'We’re having trouble getting information off of it,' McCarthy says about a hard drive. EPA joins IRS lost emails club

Move over, IRS — now the Environmental Protection Agency is having its own problems with missing emails.

The environmental agency is having trouble locating emails belonging to a former agency employee and pulling information from his crashed hard drive, House members revealed Wednesday while questioning Administrator Gina McCarthy at a hearing on complaints of mismanagement.


“What is it with bureaucrats and public employees … the hard drives crash?” asked Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.).

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He and others on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee questioned McCarthy about missing information related to the committee’s investigation into the potential environmental impact of a proposed gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska.

“It sounds like we have another missing hard drive,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.).

McCarthy said her agency hasn’t given up.

“We’re having trouble getting information off of it and are trying different ways,” McCarthy said.

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The agency also notified the National Archives on Tuesday that there may be some unrecoverable emails that should have been preserved under federal law. “I’m still hoping we recovered all those emails,” she said.

The committee has tried to reach the employee in question, who McCarthy said previously resided in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula but has since relocated to New Zealand.

Members vaguely referred to concerns about “collusion” in terms of the agency’s decision to consider blocking a federal permit for the mine, due to concerns from the nearby commercial fishing industry.

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The man with the missing emails, McCarthy said, was a fish biologist who provided input into the review of the Bristol Bay watershed. “He’s not a decision maker in this process,” she said several times.

“I don’t see any evidence that there was collusion there, and I want to again point out that he was a fish biologist, not a decision maker,” McCarthy said.