Obama White House showed ‘bad faith’ in global-warming case, judge rules
Third rebuke of administration’s transparency this year
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/9/obama-wh-shows-bad-faith-global-warming-case-judge/?page=all#pagebreak By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Monday, May 9, 2016
The White House showed “bad faith” in how it handled an open-records request for global warming data, a federal court ruled Monday, issuing yet another stinging rebuke to the administration for showing a lack of transparency.
For President Obama, who vowed to run the most transparent government in U.S. history, Judge Amit P. Mehta’s ruling granting legal “discovery” in an open-records case — the third time this year a judge has ordered discovery — is an embarrassing black eye.
In this most recent case, the Competitive Enterprise Institute was trying to force the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to release documents backing up Director John C. Holdren’s finding that global warming was making winters colder — a claim disputed by climate scientists. Mr. Holdren’s staffers first claimed they couldn’t find many documents, then tried to hide their release, saying they were all internal or were similar to what was already public.
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But each of those claims turned out not to be true.
“At some point, the government’s inconsistent representations about the scope and completeness of its searches must give way to the truth-seeking function of the adversarial process, including the tools available through discovery. This case has crossed that threshold,” the judge wrote.
Discovery is considered exceedingly rare in Freedom of Information Act cases, because the government is given the benefit of the doubt in claiming it tried to search for and release documents. But in three cases so far this year, judges have said called the Obama administration’s efforts into question, finding severe oversights that suggest “bad faith.”
Both of the other cases involve the State Department’s handling of former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails.
In the OSTP case, conservative activists were trying to get a look at how the agency director, John P. Holdren came to the conclusion that global warming was causing more severe winters — a finding that scientists generally dispute.
The OSTP repeatedly botched its efforts to search for and produce the chain of work for Mr. Holdren’s conclusions. Initially the office said it found just 11 pages of documents, none of which included drafts of the director’s final conclusions. Later, the office admitted it found 47 pages of drafts, but tried to withhold them, claiming they were protected from release because they were only seen within the administration.
“Both of those impressions turned out to be mistaken,” Judge Mehta said.
OSTP then said there were 52 total pages of drafts, only one person outside the administration saw a draft and that document was similar to what the OSTP had already produced.
“All three of those impressions also turned out to be mistaken,” Judge Mehta wrote, adding in a footnote that he was “troubled” by the government’s statements that misled the court.
Hans Bader, senior attorney at the CEI, said they hope to use discovery to find out who else Mr. Holdren shared his conclusions with, and to try to find out why the OSTP process for searching its own files was broken.
More broadly, he said the fact that three judges have ordered discovery against the administration is proof that it’s falling short on Mr. Obama’s vow to run the most transparent government in American history.
“You can’t rely on these agency search requests anymore because they just habitually do these inadequate or sloppy searches and file a declaration in court to make these cases go away,” Mr. Bader said. “Nobody ever satisfies the information of any of my FOIA requests. To the extent they give me the information is because we sue.”
The OSTP declined to comment on the record on its handling of the case.
The Justice Department, which has handled all three of the open-records cases where a judge has found “bad faith,” also declined to comment.
