On the third day of the New York Attorney General’s trial against ExxonMobil, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey jumped on the bandwagon and filed a lawsuit against the company. Healey’s timing is no accident. The announcement seeks to capitalize on media attention from the New York lawsuit and caps off a week in which “Exxon Knew” activists and their allied politicians threw everything they had at the company.

Three years after announcing her investigation into the company, Healey has received no documents from the company, and taken no depositions. Healey’s investigation – like that of the New York attorney general – stems from a highly coordinated activist campaign to pressure attorneys general into pursuing litigation against energy companies. Immediately following a secretive presentation by Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists and plaintiffs’ attorney Matthew Pawa, Healey announced her intention to sue the company, flanked by then-New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and Al Gore. As ExxonMobil described in a motion filed on October 10th:

“Attorney General Healey asserted that those who purportedly ‘deceived’ the public—by disagreeing with her about climate change policy—‘should be, must be, held accountable.’ In the next breath, Attorney General Healey declared that she too had ‘joined in investigating the practices of ExxonMobil.’ She then promised ‘quick, aggressive action’ to ‘hold accountable those who have needed to be held accountable for far too long.’”

Healey’s Collusion with Schneiderman

Healey’s lawsuit sidesteps a tolling agreement her office signed with ExxonMobil in June 2016, in which the company arranged to waive “all limitations-period or time-related defenses,” in exchange for the attorney general’s agreement that her office would not act on the Civil Investigative Demand (CID) it issued to ExxonMobil until ExxonMobil’s challenges to the CID, filed in federal and Massachusetts state court, were closed.

Healey’s office has already racked up quite a tab on her legal assault against the company. In 2017, the Boston Herald reported that the attorney general’s office had spent $63,000 on their case. Despite their superfluous use of taxpayer funds, “they have not interviewed a single ExxonMobil employee or gathered one piece of evidence from the company,” according to ExxonMobil spokesman Scott Silvestri.

Anxious to move forward with her lawsuit, Healey’s office sought other means to obtain documents relevant to her case. Bloomberg reports that Healey “gathered information from banks, advertising agencies, New York’s investigation and other sources.”

How did Healey obtain documents from the New York investigation? Through the Common Interest Agreement she signed with disgraced former-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The agreement allowed them to share documents obtained via New York’s powerful Martin Act, and the attorneys general that are party to the agreement have gone to great lengths to hide it from the public.

Maura Healey’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

Embracing Schneiderman’s flare for politically-motivated lawsuits and following her own pattern of playing follow-the-leader behind New York, Massachusetts’ filing overlaps with the claims alleged by New York. However, her suit is much more expansive, accusing the company of the misleading not only its investors but also its customers.

Healey watched as Schneiderman’s investigation completely unraveled, shifting from accusations that ExxonMobil misled the public on climate change to a very narrow question about its accounting practices. Undaunted, Healey filed an astonishing lawsuit that alleges the company continues to deceive the public to this day by not including warning labels on its advertising and on its gas pumps. (Quick reality check – that’s not required or practiced by anyone, anywhere) She adopted the most extreme activists’ arguments whole cloth, and then dialed those arguments up to 11.

In 2017, Healey’s office admitted to believing that ExxonMobil should have included a warning about climate change on all of its advertising – including at the gas pump:

“If they’re doing sales and marketing in Massachusetts, and they know things that they should be telling people – either consumers or investors – that would be relevant to the consumers or investors’ decisions, then they’ve gotta make that part of their advertising. They can’t simply go around and say, ‘We’re selling you this terrific product,’ and keep to themselves what they know about the possible impacts of those products on global warming…

“So Exxon has an obligation – and all of this is assuming that what we think may have happened did happen, and there was an understanding about the impact on climate change – that Exxon would have a responsibility both at the national level and at the local level to implement information to the consumers so that they could understand when they purchase a tank of gas that this is gonna have an impact on global warming and maybe they should be thinking about buying a more fuel-efficient car, maybe they should be thinking about public transportation…” (emphasis added)

Conclusion

The litigation filed today in Massachusetts is a flagrant waste of taxpayer resources and relies on far-flung arguments like gas pump advertising and attacks on environmental initiatives to prop up a politically motivated lawsuit.