The allegations by environmentalists and opponents of Scott Pruitt becoming chief of the Environmental Protection Agency are not the first to be raised about Pruitt receiving campaign money from friendly industries.
Environmentalists and the New York Times noted this week that Pruitt received campaign money from the poultry industry as he attempted to ease state fines due to pollution in eastern Oklahoma.
But Pruitt did the same thing with ATT in a controversial rate case that is back before the state Supreme Court. It was a story first revealed in the fall of 2015 by OK Energy Today. Days after helping ATT win a Supreme Court case involving a bribed Corporation Commission vote going back to 1989, Pruitt received $44,000 in campaign contributions from nearly four-dozen executions of the giant telecommunications company. The contributions were made even though Pruitt was running unopposed at the time.
The Attorney General never did respond to a request by OK Energy Today to comment. But further review of Pruitt’s relationship with ATT goes back to the days when he was co-owner and managing general partner of the Oklahoma City Redhawks triple-A baseball team.
It was 2004 when Pruitt, then a member of the Oklahoma State Senate became involved in the team and with ATT. The Bricktown ballpark opened in 1998 as Southwestern Bell Bricktown Ballpark then the name was changed to SBC Bricktown Ballpark after Southwestern Bell’s name change. In March 2006, the ballpark was renamed ATT Bricktown Ballpark, this after SBC and Old ATT merged. Pruitt remained an executive in the baseball team until 2010 and in 2011, ATT reevaluated its sports marketing strategy and gave up the naming rights to the ballpark.
Their relationship apparently extended to his election as Attorney General where he sided with the corporation rather than consumers in the rate case. Pruitt’s stand with ATT in the case even prompted an attorney who brought the 25-year old challenge before the supreme court to accuse the attorney general of not representing ratepayers.
The handful of consumers who raised the legality of the bribed vote are still demanding that ATT refund $16 billion to ratepayers. The original story was also reported by OK Energy Today.
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