In the six-plus years that Section 1504 languished in the murky purgatory of lobbying, lawsuits, and regulatory rollout, if anything, the daily lives of the First Family of Equatorial Guinea, the Obiangs, had continued to improve. Teodoro Obiang was by 2017 the longest-serving president on the planet and without opposition on any front, having just “won” the latest “election” with 93.7 percent of the vote. President Obiang had just completed construction of a new capital city—the country’s third. Unlike the other two working seats of government, the new capital was much nearer Obiang’s home village, and well inland, away from the gulf coast. President Obiang had chosen this site because he had grown especially wary of maritime coup attempts. (Even the corporate American mercenary force that he had agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars had not filled him with sufficient confidence.) But carving a modern new city out of the jungle was a costly proposition, which meant a good chunk of the oil revenue from ExxonMobil and Hess and Marathon and others went into its construction. The International Monetary Fund reported that Obiang’s government appropriated more than a quarter of Equatorial Guinea’s total 2011–2015 infrastructure budget for the building of the third new capital city. In 2016, the year of completion, that number jumped to half.
How much of that was spent actually constructing the new capital and how much was simply pocketed by Obiang’s family and his loyal government ministers remain matters of conjecture. This was like Putin’s Sochi Olympics construction project, only with a smaller circle of judo partners and cronies in play. Much of the construction money was funneled through a privately owned enterprise called Abayak SA. Abayak was a busy little shell company, and the largest in the country; aside from owning a 15 percent cut of ExxonMobil’s oil distribution business in Equatorial Guinea, Abayak enjoyed a monopoly on importing cement into the country, which proved mighty valuable when Obiang determined to make his new city in the jungle. Who benefited from Abayak’s supremely well-positioned market share? President Teodoro himself owned 75 percent of Abayak shares, his favored wife owned 15 percent, and the final 10 percent ownership stake belonged to Teodoro’s eldest son, the Michael Jackson glove–loving international playboy and driving menace, Teodorin Obiang. Teodorin, who had ascended from minister of forestry to vice president in the summer of 2016, had brand-new tankfuls of cash in the form of new construction contracts and subcontracts, from which he could siphon off tens of millions more dollars.
When one of Teodorin’s “construction company” partners discovered the impressive amplitude of his plunder, the First Son had the man tossed into one of Equatorial Guinea’s storied prisons, for fear he might blab to criminal investigators in the United States and France who had Teodorin in their sights. Roberto Berardi spent more than two years behind Equatoguinean bars and emerged seventy pounds lighter and much scarred. “True terror was when they tortured my neighbors in the cell next to me,” Berardi, an Italian national, said after his release in 2015. “Hearing those cries and blows every night was terrible. It destroys you psychologically. It was more frightening than when I was beaten myself….The prisons are full of innocent people who are tortured, as well as foreigners, who are exposed to the worst violence….What I saw in prison was like a horror movie.”
The everyday Equatoguineans who steered clear of President Obiang’s notorious penal system weren’t exactly flourishing, in spite of the extra $25 billion or so in oil and gas revenue that had poured into the country after 2010. “Equatorial Guinea ranks 138 out of 188 countries in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, a measure of social and economic development,” noted a 2017 Human Rights Watch report. “Its score is almost identical to that of Ghana and Zambia, despite boasting a per capita income that is more than five times as high.” Education was a shambles, and getting worse. Little more than 10 percent of Equatoguinean children made it to middle school, and almost half of those had fallen badly behind. It was not uncommon to find a teenager in the first grade.
The report noted that Equatoguineans’ access to safe drinking water had not improved one whit in more than twenty years. One in four children suffered physical consequences from lack of sufficient food. Six in ten deaths were the result of malnutrition or easily eradicable communicable diseases. The country’s vaccination rates for tuberculosis had actually dropped from 99 percent in 1997 down to 35 percent in 2015. The health-care system was no great help when someone did get sick. “If people [in critical condition] don’t have money, they die,” a doctor at a public hospital in one of the three capitals told researchers from Human Rights Watch.
Terrible to see it all laid out like that in black and white, sure, but it does conjure up what that ExxonMobil company spokesman had said around the time of the Riggs Bank hearings a decade earlier: “It is not our role to tell governments how to spend their money.” And to be honest, ExxonMobil and other oil and gas drillers continued to benefit from presidential-level corruption in countries like Equatorial Guinea; it just simplified the process of doing business there. It was quite clear whom to pay, and no one in the country had enough of a death wish to try to get in the way of Obiang delivering on his promises to let the Western companies do what they wanted. So long as nasty, authoritarian strongmen like Teodoro Obiang didn’t start making untoward new demands on oil and gas producers, and they honored ExxonMobil’s bottom-line imperative—the “sanctity of contract”—all was cool.
Anyway, by the time the Human Rights Watch report on Equatorial Guinea surfaced in 2017, Big Oil had its hands around the neck of Section 1504. Republicans controlled the Senate, the House, and the presidency. They were seizing as much control as they could of the judiciary. And ExxonMobil’s Tillerson had ascended to—of all things—U.S. secretary of state. Kind of a head-scratcher, if you had governance in mind, to give this job to a man with no government experience who had shown no interest in American foreign policy to date, had raised eyebrows, consternation, and even alarm among U.S. diplomats and national security specialists on both sides of the aisle. Not that Rex didn’t have spirited defenders, especially on social media. “Attacks on Rex Tillerson implying he is in pocket of Russia are despicable. He’s a distinguished American, with incredible accomplishments,” said one tweet. And another: “RT if you are PROUD to have Rex Tillerson as the next Secretary of State!” Except, alas, as we would learn soon enough, both of those were from @TEN_GOP, one of the many splendid accounts secretly set up by Russians working at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. When @TEN_GOP got suspended by Twitter for being a Russian op, Russian-controlled @ELEVEN_GOP (get it?) took its place: “Trump to name Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State! Good!”
Jane Mayer later reported in The New Yorker that, according to a dispatch from the British intelligence veteran Christopher Steele, senior Russian officials had boasted about successfully blocking the appointment of the vocally anti-Putin former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would cooperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria,” Mayer explained. “As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it.” The first of those events was the rejection of Romney. In early 2018, The Wall Street Journal did an analysis of since-deleted Russian social media accounts that tried to steer the secretary of state appointment: “Weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Russia-backed online ‘trolls’ flooded social media to try to block Mitt Romney from securing a top job in the incoming administration….The operatives called [Romney] a ‘two headed snake’ and a ‘globalist puppet,’ promoted a rally outside Trump Tower and spread a petition to block Mr. Romney’s appointment to the top diplomatic job.” And it made an impression. In all the right places: “Around that time, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said Mr. Romney had been ‘nothing
but awful’ to Mr. Trump during the campaign, and tweeted that she was getting a ‘deluge’ of negative comments about him from Trump loyalists.” Trump loyalists, at least some of whom were writing from Savushkina Street.
After humiliatingly courting and then dumping Romney, Trump switched horses to Rex “We Do Not Support Sanctions, Generally” Tillerson. “A surprise to most,” Mayer wrote, “and a happy one in Moscow.” The two men had never met before the meeting in which Trump offered him the position. The Kremlin certainly seemed to be delighted with the choice. “[Tillerson] fulfills his duties very professionally,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov on hearing the news. Rex was a very special kind of win-win. Good for Russia. Good for oil and gas.
But, in truth, it was all good for oil and gas at the dawn of Trump.
Just a few weeks after Trump and his Republican majorities got in the saddle, Section 1504 was toast. Senator Inhofe, sponsor of the legislation that strangled 1504, was still crowing a month later, when the new Republican president was considering an executive order to gut the Obama administration program designed to decrease carbon emissions by a third. Gone were the days when Inhofe had to be the self-styled “one-man truth squad” at international climate change symposia, proudly standing up to defend the helpless, damsel-in-distress, misunderstood energy industry. Lonely work but somebody had to do it, Inhofe would say. “We’ve endured eight years of an administration that buys into the alarmist mentality that the world is coming to an end, and it’s due to man-made gases,” Inhofe offered in his excoriation of the Clean Power Plan on the Senate floor on March 14, 2017. “That’s what the hoax is.”
With a Republican House and a Republican Senate and Trump now in a position to deliver his lifetime wish list, Inhofe pulled out all his greatest hits—a trifecta of conspiracy theory, bad science, and economic forecasts unsupported by fact. He explained how scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had hidden data exculpatory to the greenhouse gases. “Just a few weeks ago, a whistleblower alleged that a June 2015 NOAA report manipulated data,” he said. “Conveniently, the computer with the data suffered a complete failure and none of the data was saved.” He enumerated the benefits of increased carbon dioxide emissions: “Many people still remind us, over and over again, that CO2 is actually a fertilizer. It helps things grow.” He ad-libbed make-believe statistics attributed to the energy-industry-backed National Black Chamber of Commerce, enumerating the damage certain to fall on “the most vulnerable people” if emissions were reduced. The Clean Power Plan “would increase black poverty by 23 percent, Hispanic poverty by 26 percent, reduce black jobs by 200,000 and Hispanic jobs by 300,000, with a cumulative job loss of 7 million for blacks and nearly 12 million for Hispanics by the year 2035.”
When the new American president signed on the dotted line, Inhofe was in his glory. “This order is a clear sign to the country that Trump is serious about unleashing this country’s energy dominance.”
Some hope still remained on the transparency front, thanks to something called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which had gained a great deal of momentum in the previous few years. For all the same reasons that Lugar and Cardin had written Section 1504, for all the potential benefits that might flow from stopping the fire hose of corruption that the oil and gas industry sprayed into weak countries, more than fifty countries around the world had committed to public reporting of all money received, of all kinds, from oil and gas producers. The United States had been one of them, a leader by example. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Just a few weeks after Congress knifed Section 1504, The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson reported, the Trump administration unilaterally canceled mandated, regularly scheduled meetings of the EITI stakeholders in the United States, which included representatives from the federal government, energy companies, trade organizations, and civil society groups like Global Witness and Oxfam America.
Industry watchers initially scratched their heads about the meaning of the United States canceling those meetings, but not for long. Before the end of the year, the United States announced its full withdrawal from the agreement. Forget transparent financial reporting in developing countries. Oil and gas companies wouldn’t even need to report their tax expenditures here, inside the United States of America. “The argument for withdrawal, according to the formal letter from the Department of the Interior to the chair of the E.I.T.I. board, is that U.S. law simply doesn’t allow for the kind of transparency that E.I.T.I. requires,” wrote Davidson, who had been closely following the action. “This argument is hard to accept, since the U.S. played a central role in crafting the rules of E.I.T.I.”
Senator Ben Cardin and Richard Lugar, who by then had been forcibly retired by Indiana Republicans for his dastardly bipartisan proclivities, issued a joint statement on hearing the news. “The Department’s justification for withdrawing from EITI—because the initiative contravenes the U.S. legal framework—is a front meant to mask Big Oil and Gas’ money and influence,” they said. “There is no U.S. law that prevents oil, gas or mining companies from voluntarily disclosing their federal tax payments to the American people. The Trump Administration’s move today is a painful abdication of American leadership on transparency and good governance.” EITI’s founding voice Daniel Kaufman, writing in the Financial Times, pointed out the rich irony that even Russian and Chinese oil and gas companies were reporting their tax expenditures. It was just the American majors who didn’t want to. “The US ones refuse to change their old habits,” he said.
Jay Branegan, who had worked for Lugar in the Senate and witnessed Rex Tillerson’s outburst about government-enforced transparency, wrote an incisive op-ed in the days after the American withdrawal from EITI. “The US action is a stab in the back to the activists in poor countries around the world who have been struggling to expose corruption by their countries’ leaders,” Branegan wrote. “It’s probably not too strong to say that for the past several years, the major US oil companies duped the public and their shareholders about their commitment to good governance and corporate responsibility. Last week, when their fraud was exposed, the Trump administration colluded with them to try to cover it up. The timing of the pullout—as Congress is preparing unprecedented corporate tax cuts and new ‘Paradise Papers’ revelations about the widespread use of offshore corporate tax avoidance schemes—led many to ask, ‘Just what are ExxonMobil and Chevron and the others trying to hide?’ ”
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As I was finishing the manuscript for this book, the Justice Department released most of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s election interference: “The investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the [Trump] Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” The unspooling story of Russia’s election attack—and its care and feeding of the Trump campaign—has been told through Mueller’s indictments and through the pages of his report and in episodic bursts from America’s major dailies. But in the big picture, the trails between Trump and Russia turned out to be not only myriad, but surprisingly, well, greasy.
The Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the Trump campaign foreign policy team, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, were both self-styled energy experts when they were plucked from obscurity and installed on Team Trump. Papadopoulos was introduced to the nation by Donald Trump as “an oil and energy consultant” and “an excellent guy” and then put on display at the all-for-the-cameras show Trump captioned “Meeting with my national security team” on his Instagram feed. Eventually, it would be Papadopoulos’s advance-notice bragging about Russia’s hacking of the Democrats that would spur the FBI to open its initial investigation into what the hell was going on between the Russians and Trump.
As for Carter Page, proprietor of Global Energy Capital LLC�
��wow, that sounds big—Mueller reported that Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow while he was a Trump campaign adviser included a meeting with Andrey Baranov, an old Gazprom hand who had become the head of investor relations at Rosneft. (“Page believed he and Baranov discussed Rosneft president Igor Sechin, and he thought Baranov might have mentioned the possibility of a sale of a stake in Rosneft in passing.”) Page told Mueller that on that same trip to Moscow his meeting with another Russian oil company, Tatneft, included a discussion of him potentially becoming a consultant for the firm. The Kremlin must have been especially eager to keep Page in the clover, this nonentity who miraculously got himself named one of only five key foreign policy advisers to Trump after he sent the campaign co-chair and deputy campaign manager emails in early 2016 slagging the U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Mueller also makes nearly four dozen mentions in his report of Robert Foresman, one of the U.S. bankers who helped smear some international validation onto Putin’s Yukos heist back in the day. Foresman had acted as a sort of character witness for Igor Sechin as early as 2008, telling U.S. State Department officials that the Rosneft boss was smart, hardworking, patriotic, and “exceptionally courteous.” In Mueller’s telling, Foresman was back and forth between Moscow and the United States during and after the 2016 presidential election, seeing off Putin emissaries on their way to a meeting with Jared Kushner, and helping to identify the best Kremlin communication channels for Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn. In conveying a Kremlin invitation for Trump to attend a Russian economic forum, Foresman referenced “an approach he received from ‘senior Kremlin officials’ about the candidate.” Foresman also requested a meeting with Trump himself to discuss “concrete things” that cannot be communicated over “unsecure email”; when that didn’t happen, he asked for a meeting with Donald junior, maybe. Or Eric? Is Eric available? Among the “concrete things” he wanted to discuss were “details of a Ukraine plan.”
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