When Vice President Kamala Harris was California’s attorney general, her team found evidence of corruption after the closure of a nuclear power plant left customer ratepayers to cover the multibillion-dollar settlement bill. Harris was criticized for failing to prosecute. Now, The Federalist has reviewed financial records revealing that the company operating the plant had been giving hundreds of thousands to state Democrats when Harris decided to look away.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station permanently shut down in 2013, following a radiation leak the previous year. The settlement originally left customers with 70 percent of the financial burden, or $3.3 billion. And it left 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste on a popular California beach.
As attorney general in California, Harris’s team uncovered evidence of a secret meeting between an executive of Southern California Edison (SCE) — the primary owner of the nuclear power plant — and the then-president of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to apparently draft the settlement. But as Harris was running for U.S. Senate in 2016, the investigation seemingly began to trail off.
Democrat then-Gov. Jerry Brown — who appointed members to the CPUC and endorsed Harris’ bid for Senate in 2016 — met with an SCE executive in 2013, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Later that year, SCE funneled $54,400 to his reelection campaign, state records show. Evidence later revealed another SCE executive secretly met with the then-CPUC president in Poland in 2013. This SCE executive had been a long-time contributor to the campaign of the CPUC president’s wife — who was then a Democrat state senator — and donated nearly $3,700 to her campaign in 2012 alone.
In reviewing state financial records, The Federalist also learned that while Harris’ investigation was underway, SCE funneled $380,000 to the California Democratic Party from March 2015 to May 2016. The company and its employees have consistently bankrolled state campaigns since at least 2001, including for state senate, state assembly, and governor, records show.
A Secret Meeting Overseas
SCE and the CPUC claimed the settlement “was the product of hard-fought negotiations between ratepayer advocates and the power company,” according to KPBS. But the outlet noted “a different story emerged” after Harris’ investigators searched the home of former CPUC President Michael Peevey in January 2015 when investigating a “judge-shopping” case.
In the process, they found evidence Peevey privately met with SCE executive Stephen Pickett in Poland in March 2013, where the two devised a “framework for a San Onofre settlement that closely resembled the final public deal,” as KPBS wrote.
The nonprofit Public Watchdogs published the draft notes in 2016, and the groups also published an affidavit reviewed by the California deputy attorney general.
“[T]here is probable cause to believe that PICKETT knowingly engaged and conspired to engage in a reportable ex parte communication with PEEVEY in POLAND to the overall advantage of SCE in the subsequent settlement process pertaining to the closure of SONGS [the nuclear plant],” the affidavit reads.
Harris announced her run for Senate in January 2015. Six months after searching Peevey’s house, her investigators served warrants to Edison and the CPUC and asked them “to turn over all documents and communications related to the San Onofre settlement,” according to KPBS. But when the CPUC was, as the outlet noted, “slow to turn over records,” Harris was criticized for not challenging the commission’s apparent stonewalling.
According to an April 2016 KPBS report, a Harris representative issued a statement acknowledging that “[n]o government agency, and no public utilities company is above the law,” but declined to “disclose details” about ongoing investigations.
“While we cannot disclose details of any ongoing criminal investigations — this investigation will go where the evidence takes us, and any potential charges would be filed on the facts of the case, and not an election cycle,” the statement said, according to the outlet.
Democrat Interests at Play
Then-Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat also running for the U.S. Senate in 2016, accused Harris that year of “refusing to prosecute well-documented, illegal goings-on at the Public Utilities Commission.” Sanchez said on KPBS at the time that “the attorney general has made it clear that she would rather protect the P[ublic] U[tilities] C[ommission] and political cronies than the people of California.”
Another source told KPBS earlier that year the scandal would “very likely implicate” powerful Democrats in the state, and theorized that “going up against the Democratic Party structure” was “distressing to [Harris] when [she was] running for U.S. Senate.”
Peevey previously worked for SCE and has given thousands to Democrat candidates. His wife is former state Sen. Carol Liu, a Democrat. Pickett gave nearly $3,700 to Liu’s campaign in November 2012, just months before the controversial Poland meeting, state records reviewed by The Federalist show.
Then-Gov. Jerry Brown, also a Democrat, endorsed Harris in 2016. Brown, who appointed members to the CPUC, met with an SCE executive just weeks before Peevey and Pickett secretly met in Poland in 2013, although “[r]epresentatives of the Governor’s Office and Edison said there was no connection between” this meeting and the “new settlement push at the utilities commission,” according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. That year, SCE funneled $54,400 to Brown’s reelection campaign from September to December.
SCE also shuttled more than $380,000 to the California Democratic Party between March 2015 and May 2016, according to state financial records
Michael Aguirre, a former San Diego city attorney who later took legal action against the settlement deal, told the Federalist he thinks the investigation into the San Onofre settlement dropped off because the CPUC was so powerful.
“The problem was to have the horsepower to take on the P[ublic] U[tilities] C[ommission],” Aguirre said. “They had a whole army of people. That was going to be a very tough problem to deal with.”
Aguirre told The Federalist he helped consumers reduce their share of the settlement. In 2018, a CPUC judge greenlit a proposed settlement “under which the owners of the failed San Onofre nuclear plant agreed to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from the cost to ratepayers of the 2012 breakdown,” CBS News previously reported.
“They literally shouldn’t have had to pay for any of this,” Aguirre said. He called the backdoor-dealing for the settlement “purely illegal.”
Aguirre said he considers himself an “FDR Democrat,” but often sues state-level Democrats.
“I find myself suing in California the Democrats because the Democrats are in power,” Aguirre said. “This is corrupt, you know? I mean, California is not in good shape in terms of dealing with high-level wrongdoing.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
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