BP Keeps Up Its Negligence Denials Despite Texas Officials’ Insistence

That's also how the Texas officials described it—a conversation about the Oil Pollution Act. In their July 22 letter, they said BP wasn't invoking the Oil Pollution Act's liability cap because it had acknowledged negligence in a conference all with them.

When I asked the Texas attorney general's office for its reaction to BP's denial, spokesman Jerry Strickland stood by the account detailed in the letter:

BP is apparently disavowing its acknowledgment that certain evidence about the Deepwater Horizon explosion would be revealed—and that evidence would render the Oil Pollution Act's liability cap inapplicable—just as they have backed away from their assurances that Texas would receive the $25 million oil spill response grants that every other Gulf State received. And because BP continues to say one thing and apparently mean another, questions about their statements' real meaning—which evidence, parties and conduct they were referring to—should be directed to BP.

The response and the letter indicate that the initial benefit-of-the-doubt that Texas Gov. Rick Perry extended to BP—when he warned that the spill was "just an act of God"—may have dissipated, especially after BP denied the state's request for a $25 million cleanup grant.