A federal judge condemned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday for how it dealt with a 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by a conservative group for officials' emails, accusing the agency of "suspicious" behavior.
Judge Royce Lamberth, working in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said the EPA either intentionally attempted to evade a 2012 FOIA request from the Landmark Legal Foundation so that it could destroy documents, or at the very least, handled the request with extreme apathy and carelessness, The Hill reported.
"Either scenario reflects poorly upon EPA and surely serves to diminish the public's trust in the agency," Lamberth wrote in a 25-page opinion paper released Monday.
"The recurrent instances of disregard that EPA employees display for FOIA obligations should not be tolerated by the agency," the judge said. "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."
The case was part of an effort to discover whether the EPA delayed regulatory actions before the 2012 election for political reasons.
One example of carelessness cited by Lamberth was the fact that the agency had initially claimed it had conducted a full search for records, then retracted that claim years later in a footnote to a different document without providing an explanation for its errors, according to The Washington Times.
Another action Lamberth found troubling was how EPA attorneys advised some employees to stop deleting records that could be relevant to the case, but failed to send the message to the ageny's top officials, reported The Hill.
Though Lamberth admitted he couldn't prove wrongdoing, the circumstances surrounding the request and court case stemming from it were "absurd" and "insulting," he said.
The judge denied Landmark's request to award it damages for the EPA's destruction of records because Landmark had not established that the EPA acted in bad faith.
"While the existing record in this case does not support a holding that EPA acted in bad faith, it is obvious to this court that EPA has, once again, fumbled its way through its legally unambiguous FOIA obligations," he wrote.
The judge singled out two employees for their actions, noted the Times. The first, Nena Shaw, either showed "utter indifference" to the law or flatly lied to the court about her efforts to provide records to Landmark. The second, Eric Watcher, an EPA official intimately involved in overseeing the FOIA record search, previously told the court that he had thoroughly searched for the records Landmark requested. But on Friday, the Justice Department retracted those claims.
EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said the EPA was glad the judge didn't enact additional punishment, and promised that the agency would handle future requests better.
"EPA is focused on creating more efficient work processes to ensure FOIAs responses are done more effectively and at a lower cost," she said, according to the Times.
Mark Levin, the president of Landmark, said the EPA got lucky and it is now up to the administration to decide the appropriate punishment.
"What the administration should do, when a federal judge issues an opinion like this, is fire people," Levin said. "What this admin will no doubt do is throw a party."
