It’s not quite the indictment that everyone is waiting for, but Mother Jones is reporting that one of Trump’s top EPA officials has been indicted in a bribery case that’s connected to now-former attorney general Jefferson B. Sessions III.
The Alabama Ethics Commission announced Tuesday morning that a grand jury had indicted Onis “Trey” Glenn, the EPA official, and Willie Scott Phillips, his former business partner, on a variety of state ethics charges.
Glenn was named administrator for the EPA’s southeast region by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But before he immersed himself in the Trump swamp, Glenn was involved in a scheme to protect Drummond Coal Company from having to follow the laws that required it to clean up its mine sites. Drummond found it was cheaper to line a few politicians’ pockets than it was to actually carry out the required remediation, and since the communities affected were mostly poor and black, Alabama politicians found it easy to ignore the issue.
Under President Obama, the EPA tried to force Drummond to live up to its obligations. But Glenn was one of a group of state officials who pushed back—assisted by then Senator Jeff Sessions. Already leadership at Drummond and their law firm has been convicted for bribing a state senator. And the same people who handed over those dollars, handed more than a few to America’s outgoing chief law enforcement officer.
Sessions has long had close ties to Balch and Drummond—the companies respectively ranked as his second- and third-biggest contributors during his Senate career, and collectively donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to his campaigns.
Sessions has reportedly been expected to return to the Senate by running for the state’s other seat in 2020. He might have to rethink that effort.
AL.com’s reporting on the bribery trial shows how Glenn was connected to the keep-Drummond-dirty effort. His work for Drummond, in violation of state ethics laws, is the second time Glenn was connected to the same firms. He escaped indictment in 2008 after facing similar charges.
And as it turns out, Glenn isn’t just making money off taking bribes from coal companies. His paperwork for the EPA position revealed his stake in several companies that he had previously not disclosed including the perversely named waste disposal company, Big Sky Environmental.
Big Sky Environmental made headlines this year after it accepted human feces from New York for disposal at its Adamsville landfill. A train that delivered that refuse stunk up the surrounding community and after national news coverage became known as the “poop train.”
Coal is a failing industry. No matter what Trump says, steam coal used for electrical generation is no longer economically competitive with solar, wind, or natural gas. Coal is slowly—and sometimes not so slowly—losing ground every year.
That means that what coal companies want most is to get out of environmental and safety regulations. Not because they need these changes to expand their businesses and create more jobs, but because they are trying to cut their costs to the bone and extract every last penny from the ground before their market disappears entirely. And if that means leaving Alabama and other states full of unreclaimed pits of steaming toxic sludge, they’re okay with that.
They can always fill them with poop trains.