I mentioned earlier this week the on-going litigation about the DOGE all-government-employee email system (GWES) that Musk micro-bros set up in their first days taking over the Office of Personnel Management. To deal with the various legal issues tied to setting up this new email system DOGE/OPM made an official Privacy Impact Statement about how the system would be used and how it wouldn’t. Mostly specifically all GWES emails would always be voluntary. You could respond or not respond. Your choice. But obviously that was a lie. (To understand all the ins and outs of the litigation definitely read the original post if you haven’t already.)
Not only was that policy statement false but government lawyers vouched for its accuracy to a federal judge. And actually Elon/DOGE is now going back to the well with a second “accomplishments”/threat email scheduled to go out on Monday.
So this evening the lawyer for the plaintiff’s in the case, Kel McClanahan, filed a motion for sanctions against the government’s lawyers for deceiving the court.
When I asked McClanahan for comment he gave me this statement …
Three weeks ago OPM filed a document saying that responses to any emails were entirely voluntarily and that’s why there was nothing to worry about. Their lawyers stood up in front of a federal judge and led him to believe that he should completely dismiss our case because of that document. Worse, they let him believe that they had removed all the information from people who weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, from legislative staffers to federal judges. Then last weekend Elon Musk went and threatened everyone with a government email address (including those same legislative staffers and federal judges) that they must respond or it would be taken as a resignation. Then they walked it back after a lot of the damage was done, except that the President said they would be fired if they didn’t comply, and many agencies ordered their employees to comply. Then Elon Musk had the nerve to again insist that people would be fired if they didn’t respond to the next one. And now we hear that they’ve decided to make the agencies order people to comply. All while still trying to dismiss my case based on the document that lied about responses being voluntary. We don’t take sanctions lightly, especially against government lawyers, but this is so far beyond the pale that nothing less is left to stop the Trump Administration and Elon Musk from trampling on the duty of candor to the court in service of their misguided crusade against the federal workforce.
