Trump Appointees Used Their Personal Emails for Government Business

At least three political appointees at the Department of Energy repeatedly skirted public-records laws by using their personal emails to conduct government business, according to court records reviewed by NOTUS.

When the DOE was secretly crafting an explosive report that challenged the scientific consensus on the harms of climate change, the Trump appointees involved in coordinating the report at times used their personal emails to communicate, according to the court records and a letter sent from the Environmental Defense Fund to the National Archives and Records Administration this week.

“I’m sending this email to warn you that all the reviewer materials will be coming from my DOE account,” Travis Fisher, who leads energy policy at the Cato Institute but worked temporarily for the DOE, said in an email from his personal account. He added: “Also please keep in mind that my DOE emails (and your replies) will be easily discoverable by outside parties.”

Seth Cohen, an attorney and former DOGE representative at DOE, and Joshua Loucks, a special assistant to the department’s deputy secretary, also were among those who sent or received emails to their personal addresses about the report. The emails in question also discussed the movements and activities of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.

The records were made public as part of court proceedings in a case between the Environmental Defense Fund and the DOE about the creation of the controversial climate-change report and the group that wrote it, known as the “Climate Working Group.”

“EDF is concerned that DOE political officials are systematically using non-governmental email and electronic messaging accounts to conduct official government business, and that the agencies may be failing to appropriately preserve these records and, when requested, provide them to the public,” Environmental Defense Fund attorneys Erin Murphy and Peter Zalzal wrote in their letter to the National Archives. “In light of the records detailed above, EDF is also concerned that these practices could be in use more broadly, such as by EPA or White House officials.”

The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Federal public-records laws require agencies to preserve all emails and written communications about agency business, which is why nearly all government business is usually required to be conducted on government-issued phones and laptops.

There have been multiple reports of Trump administration officials skirting these laws with personal devices, most notably in the case of a Signal group chat with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, and again in the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Waltz using a personal Gmail account.

The Climate Working Group was made up of five well-known climate-science skeptics handpicked by Wright, all of whom worked in secrecy to create the report before its publication in late July. The report immediately drew widespread criticism across the climate- and weather-science community; more than a dozen researchers whose work was cited in the report told NOTUS that their research findings were misinterpreted or incorrectly cited.

After the report was published, the Environmental Defense Fund sued the Trump administration, claiming that the secrecy shrouding Wright’s creation of the group violated a Nixon-era transparency law. The DOE disbanded the group in September, and then in January a judge ruled that the Climate Working Group’s establishment did in fact violate the law.

It remains unclear whether the EPA or the DOE will cite the report as scientific evidence in upcoming deregulatory actions. Later this week, the Trump administration is planning to announce the long-awaited repeal of the EPA finding that climate change poses a risk to human health and the environment.

While the original Climate Working Group report was released alongside the EPA’s draft repeal of the endangerment finding, the legal challenge and Wright’s disbanding of the group could cause the agency to remove any mention of the report.