A lawsuit has been filed against President Joe Biden’s administration over the practice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of deleting employees’ emails after they leave the agency.
America First Legal (AFL), a Washington-based non-profit that describes itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” filed a lawsuit due to the destruction of federal records by the CDC in violation of the Federal Records Act.
Non-Capstone officials include members of general staff and contractors.
While citing liberal organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign, the CDC’s guidance encourages educators to display “visual labels” such as rainbow flags, and pink triangles, and to have unisex bathrooms so students will know their classroom is “a safe space for LGBTQ students.”
The document also provides teachers and administrators with a “self-assessment tool” to determine their personal inclusivity score.
AFL specifically requested “all records or communications” with any employee of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health and any employee with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and Trans Student Educational Resources, related to the CDC’s transgender guidance.
“The timeframes for this item are July 1, 2020 – November 1, 2020, and November 1, 2022 – to the date this item is fully processed,” the FOIA stated.
Mr. Epstein said they copied the National Archives in on their communications with the CDC “because they have a role in ensuring that there is never any unauthorized disposition of records.”
The unauthorized disposition of records is the legal term for the destruction, removal, or alienation of government records from federal government control, Mr. Epstein explained.
After completing the requested investigation, NARA told AFL that, because the “CDC instructs individual email account holders to apply retention based on the email’s content value and its applicability to a NARA-approved records schedule,” the agency considered the matter closed.
Mr. Epstein told The Epoch Times, “Even if you defer to an individual bureaucrat as to what is an official federal record and what is not, you can easily imagine a scenario where that individual is not going to apply the law.”
Case Against Trump
AFL contends that, if it’s the federal government’s position that a government employee’s records are no longer part of U.S. records when they separate from a government agency, then the same applies to presidents of the United States after they leave office.Considering this, AFL argues that the case brought against former President Donald Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith regarding the documents confiscated by the FBI during the August 8, 2022, raid on his Mar-A-Lago residence should be declared null and void because they ceased to be part of U.S. records on the day he left the White House.
Mr. Epstein said the law is applied differently when the case doesn’t involve President Trump.
The March 30, 2022, follow-up email acknowledged that the FBI’s report admitted that 99 discs were retrieved from Mr. Payne’s residence.
Again, NARA considered the allegation to be “resolved.”
Even though the investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Mr. Hur predicted that a jury would likely see him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Mr. Hur decided that “no criminal charges were warranted in this matter.”
At least 100 of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton turned over to the State Department contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Seven of the email chains were designated as “top secret.”
However, while then-FBI director James Comey determined that there was evidence that Mrs. Clinton and her team “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” she was cleared of any wrongdoing because he couldn’t prove she knowingly exchanged classified information on her private server.
Mr. Comey said in his July 5, 2016, statement that “no charges are appropriate in this case.”
“Although there is evidence of potential violations regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” he said.
“Hillary Clinton took federal records and preserved them on her private servers,” Mr. Epstein said. “Nothing happened to her.”
As for the lawsuit against the Biden administration for the deleted CDC emails, “We’re going to aggressively pursue this litigation. We want the Biden administration to recover these records,” Mr. Epstein said.
“Who knows what’s on these email accounts?” he added.
