WASHINGTON _ Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is being sued over allegedly failing to preserve official notes about President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a court ruled Wednesday that the case could move forward.
That means Pompeo must either provide evidence that he complied with the Federal Records Act, which requires the State Department to collect and preserve interpreter notes, or else argue that he is not obligated to do so.
Democracy Forward and American Oversight, two progressive watchdog organizations, filed the lawsuit in June after public reporting emerged claiming that Trump had collected notes from interpreters and directed them not to discuss the contents of the meetings. The court filing called it "unusual, and in some cases extreme, measures to conceal the details of these meetings."
Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump-appointed judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, rejected the government's efforts to dismiss the case Wednesday.
Pompeo has until Jan. 10 to file a response to the lawsuit and until March 13 to file a substantial brief to the court.
"From our perspective, if they want to show that they don't have an obligation to preserve the record, or that they preserved it appropriately, either will require some evidence of the contents of the record or some evidence of how it has or has not been preserved," John Bies, chief counsel at American Oversight and a former Obama administration official, told McClatchy.
It is the latest unfavorable court ruling for Pompeo in a series of cases brought by American Oversight, which last month secured records of communication between the secretary's inner circle and Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, over Ukraine policy.
"Obviously we think what happened in these meetings with Putin is an important fact � it's historically important. And our goal is simply to preserve what happened in these meetings," Bies said. "We think it would be quite troubling if all the records that showed what actually happened were destroyed."
"Now they'll have to respond," he added.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
