Article by Jazz Shaw June 1, 2021 (hotair.com)
• Luis “Lue” Elizondo ran AATIP Pentagon UFO investigation program for a number of years before retiring in 2017 and taking his fight for an end to government UFO secrecy to the public. Throughout this process, however, his history with the Pentagon has been shrouded in secrecy and conflicting stories. Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough has repeatedly stated that Lue had “no assigned responsibilities” related to AATIP or anything to do with UAPs/UFOs. Meanwhile, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vouched for Elizondo’s role as the director of the Pentagon program.
• One of the most dogged researchers of government documents via the FOIA process, John Greenewald Jr. of The Black Vault, has been seeking answers that are few and far between. For years, Greenewald has been submitting FOIA requests seeking some of Elizondo’s old emails from his time at the Pentagon. Greenewald was repeatedly told that there were no records responsive to his request. Finally, he learned why could be no such emails – they had all been deleted.
• A responsive letter to Greenewald read: “After thorough searches of the electronic records and files of OUSD (I&S), no records of the kind you described be identified. Please note that e-mails of former Department of Defense (DoD) employees are not retained unless they are considered historical records and retained by the National Records Center. There are currently no existing e-mail accounts for Mr. Elizondo.”
• Now, two months after this responsive letter, the DoD has confirmed that all of the email records of a man who spent his career working on some of the most sensitive programs and operations in the entire government – a lot more than just the AATIP UFO program – were scrubbed by the Pentagon. Beyond confirmation of that, the DoD offers no official statement explaining or expanding on the situation.
• According to DoD protocol, even if Elizondo had been a DoD employee responsible for nothing more critical than tracking the maintenance of the copy machines at the Pentagon, his emails should have been kept for seven years before being destroyed. He retired only four years ago. Department emails of anyone that might be considered of “historic” significance should never be destroyed, but instead transferred to the National Records Center. Not only was Elizondo in charge of a secret UFO program, the office he worked out of dealt with matters as significant as the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the 9/11 mastermind.
• How in the world could Elizondo’s emails not be considered of historic significance? This is a smoking gun of a government cover-up although much of this story is still flying under the MSM radar. Does this have anything to do with the imminent Inspector General’s Office investigation of the DoD and what they’re doing in terms of UAP investigations?
• Inadvertent admissions Greenewald received from the Pentagon indicate that the email accounts were not scrubbed until sometime after he retired in 2017. So when did they do it? Who at the Pentagon has been trying to sully Elizondo’s reputation? Is Susan Gough tasked with more than just fielding questions from reporters? Is any of this legal? Will anyone go to jail? To keep up with the story, see Greenewald’s full article on The Black Vault website (see here), an accompanying video report (see below), and a follow up podcast interview of Elizondo by Greenewald on June 1st (see here).
Hang on to your hats because this is going to sound like something out of a Tom
Clancy movie, but it’s absolutely real. If you’ve followed our coverage of the Pentagon’s secret UFO study program (AATIP) and the anticipated June 25th release to the Senate Select Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees from the UAP Task Force (unidentified aerial phenomena), you are already familiar with the name of Lue Elizondo. He ran AATIP for a number of years before retiring in 2017 and taking his fight for an end to government secrecy on the subject of UFOs to the public. That fight continues to this day.
All through this process, however, his history with the Pentagon has been shrouded in secrecy and conflicting stories that journalists have struggled to sort out. While officials no less high ranking than former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have vouched for Elizondo’s role as the director of the program and his extensive history working for our nation in counterintelligence, the Pentagon has appeared to try to discredit him. Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough (the only person in the entire DoD allowed to answer questions about AATIP, Elizondo or the UAP Task Force) has repeatedly stated that Lue had “no assigned
responsibilities” related to AATIP or anything to do with UAP. One of the most dogged
researchers of government documents via the FOIA process, John Greenewald jr. of The Black Vault, has been seeking answers ever since Elizondo’s name first popped up on the media’s radar. But answers were few and far between. This weekend we learned why and the reasons were shocking to even the most seasoned reporters covering the United States government and our military.
Greenewald had been submitting FOIA requests for years seeking some of Elizondo’s old emails from his time at the Pentagon, requesting any documents mentioning keywords, acronyms and phrases such as unidentified, AATIP, and AAWSAP (the program preceding AATIP), among many others. Each time the answer was the same. John didn’t receive heavily redacted documents lacking in interesting information as you might expect. He was told that there were no records responsive to his request. But this year he finally pried an answer from the Pentagon as to how there could be no such records. He wasn’t getting any of Elizondo’s emails because no such emails existed. They had been deleted. But as shocking as that sounds (and it is), there is much more to the story
than that.
“After thorough searches of the electronic records and files of OUSD (I&S), no records of the kind you described [Elizondo e-mails containing the word “unidentified”] could be identified. Please note that e-mails of former Department of Defense (DoD) employees are not retained unless they are considered historical records and retained by the National Records Center. There are currently no existing e-mail accounts for Mr. Elizondo. We believe that search methods were appropriate and could reasonably be expected to produce the requested records if they existed.”
Essentially saying the records were destroyed, The Black Vault reached out to clarify. The DoD has now confirmed nearly two months after they wrote the letter, that their final determination does equate to Elizondo’s emails being destroyed with no backup available. Beyond confirmation of that, they offer no official statement explaining or expanding on the situation.
What is unclear, is whether or not the deletion of these electronic records was authorized by protocol. To delete records such as these, set procedures followed by the agency called “record retention schedules” need to have certain prerequisites met in order to delete or destroy files.
54:15 minute “Inside the Black Vault” with John Greenewald on Lue Elizondo Emails
(‘The Black Vault Originals’ YouTube)
4:40 minute excerpt of Elizondo discussing intel failures on Tucker Carlson (‘TOOL BOSS’ YouTube)
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