A coal trade group has a lot more to worry about than just the fraudulent climate change letters sent to lawmakers, Democrats warned today. The group's overall lobbying tactics on energy legislation -- in the form of advertisements, phone calls and outreach on Capitol Hill -- have been misleading, Democrats said at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

"You remind me of a guy who hired a hit man and said to him, 'Don't tell me if you used a knife or a gun,'" Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., told Steve Miller, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Inslee compared the coal industry's lobbying on climate change to the tobacco industry's attempts to hide information about the harms of smoking in previous decades.

"This is a deeper defrauding," he said, pointing to a training document given to individuals who made phone calls for a company hired by ACCCE. The document instructed callers to say the House climate change legislation would double electricity bills, Inslee said, which was a lie meant to "scare the dickens out of voters."

Miller apologized for the sending of the fraudulent letters and maintains his group "never opposed" the House climate change bill. Rather, he said his group was lobbying to change portions of it and supports a cap and trade bill "so long as it is reasonable." He also said the training document that Inslee pointed to wasn't authorized by ACCCE.

ACCCE hired a public relations firm, the Hawthorn Group, which hired a subcontractor, Bonner & Associates, to handle grassroots efforts related to climate change legislation. Miller and Jack Bonner, Bonner & Associates' CEO, said during the hearing that the fraudulent letters were written and signed by a temporary employee on his first day of work at Bonner, who was fired after the incident was uncovered.

They said the incident did not reflect the normal practices of either group, and Miller defended the overall lobbying efforts of ACCCE. The group sought amendments that would limit the costs of the bill, but besides the fraudulent letters, the group's efforts have been legitimate, he said.

Bonner said that an internal investigation had not revealed the motivations of the temporary employee who sent the letters. He said the matter had been referred to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

"It was the action of one rogue temporary employee, acting on his own against our company's policy and without the knowledge of anyone else at Bonner & Associates," Bonner said.

But the committee's investigation into the letters did not arrive at the same conclusion. The "fraud chiefly resulted from a systematic lack of oversight and quality control, mixed with a substantial disregard for the facts," Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., said at the hearing. The committee's investigation concluded that the more than a dozen letters were sent as a part of a multi-million dollar "shadow lobbying" campaign.