Dems Kick Off their Traditional Election Year Silly Season Targeting 'Big Oil'

[Note: Donald Trump isn’t the only party who gets hit by Democrat partisan show trials. CEOs of “Big Oil” companies know they’ll also be targeted along about May of any election year by Democrats in congress. That particular political silly season kicked off last week when Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse, along with New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone sent letters to an array of company CEOs demanding they ‘fess up to alleged schemes of market manipulation that of course do not exist.

I wrote separate pieces on this tiresome bit of partisan hackery this week for The Daily Caller and The Telegraph. They appear below. Enjoy.]

t happens in or around May in any election year during which Democrats hold suitable positions in either house of Congress: heavily politicised show trial-style hearings targeting “Big Oil” begin. This has been an entirely predictable process across at least the last 30 years, and last week we found out this year will be no exception.

The first step comes when senior Democrats on certain committees in the Senate and/or House fire off hyperbolic letters to CEOs of “Big Oil” companies (this includes gas, of course) accusing them of all sorts of nefarious activities. Most frequently, the suggestion is that their companies have been engaging in “collusion” to “fix prices” for gasoline at the pump. Not surprisingly, that very accusation forms part of the basis for this year’s round of hearings.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan's recent criticism of the US oil executive Scott Sheffield has been described as a 'smear' based on 'dubious evidence' CREDIT: Kevin Dietsch/Getty

As it happens, this year’s scenario was set in place by what appeared to be a coordinated media frenzy regarding a fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago involving Donald Trump and some oil and gas industry executives. Although the dinner took place on April 11 and the Washington Post reported on it just 6 days later, the story didn’t become a cause célèbre in the rest of the legacy media until the second week in May. Then it took off, for whatever reason.

That turned out to be perfect timing for Senate Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who sent letters on May 23 to CEOs of 8 “Big Oil” companies, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, under the letterhead of the Senate Finance Committee which Wyden chairs. Setting up a predicate for a hearing to come, the Senators demanded that each company provide information related to the April 11 dinner, and to also provide any draft documents they might have prepared for proposed policy actions in a future Trump administration. 

Senators Wyden and Whitehouse demand all this information without irony despite the fact that these kinds of interactions between politicians and their supporters are standard operating procedure in the US political system. They happen all the time, in both parties.