A federal court ruled today that the White House’s Office of Administration (OA) is not a federal agency and therefore does not have to release thousands of pages of documents that detail the White House’s e-mail archive practices. Those practices are the subject of ongoing litigation and a congressional investigation.
Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) sued the White House in May 2007 after the organization was unsatisfied with the administration’s response to two Freedom of Information Act requests for information from the White House’s investigation into potential loss of records concerning e-mails. However, today a federal district court judge ruled that the OA is not required to release those documents because it solely advises and assists the president and therefore should not be considered a federal agency subject to FOIA requests.
“OA lacks the type of substantial independent authority that the D.C. Circuit [Court] has found indicative of agency status for other EOP [Executive Office of the President] components…and because the nature of OA’s delegated authority is dissimilar to that of other EOP units that have been found to be agencies subject to the FOIA,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
Courts have found that executive office components such as the Office of Management and Budget, Council on Environmental Quality, and Office of Science and Technology Policy are agencies and therefore subject to FOIA requests. However, Kollar-Kotelly ruled that OA did not have similar authority.
In a separate but related action, CREW and the George Washington University’s National Security Archive filed complaints against the White House in September for allegedly not satisfying federal records laws by failing to archive millions of e-mail messages from 2003 to 2005, a period that includes the invasion of Iraq, key developments in the Valerie Plame investigation and the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. That case is ongoing.
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