Judicial Watch Suing for Access to Obama Administration Communications

The government watchdog group Judicial Watch has become synonymous with exposing government coverups involving Obama administration officials in the Justice and State departments.

But, it’s also largely responsible for exposing much of the corruption surrounding rigged climate data used by the U.S. government to justify the “climate change” narrative. In 2010, it obtained internal documents from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that corroborated a Canadian blogger’s assertion that errors had exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the U.S.

Monday, Judicial Watch took their investigation of the “climate change” narrative a step further by filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Commerce, the parent department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The group is asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel the department to turn over all communications between two scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s “climate change” policy.

Their work also led to U.S. support for the UN’s Paris Agreement.

Judicial Watch had requested the following documents from NOAA, but had failed to received a response by its Feb. 6 deadline:

• All records of communications between NOAA scientist Thomas Karl and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren.
• The FOIA request covers the timeframe of January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017.

Until last year, Karl was director of the NOAA section that produces climate data—the National Centers for Environmental Information—and was the lead author of a research paper that was reported to have heavily influenced the Paris Agreement. Holden is the former White House Director of Science and Technology Policy and lead the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

According to a report in The Daily Mail, a whistleblower accused Karl of bypassing normal procedures to produce his research paper—known as the “Pausebuster Paper”—which promoted climate alarmism. The whistleblower, John Bates, was responsible for developing NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process, which Karl allegedly bypassed.

Judicial Watch was already sued for communication records from NOAA officials about their methodology for collecting and interpreting the data used in climate models, and specifically those used to justify the “Pausebuster” report. Although President Donald Trump has vowed to scrap the so-called Clean Power Plan and to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said there is value in pressing for the information requested.

“This new lawsuit could result in the release of emails that will help Americans understand how Obama administration officials may have mishandled scientific data to advance the political agenda of global warming alarmism,” he said.