A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 , 2019
and had asked him about letting
go of an investigation into former
national security adviser Michael
Flynn.
Comey’s orchestration of the
release of their contents helped
spark special counsel Robert S.
Mueller III’s appointment to in-
vestigate possible coordination
between the Trump campaign
and Russia to affect the 2016 elec-
tion. Mueller would go o n to focus
intently on the episodes Comey
described as possible obstruction
of justice by the president.
Trump on Thursday seized on
the findings to lash out at Comey.
“Perhaps never in the history of
our Country has someone been
more thoroughly disgraced and
excoriated than James Comey in
the just released Inspector Gener-
al’s Report,” he tweeted. “He
should be ashamed of himself!”
In total, the inspector general
wrote, Comey wrote seven mem-
os, documenting most of the nine
one-on-one conversations he had
with Trump in early 2017, just
before he was fired.
Comey left three memos at the
FBI, the inspector general wrote.
He stored the other four docu-
ments in a safe in his home and
provided copies to his personal
attorneys, the inspector general
found. Of those four, he gave one
— which included information
the inspector general called “sen-
sitive” but unclassified — to a
friend and authorized him to
share its contents.
One of those memos shared
with the attorneys was later de-
termined to contain information
that was classified as confiden-
tial, the lowest level of secrecy,
after a review that included Com-
ey’s FBI general counsel, the in-
spector general wrote.
The confidential material in
that memo entailed just six words
“from a statement by President
Trump comparing the relative im-
portance of returning telephone
calls from three countries,” the
inspector general wrote. Another
memo Comey kept contained a
classified “assessment of a foreign
leader by President Trump,”
though Comey redacted that be-
fore providing it to his attorneys,
COMEY FROM A
the inspector general wrote.
On Twitter, Comey noted that
the inspector general found “no
evidence” that he or his attorneys
released any classified informa-
tion to the media.
“I don’t need a public apology
from those who defamed me, but
a quick message with a ‘sorry we
lied about you’ would be nice,” he
wrote. “A nd to all those who’ve
spent two years talking about me
‘going to jail’ or being a ‘liar and a
leaker’ — ask yourselves why you
still trust people who gave you
bad info for so long, including the
president.”
The report is the second time
Inspector General Michael Horo-
witz has criticized Comey for how
he handled FBI business duringhis abbreviated tenure in charge
of the bureau. Last summer,
Horowitz lambasted Comey for
his leadership of the investigation
into Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server while she was
secretary of state, accusing him of
insubordination and flouting Jus-
tice Department policies in decid-
ing only he had the authority and
credibility to make key decisions
on the case and speak about it
publicly.
The inspector general wrote
that his office gave its findings to
the Justice Department to deter-
mine whether Comey had com-
mitted a crime and that officials
declined to prosecute the case.
Conservatives, though, used the
finding to attack Comey.Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Lindsey O. Graham
(R-S.C.) said in a statement that it
was a “stunning and unprec-
edented rebuke of a former Direc-
tor of the FBI.”
George J. Terwilliger III, a for-
mer deputy attorney general and
acting attorney general under
President George H.W. Bush, said
the inspector general had de-
scribed “a gross abuse of institu-
tional power and authority.”
“A nd for someone who claims
on a regular basis the mantle of
righteousness, Comey should be
ashamed of what he did,” Terwil-
liger said.
That Comey had in his posses-
sion material that was later
deemed classified and shared itwith his lawyers has also rankled
liberals. It was Comey, after all,
who said Clinton and her aides
were “extremely careless” in their
handling of classified informa-
tion in their use of a private email
server.
Many Clinton supporters say
the FBI’s investigation into that
matter — and Comey’s revelation
on the eve of the 2016 election
that the case was resuming — cost
her the presidency. As an FBI
employee, Comey had to surren-
der all bureau materials upon
leaving his job and abide by a
“lifelong” duty to protect classi-
fied material, the inspector gener-
al wrote.
The New York Times first made
some of the contents of Comey’smemos public on May 11, 2017,
publishing a story about how, at a
private dinner, Trump asked him
for the loyalty pledge. Later, it
published another story detailing
Comey and Trump’s conversation
about Flynn.
Comey would later admit that
he had engineered the release of
some of that information through
a friend, Daniel Richman, a Co-
lumbia Law School professor who
served as a special government
employee at the FBI while Comey
was director. Comey claimed he
did not authorize Richman to
serve as a source for the story on
May 11, but did for the later piece.
None of it was authorized by
the FBI. When Comey revealed
what he had done at a June 20 17
congressional hearing, senior bu-
reau leaders were taken aback,
the inspector general wrote.
Earlier that month, Comey had
reviewed the memos and seen the
classification markings the FBI
had applied to the memos after he
had left, the inspector general
wrote.
FBI officials scrambled to get in
touch with Richman, who told
them Comey had also shared the
material with his other lawyers,
the inspector general wrote.
The memo provided to Rich-
man was determined to be “For
Official Use Only” but did not
contain classified information,
the inspector general wrote. But
because other memos Comey
shared with attorneys had ma-
terial deemed classified, officials
had to track down who had ac-
cessed the documents so they
could be secured, the inspector
general wrote.
“Members of Comey’s senior
leadership team used the adjec-
tives ‘surprised,’ ‘stunned,’
‘shocked,’ and ‘disappointment’ to
describe their reactions to learn-
ing that Comey acted on his own
to provide the contents of
Memo 4, through Richman, to a
reporter,” the inspector general
wrote.
The man who subsequently be-
came the acting head of the FBI,
Andrew G. McCabe, referred the
matter to the inspector general in
July 2017, the inspector general
wrote.
[email protected]Comey found to have broken rules, but prosecutors decline criminal charges
costs. Thursday’s proposal, like
some others before it, faced
mixed reactions from the very oil
and gas industries meant to ben-
efit from it.
BP President Susan Dio said in
a statement that the EPA should
regulate methane emissions. “It’s
not only the right thing to do for
the environment, there is also a
clear business case for doing this,”
she said. “The more gas we keep
in our pipes and equipment, the
more we can provide to the mar-
ket — and the faster we can all
move toward a lower-carbon fu-
ture.”
Smaller operators, however,
had lobbied the administration to
lift the requirements. Lee Fuller, a
vice president at t he Independent
Petroleum Association of Ameri-
ca, said in an interview that the
Obama administration rule had
“made it really onerous on small
businesses.”
Methane is a significant con-
tributor to the world’s green-
house gas emissions. It i s 80 times
as potent as carbon dioxide,
though it doesn’t last as long in
the atmosphere, nor is it emitted
on the same scale.
Scientists have projected that
the world needs to cut its overall
greenhouse gas emissions nearly
in half by mid-century to avert
catastrophic effects from global
warming. According to the EPA,
methane accounted for more
than 10 percent of all U.S. green-
house gas emissions from human
activities as recently as 2017.
Nearly a third of those emissions
were generated by the natural gas
and petroleum industry.
Several Democratic presiden-
tial candidates seized on the news
to argue that President Trump
should be ousted, underscoring
the sharp divide between the two
parties on the issue.
“With the Amazon burning,
farms under water, and hurri-
canes looming, Trump has decid-
ed to lift regulations on methane
— one of the most dangerous
greenhouse gases. Even oil and
gas companies think this is too
far. We need a President who will
act on climate, not make it worse,”
tweeted former congressman
Beto O’Rourke of Te xas.
Anne Idsal, assistant adminis-
trator of the EPA’s Office of Air
and Radiation, said the adminis-
tration is confident that methane
emissions will continue to decline
over time, even without the cur-
rent regulations.
“Methane is a valuable re-
METHANE FROM A
source,” Idsal told reporters in a
call Thursday. “There’s every in-
centive for industry to minimize
any type of fugitive methane
emissions, capture it, use it and
sell it down the road.”
David McCabe, a senior scien-
tist at the Clean Air Ta sk Force,
noted that the biggest cuts in
methane emissions from the gas
and oil sector have happened
during exploration. Emissions
dropped sharply in 2012 and
2016, respectively, after new fed-
eral requirements for pollution
controls took effect.
“The best information we have
is that the emissions dropped
because of regulations,” McCabe
said.
The EPA estimates that the
proposed changes, which will be
subject to public comment for 60
days after they are published,
would save the oil and natural gas
industry $17 million to $19 mil-
lion a year. That i s a small fraction
of the industry’s annual revenue,
which exceeds $100 billion.
Several of the world’s biggest
fossil-fuel companies, including
Exxon, Shell and BP, have op-posed the rollback and urged the
Trump administration to keep
the current standards in place.
Collectively, these firms account
for 11 percent of U.S. natural gas
output. In a statement Thursday,
Shell U.S. President Gretchen
Watkins noted that Shell has
pledged to reduce its methane
leaks from its global operations toless than 0.2 percent by 2025.
Asked about that support for
methane regulation, Idsal said
each company must decide its
own path. “We don’t precludeanybody from going above and
beyond, if they think that’s what
they need to do from a business
and a compliance standpoint.”
Large oil companies are not the
only industry to push back
against some of the White
House’s attempts to scale back
environmental regulations.
Last month, four major auto-makers struck a deal with Califor-
nia to produce more fuel-efficient
vehicles in coming years, under-
cutting one of the Trump admin-
istration’s most aggressive cli-mate policy rollbacks. And some
electric utilities opposed weaken-
ing limits on toxic mercury pollu-
tion that were put in place under
the Obama administration.
Erik Milito, a vice president at
the American Petroleum Insti-
tute, said in an interview that oil
and gas firms have adopted differ-
ent policy positions in part be-
cause some operate globally in-
stead of just in the United States.
But he said the EPA was right to
question the legal justification for
the Obama-era standard.
“What they’re tackling is
whether methane can lawfully be
a regulatory pollutant,” he said.
“We have a strong consensus that
federal agencies need to follow
the letter of the law. They did not
do that, and they are going back
and correcting that.”
Idsal said the agency will con-
tinue to require oil and gas com-
panies to limit the release of what
are known as “volatile organic
compounds,” which include
methane, but only during drilling
and processing. Milito noted that
by 2023, 90 percent of oil and gas
facilities will have to install tech-nology curbing volatile organic
compounds.
Still, the EPA acknowledged
that its proposed rollback could
have public health implications.
The fact that more volatile organ-
ic compounds could be released,
the agency wrote in its proposal,
“will degrade air quality and are
likely to adversely affect health
and welfare” because of more air
pollution. But, the agency added,
“we are unable to quantify these
effects at this time.”
In September, the Interior De-
partment eased requirements
that oil and gas firms operating
on federal and tribal land capture
the release of methane.
Environmentalists threatened
to fight the Trump administra-
tion’s latest move in court.
Kassie Siegel, director of the
Climate Law Institute at the Cen-
ter for Biological Diversity, an
advocacy group, called the pro-
posal reckless, saying it shows
“complete contempt for our cli-
mate.” She said that even the
Obama administration’s e fforts to
limit methane emissions were
modest, given the significant
amount that escapes into the at-
mosphere each year.
“The Obama rule was like a
Band-Aid on a gaping wound,”
Siegel said. “The Trump adminis-
tration is so fanatical that they
couldn’t even live with the Band-
Aid. They had to rip off the Band-
Aid.”
The Obama administration’s
push to impose the first limits on
methane emissions from the oil
and gas industry in 2016 came
shortly after the EPA found that
emissions were on an upswing at
a time when booming U.S. shale
oil and gas drilling had dramati-
cally driven down the prices of
domestic natural gas and global
oil alike.
Ben Ratner, a senior director at
the advocacy group Environmen-
tal Defense Fund, said in an inter-
view that rolling back the regula-
tions could reward bad actors in
the industry. Given that many
major players had embraced lim-
its on methane, Ratner added,
Thursday’s proposal suggests
that the Trump administration
opposes regulating greenhouse
gases on principle.
“It’s more of an ideological
reaction to regulation of any cli-
mate pollutant by the federal gov-
ernment,” he said.
[email protected]
[email protected]Steven Mufson contributed to this
report.EPA to relax restrictions on methane, a move that is dividing energy industry
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Former FBI director James B. Comey testifies in June 201 7 before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Justice Department’s watchdog
said in a report Thursday that Comey violated FBI policies in how he handled memos that detailed his interactions with the president.BRIAN MELLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Pumpjacks operating in California’s Central Valley northwest of Bakersfield. The EPA plans to allow energy firms to largely police themselves
when it comes to preventing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from leaking out of new oil and gas wells, pipelines and other infrastructure.“The Obama rule was like a Band-Aid on a
gaping wound. The Tr ump administration is
so fanatical that they couldn’t even live with
the Band-Aid. They had to rip off the Band-
Aid.”
Kassie Siegel, Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity