A Fieldnotes investigation reveals that new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin was paid to take part in an off-the-books lobbying campaign last year on behalf of BlackRock, the financial firm conservatives have long targeted in their ongoing war on ESG investing.

Zeldin’s role was obscured by BlackRock and a pair of well-connected lobbying shops, making it look like the former Long Island congressman was simply sharing his purported expertise in his local newspaper. In reality, he was getting paid to help BlackRock lobby state officials halfway across the country, ones with the power to affect billions of dollars under the money manager’s control. And at roughly the same time that Zeldin was boosting BlackRock, he was also being paid by the right-wing firm leading the campaign against BlackRock over its ESG efforts.

Short for environmental, social and governance, ESG is a catch-all term for both how companies disclose information about their impacts on the environment and society, and how investors assess the risks posed by those same disclosures. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was an early advocate for factoring ESG concerns into investment decisions and conservatives quickly made him the face of what they deride as “woke capitalism.” BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has drawn so much right-wing ire—even as its green words have largely failed to translate into green actions—that it was briefly at the center of an unfounded conspiracy theory around the attempted assassination of Donald Trump this past summer.

The revelation that Zeldin worked on BlackRock’s behalf through an intermediary could anger his allies on the right, while the fact that he cashed checks from both sides of the fight suggests the man now leading EPA may let his personal finances shape his public positions. The episode also illustrates how powerful corporations can use multiple layers of misdirection to launder their talking points through public figures—in this case, one who had left Congress less than two years earlier, and who just months later would be nominated to lead a federal agency.

Zeldin’s undercover role in BlackRock’s campaign can be traced to the $10,000 he was paid by the DCI Group, a Beltway firm specializing in crisis management and so-called shadow lobbying, for an op-ed that was published by Newsday on Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. Zeldin disclosed that payment publicly for the first time in January in the ethics filing required by his cabinet-level nomination—the entry reads, “DCI Group -- for paid op-ed published by Newsday (08/10/2024)”—but declined to offer additional details when pressed by Senate Democrats at his confirmation hearing. “There is no dollar, large or small, that can influence the decisions that I make,” he assured lawmakers.

While Zeldin did not identify the specific piece he was paid by DCI to write, Newsday’s archives show just one byline for him that day: “War on ESG investing must shift focus to proxy advisors,” which also ran in the paper’s Sunday print edition. In it, Zeldin argued that conservatives had successfully convinced most asset managers to abandon ESG and so should now turn their attention to the proxy advisors who had picked up the cause in their stead. The piece mentioned BlackRock by name, with Zeldin touting the firm for “walking back their support for ESG initiatives” and “expand[ing] its voting choice by introducing its own proxy service.” Compared to other ESG op-eds, Zeldin’s was something of an anomaly: It was simultaneously anti-ESG and pro-BlackRock.

Days after Zeldin’s commentary ran, BlackRock would use it to lobby state GOP officials with the ability to impact the firm’s fortunes, emails obtained via a public records request show.

On Aug. 13, 2024, a partner in a multinational law and lobbying firm working on behalf of BlackRock, Andrew Cook of Orrick, emailed Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Amie Ely a copy of the op-ed, highlighting the “key” portions lauding BlackRock and noting it was written “by former Congressman Lee Zeldin.” The following week Cook again reached out to Ely, this time to share an in-house BlackRock report that, in Cook’s words, "specifically provides insights into the firm's proxy voting activities." The big takeaway, according to Cook: BlackRock had supported just 4 percent of shareholder ESG proposals in the past year, down from 7 percent the year before. The clear but unstated implication was that BlackRock really had walked back its ESG efforts as Zeldin argued in his op-ed.

In the emails, Cook acknowledged he was working on behalf of BlackRock, describing the firm as his “client.” However, Cook, who previously worked as chief deputy AG in Wisconsin, is not registered to lobby in Oklahoma, according to the state’s online ethics database. Cook did not respond to requests for comment about his work for BlackRock or his lack of a lobbying registration.

Cook’s outreach came at a crucial moment for BlackRock. Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond had vowed to appeal a recent court ruling that had blocked the state’s 2022 anti-ESG law, which bars state agencies and public pension funds from doing business with firms accused of boycotting the oil & gas industry. If Drummond ultimately succeeds in convincing the state supreme court to uphold the law, BlackRock would likely lose out on a major client: the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System, which then had (and now has) roughly $7 billion under the firm’s management. Meanwhile, BlackRock’s move to add more proxy options had so far failed to win over conservative critics of ESG, including Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who told Fox News earlier that summer that the move was “too little, too late.”

DCI did not respond to multiple requests for comment concerning the pro-BlackRock op-ed it paid Zeldin to write and the firm’s relationship with BlackRock. But two individuals with firsthand knowledge of the arrangement confirmed to Fieldnotes that BlackRock hired DCI. (Update: E&E News independently confirmed the BlackRock-DCI relationship via its own follow-on reporting.)

Reached for comment and informed of the evidence on which this investigation is based, a BlackRock representative did not deny that the company hired DCI Group. Instead, the spokesperson downplayed the importance of the op-ed. “I would assume zeldin [sic] had much larger/more significant payments than the dci oped [sic]," Christopher Van Es, Blackrock's director of corporate communications, texted Fieldnotes. Van Es, who had previously communicated via phone, text, and email, did not respond to follow-up questions.

BlackRock and DCI are also connected via the public tax filings of two ostensibly unrelated advocacy groups: the Alliance for Prosperity and a Secure Retirement, which publicly launched last year with BlackRock as a founding member and has come to the firm’s defense on ESG matters; and Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, a pro-pipeline front group also known as the GAIN Coalition that has been led by a DCI Group executive since its founding in 2017. As 501(c)4s, neither organization is required to disclose its donors. Both, however, are registered with the IRS at the same mailing address.

DCI Group, which was founded in the mid-1990s by GOP lobbyists with ties to the tobacco industry, bills itself as having “the deepest and most sophisticated political network in the public affairs industry.” The firm has done a variety of work for oil & gas corporations: It was a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations and led an astroturfing campaign to support Energy Transfer’s controversial Dakota Access Pipeline during the Standing Rock protests. (That effort would eventually evolve into the DCI-led GAIN Coalition.) More recently, DCI has been linked to an alleged global hacking-for-hire campaign targeting prominent U.S. climate activists critical of Exxon, a DCI client.

That Zeldin, now a member of Trump’s cabinet, was recently paid to provide cover for BlackRock, a high-profile target in the conservative culture wars, is surprising—all the more so because Zeldin has also accepted money from other political clients to write opinion pieces far more in line with the conservative orthodoxy on ESG. (Zeldin did not respond to requests for comment sent via the EPA’s press office.)

On March 23, 2023, Zeldin got $25,000 from CGCN Group, a Republican-led lobbying firm, for an op-ed that ran in RealClearPolicy in which he argued that ESG would lead to firms engaging in Sam Bankman-Fried-style fraud. And on July 31, 2024—less than two weeks before his BlackRock-boosting commentary ran in Newsday—Zeldin was paid $3,000 by consulting firm CRC Advisors for an anti-ESG-themed essay published by Fox News, according to his ethics filing.

As Fieldnotes and others have previously documented, CRC—led by conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, who has been dubbed Trump’s “court whisperer”—is a key player in the sprawling network of dark-money groups that have pushed for anti-ESG laws like the one passed in Oklahoma aimed at blocking financial institutions from assessing the risks posed by climate change. Their longtime target: BlackRock.

Colette Rosenberg contributed reporting and research to this investigation.