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The Obama-era EPA knowingly violated federal law to push another power grab.
900 pages of documents from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reveal the agency’s use of the mass-sharing Thunderclap social media platform to covertly promote its policies in violation of federal law.
The documents show that EPA staffers, via the Thunderclap platform, recruited outside groups to lobby in support of the Clean Water Rule or “Waters of the United States.” Thunderclap shares member messages across multiple Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts simultaneously.
Federal law prohibits agencies from engaging in propaganda, which is defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public.
Federal law also prohibits agencies from using federal resources to conduct grassroots lobbying to prod the American public to call on Congress to act on pending legislation.
The EPA’s Director of Web Communications Jessica Orquina, in a September 10, 2014, email, wrote to Karen Wirth, an EPA team leader in the Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, urging the covert use of the Thunderclap technology. “I don’t want it to look like EPA used our own social media accounts to reach our support goal,” Orquina wrote to Wirth.
The Clean Water Rule was a significant and legally controversial increase in federal authority.
A December 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded the EPA’s use of Thunderclap to promote the Clean Water Rule “constitutes covert propaganda” and violated federal law.
The records were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the EPA failed to respond to a FOIA request.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/tag/thunderclap-01218/
