EXCLUSIVE: Missouri AG Eric Schmitt Takes Biden to Task Over Sale of Oil, Energy Policies

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt hasn’t been one to pull punches when it comes to taking on the Biden Administration.

🚨 BREAKING: A federal court granted our Office's request to collect discovery and documents from top ranking Biden officials and social media companies to get to the bottom of their alleged collusion to suppress and censor free speech. pic.twitter.com/qu6oenVq9G

— Attorney General Eric Schmitt (@AGEricSchmitt) July 12, 2022

Previously, he blasted Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm over skyrocketing diesel prices.

On Thursday, Schmitt directed a letter to President Biden blistering him for the sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as well as the damaging energy policies the administration continues to doggedly pursue.

In the letter, obtained by RedState, Schmitt highlights those ubiquitous Biden gas pump stickers, observing:

You once spoke of your own family that “when the price of a gallon of gasoline went up, it was discussed at the kitchen table.”¹ This has been the topic at Missourians’ dinner tables for months now as your repeated failures to lower the price of fuel they need to get to work makes it increasingly harder to make ends meet. In the Show-Me State, gas pumps regularly include a picture of you pointing to the outrageous price and stating, “I did this.” Well, Mr. President, these stickers say it all.

Schmitt continued, laying out the impact of the Biden Administration’s disastrous efforts.

Under your administration’s extremist policies, we have seen the worst economy since the 2008 recession. One year ago, inflation was projected to recede to 2.1% by the end of the year. Now we are looking at inflation that is double that.² Your administration chose to push your woke environmental ideology knowing it would put our gas prices at the outrageous levels Americans are facing today. Under the previous administration, America drilled and refined oil ourselves and foreign nations actually sought to purchase American energy. Now we have a supply chain in chaos, a shortage in baby formula, and gas prices breaking $5 per gallon nationally compared to the Trump Administration’s national price of below $2 per gallon.³

The Attorney General further put Biden’s decision to drain the SPR in perspective:

In an attempt to slap a Band-Aid on the problem, your administration has drained our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to historically low levels.⁴ If one took the three largest operational sales in American history (sales made in response to Desert Storm, Hurricane Katrina and Libya’s Collective Action), it would result in 58.940 million barrels of oil sold.⁵ These sales combined still do not compare to this year’s 101.98 million barrels sold.⁶ Even after the release of all this oil, the price of gas continued to increase. One month after your March release, we saw the price of gas rise by $0.71 per gallon.⁷

Then Schmitt points to an even more troubling aspect of this move — one which we’ve noted previously.

To make matters worse, the crucial emergency supply of oil being sold from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that the United States taxpayers spent nearly $25.7 billion⁸ on has landed in Europe and China,⁹ the nation that the Secretary of State has labeled as the “‘most serious long term’ threat to world order.”¹⁰ Now there are reports that the Communist company that stands to benefit from this sale has financial ties with members of your immediate family. A strategic disaster of this magnitude could only be dreamed up in Washington, D.C.

Oh, but I’m sure that familial connection is just happenstance. Nothing to see there, of course.

The entire letter is worth the read, but this line from Attorney General Schmitt really sums it up: