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06/25/2015

Daily Signal – Top Export-Import Bank Official Deletes Text Messages Sent During 2014 Midterm Elections

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A government watchdog has learned a top-ranking official at the Export-Import Bank deleted text messages sent during the 2014 midterm elections, sparking a lawsuit calling for the recovery of the records.  Cause of Action, a nonpartisan government accountability organization, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Ex-Im on Nov. 14, 2014, asking for text messages sent between top bank officials the week of the 2014 midterm elections, Nov. 2, 2014 to Nov. 8, 2014.  As a result of the FOIA request, the group learned that Scott Schloegel, Ex-Im’s chief of staff and senior vice president, deleted critical text messages during this time period.  When Ex-Im replied to Cause for Action’s FOIA request on May 12, 2015, six months later, they informed the group the messages were “accidentally deleted on approximately Jan. 1, 2015.” Additionally, Schloegel said in a signed declaration on March 27, 2015, that he “deleted, by mistake, the messages … on [his] phone for the period in question.”  “The fact that a top official at the Export-Import Bank deleted his text messages several weeks after our organization asked to see them raises serious questions,” Dan Epstein, Cause of Action’s executive director, said in a statement. “Furthermore, it’s puzzling that it took the bank another four months to let us know that this happened.”

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06/24/2015

Washington Free Beacon: Ex-Im Official Deleted Text Messages After FOIA Request

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A top official at a controversial U.S. export finance agency deleted text messages sent within days of the 2014 midterm elections after a watchdog group filed an open records request for the messages, the agency admitted recently.  The watchdog group, Cause of Action, said the deletion amounts to “unlawful destruction of federal records” in a legal complaint filed on Wednesday.  The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Nov. 14 asking for text messages sent or received by top officials at the U.S. Export-Import Bank from Nov. 2 to Nov. 8.  Ex-Im responded months later, saying in a May reply that messages from Scott Schloegel, the chief of staff and senior vice president, “were accidentally deleted on approximately January 1, 2015,” more than a month after Cause of Action filed its FOIA request….

Cause of Action is now filing a legal complaint “to ask the Justice Department and/or Congress to initiate action to recover the deleted messages,” it announced on Wednesday.  The complaint alleges that Ex-Im violated the Federal Records Act—by its own admission—by failing to preserve official intra-office communications.  “The fact that a top official at the Export-Import Bank deleted his text messages several weeks after our organization asked to see them raises serious questions,” Dan Epstein, Cause of Action’s executive director, said in a statement. “Furthermore, it’s puzzling that it took the Bank another four months to let us know that this happened.”  Cause of Action’s Ex-Im FOIA request was the latest in what the group’s complaint describes as “an investigation into whether federal agencies comply with their obligation to preserve text messages for a period of time.”

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06/14/2015

Daily Caller: IRS Finds 6,400 New Lois Lerner Emails…Gives DUMBEST EXCUSE YET For Not Releasing Them

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The Internal Revenue Service found 6,400 more Lois Lerner emails — but they’re not handing them over in court.

The IRS’ latest excuses are nothing short of infuriating.  Department of Justice lawyers Geoffrey J. Klimas and Stephanie Sasarak, acting as counsel for the IRS, submitted a U.S. District Court filing June 12 in the case Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service. The court filing, provided to The Daily Caller, claims the IRS received new Lerner emails from the Treasury Department’s inspector general (TIGTA) but can’t fork over the emails to Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group suing to get the emails. Why? Because the IRS is busy making sure that none of the emails are duplicates  – you know, so as not to waste anyone’s time.  However, the inspector general already made sure that none of the emails were duplicates, so the IRS’ latest excuse falls flat. Here are takeaways from the court filing….

TIGTA gave the IRS 6,400 Lerner emails that they recovered from backup tapes:…. TIGTA already checked for duplicate emails:… But the IRS is going to go ahead and do some “deduplication” anyway, just to make sure TIGTA de-duplicated correctly:…

The deduplication might take a long time:…

The IRS isn’t going to start de-duplicating the emails it has until AFTER it reviews “Lerner communications which were not forensically recovered.” In other words, they’re going to review Lerner emails that they DON’T HAVE before they look at the ones that they DO have:…

The legal advocacy group Cause of Action is also encountering ridiculous excuses in its own lawsuit to get Lerner’s emails. Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, Obama’s former White House chief of staff, seized all of the emails that went back and forth between the IRS and the White House and won’t hand them over, arguing that since confidential taxpayer information was illegally disclosed in the emails, then it would be illegal to make the emails public – since they have confidential taxpayer information in them. Get it?

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06/9/2015

National Review: The Obama Administration’s Newly Political Approach to FOIAs

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At the Treasury Department, the memo came down from the deputy executive secretary, Wally Adeyemo, in December of 2009. Going forward, the memo stated, “sensitive information” requested under the Freedom of Information Act was to be reviewed not only by career FOIA officials but also by a committee of political appointees, including Adeyemo and representatives from the public-affairs, legislative-affairs, and general counsel’s office, before release. What followed was an unusual review of Treasury FOIA requests by high-ranking political officials. And it didn’t just happen at Treasury, but at the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security, too. Current and former FOIA attorneys at these agencies say documents requested by the media have come in for special scrutiny, called “sensitive review,” often holding up release for weeks or months. At times, these officials say, political officials delayed the production of documents for political convenience. The policy runs counter not just to the spirit and the letter of the Obama administration’s pledge to unprecedented transparency, but also to the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act itself….

The Treasury Department is not alone in its use of the sensitive-review process. Internal documents suggest that the IRS (part of Treasury, but with its own policies), the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of other agencies have, to varying degrees, implemented similar procedures. At the IRS, for instance, when the legal watchdog group Cause of Action sued in 2012 to secure the release of documents under FOIA, it set off a spate of e-mails within the agency about whether the request had been subject to sensitive review. On October 12, John Davis, the agency’s chief of disclosure, wrote to Valerie Barta, a tax-law specialist, of Cause of Action’s original FOIA request: “This case we closed out in May of this year is coming back to haunt us. Gary wants to know why this was not on a sensitive case report. Can you pull this case and if you can tell why Susan didn’t put this on a sensitive case report?”

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06/5/2015

Washington Examiner: State Department preparing to probe Clinton email scandal

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Records from the State Department’s office of inspector general reveal the agency watchdog has taken early steps toward investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address and server during her time as secretary of state.  Steven Linick, State’s inspector general since June 2013, signaled his office is making “preliminary” preparations for a larger probe of the policies that allowed Clinton to determine which of her official communications she wanted to withhold from the public, according to documents obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Cause of Action.  “In the past, when faced with employees who were using non-governmental email accounts for government business, the OIG questioned such activities,” Linick wrote in response to a letter from Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The Iowa Republican had written to Linick in March seeking answers about the communications and business activities of Clinton and her top aides that were then emerging in the media.  Cause of Action filed a Freedom of Information Act request to State’s inspector general and to the National Archives and Records Administration seeking records related to the Clinton email controversy.  A letter from the State Department inspector general dated May 15 claimed there were just 18 documents that ever mentioned Clinton’s emails, the national archives or the Clinton Foundation.  Just six of those were given to Cause of Action in their entirety, with the others being redacted or punted to the State Department for further review.  But the few records that the agency did release had nothing to do with the information requested, and were not even produced during Clinton’s time in office.

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06/3/2015

Washington Examiner: Acting IGs at State Dept., National Archives ignored looming Clinton email scandal

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A years-long vacancy in the State Department’s Office of inspector general allowed Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server to hide her public records to continue unchecked, experts told a Senate committee Wednesday.  Daniel Epstein, president of nonpartisan watchdog Cause of Action, pointed to another empty inspector general office — this one in the National Archives and Records Administration — as a potential cause of the breakdown in transparency that occurred during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.

James Springs, who now serves as the National Archives’ permanent inspector general, oversaw the agency in an interim capacity from September 2012 until March of this year.

That means the watchdog position was effectively empty as Clinton made her transition out of the State Department.  Top Archives officials were concerned at the time that Clinton might attempt to leave the State Department with her records and bring them to the Clinton Library in Arkansas, internal emails obtained by Cause of Action show.

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06/3/2015

Government Executive: Senators to Obama: Fill the Inspector General Vacancies

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Nearly every recent scandal and lapse involving inspectors general was mentioned at a Wednesday Senate panel hearing as senators from both parties teamed with transparency advocates to push the White House to accelerate nominations to empty watchdog slots.  The White House, however, sent no one to punch back, despite efforts by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to obtain testimony on delayed nominations from Valerie Green, director of the Office of Presidential Personnel, and her predecessor Jonathan McBride.  “When IG positions remain unfilled, their offices are run by acting IGs who, no matter how qualified or well-intentioned, are not granted the same protections afforded to Senate-confirmed IGs,” said Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “They are not truly independent, as they can be removed by the agency at any time; they are only temporary and do not drive office policy; and they are at greater risk of compromising their work to appease the agency or the president.”…

“The disadvantage of being acting IG is you have less credibility because there’s no vetting,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of POGO. “There’s an incentive to curry favor with the agency head to get appointed, and they’re often more lapdog than watchdog.”… Brian joined with Daniel Epstein, executive director of the legal group Cause of Action, in an opinion that the longtime acting State Department Inspector General Harold Geisel, a Foreign Service officer ineligible for the permanent job, might not have vetted Clinton’s unusual email arrangements as a permanent IG would have. “Obama’s decision not to appoint a permanent IG at State may have been political,” Epstein said, since “acting IG’s have the incentive not only to delay but to avoid investigations.”  Epstein said Obama should make use of the recess power of appointments as he has done to fill vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. “He is able but not willing,” Epstein speculated.

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