by Nick Pope
The Daily Caller
The Biden administration communicated about changes to a landmark environmental law with a major eco-group that is suing the federal government over the law in question, emails obtained by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) and shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
The emails, exchanged in May 2021, show that Kristen Boyles, a managing attorney for Earthjustice, contacted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request information about the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) forthcoming rulemakings on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a decades-old environmental law. The communications occurred as Earthjustice was suing the Biden administration in an ongoing NEPA lawsuit and show that President Joe Biden’s CEQ was willing to provide at least some information.
At the time of these communications, the Biden administration had not yet made public its specific proposal for the NEPA rulemakings. The administration published the new rules in the Federal Register in October 2021.
“These emails certainly raise suspicions that there is some inappropriate conduct by the DOJ lawyer,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF. “That the information being privately provided to Earthjustice is then redacted in the FOIA request makes the exchange doubly suspicious.”
