The good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, contending that the group’s requests for records related to missing emails in the torture memo investigation have gone unfulfilled.
In February, an internal report from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility noted that key emails from John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department official and one of the authors of the memos, had been deleted and could not be recovered.
In response, CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about the department’s policy on preserving employee emails, and another seeking any existing Yoo emails. So far, the group says, the DOJ has offered up only two documents (.pdf) on departmental policy.
When the issue of the missing emails surfaced earlier this year, CREW, the National Archives, and the New York Times, demanded the DOJ specifically look into the disappearance of the emails — calls CREW says have fallen on deaf ears.
CREW has had success in similar efforts in the recent past — last year the group sued to recover emails from the Bush White House that were said to have been deleted.
Read the complaint here (.pdf).
