America's Talking - Biden Energy Official Under Scrutiny for Family Ties to Environmental Lobby

Starting point is 00:00:00 Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper, we are recording this on Friday, June 9th. Casey Republican lawmakers this week stepped up their criticism of President Joe Biden's department heads, Secretary of the Department of Interior Deb Holland, and her questionable family connections to groups that lobby the department and support a certain cause. that the Department of the Interior is over? Just summarize this story for us. What's going on here? Right.

Starting point is 00:00:35 In a more perfect world, we wouldn't have to know much about the Department of the Interior. The average person is not normally one of the top agencies that people are familiar with. It's not Treasury. It's not IRS or DOJ that we're kind of monitoring for more politicization or something like that. In this case, it's Department of Interior. Now, why Department of Interior is important is because they oversee a lot of the drilling on, you know, federal lands. And we've seen, you know, gas prices hit a record high.

Starting point is 00:01:00 during the Biden administration. He's really shut down a lot of drilling and pipeline development, pushing hard toward electric vehicles and that kind of thing. So there's a lot more scrutiny on the Interior Department and what they're up to. And it turns out, at least according to these allegations and this investigation that Republican lawmakers are digging into is that Secretary Holland's family and she herself really has some connections to radical environmental groups, but also with some lobbying and maybe financial connections there too. So before, she was the DOI secretary. She was involved with Pueblo Action Alliance, PAA, which is a group, it's environmental

Starting point is 00:01:37 group based in New Mexico, the kind of a social justice group that does a lot of protest advocacy. You see this group sometimes if you live in, especially in these oil and gas states that will do different kinds of protests on sides or on pipelines. There's also, it kind of intersects with Native American lands, sometimes sacred Native American lands that might be the side of development. So that's kind of the landscape or the world that they're working in. First off, it seems that her daughter has been working for that group employed by them officially for a few years now and that she actually came to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress

Starting point is 00:02:10 on legislation that would prohibit lease sales for oil and gas development on federal land. So the daughter of the Biden administration official in charge of leasing on oil and gas leases on federal land is actively lobbying lawmakers to prevent those very leases. So it's not like she just happens to be. lobbying on some unrelated agricultural or foreign policy issue as sometimes D.C. families are well connected and do this. She is explicitly lobbying on the issue that her mother works on. So it's hard to imagine that she wouldn't be empowered to do so by her mother's position, right, whether she's explicitly bring that up or not in the same way that, you know, people say that, you know, how did Hunter Biden

Starting point is 00:02:47 get so many open doors to him? It's not because he was, you know, the smartest, most eloquent man in town. It was because of, you know, his father's connections, right? So this is what Republicans are upset about. But it really goes in this backdrop. Dan of what is the future of oil and gas domestic production in the U.S., especially if Biden gets elected again and we're pushing, you know, I've written a lot about how Biden is pushing within the next five or 10 years to have most Americans driving electric vehicles. Is this really going to happen this quickly or is this just mounting into a failed energy prices disaster? You reached out to the Department for comment. They declined, but Republicans are saying that

Starting point is 00:03:23 there's a real potential for a conflict of interest in here. But what are the potential ramification I mean, I guess what happens next? They can criticize her in the department all they want. But, I mean, is there a potential impeachment coming? Or what are the next steps? Do you know? Impeachment is probably pretty far down the road. I think what they would want to do is use their kind of investigatory powers to get more hard evidence beyond what they have now.

Starting point is 00:03:48 If they can, right now they have a lot of frustration in the oil and gas industry. They have more pressure on the Biden administration. Other things I've been reading have said that Biden doesn't want to change up his cabinet. positions right now. He doesn't want to show instability. He wants to project stability heading into the next election. So I don't think he's eager to be replacing a lot of cabinet heads. But if they can use this investigation to get more damning evidence of things maybe that the daughter has done, that the husband has done or that Holland herself has done, might be able to pressure Biden to removing her. You know, they could tie her up and enough investigations where she becomes kind of

Starting point is 00:04:22 politically toxic for Biden. I think that's probably the most likely play that they have. Of course, if there's something more illicit illegal going on, then they're going to push hard to get Holland removed for that. But I think they're kind of in the opening steps of this investigation. You're not sure if they're going to be able to find more in this regard right now. Listeners can keep up with this story and all of cases great reporting at the center square.com or Casey Harbour. I'm Dan McKalib.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Thank you for listening. Please subscribe.

America's Talking - Biden Energy Official Under Scrutiny for Family Ties to Environmental Lobby

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.