America First Legal Sues HHS Secretary Becerra and National Archives Following Investigation Revealing the Biden Administration Illegally Deletes Former CDC Employees’ Email–Illustrating Two-Tiered System of Justice

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) sued Secretary Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for illegally destroying federal records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in violation of the Federal Records Act.

On March 29, 2023, AFL sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, requesting an investigation of the CDC’s unlawful policy of deleting employee emails. AFL requested records regarding the CDC’s support for teacher-led indoctrination of children with radical gender ideology.

Federal law requires that each agency “make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”

Yet, in a routine email regarding the disclosure of these records, the CDC told AFL that the CDC routinely deletes the emails of nearly all of its employees thirty days after they leave the agency:

NARA investigated the allegations but determined that because the “CDC instructs individual email account holders to apply retention based on the email’s content value and its applicability to a NARA-approved records schedule,” NARA considered the matter closed.

In short, NARA appears to entrust individual CDC employees to decide which emails can be automatically deleted.

This is patently inconsistent with the law.

Moreover, if the federal government wants to unlawfully assert that anytime a government employee leaves an agency their records are no longer considered records of the United States, then the same assumption would apply to former Presidents of the United States.

https://aflegal.org/america-first-legal-sues-hhs-secretary-becerra-and-national-archives-following-investigation-revealing-the-biden-administration-illegally-deletes-former-cdc-employees-email-illustrati/