— Gov. Roy Cooper's administration has told rank-and-file employees not to speak with private investigators the General Assembly hired to investigate the administration's Atlantic Coast Pipeline dealings.

Legislators co-chairing an oversight committee on the issue accused the administration Wednesday of "trying to grind this investigation to a halt." The administration said it would still provide testimony in commitee.

The two sides sparred through letters this month after investigators reached out to employees at the state Department of Environmental Quality without success.

Cooper Chief of Staff Kristi Jones said the attempted interviews were a waste of time and called the investigation an "extraordinary open-ended political fishing expedition" in a letter dated Jan. 17. She complained that "there are no protections for state employees from inappropriate questions and no rules preventing these private contractors from using underhanded or even illegal methods to interrogate."

Seemingly, there would be protections in the law against illegal interrogation methods. Legislators overseeing the inquiry have said DEQ counsel could sit in on the interviews.

"Should employees expect lie detector tests?" Jones wrote. "A credit history check? A search of their personal emails, social media and texts? Questions about their personal lives or those of their co-workers?"

Sen. Harry Brown, R-Onslow, and Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union, co-chairs of a joint House-Senate committee, said in their own letter Wednesday that "these outrageous allegations are of course baseless" and that the former FBI agents running their inquiry are both decorated.

Their firm, Eagle Intel Services, made four calls to DEQ staffers earlier this month and were told to work through a DEQ attorney instead, Brown and Arp said in their letter. They made multiple calls to him before being told they wouldn't be allowed to interview department employees involved in the Atlantic Coast Pipeline permitting process, according to a call log provided with the letter.

"How this equates to potentially 'underhanded or even illegal' interrogation methods, we have no idea," Brown and Arp wrote.

Questions have swirled about the pipeline since last January, when the Cooper Administration announced a $57.8 million fund paid into by the pipeline developers on the same day DEQ announced approval of a key permit for the line.

The ACP is meant to bring natural gas from West Virginia, across Virginia and into North Carolina, and it may eventually extend into South Carolina.

The mitigation fund was meant to spur economic development along the line, but the money wouldn't have flowed through the state treasury. The Cooper Administration sought to cut the Republican-controlled General Assembly out of the matter by striking an agreement with Duke Energy, Dominion Energy and other pipeline partners to pay into an escrow fund controlled by the Governor's Office.

Republican legislators cried foul, used their super-majorities in both chambers to reroute the as-yet-unpaid money to K-12 schools along the pipeline's path and opened a joint committee investigation. Among other things, Republicans questioned whether the permit decision depended on agreement to the mitigation fund, something Cooper, his top lieutenants and DEQ leadership have all denied and the pipeline developers have not alleged.

The matter added a new front in the partisan battles between the legislature and administration.

The administration and DEQ have since released tens of thousands of documents that, Jones argued in her letter, "offer a thorough record of the Administration's work."

WRAL News has been going through those records, which can be difficult to place into context. The administration released some 19,000 pages, and DEQ tens of thousands more. Arp and Brown told Cooper in their Wednesday letter that the document dumps leave "substantial questions" and that there are "serious concerns about the very foundation of your administration's operations."

In their letter, Arp and Brown also questioned conversations the administration had with Duke Energy and the solar industry as the pipeline permit was under review at DEQ. Administration records show that Markus Wilhelm, chief executive of Strata Solar, reached out to Cooper last year regarding negotiations over solar projects Duke would not hook into its energy grid, despite what seemed to an agreement laid out in the General Assembly in 2017.

Wilhelm suggested Cooper intervene with Duke Energy leadership.

Cooper and his brother, Pell, leased property in Nash County to Solar Strata in 2013 for a solar farm, the Carolina Journal reported last year. The lease continues through 2034, according to the report, though a spokesman has said Cooper divested from the company before running for governor.

Cooper spoke with Duke Energy Chief Executive Lynn Good in person on Nov. 30, 2017, regarding a number of issues, including the pipeline and the impasse with the solar industry over the implementation of the 2017 law, Cooper spokesman Ford Porter has said.

They spoke on the telephone Jan. 6, 2018, and Good asked about the pace of DEQ's permitting process, which one of her executives had complained about in earlier communications, documents show. Cooper told her what he and his administration have said repeatedly, Porter said – that environmental permits were DEQ's responsibility and that they "must stand on their own merit."

Cooper has acknowledged, though, that he hoped to announced DEQ's decision on the permit, the solar deal and the mitigation fund all at once, hoping that the mitigation fund and solar announcement would soothe environmentalists that had backed his administration and who were sure to be angry about the pipeline approval. In addition to economic development money to tie people into the gas line, the mitigation fund agreement called for renewable energy grants and environmental projects along the line.

Jones said in her January letter to Brown and Arp that the legislature could not outsource its oversight role to private investigators. Her letter references "self-identified investigators purporting to act at your direction," though Eagle Intel was hired for this review in open committee.

Arp and Brown responded Wednesday that they wanted to avoid accusations that their review was a publicity stunt and to avoid dragging career DEQ employees before open committee. They said DEQ's legal counsel was welcome to sit in on interviews and that interviewees would get to choose locations.

They noted that Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, signed off on Eagle Intel's selection as a member of the joint oversight committee.

"You and your administration have repeatedly stressed that the ACP permitting process was open, transparent and free from your influence," Brown and Arp wrote in their letter, which is addressed to the governor. "If that is true, then these interviews will be short, and you should have no issue with career civil servants explaining the process that transpired."