The campaign hired Broderick Johnson of the lobbying firm Bryan Cave LLP, which lobbied on behalf of TransCanada, the owners of the proposed pipeline.

As the DeSmogBlog has reported, Johnson is part of a web of pipeline lobbyists with ties to Secretary of State Clinton and the White House who have been hired by pipeline proponents. Their hiring is part of a growing pipeline influence scandal surrounding the State Department’s Keystone XL review. Emails between department employees and TransCanada lobbyist Paul Elliott, Wikileaked memos, public remarks, disclosure forms and other documents provide clear evidence that the department’s review of the proposed pipeline has been corrupted by bias, lobbyist influence and conflicts of interest.

On October 6, Friends of the Earth, the Center for International Environmental Law and Corporate Ethics International, all represented by Earthjustice, amended (pdf) a Freedom of Information Act request so that it now includes a request for all State Department documents that pertain to interactions with Johnson and several other pipeline lobbyists.

It is not known whether Johnson lobbied the government directly on behalf of that particular project, but Bryan Cave earned more than $1 million from 2009-2011 from its lobbying activities on behalf of TransCanada.

In a letter to the DOJ, the group says:

On behalf of Friends of the Earth, I am submitting the following information to demonstrate that, Paul Elliott, a government relations employee of TransCanada, has acted as agent of a foreign principal and therefore violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. We respectfully request that you immediately open an investigation of this matter…

Documents obtained by Friends of the Earth from the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that as early as September 2009, Paul Elliott, an employee in the government Relations Department of TransCanada, and a former senior campaign aide to then Senator Hillary Clinton, was seeking to lobby officials of the State Department. For example, in May of 2010, he organized and attended a lobby meeting between TransCanada President and CEO, Hal Kvisle, and David Goldwyn, Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, Office of the Coordinator of International Energy Affairs Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, and Michael Sullivan, Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs, of the State Department (Exhibit 1). The meeting, which may have also included Matthew
McManus, Energy Producer-Country Affairs Division Chief, Office of International Energy and Commodity Policy at the State Department, addressed proposed comments and stakeholder lobbying on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Elliott followed up this meeting by transmitting a letter from Brian Schweitzer, Governor of Montana, to Goldwyn, McManus and
other contacts at the State Department, in order to convey further information about support for the pipeline proposal (Exhibit 2). The letters to State continued with one addressed to President Obama and copied to Secretaries Clinton and Chu and Director Browner (Exhibit 3).

Meetings at the State Department were only part of TransCanada’s efforts to influence decisions regarding the KXL pipeline. Mr. Elliott reports that he and the President and CEO of TransCanada met with Senators Inhofe, Thune, Tester, Nelson and Murkowski and Representatives Herseth Sandlin and Peter Welsh in May of 2010 (Exhibit 1).

Paul Elliott registered under the Lobby Disclosure Act on December 16, 2010 (Exhibit 4)•. The current and anticipated lobbying issues identified omit the KXL Pipeline and curiously include the Waxman-Markey bill (passed by the House of Representatives on June 26, 2009 which then died in the Senate July of 2010) and the Kerry Boxer bill (introduced in October of 2009 and no longer active). Accordingly, during 2009 and 2010, Elliott states he engaged in federal lobbying
on behalf of TransCanada which required FARA registration.

Violations of FARA can result in significant fines.

Some of those cuts include:

_ Subsidies for coal, gas and oil: Fossil fuel companies don’t need taxpayer subsidies because they’re highly profitable, the report argues.

Also for the chopping block, the report argues, is President Barack Obama’s proposed “clean energy standard,” which would mandate use of energy from renewable energy, nuclear, natural gas and “clean coal.” The report says it locks the nation into forms of polluting energy and would raise prices.

_ Nuclear loan guarantees: The report says that the industry is mature and should be able to attract its own investment…

_ Biofuels subsides: Get rid of the ethanol tax credit and the Renewable Fuels Standard, which mandates increasing use of biofuels, because biofuels should be allowed to compete in the market without government help, it argues.

It also would cut billions of dollars in subsidies for advanced biofuels and for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and storing them underground.

The report also calls for cuts to farm subsidies and crop insurance, highway projects, federally-backed flood insurance, and the use of public lands for livestock, mining and timber.

On March 16 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Gregory B. Jazcko told Congress that he was recommending the 50-mile evacuation radius but did not give an explicit explanation of how he had determined that this was necessary.

The three groups called the scope of this recommended evacuation “highly unusual and suggestive of extraordinarily high radiation levels in excess of those reported to the public in Japan and the U.S,” and they noted that the U.S. only requires reactor operators to plan for evacuations out to ten miles.

“The radiation monitoring information being collected by the U.S. Government in Japan is of urgent interest to the public in the U.S. and internationally and we expect an expedited response to the FOIA request,” Tom Clements, Southeastern nuclear campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth said in a statement. “If the full data set is not immediately released, the government can rightly be accused of attempting to cover up the radiation threat posed by the disaster. This would severely undermine regulators’ credibility.”

“We think the American and Japanese public have a right to see the complete details of the Fukushima radiation data and, therefore, we have requested the NRC and the DOE to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act, said attorney Diane Curran who filed the FOIA request for the groups. “If necessary, we are prepared to go to federal court to get the uncensored set of measurements.”

U.S. officials insist that the levels of radioactive pollution reaching the U.S. from Japan do not pose any health threat.

They’ll want to take that back. Doggett just took to the House floor to announce that he’s now supporting the bill. The reason? He was tired, he said, of listening to the members of “the flat earth society” across the aisle making “inane” arguments.