Justice Officials Must Fork Over Voter Commission Emails

MANHATTAN (CN) – Striking a blow at an administration whose scorn for “email crimes” helped its rise to power, a federal judge ordered the disclosure Tuesday of emails from the now-shuttered commission created by President Donald Trump to root out supposed voter fraud.

New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice and the Protect Democracy Project brought the lawsuit in August 2017, about three months after Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity via executive order.

Though the challengers cited at least two instances where Justice Department officials used personal email accounts to send and receive emails about the commission, the government argued that its duties under the Freedom of Information Act required it only to search agency records, leaving the private email accounts off limits. 

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein disagreed at summary judgment, noting in a 13-page opinion Tuesday that increased private email use by public officials harms transparency.

“In an environment of widespread use of personal devices for official work, there is danger of an incentive to shunt critical and sensitive communication away from official channels and out of public scrutiny, with decisions to forward the communications to official record repositories postponable at the whim of the public official,” Hellerstein wrote. “The practice is inconsistent with ‘the citizen's right to be informed about what their government is up to,’ the very purpose of FOIA.”

Hellerstein’s decision will force John Gore, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and DOJ trial attorney Maureen Riordan to search their private communications for responsive documents.

“Gore and Riordan, although not commission members, received emails from Commission members, concerning commission business, in their personal email accounts,” the ruling notes. “Gore also sent emails concerning commission business to a commission member at her personal email address.”

Hellerstein said the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget interpreted the FOIA requests too narrowly.

“I order defendants OMB and DHS to conduct their searches using the search terms employed by DOJ-OIP, that is, ‘Election Integrity,’ ‘voter fraud,’ ‘voting system,’ the names of members of the commission, ‘citizenship status,’ ‘voter registration list,’ ‘voter file data,’ ‘voter roll data,’ (‘detail’ AND ‘commission’), (‘assignment’ AND ‘commission’),” he wrote.

Feared by its opponents as a vehicle for voter suppression, Trump’s voter commission disbanded early last year without accomplishing what the president had hoped to do: establish that his nearly 3 million popular-vote deficit in the 2016 election was illusory. 

There was no evidence of the large-scale ballot tampering responsible for Trump’s embarrassment.

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