This story originally appeared in The Daily Beast newsletter, Pay Dirt. Sign up for that newsletter: HERE
The new ad from the ostensibly free-market group America’s Future Fund appears devastating. “EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is embarrassing President Trump,” the 30-second web spot declares and ticks off some of Pruitt’s recent ethics and spending controversy.
“For the good of the country, Pruitt must go,” it concludes. It even pulls a clip of Trump, in his apprentice years, declaring, “You’re fired!” (AFF appears to have abandoned its 2016 opposition to Trump.)
ADVERTISEMENT
On its face, the ad is an aggressive broadside from a Republican-oriented group that declares its commitment to free markets—not the sort of organization you’d expect to be going after an environmental official so committed to lifting the regulatory yoke from American industry.
But that’s not what’s going on at all.
AFF, a 501(c)(4) dark-money group, claims it “works to promote conservative free-market principles.” In fact, the group has deep ties to big ethanol—a very politically connected industry whose steady stream of favorable mandates and subsidies Pruitt has put at risk.
The Iowa-based nonprofit was founded in 2008 and received seed money from Bruce Rastetter, the co-founder and CEO of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, one of the nation’s largest ethanol companies. AFF’s founder, Iowa political operative Nick Ryan, later lobbied for Hawkeye and three of Rastetter’s other companies. Ryan also sat on the board of the Rastetter Foundation, according to its latest annual tax filing.
In early 2015, Rastetter put on the first annual Iowa Agriculture Summit. The meeting was organized by a Des Moines consulting firm called the Concordia Group. That firm is run by Ryan, who told Politico at the time that the summit was his idea, and three of Concordia’s staffers are also officers at AFF.
In addition to its work with Rastetter, Concordia also appears to have counted as a client one of the nation’s leading industry-funded pro-ethanol groups. In late 2015, America’s Renewable Future began airing ads attacking Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign for its lack of support for the renewable-fuels standard, the federal mandate for the use of biofuels in gasoline. One of ARF’s ads was uploaded to Concordia’s YouTube channel, and metadata showed that Ryan had crafted a fact sheet released by ARF in conjunction with the ad. A few weeks later, another of Ryan’s political groups, the Iowa Progress Project, also began hammering Cruz on the ethanol issue.
Like Cruz, Pruitt opposes the renewable-fuels standard, and recently presented a plant to President Trump to significantly weaken its biofuel mandates. That presents a major problem for the industry, and its allies have already been pressing the administration to rein in Pruitt’s opposition.
