Political Quotes

“Mr. President, investigative books, journalists' reporting, and academic studies repeatedly compare the climate denial effort to the fraud scheme that was run by the tobacco industry to disguise the harms of smoking. When I was a U.S. attorney, the Justice Department pursued and ultimately won a civil lawsuit against tobacco companies for that fraud. When I was here in the Senate, I wrote an opinion piece about a possible DOJ investigation into the fossil fuel industry fraud on climate change. This gave me a new appreciation of the apparatus in action. In response came an eruption of dozens of rightwing editorials, most of which interestingly were virtually identical, with common misstatements of law and common omissions of facts. The eruption recurred some months later in response to me asking Attorney General Lynch about such an investigation when she was before us during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. Virtually every author or outlet in these eruptions was a persistent climate denier. Common markers in the published pieces seemed to point to a central script. When multiple authors all say something that is true, that is not necessarily noteworthy, but when multiple authors are all repeating the same falsehoods, that is a telling fingerprint. I happened to notice this because unlike most people, I get my news clips so I saw all these articles as they emerged in this eruption that took place.…”