private email

6/16

conflation? hillary attacked for having a private email server (tho her predecesors had done so, and gop staffers [rex t] routinely did to avoid scrutiny. But then russia if you're listening find the __K missing emails [her cos, wiener?]

comey broke policy to re-open investigation right before 2016 election [he thot she wd win, as everyone did, and was afraid of bad PR if he didn’t?]

SEE "but the emails" 1010 (became joke/meme

fake scandals? gop convenient amnesia? tit for tat?

note academic suppression. foia is going after public/work email?

see also FOIA

NB gop uses pvt email ALL THE TIME b/c they are doing illegal and unethical stuff (maybe remembering enron death star emails, monkey NAm)

---

~ biden impeach 12 23

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-takes-one-more-step-toward-becoming-an-autocrat-and-it-hardly-makes-a-ripple

hunter kos ref NYT

no lnx

NEWS ANALYSIS

Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals

President Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was ordered by President Trump to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

By David E. Sanger

Oct. 10, 2020

President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.

Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.

He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.

“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”

“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Mr. Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”

Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”

Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.

Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian,wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump returned from the hospital where he received Covid-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.

Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Mr. Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.

(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.”In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)

Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.

But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?

“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”

“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”

Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”

“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”

“The result,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home, and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”

In the current cases, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.

Mr. Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Mr. Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s home server.

“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”

Mr. Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Mrs. Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Mr. Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.

“We’ve got the emails,” Mr. Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”

But he also hinted that many of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Mr. Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)

“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Mr. Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”

Mr. Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while Mrs. Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.

William P. Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John N. Mitchell, who served Mr. Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president’s direction. And Mr. Nixon himself, while urging the I.R.S. to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Mr. Barr told ABC News that Mr. Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Now, clearly, the president has asked Mr. Barr to act in a criminal case — and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.

His complaint appears to have been driven by Mr. Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Mr. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.

Mr. Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Mr. Durham has had “plenty of time to do it.”

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Mr. Trump said on Fox Business.

“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”

---

1010

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/john-ratcliffe-back-his-bullshit-and-fox-news-loves-it

John Ratcliffe, President Donald Trump’s handpicked director of national intelligence, is selectively declassifying documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. His politically motivated disinformation campaign puts bolstering the president’s faltering reelection chances above U.S. national security. And he has found eager partners at Fox News. The network’s hosts are lapping up the story and baselessly claiming that it vindicates their conspiracy theories that the federal investigation into Russia’s actions was an anti-Trump witch hunt.

For years, Fox has been trying to delegitimize the voluminous evidence that Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed” at helping Trump defeat his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the U.S. intelligence community. That campaign included a Putin-directed effort to hack and release Democratic emails and an array of interactions between Trump associates and Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian operation led to the successful prosecutions of various close supporters of the president. But for Fox’s propagandists, the real story has been “Obamagate,” the right’s spittle-flecked conspiracy theory postulating that “deep state” elements in the U.S. government dreamed up a Russia “hoax” in order to stop Trump.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, is an eager “Obamagate” proponent, and over the last few years, he has replaced key figures in his administration with partisan Fox favorites who are willing to use their positions to prop up the network’s unhinged conspiracy theory. He removed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Mueller probe, in favor of William Barr, who has worked to stymie Mueller-related prosecutions while ordering and overseeing a federal criminal probe into the origins of the Russia investigation. He used the same playbook at the top of the intelligence community, ousting Joseph Maguire, whose office had warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election, and subbing in Richard Grenell, a former Fox contributor who used the office to create fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists.

And now Ratcliffe, who replaced Grenell in May after gaining Trump’s favor despite a lack of experience in intelligence because the president liked his anti-Mueller rants on Fox, has levied his own salvo. On Tuesday, he selectively declassified and released two heavily redacted documents: a set of handwritten notes former CIA Director John Brennan took after briefing President Barack Obama in July 2016 and a memo the CIA prepared for the FBI summarizing intelligence. Those documents undergird a Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe described in a letter he sent last month to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Fox, unsurprisingly, was given the exclusive on the documents, and it credulously reported that they reveal that Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s “purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”

If Ratcliffe’s aim was to create political ammunition for the president and his Fox propagandists, he succeeded. The story led the network’s website on Tuesday night and was treated as a “bombshell” by Fox’s pro-Trump prime-time and morning hosts, who alleged that it proved that Clinton had “invented the Russia hoax” to deflect attention from her email server. And Trump furiously tweeted about the story on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, demanding arrests for what he baselessly termed had been an attempted “COUP."

This is nonsense.

The Russia probe did not begin due to anything Clinton did in July 2016. It was initiated based on earlier intel that George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, had disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.Papadopoulos, a bipartisan Senate report later assessed, was a “potential vector for malign Russian influence” who learned about the Russian hacking campaign from an individual with Russian ties and almost certainly informed the Trump campaign.

The notion that Clinton was secretly scheming to link Trump to Russia to avoid talking about her email server doesn’t meet the laugh test. At the time Brennan was briefing Obama, that hacking campaign was ongoing. WikiLeaks had just released thousands of Democratic National Committee emails, it was widely believed that those emails had been stolen by Russian hackers, and Clinton’s campaign was publicly denouncing Trump for calling on the Russian government to produce her emails while also denying that government’s involvement.

Ratcliffe’s selective redactions were also deceptive.“Four people familiar with the matter said the Russians’ assessment of Clinton was only one part of a larger intelligence report that was billed as an initial examination of Russian cyberattacks targeting the 2016 election, and was not the reason that it was referred to the bureau,” Politico reported Tuesday. Likewise, Brennan explained to CNN that the notes Ratcliffe released showed him “giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.”

Moreover, the Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe produced had previously been rejected on a bipartisan basis as likely Russian disinformation intended to distract from their hacking of the Democratic National Committee as those documents were released.

This pipeline from the DNI’s office to Fox will continue as long as Trump is president. Ratcliffe is doing exactly what Trump wants him to do, using the power of the director of national intelligence to boost his reelection. And Fox is doing what they always do, serving as a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Russian effort to help Trump win the 2020 election continues.

Rep. John Ratcliffe loves Fox's Russia probe conspiracy theories. He was just confirmed to oversee U.S. intelligence.

07/29/19 1:02 PM EDT

The Foxification of the intelligence community follows the DOJ script

02/21/20 2:04 PM EST

“Obamagate” is just a rebrand of the right’s bogus “deep state” conspiracy theory

05/18/20 10:24 AM EDT

---

Trump administration and Fox News are trying to gin up a scandal that would do to the 2020 election what Hillary Clinton's emails did to the 2016 election. There's no reason that anyone has to play along with the deceit.

The short version:

President Donald Trump's handpicked director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is selectively leaking documents to pro-Trump outlets, usually Fox News.
These documents relate to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Pro-Trump personalities at Fox use the documents to claim that Russian interference was a hoax, usually saying that Hillary Clinton herself ginned up the hoax.
There is no reliable evidence for these claims. To the contrary, a bipartisan Senate committee found numerous ways that Russia interfered -- even more than Robert Mueller uncovered in his investigation.
The Russia probe began based on intel that Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos has disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.
None of this reality is reflected at Fox News, which keeps up talk of "Obamagate" as the election draws near.
Numerous sources have told media outlets that Ratcliffe's redactions were deceptive.

Objectively speaking, there is no reason to be talking aboutClinton's emails in 2020. She's not on the ballot, and a multi-year investigation by the State Department concluded in 2019 that there had been no mishandling of classified information.

---

post-truth? correction irrelevent?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-ordered-doj-investigation-into-hillary-clinton-goes-out-with-a-whimper-now-what

no lnx

Trump-ordered DOJ investigation into Hillary Clinton goes out with a whimper. Now what?

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement January 12, 2020

It was October 9, 2016. Candidate Donald Trump at the second presidential debate promised – and threatened – Hillary Clinton that if he became president she would go to prison.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” a grinning Secretary Clinton on stage told the audience.

“Because you’d be in jail,” a grimacing Trump gloated.

It was such a stunning moment, a gut punch to American democracy and presidential politics. We don’t investigate our political opponents and presidents don’t promise – or threaten – to lock them up.

It was cheered by the far right, and to this day extremists celebrate the anniversary of those horrific words.

Students For Trump

@TrumpStudents

3 years ago today, President @realDonaldTrump had one of the greatest debate moments of all time...

When Hillary Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn't in charge of the justice system,

To which President Trump responded, "Because you'd be in jail."

Priceless. ??

Embedded video

One month later to the day, in the wee hours of the morning, the news networks would call the election for Trump, despite Clinton winning the popular election by nearly three million more votes.

Less than one year in to office, President Donald Trump used the power of social media to lie repeatedly about his former political opponent, and forced his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to open an investigation into Clinton.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..

78.8K

2:57 AM - Nov 3, 2017

Twitter Ads info and privacy

42.5K people are talking about this

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Many people in our Country are askingwhat the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed”33,000 Emails? No justice!

101K

6:13 PM - Dec 2, 2017

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71.2K people are talking about this

There were no grounds. She had been investigated before by the FBI and cleared. She had been investigated before by Congress multiple times and cleared. She had sat before Congress for 11 hours in a sham Benghazi hearing (one of many sham Benghazi investigations by Republicans on Capitol Hill), and even the top Republican announced at the end of that grueling day – during which Clinton performed, some said brilliantly – that they had learned nothing new.

Sessions’ investigation cast a big net, as The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Attorney General Sessions directed John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, in November of 2017 to, as the Post details, review “a wide array of issues related to Clinton. They included the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One matters, along with the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and alleged leaks by former FBI director James B. Comey.”

“Your recommendations should include whether any matters not currently under investigation warrants the opening of an investigation, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources or further investigation, and whether any matters would merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,” Sessions told Huber.

More than two years later the investigation is concluding.

It has found nothing – ending “with no tangible results,” the Post notes, because there was never any “there” there.

Both current and former “law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.”

The cost to taxpayers is unknown.

The cost to Clinton’s reputation can be guessed, given also that the investigation is ending in silence.

There will be no FBI Director holding a press conference clearing Clinton. There will be no Attorney General apologizing. There will be nothing but yet another failed attack on Hillary Clinton, millions more of the taxpayers’ dollars taken from the Treasury’s coffers, all to prop up an actual political witch hunt and conspiracy theories that have made Republicans and the conservative media rich.

The beneficiaries, of course, are President Trump and the GOP, who have raised countless fortunes from suckered voters certain that “Crooked Hillary,” as Trump has called her – on Twitter alone – 379 times, is guilty.

She is not.

What happens next?

Nothing.

someone 10/19 said djt just need thinnest reed to hang dirt/ doubt about opponent, then rw media and cynicism of am ppl will do rest, hillary email, hunter biden corruption

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/trump-administrations-endless-information-security-breaches-show-how-mainstream

jrnl fail hillary email

DC press whitewashes its role in 2016 email fiasco after State Department exonerates Clinton

an 1019

---

omg

an 919

no lnx

Mike Pompeo is targeting Hillary Clinton’s emails in massive investigation: Bombshell Washington Post report

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 29, 2019

While claiming that the impeachment inquiry into alleged misconduct by Donald Trump is a “witch hunt,” the administration is focusing attention on investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to a bombshell report published by The Washington Post on Saturday.

“The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said,” the paper reported.

The scope of the investigation is staggering.

“As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials,” the paper noted. “Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.”State Department investigators began contacting the former officials about 18 months ago, after President Trump’s election, and then seemed to drop the effort before picking it up in August, officials said.”

The investigation is causing yet another abuse of power scandal for the embattled administration.

“To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries,” The Post explained. “The existence of the probe follows revelations that the president used multiple levers of his office to pressure the leader of Ukraine to pursue investigations that Trump hoped would produce damaging information about Democrats, including potential presidential rival Joe Biden.”

Read the full report.

719 an

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on Thursday threw a tantrum over the House Oversight Committee’s vote to subpoena emails that Ivanka Trump sent while using a private email account for government business.

During a hearing on the subpoenas, Roy bitterly complained that Congress was spending too much money — even as he chided Congress for not spending more money to secure the southern border between the United States and Mexico.

never dies zombie // benghazi? attempt to pre-empt mueller

see distraction

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trio-of-republican-senators-demand-doj-hand-over-information-on-clinton-email-probe-as-ag-barr-prepares-for-release-of-redacted-mueller-report/

As Attorney General William Barr prepares the release of a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is reportedly recruiting other Republican senators help with a separate endeavor. As MSNBC reports, “a trio of top Republican senators” are demanding the Justice Department “hand over information on the handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”

Graham, along with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Barr on Tuesday requesting documents pertaining to the department’s investigation of the former secretary of state.

The document request comes despite federal investigators clearing Clinton of criminal wrongdoing, and a separate Justice Department inspector general examination that reviewed the department’s probe. According to Politico, the trio of senators have requested a “classified briefing on steps the Justice Department plans to take in light of its inspector general’s 2018 report,” according to Politico.

“Now that the Special Counsel’s investigation has concluded, we are unaware of any legitimate basis upon which the Department can refuse to answer the Judiciary Committee’s inquiries,” Graham, Johnson and Grassley — who chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee, respectively — wrote in their letter to Barr.

The lawmakers also claimed a portion of the inspector general’s report “raises significant issues associated with the FBI’s failure to review certain highly classified information in support of its Midyear investigation.”

As Politico notes, Graham has likewise pledged to investigate whether the DOJ and FBI attempted to influence the 2016 to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/explosive-new-letter-reveals-trump-aides-unsecured-scheme-to-transfer-sensitive-u-s-nuclear-technology-to-an-authoritarian-state/

Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland and other aides in the White House appear to have worked on a plan to “transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology” to Saudi Arabia over unsecured emails, according to a new letter from the House Oversight Committee chair sent on Thursday.

The detail is one of many allegations in a broader letter about the White House’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act, which has strict requirements about how administration officials should conduct and record official business. The letter, signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), said that the committee has been investigating concerns about the White House’s use of private emailand messaging apps, including use by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top aide Jared Kushner.

Trump and his supporters emphasized the issue of administration messaging and recordkeeping practices in the 2016 campaign in light of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private email when she was secretary of State.

But the new revelation that Trump administration officials were working on a plan to transfer “nuclear technology” to Saudi Arabia is a remarkable development, given the continuing scandal of the White House’s twisted relationship with the authoritarian regime.

The letter noted that McFarland’s discussion of the plan, using an AOL email address, was done in coordination with Tom Barrack, who is described as “a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump’s inaugural committee.”

Cummings also said that Steve Bannon, the president’s former top strategist who has left the White House, may also have been involved. One email “appears to show that Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, received documents pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through hispersonal email account,” according to the letter.

The letter continued:

These communications appear to be sent while Mr. Bannon worked at the White House in order to inform Mr. Bannon’s official work relating to developing “broader middle east policy.”

These communications raise questions about whether these officials complied with the Presidential Records Act and whether the White House identified this personal email use during its internal review and took steps to address it. The Committee has jurisdiction over the Presidential Records Act and our oversight over compliance with the law will inform whether additional changes to strengthen the law are necessary.

McFarland no longer works at the White House. At the time of the emails in question, she served under National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was since ousted, indicted, and charged with lying to the FBI by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and accused of working as an unregistered foreign agent.

http://www.ecowatch.com/pruitt-epa-ethics-violations-2323438512.html

pruitt lied?

alec afmp

ny post victory lap bs

The Clinton family foundation turned out to be a liability for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it wasn’t foreordained. Here’s how it happened.

After serving as Mitt Romney’s campaign manager in 2012, I formed an outside political group called America Rising tasked with doing opposition research on Clinton. She left the State Department in 2013 with sky-high favorable ratings, but we knew that popularity (which might soon doom any 2016 GOP nominee) was the result of a general lack of scrutiny in the previous four years.

When we first started talking to reporters about the Clintons’ vulnerabilities, to their credit, they were almost always interested in the Clinton Foundation. Already, there were suspicions about the foundation unethically blurring the lines and bending the rules. The organization represented the intersection of politics and money, the favorite topic of any good political reporter.

In August 2013, the New York Post broke a story showing the Clinton Foundation had spent $50 million on private travel. Former President Bill Clinton had apparently become addicted to private jets. The general election was still more than three years away, and already the Clinton Foundation was transforming from a well-meaning charity to a private slush fund enriching the Clintons, making a mockery of Hillary’s claim the next year that her family was “dead broke.”

Uncovering this information was a challenge. Despite its lofty campaign promises about transparency, the Obama administration refused to cooperate with many of America Rising’s Freedom of Information Act requests.

Enter the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, whose president, Dave Bossie, went on to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager. When our public-record requests for Clinton’s State Department correspondence were denied, Bossie took legal action, arguing that the public had a right to see this information.

The courts agreed, and the State Department started complying with the requests. We immediately understood why the Clinton forces took such pains to keep the correspondence from seeing the light of day. Oneemail chain showed Bill Clinton seeking permission from his wife to give a paid speech to the leaders of North Korea and Congo for a whopping $650,000 fee that would be donated to the Clinton Foundation. Another email showed a major foundation donor with no national-security experience getting appointed to a highly sensitive government intelligence board.

As the emails dripped out, it became clear the Clintons were using their foundation to keep big financial supporters in place while laying the groundwork for her 2016 campaign.

Secretary Clinton’s painstaking efforts to conceal this information from the American public led her to conduct all her business on a private email server.In another twist of irony, her attempts to avoid public scrutiny caused the exact opposite and the national scandal she couldn’t shake.

larry bell forbes bs:

...Louisiana Senator David Vitter (R-LA), the new ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, plans to investigate this Sue and Settle practice, “using all available tools to bring to light this often abused path to regulatory influence”. For starters, he asked his Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell to join with AGs of 13 other states who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with EPA on August 10, 2012, asking for any and all correspondence between EPA and a list of 80 environmental, labor union and public interest organizations that have been party to litigation since the start of the Obama administration.

Unfortunately, getting federal agencies to comply with formal FOIA requests isn’t proving to be easy. And to make matters worse, there is evidence that top bureaucrats have even used private e-mail accounts and aliases to cover culpability tracks.

For example, Senator Vitter, along with Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, recently sent a letter to James Martin, EPA’s Region 8 administrator, warning him: “The use of personal,non-official e-mail accountsraises concerns that you could be attempting to insulate this and other e-mail correspondence from a Freedom of Information Act request. Moreover, your actions may also constitute violation of the Federal Records Act”…evading congressional oversight of federal agencies.

One of those private e-mails at issue involved an exchange between Martin and Vickie Patton, the General Counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, regarding an arranged meeting with him. Patton wrote: “Hi Jim, Next Monday or Tuesday December 12/13 at 9am depending on which is best for you.” Responding, Martin replied: “January 13 at 9:00 am works for me if it works for you. (Lost your original note-is that the date and time you proposed?” Vitter and Issa have confirmed that the meeting did, in fact, take place at the EPA regional office.

Several Martin e-mails were released by EPA as the result of a FOIA lawsuit lodged by Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Horner’s efforts also revealed evidence that former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was conducting official agency business under cover of the alias name “Richard Windsor”, and CEI also sued EPA seeking e-mails concerning the EPA’s behind-the-scenes regulatory war on coal plants. Horner’s new book, The Liberal War on Transparency,discusses this and other tricks.

Suspicions abound that the exposure of Jackson’s undercover communications had much to do with her departure decision shortly afterwards. Senator Vitter commented: “I think this e-mail issue clearly spurred Lisa Jackson’s resignation.But it’s much broader than her. It’s about a culture of hiding an extreme agenda from Americans because it can’t be sustained in public debate.”

CEI issued a statement that agreed with Vitter’s perspective,commenting: “We also believe the timing was no accident. She claims to have told President Obama shortly after his re-election she planned to leave in early 2013, but her announcement went public just days after the Justice Department agreed- as a result of a lawsuit filed by CEI- to begin producing 12,000 e-mails from her ‘Richard Windsor’ account.”

On January 28, 2013, on behalf of the American Tradition institute (ATI) Horner also sued in the Federal District Court of Washington, D.C. to compel EPA to end its eight-month stonewall of two FOIA requests regarding its “uncomfortably close ties at great taxpayer expense” with the American Lung Association (ALA), and the Sierra Club. Both of these organizations lobby for stringent regulatory legislation the EPA wants, while at the same time, receiving agency funding. ALA has received $20,405,655 from EPA over the past 10 years, and has run campaigns against politicians who challenge its policies. An ALA billboard ad in Michigan targeted House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, featuring a child with an oxygen mask over her face. The text read: “Rep. Fred Upton, protect our kids’ health. Don’t weaken the Clean Air Act.”

According to the ATI complaint, “The Sierra Club employs a similar model and has close working relationships with Agency officials.” This charge refers most particularly to a recent incidence where Sierra hired disgraced EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz. He left EPA shortly after a videotape revealed him acknowledging his “philosophy of enforcement” as being akin to random crucifixions used to keep subjects suitably respectful and “really easy to manage for the next few years.” Armendariz has pledged to continue to help Sierra (and, presumably, EPA) fight the coal industry.

Senator Vitter’s office has informed me that there are ongoing investigations regarding a known revolving door of environmentalists and agencies, as well as Equal Action to Justice Act recovery money flowing to these groups post-settlement. In other words, the litigating groups are getting paid to sue both at the front end and tail end as well...

During her tenure as head of the EPA, Jackson received criticism from the coal industry and Republican members of the House and Senate, most notably Oklahoma Senator JimInhofe, for claims of the EPA overreaching on regulating toxins released from coal ash and power plant mercury emissions.^[47] Senator Inhofe, who's a ranking member on the Senate Committee on the Environment, and does not believe that human activity causes global climate change,^[48] called on Jackson to reconsider new greenhouse gas regulations after e-mails surfaced leading to the dubbed “Climategate” scandal.^[49] With Jackson responding saying that “The science behind climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming,” and that “That conclusion is not a partisan one.”^[50] Though Jackson and Inhofe have conflicted views on Environmental issues, in an interview he called her “One of my favorite Liberals.”^[51]

On December 13, 2012, the Assistant Inspector General notified the EPA they would be conducting an audit into record keeping practices associated with the use of private email accounts by Lisa Jackson under the name of "Richard Windsor." The Justice Department has agreed to release 12,000 emails at a rate of 3000 per week from this account beginning January 14, 2013 in response to a lawsuit brought by a Washington attorney.^[52][53][54]

On December 27, 2012, Jackson announced that she would be stepping down from her position as EPA Administrator.^[55][56][57] According to the New York Post, Jackson submitted her resignation because she believed that the Obama administration would move to support the Keystone pipeline and she did not want this to occur on her watch.^[58] Jackson left office on February 15, 2013, and was succeeded by Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe.^[59]

At a House hearing in September 2013, Jackson denied knowledge of any government secrecy and denied that she tried to evade federal record keeping laws.^[60]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmakers-email-lawbreakers-article-1.2135674

palin romney rove christie, cuomo

colin powell blows off inquiry?

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-republicans-who-did-exactly-what-hillary-did

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy

The Bush White House email controversy surfaced in 2007 during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act.^[1] Over 5 million emails may have been lost.^[2][3] Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove emails, leading to damaging allegations.^[4] In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been lost.^[5]

The administration officials had been using a private Internet domain, called gwb43.com, owned by and hosted on an email server run by the Republican National Committee,^[6] for various communications of unknown content or purpose. The domain name is an abbreviation for "George W. Bush, 43rd" President of the United States. The server came public when it was discovered that J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, was using a gwb43.com email address to discuss the firing of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.^[7] Communications by federal employees were also found on georgewbush.com (registered to "Bush-Cheney '04, Inc."^[8]) and rnchq.org (registered to "Republican National Committee"^[9]), but, unlike these two servers, gwb43.com has no Web server connected to it — it is used only for email.^[10]

The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation.^[11] Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."^[12] The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators.^[13]

On April 12, 2007, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that White House staffers were told to use RNC accounts to "err on the side of avoiding violations of the Hatch Act, but they should also retain that information so it can be reviewed for the Presidential Records Act," and that "some employees ... have communicated about official business on those political email accounts."^[14] Stanzel also said that even though RNC policy since 2004 has been to retain all emails of White House staff with RNC accounts, the staffers had the ability to delete the email themselves.

[hide]

Dead Letter Office:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Some of the "missing" emails that were sent through the RNC accounts were mistakenly addressed to^[15] georgewbush.org, a parody site. Text of the misaddressed emails is available at the Dead Letter Office.^{[16][verification} ^needed]

Use by senior White House staff:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

According to a former White House official, Karl Rove used RNC-hosted addresses for roughly "95 percent" of his email.^[17] Rove provided email from his kr@georgewbush.com address in exhibits to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary.^[18]

White House deputy Jennifer Farley told Jack Abramoff not to use the official White House system "because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."^[7] Abramoff responded, "Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her RNC pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system."^[19]

Investigations with missing emails:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The House Oversight committee in an interim staff report, released on June 18, 2007:^[20]

At least eighty-eight Republican National Committee email accounts were granted to senior Bush administration officials, not "just a handful" as previously reported by the White House spokesperson Dana Perino in March 2007. Her estimate was later revised to "about fifty." Officials with accounts included: Karl Rove, the President’s senior advisor; Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff; Ken Mehlman, the former White House Director of Political Affairs; and many other officials in the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Communications, and the Office of the Vice President.
The RNC has 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove. Over half of these emails (75,374) were sent to or received from individuals using official ".gov" email accounts. Other users of RNC email accounts include former Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor (66,018 emails) and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings (35,198 emails). These email accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.
Of the 88 White House officials who received RNC email accounts, the RNC has preserved no emails for 51 officials.
There is evidence that the Office of White House Counsel under Alberto Gonzales may have known that White House officials were using RNC email accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records.
The evidence obtained by the Committee indicates that White House officials used their RNC email accounts in a manner that circumvented these requirements. At this point in the investigation, it is not possible to determine precisely how many presidential records may have been destroyed by the RNC. Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC email accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing emails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive.

Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy ( <ul style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" c="C" fxml="Fxml" version="version" d="D" encoding="encoding" utf-8="UTF-8" f="F" e="E" a="A" csvg="Csvg" http="http" fwww.w3.org="Fwww.w3.org" f2000="F2000" fsvg="Fsvg" width="width" height="height" ccircle="Ccircle" cx="cx" cy="cy" r="r" fill="fill" display="display" inline="inline" white-space="white-space" nowrap="nowrap" text-align="text-align" left="left" line-height="line-height" inherit="inherit" xmlns="xmlns" xmlns:data="data"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><li class="nv-view" style="margin: 0px; display: inline; word-spacing: -0.125em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy" title="Template:Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;"><abbr title="View this template" style="border-bottom-style: none; cursor: inherit; font-variant: small-caps;">v</abbr></a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li><li class="nv-talk" style="margin: 0px; display: inline; word-spacing: -0.125em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy" title="Template talk:Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;"><abbr title="Discuss this template" style="border-bottom-style: none; cursor: inherit; font-variant: small-caps;">t</abbr></a></li><li class="nv-edit" style="margin: 0px; display: inline; word-spacing: -0.125em;"><a class="external text" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy&action=edit" style="text-decoration: none; padding: 0px !important; background: none !important;"><abbr title="Edit this template" style="border-bottom-style: none; cursor: inherit; font-variant: small-caps;">e</abbr></a></li> </ul> )
Articles
Timeline Summary of attorneys Documents Congressional hearings List of dismissed attorneys Complete list of related articles
G. W. Bush administration officials involved
Fred F. Fielding, White House Counsel William K. Kelley, Deputy White House Counsel William Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Brett Tolman, U.S. Attorney, District of Utah, former counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Mary Beth Buchanan, U.S. Attorney, Western District of Pennsylvania, former Director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys from 2004 to 2005
Involved administration officials who resigned
Alberto Gonzales, United States Attorney General, former White House Counsel Kyle Sampson, Chief of Staff to the Attorney General Michael A. Battle, Director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys Michael Elston, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General Monica Goodling, Justice Department's liaison to the White House William W. Mercer, U.S. Attorney, Acting Associate Attorney General (retains position as U.S. Attorney in Montana) Sara Taylor, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs Paul McNulty, Deputy Attorney General Harriet Miers, former White House Counsel (resigned prior to publicity surrounding the controversy, effective January 31, 2007) Karl Rove, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bradley Schlozman, Director Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys; former Acting Assistant Attorney General for, and later Principal Deputy Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division; former interimU.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary 110th Congress
Patrick Leahy, Chair (D) Arlen Specter, Ranking member, former Chair (R) Chuck Schumer, Chair: Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts (D)
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary 110th Congress
John Conyers, Chair (D) Lamar Smith, Ranking member (R) Linda Sánchez, Chair: Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law (D)

Main article: Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy

During the investigation into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys,^[21] it became known White House staff was usingRepublican National Committee (RNC) email accounts.^[22] The White House stated it might have lost five million emails.^[2]

On May 2, 2007, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and theDepartment of Justice (DOJ) compelling the production of email Karl Rove sent to DOJ staff, regarding evaluation and dismissal of attorneys, no matter what email account Rove used, whether White House or National Republican party accounts, or other accounts, with a deadline of May 15, 2007 for compliance. The subpoena also demanded relevant email previously produced in the Valerie Plame controversy and investigation for the CIA leak scandal (2003).^[23]

CIA leak grand jury investigation:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main articles: CIA leak scandal, CIA leak grand jury investigation and Niger uranium forgeries

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson alleged that his wife's identity was covert and that members of the George W. Bush administration knowingly revealed that information as retribution for his New York Times op-ed entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," of July 6, 2003, regarding the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium. However, as Plame had been serving in a desk job at Langley for more than five years, she was not considered “covert” under the meaning of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.^[24] Patrick J. Fitzgerald, while investigating the leak, found that emails were missing from the White House server.^[25][26] Mother Jones wrote that this is possibly the reason the RNC changed the policy of deleting emails after 30 days to saving all email sent and received by White House officials.^[26]In light of the apparent vanished emails Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has asked to reopen the investigation.^[27][28]

General Services Administration:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: General Services Administration

It is feared that the missing emails might also have an impact on congressional investigation of General Services Administration.^[29]

Department of Education:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: United States Department of Education

While investigating the Reading First program CREW learned that employees use private emails to conduct official business. This might be a violation of the Federal Records Act.^[30][31]

Issa’s dogged desire to investigate the executive branch is a recent development for the chairman. During the Bush administration, the California congressman used his perch to obstruct investigations, defend unethical acts, and attack those who dared to accuse a Republican White House of wrongdoing.

A major scandal erupted in late 2006 over accusations that the White House improperly fired several U.S. attorneys — some of whom were allegedly dismissed for failing to prosecute politically motivated voter-fraud cases against Democrats. Congressional requests for information from the White House were complicated by the Bush administration’s practice of using parallel sets of email servers – one inside the federal government and a second housed at the Republican National Committee. White House adviser Karl Rove, who was at the center of the U.S. attorney scandal, professing convenience, used his nongovernment emailaddress for 95 percent of his communications.

When investigators found Rove’s deputy at the White House, J. Scott Jennings, had used his account provided by the Republican National Committee to discuss the firing of Bud Cummins, a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, they sought more records. However, as many as 22 million emails disappeared from the RNC’s servers.

Issa chalked up the loss of the emails to the GOP’s use of outdated software such as Lotus Notes, implying the entire investigation was a waste of money. “Are we simply going on a fishing expedition at $40,000 to $50,000 a month?” he asked.

Going a step further, he compared the behavior of Democrats on the committee to that of sexual deviants: “Well, if the chairman thinks that he should have Karl Rove’s every thinking, including correspondence with a wife or a girlfriend or an old buddy, because it was done at the RNC and not official work — sort of this voyeur, peeping tom that you’re entitled to everything.”

Fast-forward to 2014. During his investigation of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, Republicans led by Darrell Issa focused their inquiry on the head of the agency’s exempt division, Lois Lerner. As part of its investigation the committee demanded her email correspondents over a number of years, which were provided by the Treasury Department, save for a batch of 30,000 emails from 2009–2011 after her hard drive purportedly crashed.

Lerner asserted her Fifth Amendments rights not to testify before the committee, which resulted in the House of Representatives declaring her in contempt of Congress. When it came to the missing emails, whereas during the Bush years, computer errors were an acceptable reason for error, in the Obama administration lost emails were evidence of criminality. In a sharply worded letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, “Congress passed the Federal Records Act (FRA) to preserve key documents — such as those that were stored on Lerner’s hard drive — for production to congressional investigators and other stakeholders, including historians and FOIA requesters.” Issa continued, “The FRA requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records.” This was a marked difference from his stance on lost emails during the Bush years.

At a House hearing in September 2013, Jackson denied knowledge of any government secrecy and denied that she tried to evade federal record keeping laws.^[60]

How CEI and II Toppled EPA Region 8 Administrator James Martin

By William Yeatman

March 14, 2013 by Amy

Filed under: Archive

In mid-February, EPA Region 8 Administrator James Martin—who previously had served in the Ritter administration as the key facilitator of the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act—announced his resignation. The announcement came as a surprise, as Martin’s tenure at EPA was unusually brief. In fact, only one other (of 9) EPA Regional Administrators served a shorter term during the Obama administration. That was EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz, who quit after infamously comparing his enforcement strategy to a “crucifixion.” Martin served about 1 month longer than the disgraced Armendariz.

Martin cited “personal reasons” as the cause of his departure, but the truth is that he left amidst a storm of controversy. Only two weeks before his resignation, Martin was caught lying before a federal court about the extent to which he used his private email accounts to conduct official EPA business. Fibbing to a federal court is a much more likely explanation than “personal reasons” for Martin’s abrupt departure.

The lawsuit that led to Martin’s mendacity was filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And CEI’s lawsuit, in turn, was based on records from a Colorado Open Records Act obtained by the Independence Institute. The upshot is that the two organizations likely toppled an EPA Regional Administrator. In light of Martin’s history of using public office (first in the Ritter administration, then in the EPA) to wage a war on affordable energy, the Independence Institute and CEI have performed a public service. This blog post explains how we did it.

It all began in the fall of 2010. At the time, Colorado state regulators were implementing the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act (CACJA), legislation requiring that Xcel Energy switch almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity generation from coal to natural gas. On this blog, Amy and I were posting regularly on the folly of the CACJA (see here, here, here, and here). In that capacity, we attracted the attention of the Colorado Mining Association, which was also opposed to the CACJA, for obvious reasons. The Mining Association had performed a Colorado Open Records Act request for all Ritter administration correspondence pertaining to the development of the CACJA. In return, the Mining Association received a huge tranche of almost 3,000 emails, which were provided to us.

The emails demonstrate that James Martin, who was head of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment when the Ritter administration pushed the CACJA through the General Assembly, was a central player in the development of the fuel switching plan.

Yet the emails also expose the fact that Martin worked exclusively from non-official email accounts while serving in the Ritter administration. Whereas every other state official involved in CACJA deliberations sent emails from a government email account (ending in “@state.co.us”), Martin used three different “@gmail.com” accounts.

At the time, I made a mental note of Martin’s unique use of private email for public business, but I didn’t think anything more of it…

…Until last summer.

A colleague of mine at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Chris Horner, is one of the foremost transparency experts in the country. He literally wrote the book on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). While researching that booklast summer, he came across mounting evidence that Obama administration officials are using private email accounts to conduct official business, in an effort to circumvent public scrutiny.

His concerns prompted my memory of Martin’s practice of using his gmail accounts. So we filed a FOIA request with EPA, asking for all email correspondence about policy between Martin and the professional greens at Boulder-based Environmental Defense. We limited the search to email traffic to and from Environmental Defense because Martin had spent ten years there as a litigator before joining Ritter’s team. Also, we knew from the Colorado Open Records Act emails that Martin coordinated public policy with his former colleagues. To be precise, with this FOIA request, we were trying to find out how much environmental policymaking was being rendered by unelected EPA bureaucrats colluding with unelected bureaucrats. (This is a practice known as “sue and settle” policymaking).

Here’s a timeline of what followed:

May 1, 2012: CEI files FOIA request for EPA Region 8 Administrator James Martin seeking all business emails between him and Environmental Defense. Our request noted that Martin had a history of using non-official email accounts to consuct official business.

May 7, 2012: EPA acknowledges our FOIA request, and assigns it ID number 08-FOI-00203-12

July 5, 2012: EPA responds to the request. The Agency provides 11 emails from an official “epa.gov” account. Regarding our specific request for EPA’s FOIA search to include all emails, in both official and non-official account, EPA states, “Documents sent to a personal email address that an individual is not intending to use for official purposes are not Agency records.” That’s all they said. We were confused. It seemed as if EPA was dodging the issue.

July 19, 2012: CEI files an administrative appeal of EPA’s July 5 FOIA response.

September 9, 2012: Although the Freedom of Information Act gives EPA 20 days to respond to an administrative appeal, the Agency ignores CEI’s July 19 appeal for more than 6 weeks. So we sued EPA in the District of Colubia federal district court. Here’s a copy of our complaint.

November 19, 2012: EPA files a motion to dismiss the case. The Agency’s motion relies on a signed affidavit by Martin, attesting to the fact that he had conducted a “broad” search of his personal email account, and had produced 19 records. Of the 19 records, Martin testified that “While some of these documents mention EPA of environmental issues, I did not solicit them, nor did I act on them in connection with my EPA position.” Based on this evidence, EPA moved to close the case.

January 29, 2013: Senator David Vitter and Rep. Darrell Issa launch an investigation into Martin’s use of private emails to conduct public business.

February 19, 2013: EPA Region 8 Administrator James Martin resigns.

March 7, 2013: EPA withdraws its motion to dismiss the case. The Agency tells CEI that Martin had “alerted us to additional documents that he came across. In a motion filed in court that day, EPA states,

“Based upon its review and analysis of the content of the additional documents, the EPA has concluded that there are additional documents from Mr. Martin’s personal, non-Government email account responsive to the FOIA request at issue in this litigation.”

Present day: CEI, the Department of Justice, and EPA are negotiating a full release of Martin’s newfound emails.

The timeline speaks for itself. Martin had a long history of using private emails to conduct official business. CEI learned of this history from the Independence Institute. CEI then filed a FOIA request to probe the extent to which Martin continued to employ non-official emails to perform official work. When EPA obfuscated, CEI sued. In the course of this litigation, Martin lied to CEI, EPA, the Justice Department, and a federal judge. Then he resigned. Case closed.

Good riddance. This is a positive development. Martin is not capable of being a disinterested civil servant. Rather, he is a professional environmentalist who has spent a career demonizing industry. It’s one thing to war with economic development as a lawyer at a deep-pocketed green group like Environmental Defense. It’s an entirely different ballgame when these same anti-industry zealots are allowed to take the reins of the EPA, and use state power to “bankrupt” entire sectors of the economy.

7/16