Politifact: Hillary Did Get Money From the Fossil Fuel Industry
According to the latest tallies from Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton's campaign has received $307,561 from people who work for oil and gas interests so far in the presidential race
Super PACs supporting Clinton have directly given an additional $25,701. Sanders does not have a super PAC.
But in Clinton’s case, that doesn't include "bundlers," a fancy name for fundraisers who collect money from individual donors and bundle the money together for a campaign.
The Huffington Post article from July 17, 2015, cited by Sanders found that "nearly all of the lobbyists bundling contributions for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign have at one time or another worked for the fossil fuel industry." It links to 40 registered lobbyists but only offers details on some donors who still work for the industry.
However, the Greenpeace report says that when you add in the bundlers’ donations (lobbyists with some alleged tie to the fossil fuel industry), Clinton's total rises to nearly $1.8 million.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/apr/01/sorting-out-clintons-fossil-fuel-contributions/
Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of money from fossil fuel executives and lobbyists acting as bundlers (fundraisers who collect donations) who represent fossil fuel companies. (She also has lobbyist bundlers who represent other environmentally challenged corporations like Monsanto.)
Here’s just a partial list of the fossil fuel–friendly bundlers who raised money for Clinton from April through June:
• ExxonMobil executive Theresa Mary Fariello raised $21,200. ExxonMobil is the world’s largest oil and gas company, and it has a particularly ugly history of funding climate change denial. It is also eager to exploit oil reserves in delicate regions such as the Arctic, despite its responsibility for the most devastating Arctic oil spill in history.
• Brian Wolff, executive vice president at the Edison Electric Institute, a utility company trade association, came up with $26,600. EEI opposes and lobbies against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan to limit CO2 emissions from power plants, the centerpiece of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. The power-plant regulations are essential for the U.S. to meet its emission-reduction targets under the Copenhagen Accord and to live up to the promises it is laying out in advance of U.N. negotiations in Paris this December. Clinton has pledged to protect the Clean Power Plan regulations.
• Heather Podesta and Tony Podesta have raised $31,150 and $74,575, respectively. The power ex-couple are big-shot Democratic lobbyists. Tony’s brother John is Clinton’s campaign chair and former White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton. Even though John Podesta is considered a climate hawk, Tony and his ex-wife Heather represent fossil fuel companies. Heather’s recent past clients include Marathon Oil and Bill Koch’s Oxbow Carbon, a coal giant, and from 2004 to 2006 she lobbied for Koch Industries.
Tony lobbied for BP in the wake of its disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, and through last year he represented Golden Pass, a company co-owned by ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum that wants to export liquefied natural gas. To be fair, they also work on behalf of renewable fuel companies — Tony represents SolarReserve, a solar power company, and Heather lobbies for the ethanol industry. You might call the Podestas the very embodiment of the Obama/Clinton “all of the above” energy policy.
• Scott Parven and Brian Pomper, lobbyists for Chevron, bundled $24,700 and $29,700 for Clinton, respectively. Their work includes opposing the Clean Power Plan controls that Clinton supports, and protecting the tax breaks for oil companies that Clinton has previously called for eliminating.
• One of Hillary’s top fundraisers, Gordon Giffin, is a former lobbyist for TransCanada, the company pushing to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
That’s just a sampling. As the Huffington Post reports, “Nearly all of the lobbyists bundling contributions for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign
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