The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.
California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”
The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.”
According to Huffman’s office, the file was a document entitled “Draft Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies Renewables USA, LLC on Offshore Wind Lease OCS-A 0545,” which refers to the company’s Carolina Long Bay lease. (The office said it could not share the document itself due to confidentiality issues.)
While the emails do not discuss the document further, the November date is notable. It suggests that the Interior Department had been negotiating a deal with Total before BOEM officials were briefed on the DOD’s classified national security concerns about offshore wind development.
Two Interior officials, Matthew Giacona, the acting director of BOEM, and Jacob Tyner, the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, have testified in federal court that they reviewed a classified offshore wind assessment produced by the Department of Defense on November 26, 2025, and then were briefed on it again by department officials in early December. They submitted this testimony as part of a separate court case over a stop work order the agency issued to the Coastal Virginia Offshore wind project in December.
“After my review of DOW’s classified material with a secret designation,” Giacona wrote, “I determined that CVOW Project’s activities did not adequately provide for the protection of national security interests,” leading to his decision to suspend ongoing activities on the lease.
Giacona and Tyner are copied on the emails Huffman presented on Wednesday, indicating that the memorandum of understanding between Total and the Interior Department had been drafted and distributed prior to their reviewing the classified assessment.
The final agreement both parties signed on March 23, however, justifies the decision by citing a series of events that it portrays as taking place after officials learned of the DOD’s national security concerns.
The Interior Department paid Total out of the Judgment Fund, a permanently appropriated fund overseen by the Treasury Department with no congressional oversight that’s set aside to settle litigation or impending litigation. The final agreement describes the background for the settlement, beginning by stating that the Interior Department was going to suspend Total’s leases indefinitely based on the DOD’s classified findings, which “would have” led Total to file a legal claim for breach of contract. Rather than fight it out in court, Interior decided to settle this supposedly impending litigation, paying Total nearly $1 billion, in exchange for the company investing an equivalent amount into U.S. oil and gas projects.
But if the agency had been negotiating a deal with Total prior to being briefed on the national security assessment, it suggests that the deal was not predicated on a threat of litigation. During the hearing, Eddie Ahn, an attorney and the executive director of an environmental group called Brightline Defense, told Huffman that this opens the possibility for a legal challenge to the deal.
I should note one hiccup in this line of reasoning. Even though Interior officials testified that they were briefed on the Department of Defense’s assessment on November 26, this is not the first time the agency raised national security concerns about offshore wind. When BOEM issued a stop work order on Revolution Wind in August of last year, it said it was seeking to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”
During the hearing, Huffman called out additional concerns his office had about the settlement. He said the amount the Interior Department paid Total — a full reimbursement of the company’s original lease payment — has no basis in the law. “Federal law sets a specific formula for the compensation a company can get when the government cancels an offshore lease,” he said, adding that the settlement was for “far more.” He also challenged a clause in the agreement that purports to protect both parties from legal liability.
Huffman and several of his fellow Democrats also highlighted the Trump administration’s latest use of the Judgment Fund — to create a new $1.8 billion legal fund to issue “monetary relief” to citizens who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, such as those charged in connection with the January 6 riot.
“Now we know that that was just the beginning,” Maxine Dexter of Oregon said. “This president’s fraudulent use of the judgment fund is the most consequential and damning abuse of taxpayer funds happening right now.”
