Refinery Owned By Billionaire Trump Buddy Gets EPA Waiver

Carl Icahn Image by Michael Nagle/Getty Images

By Ari Feldman April 30, 2018

A refinery owned by billionaire Carl Icahn — a close confidant of Donald Trump — received a government waiver to avoid spending millions to comply with government regulations, Reuters reported. Icahn was a special adviser to the president before stepping down last year amid questions over ethics breaches related to his activity in the White House.

The Environmental Protection Agency gave a financial hardship waiver to the Oklahoma facility. The refinery is now exempt from regulations that require refineries to mix a certain amount of biofuel — usually made from corn or soybeans — into their oil. The move has angered the powerful corn and soybean lobbies.

“This one’s going to be hard for [EPA Administrator Scott] Pruitt to explain,” Brooke Coleman, head of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council industry group, said in an email.

Icahn recently wrote a letter to the Washington Post in which he claimed he has had no contact with Trump or any other high-level government administrators “in months.” The only other government official referenced by name in the letter is Pruitt. The letter was in response to a Washington Post article that quoted a source as saying Trump regularly speaks to Icahn.

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO