The e-mails show Elliott pressed repeatedly for Mills to meet senior TransCanada officials — a request State rebuffed multiple times. On July 14, 2010 several State Department officials discussed Elliott’s request that Mills meet with TransCanada’s president for energy and oil pipelines, Alex Pourbaix. “Well, conveniently she’ll be out of town,” wrote Jacob Sullivan, who then served as deputy chief of staff and now directs the Office of Policy Planning.
One senior department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the final permit decision is pending, said of Elliott: “He was a regular requester of meetings. We sometimes met with him, and he was sometimes told the person he was trying to meet with couldn’t meet with him.”At one point, Elliott suggested that his firm could lobby the Canadian government on the administration’s behalf. In an e-mail dated Dec. 6, 2009, Elliott offered to help State officials enlist Canada’s aid in securing a global climate accord during U.N.-brokered talks in Copenhagen.
“TransCanada’s senior executive leadership team would welcome any guidance you might share on background — U.S. government messaging and expectation — specific to developments at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen,” Elliott wrote to Mills’s assistant. “If there is a message and or topics that the State Department would welcome us to encourage with Canadian government officials, I am happy to pass on that direction to the senior executive leadership team of TransCanada. TransCanada can be an asset for the state department and I hope you might see us as such.”
Cunha denied that Elliott was suggesting the firm could help the administration at international climate negotiations. Instead, Cunha said, Elliott “was trying to understand what impact these policies would have on our natural gas assets.”
Moglen said that Friends of the Earth would pursue additional documents.
He said the documents released were numbered, but some numbers were missing. “There are clearly things that are not here,” he said.
He also questioned why Elliott did not register as a lobbyist for a foreign company until Dec. 16, 2010 even though he was approaching State officials about the project more than a year earlier. Cunha said Elliott’s activities did not warrant a formal registration until “the last six weeks of 2010.”
Moglen said the June 28 e-mail exchange suggests department officials gave TransCanada special access to what is supposed to be an impartial process.“That is obviously not an independent, probing environmental review process,” Moglen said in an interview. “It’s, in fact, a closed loop.”
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