By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Is California Attorney General Kamala Harris on the take? It sure looks like it. But let us be fair here. Perhaps she is not being paid off. The alternative explanations are that she lacks character, or that she is a political hack or she lacks courage or she is merely incompetent. Those are the five possibilities. It seems to me that exhausts the potential interpretations. I will lay out the facts and allow you, gentle readers, to draw your own conclusions…
In 2010 in San Bruno, in the northern part of our state, a gas pipeline operated by Pacific Gas & Electric exploded, killing eight people. A technical evaluation of what occurred was carried out by several entities, including the California Public Utilities Commission, local law enforcement and the district attorney’s office. What was learned through these inquiries was that Pacific Gas & Electric had failed to follow safety rules for the pipeline’s operation. San Bruno filed suit against Pacific Gas & Electric and in the course of that legal action came across some irregularities with regard to the way the California Public Utilities Commission addressed the issue. The city has accumulated a cache of internal PG&E emails as well as exchanges with commissioners and commission staff that indicate there was something less than an arm’s length relationship between the commission and PG&E. San Bruno officials are particularly incensed with the action of Mike Florio, appointed to the commission by Governor Jerry Brown. Documents San Bruno obtained show that PG&E executives had meetings, e-mail exchanges and other communications with Florio that were conducted without public notice. Such communications are strictly prohibited and where incidental contact between commissioners and a utility occurs, those contacts are supposed to be outlined in a summary that is disclosed. Other documents in San Bruno’s possession show that Governor Brown was clearly aware of Florio’s conflict-fraught involvement. Another, one authored by a senior PG&E executive, shows that Brown was not merely entrusting decisions to the commissioners but had pressured a commissioner to change his vote. Other communications show that Brown is told in advance – well in advance – of actions to be taken by the commission. And why would that be? His right-hand woman, that is, his chief of staff, is Nancy McFadden, who was previously a senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric. There are conflicting reports as to whether Nancy McFadden has a financial interest – a huge financial interest – in Pacific Gas & Electric. In 2011, McFadden left Pacific Gas & Electric to serve as Brown’s executive secretary two days after he became governor. At the time she left the company, McFadden owned between $100,001 and $1 million in PG&E stock options, according to a filing with the state.
In her separation agreement from PG&E that paid her more than $1 million in February 2011, McFadden signed a clause saying she “agrees to refrain from performing any act” that “adversely affects the best interests of PG&E.” According to Consumer Watchdog, Ms. McFadden violated the Political Reform Act of 1974 “by using her official position to influence governmental decisions in which she knew she had a financial interest. Her actions impacted the value of the PG&E stock options she held,” according to the complaint. At a minimum, San Bruno officials want Florio prohibited from participating in any decisions related to PG&E. They have gone on record as demanding his resignation from the California Public Utilities Commission. Privately they have requested that Harris prosecute him. For her part, Harris has refused to prosecute Florio or involve itself at all in authoring an opinion letter that would essentially tell Governor Brown that he needs to make sure that McFadden and Commission straighten up and fly right. Nor has Harris seen fit to chastise, let alone prosecute, Brown or McFadden for their involvement in this coverup…
Not to minimize the deaths of the eight people in San Bruno, but there is even stronger indication of criminal wrongdoing involving the California Public Utilities Commission here in Southern California and equally disturbing information to show that Kamala Harris is ignoring it…
That matter is the conflict-ridden decision by the Commission in November 2014 that saddled the customers of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company with paying $3.3 billion of the shutdown costs at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station following a 2012 radioactive leak which has been established as being the result of plant operational errors by Southern California Edison. That settlment came nineteen months after a secret meeting at the swanky Bristol Hotel in Warsaw, Poland between then- California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey and Stephen Pickett, Edison’s executive vice president of external relations. In the course of the discussions between Picket and Peevey, who was formerly the president of Southern California Edison, they hammered out the gist of an agreement that is essentially indistinguishable from the final San Onofre settlement, including the multi-billion dollar charges to customers…
In February 2015, Southern California Edison filed with the California Public Utilities Commission what it called a “late-filed notice of ex parte communications” which disclosed that the meeting in Poland between Peevey and Pickett took place. The company did so only because San Diego public interest attorney Mike Aguirre and some investigators he is in league with had done some impressive spade work to unearth that the meeting had occurred…
More than six months later, in September 2015, investigators with Harris’s California Attorney General’s Office obtained a search warrant for Pickett’s emails. In his affidavit in support of that search warrant, Reye Eugene Diaz, an investigator with the California Attorney General’s Office since 1997, stated, “There is probable cause to believe Stephen Pickett, former executive president of external relations at SCE, and Peevey knowingly engaged in and conspired to engage in prohibited ex parte communications regarding the closure of a nuclear facility, to the advantage of SCE and the disadvantage of other interested parties.”
At issue in the investigation were the illegal private contacts between a member of the Commission and a conspiracy to construct a settlement contrary to the interests of the public, coupled with obstruction of justice. In short order, the California Attorney General’s Office acknowledges, it obtained the evidence needed to establish those charges. Inexplicably however, Harris earlier this spring allowed the three year statute of limitations on the Warsaw meeting to elapse. The once-secret meeting at the Bristol Hotel took place on March 26, 2013…
Why did Harris miss the deadline for bringing a key criminal charge in the case in March? Some will say it is a matter of sheer incompetence. Others think that someone, probably Edison, has paid her off.
Let me suggest this: Harris is stalling the San Onofre probe because she lacks character, because she is a political hack and she is, at her core, a political coward…
Right now, she is running for U.S. Senate, hoping to replace Barbara Boxer, who like her, is a Democrat. Going hard on these issues relating to the California Public Utilities Commission and Southern California Editions – and for that matter PG&E – would be highly damaging to Democrats with whom she is closely aligned and to big donors to the Democratic Party as well as to her own ongoing campaign. Michael Peevey is married to California State Senator Carol Liu, one of the leading Democrat’s in the California legislature and a staunch Jerry Brown and Kamela Harris ally. Ms. Harris succeeded Jerry Brown as attorney general. They have endorsed each other right down the line and she has consistently carried his political water for him and is not about to stop now. On June 6, 2013, Governor Brown was in Rancho Mirage, meeting with President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Under those circumstances, one might think the governor would have handed his phone off to an aide with instructions that any calls that came in be held until his palaver with two of the world’s most powerful men came to an end. One would be wrong because when Edison International Chairman Ted Craver called our governor in the middle of that meeting, Jerry Brown took the call. That was the day before the utility announced it would not seek to restart the San Onofre plant. In an email, Craver told his board of directors about his exchange with the governor during that call. He said Governor Brown was supportive of Edison’s plan to close the plant and that he provided Jerry Brown with talking points, to the effect that Edison was “taking the high road” and “insuring system reliability for our customers.” The next day Brown put out a news release in which he was quoted as saying, “Since San Onofre nuclear power plant went offline last year, energy utilities and the state have worked to provide Southern California with reliable electric power year round.” Clearly, Harris is not her own woman, and despite her sworn duty to look after the best interests of California’s residents and to enforce the law, she is more interested in not crossing up Jerry Brown. This is no different than her action in San Bruno, where she has deemed getting to the bottom of the corporate irresponsibility there that led to the deaths of eight people less important than not embarrassing the governor by exposing one of his appointees to the California Public Utility Commission as Pacific Gas & Electric flunky…
Before anyone sends me some stinking letters maintaining that all of this is an illegitimate partisan attack and that my opinion doesn’t mean anything because I just happen to be a Republican, consider this: among the most vociferous critics of Ms. Harris’s failure to act in San Bruno is California State Senator Jerry Hill, whose district includes San Bruno. Senator Hill is a Democrat.
In my opinion, Ms. Harris lacks the strength of character and courage to stand up to members of her own party when they have acted in contravention to the interests of the people of California and to the law. Her political ambition outweighs her commitment to the people she was elected to serve. Her unwillingness to her job as California Attorney General, which is to stand up to the powerful forces that would prey upon the citizenry, suggests to me she is not qualified to be a U.S. Senator…