Wonder things don’t change as much as you’d hoped? Disappointed in Obama and in Canada’s disassociated opposition? It all really comes down to simple things. Money. Messaging. Discipline. The other side’s got all three in spades. You can’t compete against that unless you also bring them to the table. Not gonna happen.
So it’s no surprise to read that a TransCanada lobbyist is cozy as toast with the State Department.
Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal continued their assault Monday on what they consider a corrupt federal approval process for the project, releasing dozens of new email messagesbetween State Department employees and a lobbyist for the company behind the pipeline, TransCanada.
The emails, part of a growing cache obtained by the environmental group Friends of the Earth, focus on the interaction between TransCanada lobbyist Paul Elliott, a former deputy campaign director for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid, and representatives of the State Department, which is currently weighing approval of the Keystone XL project.
While no emails between Clinton and Elliott have been released, the newest messages reveal a cozy and solicitous relationship between Elliott and State Department staff — particularly one member of the senior diplomatic staff at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Marja Verloop.
“The emails between Verloop and Elliott are extremely friendly and illustrative of a cozy and complicitous relationship,” Friends of the Earth said in a memo released Monday morning. “They are filled with emoticons and contain an invitation to visit Ottawa’s ‘winter wonderland,’ acknowledgment that Elliott obtained his job as a lobbyist ‘precisely’ because of his connections, and an offer by Verloop to hand-deliver an invitation to Elliott. The emails also indicate that Elliott succeeded in securing multiple meetings between TransCanada and high-level officials at the State Department.”
