The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote this afternoon on whether to confirm longtime ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Many lawmakers and environmental activists have expressed concerns over his potential confirmation. Here in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival, Democracy Now! interviewed former Vice President Al Gore about Rex Tillerson.
Al Gore: “ExxonMobil has financed climate denial. And every year, they say they have stopped. And then, when the funding reports come out at the end of the year, we find that they have continued. I think what ExxonMobil has done is deeply unethical.”
The Senate confirmed the first two Trump Cabinet members on Friday: retired General James “Mad Dog” Mattis as defense secretary and retired General John Kelly as secretary of homeland security. The confirmation of the rest of Trump’s Cabinet has been delayed because many of the nominees failed to submit the required ethics and financial disclosure forms to Congress in time for them to be reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics ahead of the scheduled hearings. The confirmation process has also been slow because Trump’s Cabinet is the richest in U.S. history, consisting largely of white male millionaires and billionaires whose array of financial ties pose unprecedented potential conflicts of interest.