Black Tea for the Tillerson
By 
Brad Plumer’s story about Rex Tillerson’s massive conflicts of interest is amazing in a horrifying way, which I suppose at this point goes without saying:
On Tuesday, Donald Trump tapped ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state. And one eyebrow-raising aspect of this pick is that Exxon has billions of dollars at stake in one of the biggest foreign policy decisions Trump will consider over the next few years — whether to maintain sanctions on Russia.
Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, has long had its eye on Russia’s vast oil and gas deposits. Between 2011 and 2013, Exxon signed a series of deals with the Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft to explore the Black Sea, develop shale resources in western Siberia, and — most importantly — drill for oil in the Arctic, one of the biggest untapped fossil fuel resources left in the world.
For Exxon, which famously missed out on the massive US fracking boom, these deals were crucial for the company’s future. “Arctic oil in particular would’ve been a game changer for Exxon,” says Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. It was supposed to be a decades-long investment worth many billions.
But Exxon’s activities ground to a halt in 2014, after the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia’s oil industry over Russian incursions into Ukraine. Despite having just made a landmark oil discovery in the Kara Sea, Exxon was forced to stop work, and Arctic exploration faded.
At the time, Tillerson told shareholders that he was opposed to targeted sanctions on Russia: “We do not support sanctions, generally, because we don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented comprehensively,” he said in May 2014. His new boss appears to agree: Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, recently said Trump was not yet sure whether he’d keep those Russian sanctions in place.
The potential conflicts of interest here are considerable: Tillerson himself owns $218 million in Exxon stock and a pension reportedly worth $70 million, though it’s not clear what he’ll do with those investments once he joins the Trump administration. What we do know is that Tillerson could soon find himself in a position of influence over the sanctions question — and that lifting them would be a boon to Exxon. It’s conceivable Tillerson could stay impartial and judge the issue purely on its policy merits, but this conflict will be looming in the background.
Having said that, a Clinton Foundation donor once emailed Huma Abedin for a meeting and didn’t get one, so I’d have to conclude that Both Sides Do It but Clinton was probably worse.