03.01.18

Latest Failed GOP Congressional Effort to Smear Environmental Groups Cites No Evidence, Relies on Recycled and Unsupported Claims

Washington, D.C. – Today’s House Science Committee Republican staff report claiming to show evidence of Russian funding for U.S. environmental groups cites no actual evidence, relies on recycled Republican conspiracy theories and bases its entire case on a letter its own Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), sent last year making similarly outlandish claims. The report is part of a larger campaign designed by notorious public relations mogul Richard Berman, who was taped in 2014 urging the oil industry to “win dirty” by funding a multi-million-dollar PR campaign to smear domestic environmental organizations.

In a sleight of hand typical of its overall lack of rigor, today’s report cites Chairman Smith’s 2017 letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as its central piece of evidence for its claim that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups. That letter, in turn, based its claims on a 2014 report by the Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, in which the words “Russia,” “Putin” and “Kremlin” never appear. That report claimed only to document “foreign” money.

In his 2017 letter, Smith approvingly cited a report called From Russia With Love?, which was released by a front group called the Environmental Policy Alliance later shown to be run by Richard Berman, the architect of the ongoing anti-environment campaign.

Today’s report makes much of the fact that Russian accounts named by Robert Mueller’s investigation posted pro-environment messages on social media. The report offers little analysis of the posts’ overall policy impact – a striking omission considering that some of these central pieces of evidence, by the report’s own reckoning, received as few as five shares on Facebook.

Indeed, the report fails to explain why the pro-industry, anti-protester social media posts they examined often got more traction than their counterparts.

“The only dupes here are the Republicans on Capitol Hill doing errands for the oil industry while Americans demand cleaner energy,” Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said today. “You’d think the House Science Committee majority could have spent five minutes investigating the documented, ongoing Russian cyberattacks on our election system instead of wasting our time with another round of unsupported conspiracy theories.”

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