Interior has separately moved to cancel and refund two other offshore wind leases in California, with the developers Invenergy and RWE, though neither were named in the lawsuit.
Democrats in Congress probe deals
In announcing the legal challenge last week, California Attorney General Bonta accused the Trump administration of using the buyouts to “line the pockets of their Big Oil donors.”
A day earlier, The Washington Post broke the news that another offshore-wind deal with German energy firm RWE will generate a giant payday for one of Trump’s neighbors near Mar-a-Lago.
In early August, Interior agreed to hand over $1.22 billion to RWE to give up its leases off the coasts of California, Louisiana, and New York. As part of the deal, RWE said it would spend $900 million on a stake in a huge Louisiana liquefied natural gas terminal — a stake it’s buying from a private equity fund run by Michael Dorrell, one of Trump’s million-dollar donors, who owns a mansion near the president’s Florida estate.
