Michael Barbaro

Russell Vogt, as we know, during the Biden years, starts a think tank of his own, the Center for Renewing America, where they were keeping the MAGA movement alive.

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Clark has been in the fight against the endangerment finding for decades.

Before there ever was an endangerment finding, he went to court to argue that the EPA...

doesn't have and shouldn't have the legal authority to address greenhouse gases.

It doesn't matter to EPA if it's absurd, if its regulations are going to lead to absurd consequences that inflict massive harm on the national economy.

He loses that.

And that, from everything we have been told, is really a motivating factor for years with Jeff Clark, what he sees as righting a wrong.

Of course, the other thing Jeff Clark is known for, and I think a lot of our listeners will remember this, is that at the end of the first Trump term, he emerges from deep within the Justice Department as an ally of President Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election, so much so...

that Trump briefly considers making him the acting attorney general.

And that so scares people at the Department of Justice that many of them threaten to quit.

If it happens, President backs down.

But Clark becomes known as a major election denier.

That's right.

And so by late 2022, 2023, Jeff Clark and Russ Vogt are ensconced in a row house in Capitol Hill that Vogt had complained was infested with pigeons and drafting executive orders for a new president to use to eliminate climate protections.

And then at the same time, Gunasekara and Brightbill are collecting what they have called

an arsenal of information to support the repeal of the endangerment finding.

Sure enough, President Trump wins the presidency.

Three out of four of the people that we're talking about here, Bright, Bill, Clark, and Vote, go back into the administration and are able to hand the president a very clear roadmap for the biggest climate deregulation in American history.

And that's what's being followed right now.