| Dino Grandoni reports for The Energy 202 |
Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop speaks on the Senate floor at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City in February. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
For years, environmentalists have criticized Republicans in Congress for ignoring climate change and trying to whittle down protections for endangered species.
Now, some top House members have found a way of striking back with more than just rhetoric. Two top GOP members of the House Natural Resources Committee have opened probes into three high-profile U.S. environmental groups working on issues abroad. The Republican congressmen want to know whether during their advocacy work the groups have acted as agents of foreign governments.
The environmental groups that find themselves in the GOP’s crosshairs say that big environmental issues, such as ocean pollution and climate change, are global in nature and require engaging foreign leaders. They cast the probes as part of a campaign to browbeat them for opposing Republican policies that prioritize energy development over environmental concerns.
“We know this whole issue is an effort — a clumsy, McCarthyist effort — to intimidate us,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of one of the targeted groups, the Center for Biological Diversity.
The latest environmental group probed by Reps. Rob Bishop of Utah and Bruce Westerman of Arkansas is the World Resources Institute. On Wednesday, the pair requested documents pertaining to the group’s work in China, where it has hailed the Chinese government’s pledges under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“The Committee is concerned that WRI’s relationship with the Chinese government may have influenced its political activities in the United States,” Bishop and Westerman wrote in a letter sent to WRI on Wednesday.
Describing itself as “a global research organization,” WRI responded to the letter by saying in a statement to The Post that “it’s vital to work in the world’s developing countries and major economies, including China.” The group welcomes “the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s letter.”
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Bishop and Westerman, respectively the chairmen of the committee and of its oversight and investigations subcommittee, have requested reams of documents from the groups by invoking the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The requests came in letters to WRI, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity sent over the past four months.
The 80-year-old FARA law requires those paid by or acting as agents of nations abroad to influence political activity at home to periodically disclose those ties with the U.S. government. The committee wants correspondence between the groups and foreign governments to see whether they are required to register as foreign agents and failed to do so.
FARA — once a low-profile law resulting in only “about a half-dozen prosecutions,” according to Rosenstein — has made headlines recently since its use by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to prosecute President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Merely agreeing with the policy position of a foreign government, as many environmental groups end up doing, does not mean an organization needs to register with the Justice Department, said Joshua Rosenstein, a partner at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock and an expert in foreign-registration law.
“Just having overlapping issues with some third party,” Rosenstein said, “does not mean you’re acting as an agent for that third party.”
That has been the defense of the NRDC and the Center for Biological Diversity. Both say they do not need to register under FARA because they do not work at the behest of foreign governments.
“We answer to our leadership, and only our leadership,” said Bob Deans, director of strategic engagement at the NRDC. “We’re held to account by our members and supporters.”
Like WRI, the NRDC is being investigated by the committee over its climate and environmental activities in China and, as Bishop and Westerman put it in their letters, with “the ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
“Of course we work in China,” Deans said. “The most populous country in the world, China is a key player in any serious effort to leave our children a livable world.”
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