Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met privately with 39 energy companies and trade associations while the task force on which he sat developed President Bush’s national energy policy, but he held no meetings with representatives of environmental and consumer groups, according to The Center for Responsive Politics’ (CRP) review of Department of Energy (DOE) task-force documents that were released last week.

Between Feb. 14 and April 26 of last year, the documents reveal that Abraham consulted on eight separate occasions with the energy executives and trade associations, mostly in groups, at DOE’s headquarters. One meeting (with coal producers), however, took place at the White House. Among those conferring with Abraham were representatives from the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), UtiliCorp United (now Aquila Inc.), Constellation Energy, Duke Power, Northeast Utilities, CMS Energy, Exelon Corp., the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Domestic Petroleum Council, Cabot Oil & Gas, Noble Affiliates, EOG Resources, Kerr-McGee Corp., and municipal and public power authorities. Ironically, Enron Corp. — the company that has fueled the interest in the task force records — was not listed as having met with Abraham.

Twenty-nine of the companies or executives who had powwows with Abraham were big donors to the Republican Party, said CRP, a Washington, DC-based non-partisan group that tracks political contributions. They contributed a total of $6.3 million in individual, political action committee (PAC) and soft money since 1999, the majority of which ($4.5 million) went to the GOP, it said.

As a former senator from Michigan, Abraham also has received money from some of the energy companies that sent representatives to confer with him on the national energy policy, the CRP said. For example, CMS Energy, which owns coal-fired power plants in Michigan and a 10,000-mile gas pipeline, gave $30,750 in individual and PAC contributions to Abraham in 1995-2000, his last term as senator, the group noted.

Abraham was one of nine federal agency heads who sat on the high-level energy task force, which was chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney. The White House and Cheney have refused to give up any task force-related documents, saying that to do so would encroach on the ability of the Bush administration and future administrations to engage in private consultations when establishing policy.

Its initial review of the 11,000 pages of documents turned over by DOE last week, The Washington Post reported, appears to support the claims of Democrats and environmental groups that the Bush administration “relied almost exclusively on the advice of executives from utilities and producers of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy while a White House task force drafted recommendations that would vastly increase energy production.”

The documents further show that Abraham invited members of a business roundtable to an “off-the-record discussion about the administration’s energy policy” last April, even as the energy task force refused to disclose its dealings to the public, the Boston Globe reported.

Abraham, however, claimed DOE officials “carefully considered the views of energy experts, stakeholders and public interest groups” when crafting the energy policy. The released documents “only further confirm that it was indeed a balanced plan, that not only sought, but included all viewpoints,” he said in a prepared statement. A White House spokesman last week also noted that almost half of the proposed actions in the national energy policy were related to energy conservation and the environment (42 out of a total of about 100).

Abraham further said the task force rejected more energy policy recommendations from the energy industry than it accepted. For instance, the American Petroleum Institute offered 25 recommendations, he noted, but only four were included in the energy policy.

In addition to records from DOE, thousands of pages of task-force documents were released last week by the Department of Agriculture, Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Two federal court judges had ordered the agencies to surrender the documents and records in response to lawsuits brought separately by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a liberal environmental group, and Judicial Watch Inc., a Washington, DC-based conservative watchdog group. The groups filed the lawsuits after their requests for the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) had been rebuffed.

The departments of Transportation and Commerce have been ordered by the court to provide Judicial Watch with a complete package of records by May 3, as well as a list of documents being withheld by May 15. Neither agency has turned over any task force documents yet.

Many of the documents surrendered last week were blackened out, attachments were missing and in numerous cases records were withheld, which further has ignited the controversy over the task force’s closed-door meetings and contacts with energy executives and companies.

Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, estimated that more than 15,000 pages of documents still were being withheld, mostly by DOE. He accused the Bush administration of “obstruction of justice,” and said the group planned to go to court in “a week or so” to obtain the documents.

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