Obama’s Idea of Transparency

Chris Horner is mentioned in a National Review article about the Obama administration’s lack of transparency:

The Internal Revenue Service’s handling of the Lois Lerner correspondence is just one example. Earlier this week, Chris Horner — a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and counsel for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute who is an expert on the Freedom of Information Act — wrote in the Washington Timesabout how the EPA has inappropriately withheld work-related text messages from high-ranking EPA officials.

Specifically, Horner had asked for text messages from Gina McCarthy, the head of the EPA, who has presided over several of the Obama administration’s efforts to more heavily regulate traditional energy sources. Initially, Horner writes, the EPA claimed no text messages existed in which McCarthy discussed official EPA business.

But “McCarthy admitted through the Department of Justice that she had in fact deleted each and every one of her many thousands of texts on her EPA-provided phone,” Horner writes. “She claimed they were all ‘personal,’ even after we proved her correspondents indeed included multiple members of her EPA team.”

Horner adds that, even though many requests seek all electronic records, “it is my understanding that EPA has never before produced text or instant messages. . . . At least with Obama’s EPA and IRS, it appears we now know why — they are destroying them, illegally. This isn’t a ‘gaping open-records loophole,’ it is wanton lawbreaking because the law is quite clear.”

Continue reading this article at National Review Online.