The pro-business Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is seeking to use the Federal government’s own surveillance to access text message records that it has been unable to acquire from the Environmental Protection Agency.
For months, the Institute has been asking EPA officials to turn over text messages and email logs that could implicate top environmental officials in regulatory wrongdoing. The EPA has maintained that it doesn’t store the data that the organization is seeking.
The Washington Times reports:
The institute also filed an open records request with the EPA on Monday seeking information about secondary email accounts that two top officials maintain to do business within the agency.
[CEI lawyers] has no objection to either Administrator Gina McCarthy or top deputy Bob Perciasepe having the secondary addresses, but he cited internal EPA documents showing the addresses have been scrubbed from the agency’s enterprise content management system.
By not storing the data for the secondary accounts, CEI lawyers argue that the EPA could be shielding official business from public view. But even if the EPA no longer has the records, it’s likely that another government agency does.
“What today’s request will get us closer to is seeing the audience for and the subject matter of the very small [amount] of correspondence that our documents show exist on these atypical accounts, such as for whom and what topics were these nonpublic accounts reserved?” CEI lawyer Christopher C. Horner said of the lawsuit filed Monday.
The organization is asking the NSA to provide “metadata” (including time of the communication, duration, sender and recipient) from McCarthy’s communications made by phone, email and text message. In response to the CEI’s previous Freedom of Information Act requests, EPA officials argued that all of that information had been destroyed.
“We have found the silver lining of the NSA affair: While spying on all of us, our federal spooks inadvertently caught some of their lawbreaking political operatives at EPA,” Horner said.
