Testifying before Congress, Attorney Sharon Eubanks told Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that if she were the Attorney General of the United States, she would pursue Big Oil — ExxonMobil and company — for conspiracy using a RICO statute.
Sanders set up the hypothetical job for Eubanks, putting her in the Attorney General’s chair and saying that if “a large corporation knowingly produces a product that gets me sick or kills me, I would assume that we have an abundance of laws to prosecute that company, to hold them accountable, and to demand punitive damages.”
Did she concur? Eubanks knows how such a prosecution could work, and how those punitive damages might go.
Currently Chief Counsel at the National Whistleblower Center, Eubanks served as lead counsel on behalf of the United States in the “largest civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) enforcement action ever filed, United States v. Philip Morris USA, et al., the federal tobacco litigation.” (The tobacco case complaint “alleged that the tobacco companies had engaged in an approximately fifty-year conspiracy to fraudulently deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking.)
Sanders: A large corporation knowingly produces a product that gets me sick or kills me, I would assume that we have an abundance of laws to prosecute that company, to hold them accountable, and to demand punitive damages. pic.twitter.com/DHd7Wwbfsj
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 1, 2024
Sanders makes “intent” to mislead a clear item in his questioning, saying “if we have an industry that knowingly — and that’s the point, knowingly, understood that carbon emissions were causing climate change, knowingly understood that climate change would bring devastating destruction to the lives of billions of people, what are the legal grounds that we can hold them accountable for?”
Eubanks responds that the federal RICO statute used in the tobacco litigation was a way to bring “all the claims under the same umbrella.”
“If you were Attorney General of the United States, would you proceed in that direction?” Sanders asks directly.
“I would, yes,” Eubanks replies. “No question.”
Sanders used the testimony (below) of Dr. Geoffrey Supran, Professor of Environmental Science & Policy and Director of Climate Accountability Lab at University of Miami, to support his assertion that Big Oil acted knowingly to disinform on the science and spread misinformation and misdirection about climate change and its sources.
Sanders: They’ve been consistently lying?
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 1, 2024
Supran: The oil industry? They have been consistently misleading the public about the realities and implications of their products pic.twitter.com/mMYz0SKwvp
Below, Sanders asks Supran about Big Oil: “Have they been consistently lying?”
Supran answers: “They have been consistently misleading the public about the realities and implications of their products, yes.”
Excellent summary of the years of work Congress has already spent seeking to hold fossil fuel interests accountable for their decades of climate deception.
— Geoffrey Supran (@GeoffreySupran) April 29, 2024
I look forward to testifying at Wednesday’s hearing and adding to the evidentiary record. https://t.co/CNzkpDejOX
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