Members of President Donald Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission vice chaired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) used personal email to conduct official business, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the commission claimed Tuesday. The claims appeared in a joint status report filed by both sides Tuesday in the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Members of the panel “have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government systems to conduct Commission work,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed suit against the committee in July.
The lawyers’ group said in the filing that the use of personal accounts is a violation of the Presidential Records Act and claimed that lawyers for the commission said “they did not yet have any settled plan for how they would collect emails from these personal, non-federal government systems.”
The lawsuit is against the panel at large, a number of its members and a number of federal offices.
The committee alleged in its lawsuit that the election panel’s “failure to disclose communications and make its meetings open to the public” was a violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The law codifies guidelines to ensure advice given by federal advisory committees is “objective and accessible to the public.”
Full Article: Lawyers’ Group: Sketchy Election Panel Using Personal Email For Official Biz – Talking Points Memo.