Whomp Whomp! Right-Wing Group Built To Smear Climate Scientists Collapses In Lawsuits, Tax Fraud
FAIRFAX, Va. — The Free Market Environmental Law Clinic has long sought to inject doubt into the public conversation about global warming. Now, the future of the group itself is in doubt. Its founders are battling in court over control of the group, as well as some $900,000 in its bank account. One of them, David Schnare, has been accused by his former allies of botching the group’s tax-exempt status and of attempting to extort a quarter-million dollars from its coffers.
It all comes at a time when Free Market — which made a name for itself using the legal system to obtain climate scientists’ emails — should be ascendant. The Trump administration shares its views on environmental regulation and its dismissal of climate science. And Mr. Schnare, 70, was part of the Trump “beachhead team” at the Environmental Protection Agency during the transition between presidential administrations, though he did not last long there.
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Mr. Schnare took a leave of absence in January 2017 to join the Trump administration’s transition team at the E.P.A. He had previously worked at the agency for 33 years, until 2011, “fighting the conservative fight” from within, as he put it in a message to a colleague. Mr. Schnare does not deny that climate change is occurring, but has questioned the potential impacts and the costs of fighting it and has criticized those who disagree as alarmists. His return to the E.P.A. was brief; he resigned within two months after clashing with Scott Pruitt, then the administrator, over issues like Mr. Pruitt’s proposal for a “red team, blue team” exercise to debate climate change, which Mr. Schnare said displayed “ignorance of the scientific progress or science itself.”
But when Mr. Schnare tried to return to Free Market, Mr. Hardin told him he was not welcome. By then, it had become clear that Mr. Schnare had made an enormous error when he created the group: He had applied for status with the Internal Revenue Service that would let Free Market accept tax-free donations, but he had created the organization as a limited liability company, which cannot normally be tax-exempt. Mr. Schnare acknowledged in a letter to Free Market’s board last December that he had “made some significant errors.” But the lawsuit states that Mr. Schnare offered conflicting explanations and produced “different versions of organizational documents, as circumstances dictated.” The suit suggests that those papers, some filed with the court, were faked.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/climate/climate-emails-group-lawsuit.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytclimate
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