Read the full story: Daily Signal

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.”

Read the full story: Washington Free Beacon

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.”