Obama's 'backroom deal'?

Clearing up nuclear waste

"Senator Obama has some questions to answer about his dealings with one of his largest contributors, Exelon, a big nuclear power company. Apparently he cut some deals behind closed doors to protect them from full disclosure in the nuclear industry."
--Hillary Clinton, ABC-Politico Forum, Feb. 11, 2008.

Hillary Clinton has leveled a serious charge against Barack Obama, her colleague on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. During the ABC-Politico forum earlier this week, she suggested that Obama "cut some deals" on nuclear regulatory legislation with the Exelon company of Illinois, a major nuclear power operator. She implied that the backroom "deal" was somehow connected to contributions to the Obama campaign from Exelon.

Both the Obama campaign and Exelon strongly deny these charges, while acknowledging "contacts" between Obama staffers and Exelon officials on the nuclear bill. For the record, Obama has not received any corporate contributions from Exelon. But senior Exelon executives have contributed more than $160,000 to Obama's presidential campaign and $46,000 to his 2004 Senate run.

So what is going on here?
The Facts

Local residents and environmental groups have long complained about unreported releases of radioactive water from Exelon-operated plants in Illinois. Their fears were confirmed in December 2005 when Exelon revealed that more than six million gallons of waste water containing low levels of radioactive tritium had been released from the Braidwood nuclear plant in Braceville, Il., 60 miles south-west of Chicago, in 1996, 1998, and 2000, without the public being informed. The County attorney later accused Exelon of "callous disregard" for public health and safety.

On January 1, 2006, Obama introduced a bill, S. 2348, to help allay the concerns of Illinois citizens. The original draft of the legislation required nuclear plant operators to "immediately notify" local communities of any "unplanned release" of radioactive substances in excess of federal limits. The legislation was subsequently modified in committee over the objections of some environmental activists. The new draft shifted responsibility for drafting the regulations away from Congress itself to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the goverment's nuclear watchdog. Both drafts are available here.

The chief Exelon lobbyist on the Obama bill was David C. Brown. He told me that Exelon supported the "spirit" of the Obama legislation, in contrast to some other nuclear operators, who opposed more regulation of the industry. Nevertheless, Exelon had some "concerns" about the way the legislation was written. For example, the company felt that the phrase "immediately notify" should be changed to "within 24 hours," and that small spills on plant premises should be exempted from the reporting requirement.

Brown says that he met with the Obama staffer responsible for the notification legislation, Todd Atkinson, half a dozen times between January and June 2006, while the bill was being considered by the Senate environment committee. In addition, he helped arrange a five-minute meeting between Exelon CEO (and Obama contributor) John W. Rowe and Senator Obama outside a Senate hearing room on March 29, at which the bill was briefly discussed.

As Brown remembers this conversation, Rowe told Obama that he supported his bill, but that the company had some concerns about the language. According to Brown, Obama replied, "Fine, work with Todd."

Over the next four months, according to a timeline drawn up by Exelon, Brown had a series of meetings with Atkinson (on May 12, May 25, and June 21), as well as staffers for the GOP majority and Democratic minority on the Environment Committee. An e-mail provided by the Obama campaign shows that the committee chairman, James M. Inhofe (R-OK), favored rewriting portions of the bill to reflect the concerns of Exelon and other nuclear operators. In May, Obama put a temporary hold on a Bush administration appointee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because he was unsatisfied with his answers on the notification issue.

Although Obama had initially introduced the legislation, Inhofe had the decisive say on whether it would move forward. Two other Democratic senators on the committee, Barbara Boxer (CA), and Richard Durbin (IL), said that Obama had little choice except to go along with Inhofe, in order to keep his legislation alive. Both scoffed at Clinton's claims of a "backroom deal" between Obama and Exelon.

"The choice came down to no bill or a weaker bill," said Boxer, who said she is "neutral" in the presidential campaign. "Barack tried desperately to get it through, but got the best thing he could."

When the revised bill was introduced on September 13, it met with unanimous consent. Senator Clinton issued a press release hailing "this important legislation," saying that it would ensure that the public received "prompt notification" of future leaks at nuclear reactors. On September 25, she signed on as a co-sponsor of the revised bill.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to several e-mail messages and telephone calls. The campaign website cites a Feb. 3, 2008 New York Times article as the source for the senator's claims about a backroom deal between Obama and Exelon. No other member of the committee has come forward to support the Clinton version of events.

The revised bill never made it to the Senate floor in 2006, and was effectively shelved in last-minute partisan maneuvering. Obama re-introduced similarly worded legislation in October 2007, but it has not gone anywhere. In the meantime, the industry has agreed to more stringent voluntary guidelines for reporting radioactive releases.

An Exelon spokesman, Craig Nesbitt, said that Obama had "never done anything legislatively that has provided any benefit to this company."


The Pinocchio Test

Obama has exaggerated his legislative accomplishments on the campaign trail. He misspoke last December when he told Iowa voters that he had "passed" a nuclear notification bill. There are certainly legitimate questions to be asked about his dealings with senior Exelon executives, who have poured large sums of money into his campaign.

On the other hand, the Clinton campaign has failed to provide evidence to support the New York senator's claim of a secret deal between Obama and the nuclear power plant operator "to protect them from full disclosure." Exelon lobbied Obama over the nuclear notification bill, but it expressed the same concerns to other senators. Had Obama not agreed to the drafting changes, the bill would almost certainly have been blocked by the Republican majority on the Environment Committee.


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Posted on February 14, 2008 at 6:40 PM ET | Category: 2 Pinocchios, Barack Obama, Candidate Record, Candidate Watch, Environment, Hillary Rodham Clinton