District Court judge: The EPA has provided no “credible evidence” that the funds are fraudulent or the allocation process was corrupt
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund authorized a landmark $27 billion for grant recipients to invest in clean and cost-saving technologies to deploy in communities across the country. Of that, $20 billion would be distributed to eight nonprofit organizations through two programs: the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator.
Fox News has referred to the climate fund as “gold bars” (referencing a hidden camera video of a former EPA staffer allegedly describing distributing funding at the end of the Biden administration), “money laundering,” and a “slush fund.” But repeating these phrases doesn’t make them true, and in fact, the EPA’s effort to claw back the climate funds has been rebuffed at several junctures because the agency has failed to provide any credible evidence of wrongdoing.
On March 12, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan excoriated Zeldin’s EPA for producing no actual evidence of waste, fraud, or abuse, adding, “I can cite cases all day long, but you have to have some kind of evidence or proffer to back it up.”
On March 18, Chutkan issued a temporary restraining order blocking the EPA from taking back $14 billion of the total, ruling that the agency “had not offered 'credible evidence' in support of its efforts to block the grants, nor had it followed proper procedures in canceling them.”
Only 2 Fox segments covering the EPA’s climate fund clawback effort after March 12 even mentioned that the judge found no credible evidence to support the EPA clawback attempt. The majority of the coverage dismissed the restraining order as part of a supposed partisan plot to block Trump’s agenda through the courts without even mentioning the details of the order.
But even before the district court decision, the question of sufficient evidence was raised by major outlets reporting on the February 18 resignation of veteran prosecutor Denise Cheung. Cheung, who headed the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., resigned after the Trump administration demanded she take action to ensure the climate funds were frozen, because they were the subject of a criminal investigation. Cheung had opposed opening the investigation because she said there was insufficient evidence to do so.
According to The Washington Post, rather than end the investigation, “interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin then personally submitted a seizure warrant application without any other prosecutors in his office that was rejected by a U.S. magistrate judge in D.C.” The attorney general’s office also asked at least one other attorney’s office outside of D.C. to launch an investigation, without success.
On March 12, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) launched an investigation into potential law enforcement misconduct around the freezing of the climate funds.
Fox News has not mentioned the resignation of the prosecutor who refused to freeze the climate funds, other legal setbacks the Trump administration has experienced in its mission to claw back climate funding, or the Senate investigation into its coverage of the EPA’s efforts to eliminate the climate funds.