Federal Judge Rebukes Obama’s EPA

Most transparent administration evah! Recall his promise:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/CU0m6Rxm9vU[/youtube]

Ever since the moment he entered the White House his administration has been one of the most secretive and least transparent since the Nixon years and now we get even more evidence of this fact.

In 2012 Mark Levin’s organization filed a FOIA to the EPA to discover if they were hiding the implementation of certain regulations prior to the 2012 election. What did the EPA do?

Judge Royce C. Lamberth concluded the agency may have lied to the court and showed “apathy and carelessness” in carrying out the law, though the judge was unable to determine if documents were intentionally destroyed.

Judge Lamberth described the “absurdity” of the way the EPA handled a Freedom of Information Act request from the Landmark Legal Foundation and then the court case stemming from it — including late last week admitting it lied to the court about how it went about searching for documents.

In a scorching 25-page opinion, the judge accused the agency of “insulting” him by first claiming it had done a full search for records, then years later retracting that claim without any explanation.

“The recurrent instances of disregard that EPA employees display for FOIA obligations should not be tolerated by the agency,” the judge said in a 25-page ruling. “This court would implore the executive branch to take greater responsibility in ensuring that all EPA FOIA requests — regardless of the political affiliation of the requester — are treated with equal respect and conscientiousness.”

…Judge Lamberth said Mr. Wachter provided false information to the court, then the EPA tried to withdraw it on Friday, though never explained how it got things wrong in the first place nor why it waited years to admit it had lied to the court.

…Just Lamberth said at several turns, the EPA was either lying or terribly incompetent in how it handled the situation, both in terms of the search it performed and how it responded to the court case.

“Either EPA intentionally sought to evade Landmark’s lawful FOIA request so the agency could destroy responsive documents, or EPA demonstrated apathy and carelessness toward Landmark’s request,” Judge Lamberth said. “Either scenario reflects poorly upon EPA and surely serves to diminish the public’s trust in the agency.”

Opinion here.

Just more evidence that everyone of Obama’s federal agency’s have a liberal agenda and lie or intentionally ignore any requests that would reflect badly on them but come on….a strongly worded rebuke? That should force Obama and pals to cooperate eh? Sigh….

Curt

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