A lawyer on the Trump transition team left the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) five years ago to to help found an oil industry–funded nonprofit that specializes in suing universities for climate scientist emails.

David Schnare, 68, of the Energy & Environment Legal Institute in Washington, DC, was named this month to the Trump transition team for the agency, which he left after 33 years as a staff attorney.

“I have a deep fondness for the Agency, its mission and the people who work there,” Schnare told BuzzFeed News by email. Schnare, who has degrees in public health as well as law, would not comment on his current role in Trump transition team at the environmental agency, citing confidentiality requirements.

In his position on the transition team Schnare will have a significant role in picking its political appointees and setting the direction of the agency under its next chief — who, pending confirmation, will be Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.

Pruitt has led efforts to sue the EPA over its clean power plan. Schnare left the EPA in 2011, by which time he had already started suing the University of Virginia (UVA) for the emails of prominent climate scientist Michael Mann on behalf of his nonprofit, then called the American Tradition Institute.

He lost that case, along with prominent climate doubter Christopher Horner of the coal industry funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (who was also recently named to the Trump EPA transition team). But the groups, funded by petroleum and coal industry foundations, have gone on to sue universities for climate scientist emails in Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Illinois, Texas, and Washington, DC.

“A man who has been harassing scientists, for doing science, is now going to help shape the future of the most important federal agency that relies on scientific information to inform public policy,” Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes, co-author of The Merchants of Doubt, a history of industry attacks on scientists, told BuzzFeed News.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal help to researchers targeted by nonprofits funded by the coal and oil industry, calls his work “one part of a systematic campaign, funded by certain individuals and entities whose economic interests are threatened by any meaningful efforts to combat climate change, to create doubt about the reality, causes, and potential consequences of climate change where there should be none.”

Environmental sociologist Robert Brulle at Drexel, for example, has documented that 140 industry and conservative foundations paid about $558 million to bankroll more than 90 organizations similar to Horner’s CEI and Schnare’s E&E Legal Institute, from 2003 to 2010.

For his part, Schnare calls his post-EPA work “public service,” similar to his participation on a Chesapeake Bay preservation committee in Fairfax County, Virginia. “For some of us, it's in the blood,“ he said. "We commit ourselves to public service and we never stop."