September 20, 2013 – Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office distancing itself from emails

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office distancing itself from emails

BY MICHAEL L. OWENS | BRISTOL HERALD COURIER | Posted: Friday, September 20, 2013 7:50 pm

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office is distancing itself from the staffer who in a series of emails appears to have advised energy company lawyers in their defense of an ongoing lawsuit over natural gas royalties in Southwest Virginia.

Senior Assistant Sharon Pigeon “was not writing the emails at the direction of anyone in Richmond,” Cuccinelli spokesman Brian Gottstein wrote in a recent email to the Bristol Herald Courier.

Pigeon is now barred from further discussing with corporate lawyers their federal battle against regional landowners seeking gas royalties, Gottstein wrote, and her job of scrutinizing the cases’ potential impact on Virginia ’s gas drilling laws has been handed to someone else.