Politics
State Dept sued over alleged incident regarding John Kerry documents
A government monitoring organization filed a lawsuit against the Department of State after it stated that it would not be able to complete a document request for president environmental envoy John Kerry’s Department until after the 2024 presidential election. Protect the Trust Of the public (PPT), a government monitor, filed the complaint on Wednesday after the Department of State said it’s not capable of meeting the group’s Right to Information Act (FOIA) claim on Kerry’s office until November 18, 2024. According to the State Department, the request will not be finalized until after the next presidential election.
Kerry faced criticisms and issues last year too. WATCH:
The new issues were detailed in a statement to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, PPT director Michael Chamberlain chastised the Biden administration for its lack of openness. “The Biden administration claimed to be the most open ever,” Chamberlain said. “However, when the State Department is asked for papers relating to John Kerry’s office, which deals with energy costs, international relations, and many of the current issues that affect this same American public, they refuse to agree to anything until after the next presidential election,” as stated in a report.
“It really doesn’t take a cynic to believe politics played a part,” Chamberlain said. According to the costume obtained solely by news on Fox Multimedia, PPT first submitted the FOIA request with the Department Of state on October 2021 for communicating expectations, internally and externally communications, and legal counsel communications from Special Envoy for Changing Climate (SECC) senior advisor Jesse Young.
According to the request, Young’s “official schedule, calendar, travel logs and itineraries, government purchasing card transactions, and government cell phone log.”
Young was a member of the State Department team that negotiated the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and previously worked as an assistant to Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “‘Timely disclosure of records is also critical to the primary objective of FOIA,’ according to the Garland Memo. A government entity that claims to take more than three years to respond to a FOIA request is everything but timely “The following is an extract from the lawsuit.