Frank Shaffer,
now a homeless beggar.

During the fury of our efforts to stop the damage being done to 1000 miles of US shoreline by crude oil from British Petroleum’s exploded Deepwater Horizon oil rig, I worked covertly with the Director of the US Geological Survey, Dr. Marcia McNutt, to create official records to disqualify the Honorable United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar from ever giving technical testimony about the amount of crude oil discharged into the Gulf of Mexico.  

Dr. Marcia McNutt, now President of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marcia told me that Secretary Salazar had a team of DOI attorneys “reviewing” and making changes to the emails she sent from her USGS.DOI.GOV email account in a way that she was not comfortable with.  

We knew that everything we wrote would eventually become evidence in largest and most expensive litigation in US history.  We knew that the fine under the Clean Water Act and Oil Pollution Act -- the amount of money that would go to the 60 million people of five Gulf states to rebuild – would be based on our official measurement of the amount of crude oil discharged into the Gulf of Mexico. 

So, to evade censorship by the team of Secretary Salazar’s attorneys,   Marcia started communicating with me using her old email address, Marcia@MBARI.org, from when she was Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) .   By the way, everyone should visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium at least once in a lifetime!  It’s a real treasure of our United States.

The following discussion could be upsetting to Secretary Salazar, British Petroleum, and BP’s investors.  So if you have a health condition that could be aggravated by shock and stress, please see your physician before continuing. 

For everyone, at the end of this webpage is a “Littoral RelaxOcean” video from Monterey Bay Acquarium.  After reading this, you might need to watch it.
It’s 12 hours long.

To my knowledge, only I and Marcia knew about our emails to disqualify Secretary Salazar until they were entered as evidence in the Multi District 2179 (MDL 2179) litigation in the US District Court for Eastern Louisiana, The Honorable Judge Carl J. Barbier presiding.

Below is a private exchange of emails between me and Marcia when we were on the lead team responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak crisis.   Our “conspiracy” is one of the reasons that I played a unique and leading role in causing British Petroleum to be rightly fined $20.8 billion dollars.