It's been an exciting few days for Republicans having a sudden epiphany that — maybe, just maybe! — they should comply with the laws that say they need to report their spouses' financial shenanigans. First was Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who waited 16 months to share the fact that his wife was trying to make money off a COVID treatment company. Now it's Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who this week disclosed that her husband made almost half a million bucks as a consultant for one of the country's most prodigious methane producers.
According to the Associated Press, Boebert — the first-term congresswoman who has made a name for herself as a gun-toting, sedition-endorsing, diarrhea-causing conservative superstar — filed paperwork Tuesday with the House of Representatives admitting that her husband Jayson earned $478,000 last year, and $460,000 the year before, as a "consultant" for Terra Energy Partners. (Fun fact: She erroneously had them listed as "Terra Energy Productions.") TEP, a Texas-based "privately-held oil and gas exploration and production company," notably expanded its operations into Colorado in 2016, spending nearly a billion dollars to "acquire the WPX Energy Piceance Basin assets" and thus becoming one of the largest energy production companies in the state, according to its website.
Curiously, Boebert, who has made little secret of her deep abiding love for cataclysmic climate change, neglected to mention her husband's lucrative consulting gig during her initial run for office. Per AP, she'd initially listed the income from his consulting work in an earlier filing as "N/A." It's possible, I suppose, that her selective memory has something to do with TEP's reputation as one of the nation's top methane producers, eclipsing the output of larger, more established companies by a significant measure. Indeed, TEP is one of the major beneficiaries of larger natural gas companies yielding way for smaller, less-scrutinized outfits.
Regardless, it's one thing to say you're a fan of fossil fuels, but it's quite another to fess up to making almost a million bucks from one of the country's top pollutant sources. All the more so, given the grassroots pushback against unchecked natural gas extraction, which has resulted in new fracking rules being instituted in some counties.
"Mr. Boebert has worked in energy production for 18 years and has had Boebert Consulting since 2012," a Boebert representative told AP. “For any other questions regarding the congresswoman’s finances, I’d refer you to the disclosure she filed."
