Lt. Gov. Forest wants FBI probe of Gov. Cooper after Atlantic Coast Pipeline report
A day after the release of findings from an independent investigation into a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the issue landed in the middle of the 2020 elections as Lt. Gov. Dan Forest called on the FBI to do its own investigation into Gov. Roy Cooper and the pipeline.
Forest, a Republican who is running against Cooper, said the FBI should investigate the Democratic governor over the pipeline permitting process and a fund meant to offset potential damage from the pipeline.
The report was issued almost two years after Republican General Assembly leaders first questioned the governor’s office about the appearance of a “pay-for-permit” in the state’s approvals for the pipeline. Legislators hired outside investigators to produce the report, which found that Cooper “improperly used the authority and influence of his office” but did not personally benefit from those decisions.
The Cooper administration approved a permit for the pipeline in 2018, and at that time also announced the pipeline companies would provide $57.8 million to a fund under the governor’s control to be used for environmental mitigation, economic development and renewable energy in areas affected by the pipeline. The natural gas pipeline would travel through West Virginia, Virginia and then North Carolina, where it would follow the Interstate 95 corridor.
Cooper’s office maintains that the fund was negotiated separately from the permitting process and was not conditional on the fund, and Duke Energy has said the same.
At the end of the report, investigators wrote that while the report “was not conducted for the purpose of identifying criminal violations and the information has not been evaluated to determine if specific criminal statutes have been violated ... the information suggests that criminal violations may have occurred.”
“An investigative agency with the authority to compel cooperation and the production of documents could potentially obtain additional information to identify violations of criminal statutes,” the report states.
In a news release, Forest claimed repeatedly that “someone is lying” and he wants the FBI’s public corruption unit to get involved.
“The CEO of Duke Energy says she met face-to-face, alone, with the Governor; the Governor denies such a meeting took place. Someone is lying. The Governor says he did not sign off on the pipeline, but emails, timelines, and texts from his top aides say otherwise. Someone is lying. The Governor’s top aide claims the creation of the fund was Duke Energy’s idea and Duke Energy states otherwise. Someone is lying,” Forest said in an emailed statement from his office and his campaign.
“People are lying, and they need to be put under oath, under threat of perjury, and reanswer these questions. I call on the Public Corruption Unit of the FBI to step up and do their job,” Forest said in his statement.
However, the report repeatedly states that Cooper met with Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good, and Thursday a Cooper spokesperson said the governor has never denied the meeting.
On the issue of whether the fund was Duke’s idea, the report concluded there’s no documentation to show that.
“Even though, information, as listed in this report, shows that Duke was not contemplating a fund prior to November 30, 2017, some Duke executives said that Duke had considered the creation of a fund prior to that date. ... Duke has not produced any documents to show a fund was being considered by Duke, prior to November 30, 2017.”
The report says “information from Dominion (Energy, another of the pipeline partners) shows that a paragraph was purposely added to the first draft of fund to allow for other uses beyond mitigation of interior forest habitat. No Duke Executives could explain why the first draft was written and submitted in this way.”
Cooper adviser Ken Eudy suggested the draft was based on a template of Virginia’s agreement for its own fund, according to the report.
Cooper spokesperson Sadie Weiner said in a statement in response to Forest on Thursday:
“The Lieutenant Governor has taken more than $2 million from a donor indicted for bribing an elected official, and he has even more facts wrong about this than the Republicans’ investigators did. The permit process was left to experts at DEQ as they have said dozens of times, and it is Republicans who hijacked a fund meant to create jobs in Eastern North Carolina. The Republicans’ story changes every time they run into inconvenient facts, and North Carolina would be better off if they’d spend this energy on raising teacher pay and expanding Medicaid.”
Last year, the legislature took control of the fund away from Cooper and redirected the money to schools in the pipeline area.
The legislature adjourned for the year earlier this month without any teacher raises becoming law, nor Medicaid expansion, which are both issues at the center of the months-long budget stalemate between the Republican-majority General Assembly and Cooper.
All 170 seats in the state legislature and the governor’s office are up for election in 2020. Candidate filing begins Dec. 2. Both Forest and Cooper campaigns have been active for months. Rep. Holly Grange, another Republican, is also running for governor. The primary is on March 3.
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This story was originally published November 21, 2019 at 7:42 PM.
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