Hillary Clinton State Department Emails Contain Redacted Job Description for Top Energy Diplomat

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onJul 1, 2015 @ 16:36 PDT

The U.S. State Department released a batch of 3,000 searchable documents formerly stored on the private hard drive and in a private email account of Democratic Party presidential candidate and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Among them: a fully redacted job description for State Department International Energy Coordinator/Diplomat-At-Large.

David Goldwyn — now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, fellow at the Brookings Institution and head of Goldwyn Global Strategies — would eventually come to assume that role as head of the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources, a Bureau that premiered under the watch of then-Secretary Clinton.

Goldwyn, as revealed in a Mother Jones article by Mariah Blake, headed up the State Department’s Global Shale Gas Initiative as the leader of the Bureau of Energy Resources, where he “sold fracking to the world.” A biography for Goldwyn that appears to have come from the job application process for the position was also released by the State Department.

The job description document was whited out because it fell under the B(5) “deliberative process privilege,” a controversial rationale used by the federal government to redact large chunks of emails and other documents. The use of the B(5) exemption has exploded under the Obama Administration.


Image Credit: National Security Archive

Before taking the job as State Department International Energy Coordinator, Goldwyn served as an oil industry lobbyist and consultant, often lobbying in everything but name and in an unregistered manner.

Goldwyn is one of the characters featured in investigative journalist Ken Silverstein’s book “The Secret World of Oil” as a “fixer.” He also plays a central role in the DeSmogBlog-Republic Report joint investigative report, “Natural Gas Exports: Washington’s Revolving Door Fuels Climate Threat.”

Image Credit: United States Department of State

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Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

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