If an earlier Fox News report is accurate, there were some shenanigans going on within the Biden administration to justify shutting down a chemical plant in Louisiana.
That report is now being cited by Republicans who are opening a probe into the Biden administration to see if the paper trail was, in fact, fabricated.
Talking Points…
- Official claims report was made up
- GOP pounces
- Analysis
This all got started when Michael Morton, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 6 science liaison to the EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) in Washington, D.C., testified.
He was asked about a specific email that allegedly originated with his office. When he was being questioned by attorneys for synthetics manufacturer Denka Performance Elastomer (DPE) on the email in question, he responded:
"I didn't write that.
"I didn't say that. For – for that part, I didn't – I don't know that, so I don't know who wrote that."
When Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan visited Saint John the Baptist Parish, he vowed to take action against the plant and protect residents from "harmful chloroprene emissions from the Denka facility." Now, the question is if he made up the paper trail needed to make that happen.
House Republican leaders on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee are now calling out the Biden administration, with the effort being led by Environment Subcommittee Chair Max Miller (R-OH) and Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chair Brian Babin (R-TX), who penned a joint letter demanding answers from Regan.
The letter, in part, stated:
"Officials in EPA's Office of Research and Development may have violated scientific integrity policies by influencing EPA's Region 6 Office to withdraw a request for a scientific review of the cancer risk assessment in the 2010 Toxicology Review of Chloroprene under EPA's Integrated Risk Information System Program."
It actually gets worse, as DPE counsel has also submitted metadata of the origins of the email, which have been traced back to the ORD. If the data is correct, the ORD created the content and then used Morton's email to send the data to itself to justify the walking back of the chloroprene nomination.
The letter continued:
"Based on this evidence alone, it appears that ORD officials, in an apparent effort to build a fabricated scientific record, authored the email withdrawing the request for scientific review on behalf of Region 6, which had previously determined a scientific review necessary. This practice is otherwise known as 'ghostwriting.'
"Additionally, because this ghost-written email was sent several weeks after the chloroprene nomination was rejected, the actions undertaken by ORD officials appear to be a retroactive attempt to provide scientific rationales and may have been an action to silence scientific opinions of chloroprene that differ from the Agency's public position."
We will not be able to truly comment on this until after the probe has been completed, but it does fit the mold of allegations made prior that activists are making policy, with this administration merely rubber-stamping the policy and then sending it out. In this case, another agency within the administration appears to have just decided to invent data to support its end game.
Keep in mind that this is barely being covered right now in the mainstream media. Yet, if this had happened on a Republican's watch, it would be front-page news and all over the cable news networks. This is potentially a major scandal, yet nobody in the media seems interested because it is a Democrat administration.
