A ‘tell’ giving “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” a run for its money
The biggest scandal waiting to happen in policy—first revealed here, reported on by the Daily Caller here and updated by GAO here—is the Biden-Harris Department of Energy freezing exports of liquified natural gas exports purportedly because it needed to conduct a study of the macroeconomic impacts. Except, as GAO was informed, DoE had already conducted the study, in 2023, which concluded what previous studies also concluded: it’s a good thing. Which was the ‘wrong’ answer for the ideologues in the administration, whose political appointees spiked it.
GAO filed suit over a FOIA request for the study sent to DoE by the National Energy Technology Labs, which DoE had been delaying responding to. After DoE then engaged in numerous dilatory moves to further postpone any revelations of (an actual Biden-Harris strategy adopted in 2024, it seems), GAO did wrangle a confession that, yes, DoE had a lot of pages meeting GAO’s description which was:
1) any LNG export study transmitted by the National Energy Technology Lab to the Office of Fossil Energy between January 1, 2023 and October 31, 2023, and 2) the email(s) transmitting the document(s) from NETL
Specifically, “DOE has subsequently identified 97 potentially responsive documents, totaling 4,354 pages.”
DoE admitted this only grudgingly, months late, under pressure from GAO counsel and six weeks after knowing it.
After this facially scandalous revelation received a broader audience—and, one would assume given the magnitude of the deception on an issue of such enormous consequence, someone in an oversight capacity in Congress though we have yet to see anything—DoE came out with this gem on Friday.
Guess what words are not found in the parameters of the actual request?
DoE’s clumsy effort seems to be an effort to end-run a hearing that is presently scheduled for November 15 regarding this very timely request. That hearing itself was pushed back until after the election, after months of earlier DoE stalling maneuvers, because DoE claimed at a status hearing on October 1, to which DoE sent three attorneys, that one of those three attorneys was unavailable until after the election was over so things must wait.
Be that as it may, as GAO’s attorneys have informed those representing the Department of Energy, taking the initiative to rewrite the request in order to claim ‘no records’ does not a response make. It does, however, nicely confess.