A Republican congressional committee chairman is demanding an investigation into whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is illegally destroying text messages that should be preserved under the Federal Records Act, the Washington Times reports:
Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee, asked the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general to sort out the agency’s claims and determine whether anyone’s been punished, saying that deleting the messages appears to break the EPA’s own policy.
"These actions point to an apparent pattern of behavior directed at subverting transparency and accountability," the Texas Republican said in a letter to the inspector general.
The accusations stem from a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and researcher Chris Horner, who believe Ms. McCarthy’s text messages will shed light on her dealings with the agency’s coal regulations.
Mr. Horner has been seeking the messages since last year, and sued to force the agency to turn them over.
As previously reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the EPA said in court filings in October that it had notified the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that it may have lost text messages from former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy that it was required to preserve under federal law.
However, the EPA insists that text messages are not federal records and that the notification was only done out of "an abundance of caution."
"That EPA would represent to a court that its employees do not use instant messaging for work-related correspondence is scandalous," Horner told the Washington Times. "That the agency does so to avoid responsibility after having been caught destroying its text messages wholesale sets it apart even from the IRS, which hasn’t gone that far."
Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service said it lost thousands of emails from IRS official Lois Lerner due to a hard drive crash.
In both cases, the federal agencies did not notify NARA that it had failed to preserve federal records until it was under pressure from outside groups and Congress.