "We have three employees who monitor that fax machine and log all open records requests and open records appeals received."