Peabody paying former Obama mentor up to $75,000/month to help fight EPA

Coal producer Peabody Energy Corp plans to pay Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe — once a mentor to President Barack Obama — up to $75,000 per month to help fight the Clean Power Plan as the company works through a bankruptcy. Tribe said he will provide legal advice, research and analysis to Peabody for litigation against the U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan. Tribe estimates Peabody will disburse to him at least $435,000 in 2016: $25,000 in May; $17,500 in June; $17,500 in July and from August 2016 to December 2016, $75,000 per month. The filing said Peabody currently did not owe Tribe for any services prior.  Tribe is a professor of constitutional law and is renowned for a history of supporting liberal causes. In 2010, Obama appointed Tribe as senior counselor for access to justice at the U.S. Department of Justice.