A conservative government watchdog group won a legal victory against the Biden-Harris administration by forcing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop deleting employee emails, which they said violated the Federal Records Act.
America First Legal, the right-wing Washington, DC-based nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, demanded records of the CDC’s endorsement of controversial gender ideology in public schools in February 2023. In response, the CDC told AFL that it systematically deletes most employees’ emails 30 days after they leave the agency.
As of Friday, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has been required by a temporary restraining order against the AFL to seek the assistance of Attorney General Merrick Garland and inform Congress so that it can restore the deleted emails and stop the destruction of the records.
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A sign sits outside the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Notably, while the Biden-Harris administration has been reprimanded for illegal violations of the law, CDC employees’ homes were not raided or searched without notice or their consent, nor have their families endured the trauma and barrage of legal fees or lawsuits,” the AFL said in a press release.
“Yet that is exactly what the Biden-Harris administration did to President Trump. We cannot have a country where government bureaucrats are allowed to circumvent the law without consequences and innocent civilians are subjected to invasive and unlawful political persecution for saying the ‘wrong’ thing. The two-tiered justice system in the United States has never been more pervasive,” the group said.
In April, the AFL filed the first lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and NARA.
“The Biden-Harris administration has actively destroyed the files of federal employees at the CDC in blatant violation of the law – and we are pleased that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered a halt to their illegal conduct,” AFL Executive Director Gene Hamilton said in a statement.
The AFL subsequently contacted NARA and requested an investigation into the CDC’s policy on deleting employee emails.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is sworn in before testifying before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“NARA investigated the allegations but concluded that the CDC considered the matter closed because it instructs individual email account holders to determine retention periods based on the content value of the email and its applicability to a NARA-approved recordkeeping schedule. In short, NARA has tasked individual CDC staff with deciding which emails can be automatically deleted,” AFL said in a press release.x
This is not the first time the CDC has come under fire for its influence in the public sphere. Last year, the CDC reportedly had “significant influence over pandemic-era social media policies” at Facebook and Instagram and worked to silence “dissenting” opinions regarding the COVID vaccine.
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The headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, on Saturday, March 14, 2020 (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In the meantime, Anthony Fauci (Author)former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied during the heated House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing this summer that he tried to suppress the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was sparked by a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
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Fox News Digital has reached out to CDC, HHS and NARA for comment.
Brian Flood and Danielle Wallace of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.
