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04/29/2015

National Review: It Appears the State Department Has Had a Policy of Retaining Senior Officials’ Emails Since 2009

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When State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that the emails of senior officials at Foggy Bottom weren’t automatically archived until “February of this year,” it raised the question of why Hillary Clinton had claimed that her emails to colleagues were automatically saved.

“What was her foundation for even that? Did someone incorrectly tell her that that was happening, or did she incorrectly make such a self-serving assumption?” former Justice Department Office of Information and Privacy director Dan Metcalfe wondered to Politico.

Cause of Action (CoA), a government transparency group, thinks it has the answer. “[The State Department] just provided Cause of Action documents showing that the department has required emails to be preserved since 2009,” Dan Epstein, the group’s executive director, says in a written statement to National Review.

The documents Epstein references, which were released to Cause of Action by Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, provide guidance on the State Department’s record-keeping policy.

 

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04/28/2015

CoA April 2015 Newsletter

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04/24/2015

The Daily Ledger: Time For Hillary To Come Clean

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04/20/2015

Washington Examiner: New Voices for 2015

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The Washington Examiner’s editors and reporters have identified the intellectuals, policymakers, think tank leaders, campaign operatives, candidates, pols, pundits, wonks and others who are pushing our thinking and testing the limits of political possibility.

 

Some names on this list are already familiar to many; others will be virtual unknowns. This is as it should be. We set out to find people who are not yet fully in plain view above the horizon, which is why you won’t find party leaders or presidential hopefuls on this list. Instead, we sought out talented iconoclasts whose ideas on politics and policy are likely to be heard and should be listened to — but who may not earn the attention of the national media on a regular basis…

 

Dan Epstein’s organization, Cause of Action, is a leader in the world of government transparency and accountability. It advocates for FOIA reform laws, files lawsuits and conducts its own research and investigations. Called the “most active nonprofit you’ve never heard of,” Cause of Action has investigated everything from Hillary Clinton’s violations of the Federal Records Act, to possible fraud in a visa-for-cash program administered by the DHS, to overbilling by the Chicago Transit Authority. Epstein is no newcomer to the accountability game: Before his work at Cause of Action, he served on the Counsel for Oversight and Investigations at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Expect Epstein and Cause of Action to stay in the headlines as they work to hold the powerful accountable.

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04/17/2015

Law360: LabMD Loses Bid To Exclude FTC Docs In Data Security Row

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An administrative law judge on Thursday shot down LabMD Inc.’s bid to block the Federal Trade Commission from introducing into the parties’ data security fight new evidence related to the origin of an allegedly leaked patient file, rejecting the lab’s argument that the documents were clearly inadmissible.

 

In his order, Chief Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell denied LabMD’s motion to prohibit the FTC from using or offering into evidence six documents that contain additional information about how data security firm Tiversa Holding Corp. came across a LabMD patient file that Tiversa allegedly found on servers outside the company and turned over to the regulator.

 

LabMD argued in its March 25 motion to exclude that the agency shouldn’t be allowed to introduce the proposed exhibits because it would cause unfair prejudice and confusion due to the agency’s undue delay in obtaining and producing the documents. According to the lab, the evidence should have been produced pursuant to a September 2013 subpoena that the FTC issued to Tiversa that sought all documents related to LabMD, but were withheld by the data security company.

 

But Judge Chappell declined to side with the lab in his order Thursday, instead ruling that the present record in the case “fails to support the conclusion that the subject documents are clearly inadmissible for all purposes” and that the possibility still existed that the FTC could use the documents to rebut the lab’s defense…

 

Reed Rubinstein, a Dinsmore & Shohl LLP partner and the senior vice president of litigation at Cause of Action, which is representing LabMD in the administrative proceeding, told Law360 on Friday that his side was encouraged by the judge’s decision to leave open the possibility that the evidence could still be excluded at a later time.

 

“It seemed as though the judge’s ‘wait and see’ attitude was a suggestion perhaps that our arguments had not fallen on deaf ears,” he said.

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04/15/2015

Washington Examiner: Justice Department officials may have shared taxpayer info with White House

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Attorneys from the Department of Justice’s tax division may have improperly shared confidential taxpayer information with President Obama’s White House staff for political reasons, a watchdog group said.

 

Cause of Action, a nonprofit government watchdog group, filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests Wednesday for records demonstrating whether Justice attorneys — some of whom worked directly on elements of the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal — leaked protected information to Obama administration officials while detailed to the Office of White House Counsel.

 

“Documents obtained by Cause of Action have revealed that since 2009, several DOJ Tax Division attorneys, many of whom have been involved in litigation where … protected information was involved, have elected to serve the president as ‘clearance counsel,’ ” Daniel Epstein, president of Cause of Action, wrote in a letter to Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general.

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04/10/2015

Washington Examiner: Interactive graphic: Hillary Clinton’s insider network

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Daniel Epstein, Cause of Action’s Executive Director, says, “Due to Secretary Clinton’s failure to preserve emails on an authorized system, and the State Department’s failure to preserve any employee text messages at all, the full truth of whether Mrs. Clinton’s associations improperly influenced her decisions will never be known… Unfortunately, this lack of transparency has become the norm in Washington.”

 

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