http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423172/print How Obama Officials Dodge the Freedom of Information Act
By John Fund — August 28, 2015
During the Watergate era, delaying tactics by government officials were dubbed “stonewalling.” Obama-administration officials seem to have added an element of farce to their cover-ups by literally going to the dogs.
This week, the IRS admitted in court, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, that Lois Lerner was even more secretive than we thought. Lerner, the IRS official who resigned in 2013 after allegedly discriminating against applications for nonprofit status from conservative groups, conducted much of her IRS business on a personal e-mail account in the name of her dog, Toby Miles.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, says there is evidence that the Obama Justice Department and the IRS have known about the Toby Miles account for some time but chose not to tell the court. A House committee months ago urged that a criminal inquiry of Lerner be initiated by the Justice Department, but so far it has been ignored.
Lerner’s case reminds one of Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who avoided government-transparency laws by conducting government business using the e-mail alias “Richard Windsor,” a name derived from a dog she owned while living in Windsor, N.J. In 2013, the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued and got 3,000 “Richard Windsor” e-mails released, but there are another 120,000 records related to CEI’s request that it hasn’t gotten. The EPA says it can process only 100 records a month — meaning that the CEI request will be fully processed a century from now.
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