A federal judge says the Environmental Protection Agency's use of secret email accounts may have been aimed at skirting public disclosure requirements.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Wednesday that a conservative public interest law firm, the Landmark Legal Foundation, can question and obtain records from EPA officials as part of the firm's Freedom of Information lawsuit against the federal agency.
The judge granted Landmark the right to seek the information to determine whether top EPA officials used personal email accounts to conduct official business — and whether the agency initially excluded those accounts from Landmark's Freedom of Information request.
"The possibility that unsearched personal email accounts may have been used for official business raises the possibility that leaders in the EPA may have purposefully attempted to skirt disclosure under the FOIA," wrote Lamberth, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
He said the possibility that the agency purposefully excluded the top leaders of the EPA from the FOIA search, at least initially, "suggests an unreasonable and bad faith reading of Landmark's FOIA request and subsequent agreement to narrow its scope."
In the lawsuit last year, the foundation asked for any records that indicated EPA was delaying the announcement of new environmental regulations until after last year's presidential election.
In June, The Associated Press reported that some top Obama administration officials were using unpublished email accounts to conduct official business.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has said the practice undermines congressional oversight and complicates access to records under FOIA.
Via: Newsmax
Continue Reading....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
President Joe Biden is hiding a myriad of information on the more than 75,000 Afghans his administration has brought to the United States ...
-
A pro-amnesty group is forecasting that up to 1.76 million young illegal immigrants would get work permits under President Barack Obama’...
-
I reported last year that many of Massachusetts’s SWAT teams were claiming to be private corporations that were immune from public reco...
-
Drum roll, please The real Cali story is infinitely darker. It’s time for The Top 7 Things The National Media Always Ignore About Jerry B...
-
The Isis militant group has seized enough radioactive material from government facilities to suggest it has the capacity to build a...
-
OSKALOOSA, Iowa – President Barack Obama called the latest addition to the GOP ticket, Rep. Paul Ryan, “a good man, a family man” du...
-
Oprah Winfrey has said racism is still a problem around the world and the only way for it to end is for generations of racists to die out. ...
-
A Kentucky Chuck E. Cheese appears to have taken the kid-friendly chain’s “no guns” policy too far, refusing to serve a police officer w...
-
Television ads that can be seen on cable news networks promoting petitions to abolish the IRS and defund Obamacare are being used by politi...
-
HOUSTON, Texas — The funeral service for Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth was held 11 AM, Friday, September 4, 2015 at the 2nd Baptist ...
No comments:
Post a Comment