In a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune op-ed, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison swears that his office has been completely transparent about the climate lawsuit it filed against energy companies and trade associations in June 2020. However, rather than extricating him from the public criticism being leveled against his office around the case – specifically, the use of outside attorneys from a New York University School of Law fellowship program – Ellison’s op-ed instead shows the extent to which he tried to keep the arrangement hidden.

Responding to an op-ed criticizing his practices, Ellison declares:

“I have been transparent about the money that pays the salaries of employees in the Attorney General’s Office.”

That an attorney general even needs to qualify who “pays the salaries” of his employees is enough to raise eyebrows. Ellison is forced to admit that the two attorneys are paid for by the NYU Law School:

“Because the number of attorneys in our office has shrunk by half over the past two decades while the threats Minnesotans face have gotten more complex, I’ve successfully sought outside help at no cost to taxpayers, including two attorneys funded by NYU. They report to me and no one else. They, like me, owe a duty only to Minnesotans and no one else.” (emphasis added)

Bloomberg Ties Raise Transparency Questions

By being intentionally obscure about the funding for these two Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs) Pete Surdo and Leigh Currie, Ellison fails to disclose their connections to green groups both in and outside of Minnesota.

The two SAAGs were hired and paid for by the NYU School of Law’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center (SEEIC), which received a $6 million founding donation from Michael Bloomberg in 2017. Through his foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the former mayor has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to a campaign for a carbon-free future and has organized efforts by cities and states to meet the emissions reduction goals of the Paris climate agreement. This climate philanthropy pushes a progressive climate agenda.

The SAAGs program extends Bloomberg’s climate network to the offices of state attorneys general.  According to publicly released documents, in some cases, the offices employing SAAGs are also required to submit regular reports to NYU on their activities. These SAAGs not only receive their paycheck from the SEEIC, but the offices employing them also need to report back on their efforts. A job description for a SAAG position from the New York Office of the Attorney General explains:

“Fellows hosted by the OAG as special assistants will have responsibilities that include… preparing periodic reports of activities and progress for the State Impact Center.”

Taken together, these facts cast serious doubt on whether, as Ellison stated in the op-ed, “they report to me and no one else.”

The lack of transparency surrounding the SAAGs is especially troubling when you consider how involved they were in the climate lawsuit filed by Minnesota last June. Their efforts on bringing the lawsuit even elicited praise from Ellison who, at the press conference announcing the lawsuit, thanked Surdo and Currie specifically for their “excellent, excellent work.”

Ellison’s lack of transparency around the SAAGs in his office goes beyond obscuring who is signing their paychecks, extending to withholding information about them all together. As Ellison writes in his op-ed:

“I’ve been transparent from the start about the funding that [the op-ed] attacks: Our agreements with NYU are public documents that we’ve happily disclosed many times.” (emphasis added)

This, however, is not exactly true. The documents detailing the relationship between Ellison’s office and the SEEIC program were only released because of a public records request brought by a government watchdog.

A Breach of Confidentiality

Interestingly, the documents made public from this request show Ellison isn’t the only one in the Minnesota attorney general’s office who has an issue with transparency. According to one of the documents obtained, Leigh Currie, one of the SAAGs, signed a confidentiality statement shortly after being hired by Ellison’s office in 2019. The agreement states:

“No employee shall disclose to an unauthorized person any information obtained during employment with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office (“Office”) which in any way relates to the representation by the Office of the public, the State, a State agency, the attorney general, or any other client of the Office, or is otherwise confidential or non-public under applicable law.” (emphasis added)

It seems as though these terms may have been breached. Shortly after Minnesota filed and publicly announced its lawsuit, Michael Noble, the executive director of the Minnesota-based environmental group Fresh Energy, had surprisingly detailed information about the timeline of the case, including when Ellison began to consider the case and who was working on it. In a public webinar the week after the announcement, Noble said:

“Attorney General Keith Ellison started considering this possibility as early as the fall of 2019, and attorney Leigh Currie and Pete Surdo have basically been working on this full-time over the last few months.” (emphasis added)

The simple question is: How did Noble get these details about when and how the lawsuit was developed? The confidentiality agreements that Currie and Surdo signed should have prevented them from discussing the case before Ellison announced it publicly.

One possibility is the pre-existing ties between Ellison’s office, Surdo and Currie, the two SAAGs working there, and environmentalist groups supporting litigation.

According to Noble, he and the Center for Climate Integrity convinced Ellison to file the lawsuit in the first place. Noble and Currie are founding board members of another Minnesota environmental group. If Currie talked about the case with Noble, however, it would violate the confidentiality agreement she signed. Even if she did not discuss the case, her connections to green groups in the state, and the attorney general’s office’s attempt to hide details about the history of the development and staffing of the case, undercut Ellison’s claims of transparency.

Transparency Should Be A Two-Way Street Minnesota included a consumer fraud charge in its anti-energy suit, alleging that the companies were—in Ellison’s words — “hiding the truth,” a situation that the lawsuit was intended to rectify. Yet, despite Ellison’s professed commitment to openness, he sure has worked hard to keep the potential conflicts surrounding his climate lawsuit hidden.