Is State Department Inspector General Investigating Keystone Review?

In March the State Department issued a very controversial report stating that the environmental risks of the Keystone XL were minimal. This report was so controversial that the EPA sent a letter to the State Department urging a more thorough assessment of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Which is a polite way of saying, “You guys really messed this one up.” Before the EPA letter came out, Andy Kroll at Mother Jones found evidence that the State Department hid the contractor’s ties to Keystone XL. The article states:

“But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for?TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone’s construction.?State released?documents?in conjunction with?the Keystone report?in which?these experts’ work histories were redacted?so that anyone reading the documents wouldn’t know who’d previously hired them. Yet unredacted versions of these documents obtained by?Mother Jones?confirm that three experts working for an outside contractor had done consulting work for TransCanada and other oil companies with a stake in the Keystone’s approval.”

Based on the information in that story, the liberal watchdog group The Checks and Balances Project?sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and his Deputy Inspector General, Harold Geisel, calling for “an investigation into the proposal process for the Keystone XL Pipeline’s ‘Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS)’ due to incomplete statements on the Organizational Conflict of Interest (OCI) questionnaire by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), and the determination by the State Department Contracting Officer that ERM did not have any conflicts of interest, despite clear evidence to the contrary.”

The Checks and Balances Project said that it will “unveil evidence on Wednesday of an IG inquiry into State’s use of Environmental Resources Management (ERM), according to The Hill. This would be welcome news for those of us who argued that the State Department’s report did not adequately address the environmental concerns of the Keystone XL.

 

Edited/Published by: SB