Weekend Circuit: More Private Email Servers, Fake Diplomats

The Daily Caller discusses the court ruling in CEI's FOIA lawsuit against the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling Tuesday and found work-related emails maintained by government officials on a private server were not exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian free market think tank, pursued a FOIA inquiry against Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. CEI sought “all policy/OSTP-related email sent to or from [email protected],” a non government email Holdren maintained at Woods Hole Research Center. A lower court found the emails were beyond the reach of FOIA, as their maintenance on a non government server placed them beyond the control of the agency. The D.C. Circuit disagreed.

“In other words, an agency always acts through its employees and officials,” the court wrote. “If one of them possesses what would otherwise be agency records, the records do not lose their agency character just because the official who possesses them takes them out the door or because he is the head of the agency.”

Read the full article at The Daily Caller