CDC was Breaking the Law By Deleting Information, Court Rules
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been involved in numerous scandals in recent years.
Now, a judge has ruled that the CDC has been breaking the law, likely for years, by deleting information that should have been kept for government records.
America First Legal (AFL) secured a preliminary injunction against the Biden-Harris Administration for its policies that routinely result in the illegal destruction of CDC employee emails after they quit their jobs violating the Federal Records Act.
/1BREAKING
We just secured a preliminary injunction in our lawsuit against the Biden-Harris CDC for illegally deleting employees’ emails.
The National Archives and Attorney General Garland must now work to recover illegally deleted records and make CDC comply with the law: pic.twitter.com/OsYByavu06
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) August 9, 2024
The lawsuit stemmed from a 2023 request for records from the agency regarding the CDC’s support for teacher-led indoctrination of children with radical gender ideology.
The CDC responded by telling AFL that the CDC routinely deletes the emails of nearly all of its employees thirty days after they leave the agency.
AFL then sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requesting an investigation of the CDC’s unlawful policy of deleting employee emails. 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 entrusted individual CDC employees to decide which emails can be automatically deleted.
In light of this egregious position and the CDC’s illegal conduct, on April 17, 2024, AFL sued the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and NARA under the Federal Records Act for allowing the unlawful deletion of former CDC employees’ emails after they leave the agency.
In the court ruling, AFL’s motion was granted ordering that the CDC is enjoined from deleting or destroying former non-Capstone employees’ emails until the time periods established in GRS 6.1 (i.e., at least three years for the most junior employees) have passed or pending further order of the Court upon the Archivist’s approval of an alternate disposal schedule.
Additionally, NARA must now seek assistance from Attorney General Merrick Garland (and notify Congress of that action) to recover illegally deleted records, force the CDC to comply with the law, and stop its illegal practice of destroying federal records.
Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Executive Director shared, “The Biden-Harris Administration was actively destroying the records of federal employees at the CDC in blatant violation of the law–and we are pleased that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered a stop to their illegal conduct.”
“The Department of Justice has rightfully been ordered to assist with retrieving these records and putting an end to these illegal practices. The Biden-Harris Administration’s politicization of records management must end, and we look forward to holding them accountable for their illegal actions in all such circumstances.”
You can read AFL’s documents here.
The post CDC was Breaking the Law By Deleting Information, Court Rules appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.