Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t the only one apparently baffled by newfangled technologies such as email (see nearby). In a withering ruling on Monday, a federal judge scored the Environmental Protection Agency for its contempt for its legal obligation to disclose documents and then lying to the courts about its stonewalling.
In 2012 the right-leaning Landmark Legal Foundation made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for emails related to regulations and the forthcoming election. As many suspected at the time and we now know, the White House commanded the agency to delay major anticarbon rules so the details couldn’t be debated in front of voters, thus undermining political accountability for the economic damage.
The EPA spent years attempting to deny Landmark a meaningful response, starting with the receipt of the FOIA request. The agency’s FOIA officer waited weeks before informing the offices of then EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her deputies of the obligation to retain documents. The agency subsequently refused to search either the official email accounts of top officials or the alias personal email addresses they used to conduct government business—“for reasons still unexplained,” Judge Royce Lamberth observes in a 25-page finding against the agency. Continue>>>
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