Via American Oversight:
American Oversight and Democracy Forward, a pair of left-leaning watchdog groups, sued Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the archivist of the United States in June over the missing notes. The groups charge that Pompeo violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Trump to reportedly confiscate meeting notes prepared by State Department employees and for failing to preserve them.
In a ruling from the bench on Wednesday, Judge Trevor McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case.
The order by McFadden, a Trump appointee, means that the lawsuit will be allowed to move forward and gives the government until Jan. 10 to say whether Pompeo complied with federal records law or show why he was not obligated to do so. Pompeo will then have until the middle of March to produce the State Department’s record of evidence.
Read more below:
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration's attempt to dismiss our lawsuit with @DemocracyFwd over missing notes from Trump’s face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2017. Story by @caitlinoprysko: https://t.co/ApTRHEdUqQ
— American Oversight (@weareoversight) December 12, 2019
BREAKING: Ruling from the bench, a federal judge just rejected the Trump admin's attempt to shut down our case with @WeAreOversight that would force Pompeo to follow the law and recover the Putin meeting notes that Trump illegally seized. https://t.co/wDiGHsgC5V
— Democracy Forward (@DemocracyFwd) December 11, 2019
Trump reportedly collected all meeting notes with Putin and barred interpreters from discussing their contents. Pompeo has until January 10 to file a response to the lawsuit and until March 13 to file a substantial brief to the court. https://t.co/f3mSv4tujp
— Michael Wilner (@mawilner) December 11, 2019