BUSINESS/ENERGY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Coal magnate Robert Murray has just joined Wall Street billionaire Carl Icahn in an exclusive club — wealthy backers of President Donald Trump who tried and failed to get lucrative concessions from his administration.
Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, one of the nation’s biggest and most politically active coal miners, complained in an Aug. 4 letter made public Tuesday that the Energy Department had dragged its feet on his request that it use its emergency powers to force some Rust Belt coal-fired power plants to stay open. Trump was so taken by the idea that he immediately turned to Energy Secretary Rick Perry and ordered him to do it, wrote Murray, who said he had witnessed the conversation.
But DOE said no.
Murray’s failure to shift the policy, and Icahn’s earlier inability to convince the Environmental Protection Agency to alter its ethanol rule, raises questions about the limits of bulldog business leaders to circumvent the government’s bureaucracy, even in an administration run by a sympathetic billionaire…
Some conservatives, meanwhile, praised Trump for sticking up for market principles by refusing to grant favors to individual supporters.”
-Alex Guillen and Eric Wolff, “Trump rejects wealthy friends’ pleas for help,” Politico, Aug. 22, 2017 07:30pm