A senior Obama administration official who has allegedly conducted government business from a private email account doesn’t want to provide the contents of those messages.
The official is John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but his case shares similarities with the Hillary Clinton case, according to the plaintiff seeking records.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, filed an opening brief in an appeal this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia seeking to reverse a district court ruling that the emails can remain private.
AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Clinton has gained far more attention of late for the private email server she used while secretary of state, with her presidential campaign announcing this week she will turn over her private server to the FBI. There are similarities with the litigation over Holdren’s private email account, which has been going on since late 2013, and the Clinton situation, said Sam Kazman, general counsel for the CEI.
“Her case is a prime example of a high official keeping a personal email account,” Kazman told TheBlaze. “In our case, similarly, the official is claiming that not all of the messages in the personal account are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, even when in many cases they are clearly agency-related.”
Kazman said the Clinton matter has shed some light on what’s happening throughout the Obama administration – where White House officials such as Holdren, but also Environmental Protection Agency officials, have sought to withhold communications.
“It’s not an atypical practice. I wouldn’t say it’s an everyday practice by everyone in the administration, but this White House pledged to be the most transparent administration in history,” Kazman said. “Our joke is when this administration says transparency they mean invisible.”
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not immediately respond to inquiries from TheBlaze.
According to court documents, Holdren’s private email account was jholdren@whrc.org. He only had a private email account, not a private server like Clinton.
The CEI argues in its brief that the FOIA law applies to work-related records of agency employees, regardless of what account they are stored in.
However, on March 3, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that FOIA only applied to agency emails.
“The court ruling that we are appealing will only add to those scandals, because it legitimizes private email accounts as way to evade FOIA,” Kazman said.
The government has 30 days to respond, and the OSTP could ask for a delay.
“They could produce documents, or at least withhold documents and provide an explanation,” Kazman said.
The CEI brief said the judge’s ruling was “plainly incorrect.”
“The mere fact that emails are in a personal email account does not exempt them from FOIA, nor does it place them beyond an agency’s actual control for purposes of FOIA,” the 72-page brief said. “Agencies frequently search the personal email accounts of agency employees for work- related records, demonstrating that agencies have actual control over those accounts.”
“It makes little sense to claim that an agency is not ‘withholding’ documents when it refuses to produce documents held by its own chief executive that relate to 'agency business,'” it continued. “Even if OSTP had demonstrated that these emails were not within its actual control – which it did not – its failure to search its director’s personal account would still violate FOIA because any agency records in that account fall within the agency’s ‘constructive control.’”
Separately, the CEI filed a FOIA lawsuit to obtain records on a video Holdren did claiming the severe 2014 winter was caused by climate change. This prompted several scientists who believed climate change was a threat to challenge the scientific claims of the video. The CEI request records on the science used to back up the claims. There has been no action on this case in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
