Just because the U.S. Supreme court decided this week against hearing the 30-year old bribed Oklahoma Corporation Commission rate case doesn’t mean Oklahomans Against Bribery is giving up.
The handful of consumers who took their case to the Corporation Commission and the State Supreme Court and lost, vow to continue what they called “their pursuit of justice on behalf of ratepayers.” They also still demand $16 billion in refunds from ATT, money the group says was “stolen from Oklahoma ratepayers through bribery.”
“The bribery in this case was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and we know – even if others don’t – that bribery is unconstitutional in this state. As long as that unconstitutional bribed vote remains on the books, that order allowing AT&T to keep the excess revenues is also unconstitutional,” said bribery refund applicant and Nichols Hills Mayor Sody Clements. “An order that is unconstitutional can be challenged and overturned at any time. It’s just going to take a little longer.”
Oklahomans Against Bribery hired attorney Andrew Waldron to lead their fight.
“It took almost sixty years after Plessy v. Ferguson for the Supreme Court to realize the error of its ways and decide that segregation was unconstitutional after all. But that’s what it did in Brown v. Board of Education – no matter how late in coming, a decision finally recognized as unconstitutional was ultimately overturned,” he explained.
One of those consumers is former Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI in Oklahoma, Bob Ricks.
“The injustice of this bribery case has persisted for almost 30 years, and I fully intend to be around when the powers that be come to their senses and find bribed votes in Oklahoma are unconstitutional too.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to deny the bribery refund applicants’ petition for writ of certiorari does not necessarily reflect the high court’s agreement with the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision affirming the OCC order dismissing the bribery refund application without a hearing, or the OCC order itself. The court receives several thousand such petitions each session, and typically, only about 4% are granted, entirely at the high court’s discretion.
Despite new evidence of intrinsic fraud at both the Corporation Commission and the Oklahoma Supreme Court, both bodies dismissed the 2015 AT&T bribery refund application and subsequent appeal without even hearing the new evidence of fraud.
Since then, the New York Times has reported about more questionable attempts by AT&T to influence public officials to hinder the case, including shady financial transactions with former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. On April 21, the Times reported how AT&T had sold a house near the state capitol to Pruitt for $100,000 less than its employee had paid for it. “[W]hen Mr. Pruitt became attorney general, he helped quash another attempt to revisit the SBC bribery case,” the Times wrote.
“AT&T may think they’ve won today, but they’re wrong,” said expert witness and bribery refund applicant James Proctor, a former director of the Public Utility Division at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. “The facts, the law and that 11.589% interest rate are still on our side. The longer AT&T waits to make this right, the more it’s going to cost the company and the more sordid details are going to come out. In the meantime, nothing they can say or do will ever make that bribed order constitutional.”
“I spent a lot of my life fighting to defend this country and its institutions of democracy, only to see officials in those same institutions neglect their duty and permit proven public corruption to corrode citizens’ confidence in their government,” said Lt. Gen. Richard A. Burpee (ret.), former commander of Tinker Air Force Base. “This most recent effort to rid Oklahoma of the cancer of corruption hasn’t succeeded, but that doesn’t mean we give up. Another sortie, another front, another strategy. Someday we’re not only going to restore billions in excess revenues to the people of Oklahoma, we’ll restore their confidence in the institutions of justice too.”
