Michael Barbaro

Gunasekara is the aide who handed him that snowball, and that's one of the things she's pretty well known for in Washington.

Huh.

She enters the first Trump administration where she is instrumental in pushing for the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which President Trump eventually did.

Mm-hmm.

During the Biden administration, she argued strenuously against policies that he put in place to reduce emissions from automobiles and power plants and the rest.

From day one, he's held true to that promise to, quote, shut down fossil fuel.

essentially making the argument that policies to address climate change are more harmful than climate change itself.

It's not climate change that farmers nor Americans should be worried about.

It's the policies being pushed in the name of climate change that stand to do far much more damage.

Her partner in trying to repeal the endangerment finding was an attorney named Jonathan Brightbill.

He had served in the Justice Department under the first Trump administration.

Everyone we have talked to has described him as a very sharp legal mind who really knows his way around the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.

and has made the argument in court that Democratic administrations have really overreached in their efforts to impose regulations to address climate change.

He was essentially dealing with the downstream effects of the endangerment finding.

Because of the endangerment finding...

EPA has been dealing with a whiplash of regulations.

They have been created in Democratic administrations, erased in Republican administrations, and fought in courts the entire time.

Withdrawing the endangerment finding eliminates this situation entirely.

And that's what Gunasekara and Brightbill plotted to do.

And how do they actually go about doing that?