On Tuesday, June 12, the District Court for the District of Columbia issued an opinion in CoA Institute’s long-standing FOIA suit against the IRS for failing to produce records regarding possible White House intrusion in to the agency’s FOIA practices. The opinion can be found here.
A few thoughts on this opinion from the District Court for the District of Columbia in our #FOIA case against the @IRSnews. For background, here's what we asked for: comms between IRS & White House on doc requests https://t.co/odRkq3P7Au pic.twitter.com/bGDKQIm2VH
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
The first clause of our #FOIA request states: “All records, including but not limited to emails.” Despite that fact, the court accepted the IRS’ decision not to search employee emails. pic.twitter.com/Qh7pYFy9Ge
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
What’s worse, the court also accepted the IRS’ position that searching employee email is “unduly burdensome” because it would take an IT staffer 13 years to search. That’s nonsense. pic.twitter.com/qDvbeFd5Nz
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
The #IRS takes the bizarre position that to search staff email accounts the IT department has to mirror their hard drives one by one, and then do a search for emails. That’s how they generate those huge search times. No other agency does this.
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
As the court well knows, 11 other agencies provided documents when we sent this same #FOIA to them. Only the IRS was unable to comply.
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
Summary:
CoA sends 12 FOIAs seeking comms re: White House involvement in #FOIA in 201311 Agencies: Here you go.@IRSnews: Unduly burdensome.
CoA: /sigh – Fine, we’ll sue.
Court: Nah, they’re good. Don’t worry about it.
Transparency denied after 5 years.
— Cause of Action Inst (@CauseofActionDC) June 12, 2018
