In court documents filed last night, the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that NASA has gone out of its way to avoid turning over records that show the agency reverse-engineered temperature data to better make the case that the planet is becoming warmer.
CEI, which is being represented by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Andrew Tulumello, argues in a pleading filed in Washington federal court that NASA’s request for summary judgment in the Freedom of Information Act suit against the agency should be denied because e-mails and other evidence turned over by NASA suggest that there are additional records that are being withheld.
“Rather than deal forthrightly with a FOIA request on these issues, NASA has engaged in obstruction and delay,” Tulumello writes in the court filing, which was filed late last night in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
CEI argues in the Nov. 3 motion that NASA has additional e-mails and documents on separate servers that relate to changes made to temperature data, but has failed to turn them over. CEI also argues that Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at Goddard, used third-party Web sites and e-mail addresses to avoid having those records appear on NASA’s servers.