Former US President Barack Obama. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – A conservative watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense over Obama-era records pertaining to anti-Israel BDS groups.

Judicial Watch filed the FOIA lawsuit in order to obtain records from 2015 of groups affiliated with BDS movement, which lobbied “the Obama administration to adopt policies to harm companies doing business with Israel,” the group said in a statement.

The lawsuit occurred “after all three agencies failed to respond to nearly identical April 23, 2018, FOIA requests,” the organization explained.

“Americans deserve to know if the Obama-era agenda of supporting anti-Israel radicals in subverting US law is ongoing,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These entrenched bureaucrats of the Deep State clearly require lawsuits to compel observance of FOIA law.”

The lawsuit states, despite Obama signing the 2015 Trade Enforcement Act, “the Customs and Border Protection Bureau restated the West Bank Country of Origin Marking Requirement rules requiring labeling of goods as being from the ‘West Bank,’ despite the fact that it is not a sovereign country,” reported Judicial Watch.

The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) applauded the move by Judicial Watch.

“I would like to thank Judicial Watch for their efforts to uncover exactly what had been going on relating to the attempt of the BDS movement to marginalize the state of Israel, and whether or not elements within the Obama administration were complicit in this,” EMET founder and president Sarah Stern told JNS.