In December of last year -- or five months after Moran paid for the Corbetts' vacation -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, reported that Pennsylvania regulators had been investigating for more than a year Moran's operation of the Sunbury, Pa., waste-transfer site . The facility had been shipping drilling waste by rail to a landfill in Ohio without a permit. It said that Moran had claimed he didn't need a permit because of a loophole in federal railroad law.