Leaked Dem document on Trump features energy, climate comments
Source: Jennifer Yachnin, E&E reporter • Posted: Friday, June 17, 2016
The Smoking Gun website published a 237-page opposition research document on Trump from an anonymous source identifying himself as “Guccifer 2.0,” who said the documents came from a yearlong incursion into the DNC’s servers.
The DNC acknowledged the breach Tuesday, but a spokeswoman did not immediately return a request from E&E Daily to verify the authenticity of the opposition research.
The document appears to contain only publicly available information, previously reported by various media outlets or on social media.
In addition to sections on Trump’s business failures and immigration proposals — including the temporary ban on all Muslim immigrants to the United States — the document also includes a three-page section on the Republican’s energy and environmental policy stances.
The document highlights Trump’s past calls to eliminate U.S. EPA, including a 2015 Fox News interview in which he called the agency a “disgrace” and said, “We’ll be fine with the environment.”
The DNC also suggested it could highlight Trump’s repeated assertion that climate change is a “hoax,” as well as his comments in September 2015 that “you can’t get hurt by extreme weather.”
The document noted that Trump, shortly after that statement, issued his “thoughts and prayers” to South Carolina after historic flooding in the state killed a dozen people.
The document, which is dated December 2015, also suggested that the DNC planned to highlight Trump’s apparent flip-flop on policies related to wind energy production — including his support during the Iowa caucuses for a production tax credit (PTC) while opposing a wind farm near a golf course he owns in Scotland.
“Campaigning in Iowa, Trump claimed he supported government subsidies for the wind turbine industry, yet in a case of NIMBY-ism, Trump staunchly opposed a proposed offshore windfarm in Scotland near a site he wanted to build a golf course,” the document states.
More recently, Trump has slammed PTCs for wind and solar energy production, calling the resources “very, very expensive” during a speech on his energy policy platform (E&E Daily, May 27).