{"id":55710,"date":"2014-10-11T08:00:22","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=55710"},"modified":"2014-10-10T14:46:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T18:46:54","slug":"the-epa-continues-to-do-an-irs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=55710","title":{"rendered":"The EPA Continues to “Do an IRS”"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve spoken before about the IRS email scandal on multiple occasions. And I’ve written before about the fact that the EPA seems to be taking a page out of the IRS email “playbook”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, that emulation apparently continues. The Washington Times<\/span> has reported that a sh!tload of EPA text messages to\/from the EPA’s embattled Administrator, Gina McCarthy, also seem to have been “lost”<\/a>. In this case, “sh!tload” equates to in excess of 5,000 text messages<\/em> that were deleted by Ms. McCarthy.<\/p>\n

The matter was discovered due to a lawsuit filed by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who was seeking public access to Ms. McCarthy’s text messages. Mr. Horner did so because he suspected Ms. McCarthy had switched from email to text for discussion of issues related to regulation of coal-fired power plants in order to avoid possible public scrutiny of those discussions.<\/p>\n

Like the IRS, the EPA initially told the courts that it could not locate the missing text messages. And later, like the IRS it amended its story.\u00a0 It now says that Ms. McCarthy deleted the messages in question.<\/p>\n

Oh, did I mention that Ms. McCarthy did so in spite of the fact that the EPA has had a policy in place since 2005 requiring any text messages that qualified for retention under Federal records retention regulations<\/em>?\u00a0 Well, I guess I just did.<\/p>\n

While the text messages were destroyed, metadata about them was not.\u00a0 Some of the messages deleted are known to have been between Ms. McCarthy and other EPA employees.\u00a0 So yeah – I’d be willing to bet that some of those to other EPA employees probably should have been considered “qualified for retention”.\u00a0 I rather doubt they were all jokes, “LOLs”, and discussions of the weather.<\/p>\n

Hmm.\u00a0 Looks to me like someone’s p!ssing on our legs and telling us it’s raining – again.<\/p>\n

Lois Lerner must be proud to see her example has inspired others. After all: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – right? (smile)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve spoken before about the IRS email scandal on multiple occasions. And I’ve written before about … The EPA Continues to “Do an IRS”<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,213,98,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-global-warming","category-legal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}