Ex-Im might be on the verge of expiring for now, but they’re still up to their old tricks — this time, stonewalling transparency advocates. Politico Pro recently reported on a pending lawsuit against the bank for “accidently” deleting text messages and other forms of communication after the information was requested under FOIA:

The nonpartisan government watchdog group Cause of Action will file the lawsuit later today because the export-credit agency’s senior vice president and chief of staff, Scott Schloegel, deleted text messages, allegedly accidentally, that the group requested under a Freedom of Information Act request, according to an official with the nonprofit.
The complaint will request that Ex-Im and the National Archives and Records Administration ask the Justice Department and Congress to initiate action to recover the deleted messages, the Cause of Action official told POLITICO.
The group had requested text messages, BlackBerry messenger chats and SMS messages that were either sent or received by top Ex-Im officials between Nov. 2 and Nov. 8, 2014 — the week of the midterm elections. It sent its Freedom of Information Act request on Nov. 14, 2014, and the Export-Import Bank confirmed on Nov. 20 that it had received the request.
“On approximately January 1, 2015, I deleted, by mistake, the messages on my phone for the period in question,” Schloegel said in a signed affidavit dated March 27, which noted that the statement was made under penalty of perjury. The affidavit was included in the agency’s official response on May 12 to the FOIA request.
Ex-Im did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The “accidental” deletion of the requested communications might need to be added to the one of the many examples of Ex-Im officials trying to stop its critics from scrutinizing its activities too closely.

After all, someone at the bank did remove the Ex-Im datasets from Data.gov for over seven months, and when the dataset was restored, it was missing some critical field. That’s on top of the bank’s data being totally sloppy in general, making it hard to verify the bank’s claims about its activities.

You know, there’s an easy way to end these problems for good . . .