CEI Sues State Department for Paris Climate Treaty Docs

CEI filed suit today against the State Department for records about outside influence in developing the controversial Paris climate treaty during the Obama administration. In September, 2017, CEI submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records relating to three top former officials in the Obama administration, including two officials’ work with two named environmentalist pressure groups. To date, the State Department has provided no response, prompting CEI to sue for relevant records.

The FOIA request seeks certain correspondence and other records of:

• Former Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern
• Former “climate change legal advisor” Sue Biniaz.
• Stern and Biniaz correspondence with former State Department Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan.

CEI seeks:

• Emails, including both government and private email accounts
• Text messages

“In the absence of the Trump administration taking the initiative to review the internal record of the disgraceful process of circumventing the Senate and the U.S. Constitution to enter the Paris climate treaty, we will continue seeking to make public all of that record we are able,” said CEI Fellow Chris Horner. “In the meantime, stories pile up of the federal government, continuing defense of long-running Obama stonewalling and obstruction of efforts to make the government transparent. We call on the Trump administration to review the history of such major policy controversies as the Paris climate treaty, what is being done to assist or block public education about them, and to order the federal government to tear down the Obama administration’s many FOIA stonewalls.”

See more about the case here.

Horner and his CEI colleague Marlo Lewis, Jr., published a paper in May, The Legal and Economic Case Against the Paris Climate Treaty.